http://injoke.o...-is-the-future/

Thanks for the article Nik. I will be watching this development closely – as well as Time Warner’s quota-related trials.

I am already involved in a similar discussion/project, albeit at a much smaller scale, at the University where I am employed. We are doing everything we can to ensure good performance, with limited and expensive resources, for the 98.5% of our student residents who do not consume large amounts of network traffic. For the 1.5% who do, their traffic will get slower during high use periods.

Long-distance rates WERE something like $.30/minute. What are they now – 30 years later?

Comcast already has extremely high rates for their broadband offering. I now pay less for DSL and it’s faster (up and down). I’m in the Denver market.

This article is seriously lacking any useful information.

This problem is like a gas station charging $99 for unlimited gas…it can’t be done if you get a line of SUV’s draining the tanks every day. Someone has to pay to keep filling them up.

So, charge a fair base price, and charge for what people use (I don’t mean every single Gig) in Tiers. If people want to download 1 Terabyte of stuff per day, let them pay for it……-and- use that money to increase network capacity. If people want to ‘trade’ copies of movies, by whatever file transfer method….why should this huge network drain be included for free?

FIOS, and dsl, are just transport methods….they have to pay for their
feeds to/from the internet too. So there is no magic bullet. My experience with FIOS is that is is hella-slow. Installing new Fiber cabling (or copper) to the internet backbone costs insane amounts of money.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

The biggest problem with the cable industry is government regulation. John McCain has mentioned that if he is elected that he will tear up all the government regulated protection that the cable companies are granted. The cable lobby is one of the largest in DC, mainly because their survival depends on it. Entrepreneurs wont be able to do much until the government fully deregulates (which has all sorts of side-effects associated with it). My next post on cable will talk about that and the net neutrality factor as well

And why aren’t they using p2p to help them manage traffic: use it instead of kill it? What’s happening with their supposed work with Bittorrent?

The only way this is going to be solved is via competition. And that competition has to come from entrepreneurs (like Winer and Arrington).

Hopefully newer technology will become affordable and it will put Comcast and the like out of business (or at least bring them to their knees).

Ye we went through this on the last post. I try to Americanize it all since everyone else on TC is US-English, but I have spent years referring to The Economist Style Guide

It’s not the American English format – it’s the English format.