Last week I wrote about the Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force Hearing on Net Neutrality and Free Speech on the Internet. One of the big issues discussed was the fact that ISPs are reducing bandwidth for folks they feel use too much bandwidth.

Several ISPs have been cited for doing this, most notably Comcast. In the hearing the ISPs maintained that they needed to be able to manage their networks to work for everyone. One presenter seemed to note that the real issue was that the super users were generally doing something illegal.

Well today a blog post from someone who had been cut off caught my eye (Clearwire Makes Me Sad). It’s not the first instance I’ve read about – but this blogger (Aaron Huslage) does a good job of describing the facts of his situation. Also he mentions that he worked for an ISP in the 1990s (so I liked him right away) and compares how the ISPs budgeted for customer usage then as compared to how they do it today.

I can remember one issue we had with capacity in the 90s in some rural parts of Minnesota was that people were online a lot more in the winter. So you had to decide whether you’d build for the peak times or for a sunny day in August.

I think the ISPs today need to consider the same today and market accordingly.