Blandin on Broadband

Pretend you own a restaurant that has an all-u-can-eat buffet on Sundays. There’s one customer who comes in every week and eats as much as 19 other customers combined. Is he your best customer or your nightmare?

Change restaurant to ISP and you have the problem described by AT&T. They claim that their bandwidth hogs use as much as 19 other households. Their plan (and they’re not alone) is to start to charge metered fee for users who go over their allotted share. They say this is the fairest solution.

Rep. Eric Massa says not so fast. Last week he introduced a bill that asks the FTC to step in and look at these metered service plans – especially in markets without competition. He has the Broadband Internet Fairness Act on his side. It really calls such charges “unfair and unconscionable”.

It’s a tough call. If they don’t start to meter service, I suspect we’ll all be paying a little more. But as more services (I’m thinking remote healthcare and distance learning) become available we might all find ourselves slipping into the bandwidth hog silo – and we’ll be paying more that way too.

The flip side of all of this use and fees – it should provide the providers will more revenue to upgrade their infrastructure and ours. If I knew that’s where the money was going I might have a different view on it.