Not for Your Entertainment (Really)

After reading Joy's blog post: Netflilx and TiVo to Partner on Movies I was intrigued to read this article from Business Week: AT&T to try limits on monthly Internet traffic . The article outlines AT&T's efforts to reduce some customer's bandwidth and the amount of data customers can use. This would greatly effect those AT&T customers who are have streaming video service like Netflix offers.

Approximately 5 percent of AT&T subscribers take up around 50% of the networks capacity. To me, that seems like an awfully small group of customers to limit all of their customers connectivity. The article states, "to exceed the limits, subscribers would need to download constantly at maximum speeds for more than 42 hours, depending on the tier." Obviously, this sort of downloading is beyond the realm of your average internet user who browses the web and uses e-mail. The question is, however, as more products become available such as Netflix streaming video will more people require higher bandwidth as a result? Will streaming video on the internet become a way of life and will be people require more bandwidth on a day to day basis for new internet tools and functions?

The article unfortunately does not address "why" AT&T is putting the restriction in place. From our discussions in class the Fiber Optic cable that was layed had seemingly limitless capabilities. Two other internet service providers (ISP) are addressed in the article; Time Warner Cable and FairPoint Communications. Both of these companies are planning on or testing limits similar reductions to AT&T. Fair Point and Time Warner Cable hover, are looking at even lower limits around 5 gigabytes. These low limits would easily be exceeded by internet users watching streaming video.

I personally see the Internet Service Providers adding additional costs for those who require more downloading capability. If you want to watch streaming video there will be additional charge! It could help to protect the loss in revenue by the movie companies or retailers (if shared by ISP) or simply boost ISP's revenue. Regardless, it is interesting article given our class discussions and classmate's recent blog posts.