Plus, two horrible things your Internet service provider wants to do to make it speedier.
Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, at 7:45 AM ET
Everyone hates their Internet service provider. And with good cause: In the age of ubiquitous Internet access, Web service in America is still often frustratingly slow. Tired of being the villain, telecom companies have assigned blame for this problem to a new bad guy. He’s called the “bandwidth hog,” and it’s his fault that streaming video on your computer looks more like a slide show than a movie. The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these “power users” are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.
The ISPs are certainly correct that there’s a problem: The current network in the United States struggles to accommodate everyone, and the barbarians at the gate—voice-over-IP telephony, live video streams, high-def movies—threaten to drown the grid. (This Deloitte report has a good treatment of that eventuality.) It’s less clear that the telecom companies, fixated as they are on the bandwidth hogs, are doing a good job of managing the problem and planning for the future. The ISPs have put forward two big ideas, in recent months, about how to fix our bandwidth crisis. We can arrange these plans into two categories: horrible now and horrible later.
Plan One: Feed the meter. Category: Horrible now. In January…
