kasia in a nutshell

Ah, this can be approached from many different angles.

I used to work for a cable company and I'll claim their price hikes due to gross mismanagement of the company...Throw billions of dollars into poorly run projects only to lose them. So now they need to close the deficit gap so they're milking just about every revenue avenue (hehe) they can.

Then, as a friend of a person from Australia who had an upload limit of 3 gigs a month...However, his broadband provider now has unlimited uploads, so is it that they are changing to what US was while US is going to the Australian metered concept?

Then as a regular user. Hell, they had all open ports, for 30$ a month. Now I have to be in fear of being capped if I upload too much photos in one day? And on top of that they want me to pay 45-50$ for that...Hmmmm...

There will be change, I see the trend of municipalities starting their own backbones to provide this for the residents. It makes plenty sense. You build the infrastructure, it will take a while to pay off but then you can rent the fiber/coax just like they do phone lines now. Competition will drive prices down (hopefully) once again and better "services" should/would be offered.

I think the problem today is a trend called ISP consolidation. AOL and Time Warner were seperate, now they are the same. Years ago people would have laughed if they told you SNET would be owned by SBC. Now the ongoing joke is that SNET really stands for "somewhere north east of Texas" Rather than having smaller ISPs serving only interests of the locale we have national ISPs serving the country, and when somone b0rks up something in Texas then everyone has to take the hit (financially or otherwise). It is also leading to a more centralized and less redundant internet. Rather than having tons of nodes connecting everyone everywhere, we are heading towards a trend of central hubs in major cities that route the internet traffic. One of these hubs goes down and the internet could literally be split into two. Since we don't have as many hubs or whatever there is in fact less bandwidth to play with in getting from point A to point B.

is this only happening in the DSL realm? i've had high speed access through my cable company for over a year now and they've instituted no caps and the price has remained affordable. but then again, i know nothing about what's going on on the inside, and i don't know what i would do if my provider raised the price...

the high speed internet access is moving more and more the same two ways that PC's have been going... You sell to gamers and you sell to businesses. you sell last months model of iether of these two types of machine to the regular "I want to connect to my e-mail so i can get on the internet" users... you have cable marketing to the gamers: higher caps, higher bursts, less latency (in my area at least) and you have the DSL marketing to business: static IP(s), provider maintained firewalls, SDSL (same speed up as down and simultaneously). both of these demographics are willing to pay what is asked... however the kasia's and such of the internet -- who only want to be able to access their ssh session without having to paus when they type for the console to catch up -- are caught in the middle... there really isnt a middle ground anymore. (not like the dialup/isdn/t1 days [note: those were much more expensive days too...])

anyhow thats my $.02 for now.

3KB? That sucks. I would expect 3MB...

Anyways I have the SBC/Whatever DSL 1.5Mbps/128kbbps no rate hikes, no blocked ports, VPN is allowed, and not download or upload caps (IE you get charged if you download more than 3GB in one month).

erm, yah, that's a typo.. it was 3MB :)

Here in Belgium, it is a tiny country and we only have one phone operator (the old state phone company). This company is not public and do not have any debt.
Now, you can have a broadband access for 35€ (it is almost equal to 35 US $).
No limit, no problem.
With these prices, we are now in Belgium the first country in Europe if we count the number of users with broadband access.
I think that for one time, it is good not to be the first but to see the mistakes from others :-)

I think we're all going to have to deal with a having a limit set on how much we are allowed to upload and download in a month. They're already doing it in some parts of Europe, and I've been told by a family member who works in the industy, that the UK is probably going to go the same way. To many people are abusing the unlimited bandwidth being offered today.

Why should ISP's constantly have to upgrade servers just so the average consumer can download from Kazaa 24/7. There are students clogging campus connections, downloading stuff they don't really need but doing it anyway just because it's free. Kids at home downloading music like it's going out of fashion, just because they can.

Something has to give. We want unlimited access, unlimited bandwidth, I'm afraid we're going to have to pay for all the upgrades our providers have to make.

I think Lynne hit the nail on the head. The biggest problem is the people using KaZaA 24/7. The ISPs oversell their bandwidth because they don't think you'll use your connection full bore 24/7, but with the advent of P2P, this was killed, johnny teenager had to be l33t and download everything and warez from KaZaA, and the ISPs started to have to think realistically about the problem and what to do. If P2P never happened, I think we would still all be happy with 3Mbps/512Kbps connections to the internet, at $39.95.

That's a symptom.. not a cause.. Cause is mismanagement and overselling..

If supporting all their customers at full, advertised bandwidth and at the advertised price is not viable.. then tiered services at levels and prices more viable would be a better idea..

Then customers who use the bulk of the service pay for the bulk.. as opposed to all paying for all but only some using most.