I demand a lot from my broadband connection. But I was surprised to see my family uses 125 gigabytes of data a month. And that got me wondering. How much do my parents use? My friends? The little old lady down the street? Read more »
Few people will likely take Time Warner Cable up on its new plan that offers customers a $5 discount in exchange for staying below 5 GB of data consumption each month. But the real benefit to the plan are the meters TWC is rolling out. Read more »
Carriers like Verizon and AT&T are trying to convince Netflix to pay for the bandwidth its subscribers consume on their networks. Rather than fork over the money, Netflix is giving its iPhone customers the option of turning off cellular access to Netflix completely. Read more »
Congress, along with many in the content industry, are wondering about the fate of television in an Internet Age. I think the future is broadband, and I’d like to offer this chart from Sandvine, showing that the future is already here. Read more »
For those concerned that Cox would begin charging customers overage fees, after reading a news story last night, you can put those fears to rest. A spokesman says the ISP’s broadband meter contained an error and it has no current plans to add overage fees. Read more »
When AT&T first started throttling unlimited smartphone data users plans last fall, it claimed it had to limit the “extraordinary” consumption of its greediest customers. It turns out extraordinary is only 2 GB – a full gigabyte less than it sells customers under its most-common data plan. Read more »
Netflix may have become the new face of evil for wireline Internet service providers as they seek to impose caps or tiers on subscribers. But it also looks like Netflix is willing to play the part of consumer advocate, countering myths ISPs perpetrate around broadband scarcity. Read more »
Verizon stops offering unlimited plans on Thursday for new customers, and much like when AT&T halted its unlimited plans last June, the world will not end. However, it will get more confusing for both consumers and developers. What else could Verizon have done? Read more »
OS X Lion will only be available in the Mac App Store, but a 4 GB download-only OS upgrade is going to be trying for some consumers, because of connection quality and bandwidth caps. Apple has one possible solution: come use our retail store Wi-Fi. Read more »
A Verizon executive doesn’t foresee a need for broadband caps on the companies’ FiOS networks at the current time, despite other large ISPs such as AT&T, Charter and Comcast implementing them. Instead Verizon is talking up the idea of homes with 10 gigabit per second connections. Read more »
Bandwidth caps seem like not a bad idea, until you find yourself struggling to figure out how your home network suddenly started downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data in a matter of days, and you have blown through your monthly limit in less than a week. Read more »
Two announcements on Monday night illustrated the yin and yang of the streaming market. Amazon announced a cloud storage drive and cloud music service, and Netflix said it would have to degrade the quality of video streams in response to bandwidth caps. Read more »
ISPs have staked out a singular public rationale: Data caps are necessary to limit the consumption of “bandwidth hogs” in order to protect the network experience for everyone else. But is this really accurate and what can the application providers do to help? Read more »
Broadband caps have become a reality at many large ISPs. Protecting the pay TV business is a rationale for caps, but as connected devices proliferate and bandwidth needs skyrocket, consumers may find those caps harder to live with and operators may find them more profitable. Read more »
As a responsible Mac user, I usually feel immune from most Internet threats…except for one. Using my Mac exactly as Apple intends it to be used sometimes renders my Internet connection virtually unusable for up to a month, and costs money to fix. Could this happen […] Read more »
