Comments on: For Whom the Bandwidth Tolls

By: Ashlyn Impson

Ashlyn Impson — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:07:34 +0000

Howdy that’s a very interesting view, It does give one food for thought, I am very delighted I stumbled on your blog, i was using Stumbleupon at the time, in any case i don’t want to drift on too much, but i would like to mention that I will be back when I have a little time to read your blog more thoroughly, Once again thanks a lot for the post and please do keep up the right work,

By: nathan

nathan — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 10:26:05 +0000

llp, I just want to say I agree with 100% of your comment. I've been in a similar satellite internet situation before, even with the detail of the company denying the 200MB limitation. We probably dealt with the same company.

I further agree with the idea that we can largely blame this problem on state interference in the market, and that in the absence of such interventions we would all likely enjoy better service at lower prices.

My girlfriend once lived in a town where cable television was provided as a (voluntary, fee-based) municipal utility, and it was in competition with Mediacom's cable TV service. The prices were much lower and service better (Mediacom's, too), just from having one additional provider in the market. I currently live in a market where Mediacom enjoys a terrestrial cable monopoly, and they are just awful. High prices and poor service. It seems odd that the rescue in my girlfriend's old town came in the form of peaceful competition from the local government rather than some coercive measure.

By: Andy Stedman

Andy Stedman — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:46:59 +0000

I would certainly pay for metered internet access if it were available and if I calculated that it would cost me significantly less at my current level of usage. If a lot of low usage customers did that, the price for unmetered users would almost definitely rise as the average usage of those remaining customers would increase.

I have metered local telephone, long distance, and cell phone, even though with all three I could purchase an essentially unmetered plan--at significant extra cost.

By: llp

llp — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 08:44:36 +0000

While I believe that ISPs have property rights to meter bandwidth, I personally would not purchase services from any ISP who engaged in such activities.

A relative of mine actually bought their Internet from a satellite service which engages in that kind of practice. Of course, the limit is about 200 MB a day, which is far too little to do much of anything on a broadband connection (you can’t watch videos or download hardly anything or it will slow the connection to a crawl for 24 hours). This relative’s house is located at a spot where the phone monopoly has been too lazy to provide DSL to and they have satellite TV at their home, so they can’t get Internet from the Cable monopoly. Therefore, they are stuck paying $100 a month to this satellite Internet firm for awful service because the government’s monopolies won’t provide them any service.

Then my relative called this ISP and they denied that they engaged in any such practices, even though they admit it in the small print on their website.

I personally doubt that anybody would purchase metered bandwidth Internet service without government intervention to make that service the only broadband available. If there was landline phone competition and cable competition, which there would be were it not for the State, any ISP that engaged in such practices would probably not stay in business very long.