The larger problem is that the IT infrastructure is like the transportation infrastructure. It is too capital intensive for private investment to undertake on national and global levels, where it heading. This is going to require a coordinated international communications program in order to implement developing technology quickly and comprehensively.

It's not just a matter of watching movies on demand. It's a matter of replacing a significant portion of the transportation infrastructure with communications infrastructure.

For example, top executives no longer travel for meetings. They've been videoconferencing for some time, since their companies could afford the expense. But that's the direction the world is heading. Technologically it's no longer necessary to transport bodies around in energy-expensive vehicles — if the bandwidth is available. Communications technology is the highway system of the future.

in light of the $200 billion in tax incentives that we handed to these scoundrels that was supposed to buy us fiber optic connections to all homes.

They took the money and didn't deliver, and now they want to hit us up for more.

If they can't give us the same sort of fiber optic speeds and bandwidth that are normal in Japan and South Korea, I think they should give the money back, with interest. If they can't do that, well... I guess we got us a national telecom system for the sucker price of $200B. We should own it, at least.

Further, there isn't a whole lot of evidence to support ISP claims that we're on the verge of a bandwidth crunch. There's still an awful lot of dark fiber left over from the dot con bubble that the telcos refuse to light up.

One of the problems is the cost of the last loop. There's a lot of fiber out there, but the cost of hooking it up to users is huge and the payback too far off for private investment to justify. So it just sits there waiting.

Internet connectivity is now so important to our economy and standard of living that it's time for ISPs to be regulated as public utilities to prevent this kind of grasping behavior.

I vote to make it a public infrastructure project. We should go to free universal wireless as soon as possible. Huge bandwidth users should bear some of the burden, but I'm talking institutions, not consumers here.

This public investment in infrastructure is necessary both for education and to ensure national competitiveness.

If there really was a problem, they could "throttle" the hogs without charging them extra. Just tell them that as they approach a magic number their bandwidth is progressively derated--unless the customer wants to pay a premium fee for heavy usage.

Comcast did this.

I can see a solution to this. You can have all of the time you want, at, say 5Mbps, but if you want the higher speed, you pay by the hour.

Remember when most of the online services (e.g. Compuserve) were this way?

But it comes down to the telcos not wanting to spend money on capital improvements, such as switches and servers, no?

But it comes down to the telcos not wanting to spend money on capital improvements, such as switches and servers, no?

They won't do this unless they can either significantly expand their market or collect significantly higher rents.

IMO, CompuServe died since the stock market gave AOL a market cap which enabled AOL to swallow up CompuServe. At some point, if the glory days of the 'ol stock market don't come back, the PAYGO economy might come back.

However, these days are a hoot: I pay $7.95 for 3 months of unlimited Skype. Thus, I knocked $30 off my cellphone bill since the "before 7PM" option was unneeded.

Perhaps my Skyping is eating up tons of bandwidth.

A typical software download runs a few gigs these days. And the argument that people are using resources... is um... a crock of shit.

Most of the cost of a large ISP is fixed costs of people, the marginal costs of heavy users is trivial.

Especially when compared with the real costs of moving similar things physically.

This is artificially raising the costs of moving information, and taking advantage of the fact that transportation costs are subsidized. The telecos are trying to take advantage of the fact that roads are underpriced, and therefore overconsumed.

I'd love to know how much my usage is.

Of course I know you're into music and sampling libraries certainly run into the gigabytes but my MacBook only has 50 GB of free space on it so it's physically impossible to download 150 GB onto it although I do look at webpages and stream media; I also have work related PC's hanging around and recently downloaded Vista (less than a GB) and XP (about 1/2 a GB).

Of course, I am single so perhaps a family would hit limits if multiple copes of OSX or Windows were updating; multiple video streams were being watched; and/or a lot of software was being downloaded.

So, to be fair, I'll call Qwest and ask them how to figure out what my stats are; Perhaps I should be alarmed.