Recently, an Internet Service Provider near me announced that it had plans to start limiting the amount of information each subscription could download and upload to the Internet. The deciding factor for how much one could communicate using the same infrastructure as the other plans: how much one is willing to pay.
There are several reasons for this. First, more and more information is being transmitted over an infrastructure that was not designed to carry so much and second, ISPs are able and willing to do whatever they please because many times, the consumer doesn't have a choice.
Before the pros and cons of both sides of the issue, a small illustration of how more and more traffic is a problem for ISPs. For every bit of information to reach its destination (many times a very long distance away) it has to go through a long series of hubs. Information is like barges on water. They have no drivers of their own, just a code saying where they come from and where they should go. They are sent on their way down a stream and once they reach a hub, their code is read and if they need to go further, they are sent down another stream.
ISPs today are very centralized, so all of the information going out of the area each center serves has to go through that center. So there is some logic in the ISPs's stance that with less information, there will be less congestion. But there is one thing static bandwidth caps neglect: timing.
Most of the ISPs's problems come when there are a lot of people online all sending information at once. Bandwidth capping cannot solve this.
Here is some advice for both the bandwidth hogs that are ahead of their time and for ISPs that desperately need to catch up with the times.
For bandwidth hogs:
1: Bittorrent and other network-heavy things when you know the network isn't stressed already. Nighttime is a good time.
2: It may not be much, but it helps. Compression is your friend.
For ISPs:
1: Bittorrent and other filesharing protocols were designed in part to take some strain of of centralized servers, Decentralize and make everyone's lives easier.
Staunch holding on to the past and an a-universal-gesture-for-every-time-my-territory-is-infringed-upon mentality will only lead to more of the same. Working together, we might get somewhere.
