I think broadband providers had better be very careful. I’m old enough to remember a time when it seemed like almost everybody hated the phone company, with the type of hatred that today might be reserved for certain four-letter organizations that end in “AA.” Those of you old enough to remember Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh In” may remember Lily Tomlin’s famous line (while playing the part of Ernestine the Operator): “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the telephone company!”
Well, substitute “cable company” for “telephone company”, and you’d have a phrase that one could easily imagine falling from the lips of a big cable representative. They don’t care that people don’t want usage caps, that this is not the Internet you signed up for. They figure they’ll just re-educate you so that, like a bunch of stupid sheep, you’ll accept the caps.
The trouble with this, however, is it only works until a significant number of people find an alternative. International telephone rates were totally outrageous until VoIP (and especially Skype) came along.
Now here is the problem I see for the cable companies (and the phone companies that offer cable TV type service) that want to impose usage caps. The thing they are trying to block – the whole reason they are trying to limit usage in the first place – is video over the Internet, especially the high quality variety. They want you to buy their expensive cable service and more expensive video on demand. They will, of course, lie through their teeth and give you any other plausible-sounding reason they can think of, but the thing they are scared to death of is the day you can download any TV show, any movie, or any other kind of video you might want to see via the Internet, and they’re not getting a cut. The day you say, “I don’t need cable TV, I don’t need traditional telephone service, I just want unlimited broadband, thank you very much.”
Just for a moment, think about how your life might change if you could go to a web site at any time on or after the day a new episode of a TV show was released, and click on a button and almost immediately have it start streaming to your computer monitor or nearby HDTV set. You’d never worry about missing an episode again. No presidential speech, no sports event, no local weather or news bulletin would interrupt your program. You wouldn’t be in the only television market in the country to not see some network show because the local affiliate decided you’d rather see a local special on the city hospital, or the West Bumfart High School football game. We are, for all practical purposes, almost at that point (some would say already there), at least for some shows.
Thing is, the cable companies probably don’t mind if you go to Hulu and catch a missed show every now and then. But what they really don’t want is you deciding you don’t need cable television, and can just watch everything you want to watch online.
But what they are forgetting is that even where they are the only game in town, computer storage is getting much smaller and cheaper. And look what’s coming down the road: Store 250 DVDs on One Coin-Sized Surface (via Discover Magazine)
I don’t know if anyone remembers, but it wasn’t so long ago when modems ran at paltry speeds like 300 or 1200 bps. There was no commercial Internet – if you were lucky you might connect to a local Bulletin Board Service, but to exchange data with anyone else online could be a very expensive long distance call. So how did large programs get transferred from one user to another? Via floppy disk, sent via U.S. mail. For the price of a couple postage stamps, you could send several hundred kilobytes anywhere it needed to be. Even if you figured in the cost of the floppy disk and the cardboard mailer, you still came out ahead over a long distance phone call in most cases.
So what happens when your local ISP starts charging a buck or two per gigabyte over their paltry cap, and you get fed up and decide that if you want to trade a significant chunk of data with anybody you’ll just put it in the mail? By the time it gets to that point, people will be really pissed off at the cable company. What I envision happening is they will use their cell phones (with unlimited texting and enough data to send and receive e-mail and maybe do some web browsing each day) but start swapping large chunks of data via mail, and some of those folks will then tell the cable company to take a flying leap. You can bet that sending data by mail happens already in areas where no broadband is available – people order a hard drive with several hundred gigabytes, or maybe even a terabyte in capacity, have it sent to a close relative that has a collection of videos, programs, games or whatever, and that relative fills up the hard drive and ships it out. Today that’s a pain in the posterior – but when you can put that same amount of storage or more on a coin-sized surface (and maybe several terabytes on a disk that would just fit into a standard sized envelope) all bets are off. Would you rather pay a couple bucks to receive two or three months’ worth of viewing material in the mail, or pay the cable company a few hundred dollars (or more) for the same amount of viewing?
I always like to point to the fact that Western Union gouged people on sending telegrams (charging an outrageous per-word rate, even after they had developed teletype machines to replace the old Morse code keys) and the minute long distance telephone service became halfway affordable, people pretty much discarded the telegram like an old smelly shoe. Then the phone companies continued to charge outrageous long distance rates even after technology brought their costs down, and now we see their landline business going the way of the dodo bird – I doubt there will be many landlines left by 2020. The cable companies should learn from these mistakes and not antagonize their customers. I know they probably think that they cannot be replaced in many areas – that customers have no other choice but to use their service – but that’s simply not true. I’m sure we will see advances in digital wireless technology, and we can’t rule out the possibility of electric utilities getting into the broadband business (forget broadband over power lines, start stringing fiber on those poles!).
And then there’s the possibility of some totally new technology being developed. Personally, I’d put my money on something having to do with quantum entanglement. If you can affect the state of a particle at any distance by altering the state of its twin, and you can do this in a totally secure fashion and with minimal power usage, then all you have to figure out is how to do the state changes quickly enough to send data, and how to decode the received data at the other end. If we ever put a colony on Mars or someplace even more distant, we are not going to want to wait minutes or hours for old-fashioned electromagnetic waves (limited by the speed of light). My understanding is that at the quantum level there is no speed-of-light limitation, and I’ll just bet that you don’t have to use several thousand watts of power to get the signal out. Maybe I’m wrong, and it will be some other technology we haven’t heard of yet, but if you have ever wondered why SETI hasn’t yet picked up an extraterrestrial equivalent of “I Love Lucy” on their gigantic dishes, I suspect it’s because any aliens that might be out there would no more think of using electromagnetic waves for communication than we would consider using smoke signals.
Point is, when the new technologies and alternative connection methods come along, the cable companies may just wish they’d treated their customers a whole lot better. Guys, you know bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper – get it right out of your heads that you can overcharge customers for a decade or two and they will forgive you. No, really, they won’t, and their children won’t give you the time of day. The unintended consequence of bandwidth caps is that you become the next company that everyone loves to hate, and that’s definitely not a recipe for long-term survival.
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