Coming Bandwidth Cap Wars
Coming Bandwidth Cap Wars
Coming Bandwidth Cap WarsAs internet service providers offer comsumers faster speeds, a new area of competition is underway. Initially, the race was to provide the fastest download and upload speeds. Recently, however the speed race has outpaced the abilities of customers' computers. This created a new cost factor for the internet service provider. The bandwidth cap is rapidly becoming the new battlefields where these companies will compete.There are cost limitations on the amount of bandwidth a consumer may use in a month. While users may feel like there is a big business conspiracy preventing them from getting the bandwidth they want at a affordable cost, there are considerable hardware costs involved in getting data to your computer at any reasonable speed. On the bright side, though, prices are typically determined by how much a customer is willing to shell out for a product. Currently, the costs advertised by most internet service providers are satisfactory. However, one change in consumer behavior looms on the horizon that inevitability threatens the current comfortable footing on which service providers rest their business plans. The average consumer will some time soon want to watch on-demand HD TV content on their PCs. This will be the death knell of television as we know it.While cable companies certianly have an interest in forestalling the inevitable by limiting monthly bandwidth, they will be unable to maintain control of the market. Wireless internet is being made available all over major population centers at lightning fast speeds. This will make it impossible for the transition to online media consumption to be prevented by any commercial means.This means great things for the consumer. As companies start to advertise that you get more bandwidth for your money, caps will go up rapidly. Companies that sell hardware to internet service providers will have to lower their prices in turn. This is of course simply how the market works.With all the different ways to transfer data, there will be a huge focus on value. For the consumer that wants to view high quality content, this will be a dramatic improvement. High quality content naturally leads to higher bandwidth demands.These bandwidth limits will also have an affect on the quality of content created. For example, most current media files must be compressed to meet bandwidth limits. When it's possible to send more data faster, these limitations would melt away. This might result in new advancements in music recording software. Why not increase the size of music files if they can be transferred very quickly? It's the same for video files and any other content that people may attempt to share online. If a content provider can upload bigger files, then movie files should be available in increased quality. Over time this will permit for massive growth in the quality of audio and video files.Online games will benefit from this boom as well. As data transfer rates go through the roof, you can expect games to take advantage of all the newly available bandwidth. Online games may never require the same amount of bandwidth as streaming video or music, but the extra capacity can surely be put to use in some way.There is an exciting future for online content. While some whine about current bandwidth caps, we are not far away from an all out race between providers to deliver the increased bandwidth at lower costs. In the long run, this will mean great things for the consumers of high quality online content.I am a web designer. I work mostly with mozilla firefox free download. You can download firefox free. Add FireBug to it and nothing is better.