subject: The Immanent Bandwidth Wars [print this page] As internet service providers offer comsumers faster speeds, a new area of competition is underway. At first, there was a race to provide the fastest download and upload speeds. Of late however the speed race has outstriped the abilities of customers' systems. This created a new variable for the internet service provider. The bandwidth cap is rapidly becoming the new battlefields over which these companies must compete.
There are cost limitations on monthly bandwidth. While customers may feel like there is a big business conspiracy preventing them from getting their desired monthly bandwidth caps at a comfortable cost, there are considerable hardware costs involved in getting data to your computer at any reasonable speed. On the bright side, though, prices are usually determined by the cost a customer is willing to spend on a product. Currently, the costs offered by most internet service providers meet the needs of consumers. However, a change in consumer behavior looms on the horizon that threatens to destroy the current comfortable foundation on which service providers rest their business models. The typical consumer will some time soon want to watch HD TV content on their PC. This will spell the end of television as we know it.
While cable companies certianly have an interest in preventing this by limiting monthly bandwidth, they will be unable to maintain control of the market indefinitely. Wireless internet is being made available all over major population centers at lightning fast speeds. This will make it nearly impossible for this media transition to be prevented by any corporate interest.
This will be great for the consumer. As companies begin to boast that they provide more bandwidth for your money, caps will go up rapidly. Companies that provide hardware to internet service providers will be forced to lower their prices in turn. This is the nature of the pricing mechanism of the market.
With all of the myriad methods of transferring data, there must be a huge focus on value. For the consumer who desires to view high quality videos, this will be a dramatic improvement on the current online experience. High quality content leads to higher bandwidth demands.
Higher bandwidth limits will also have an affect on the quality of content that is produced. For example, most current media files need to be compressed to meet bandwidth limitations. When it's possible to transfer more data at faster speeds, these limitations would melt away. This could result in new advancements in music recording software. Why not increase the size of music files if they can be transferred very quickly? The same logic would apply for video files and any other content that people may attempt to share online. If a content provider can move bigger files, then movie files would be available with increased quality. Over time this will permit for serious growth in the quality of audio and video files.
Online games will participate in this expansion too. As data transfer rates go through the roof, you can expect games to take full advantage of all the extra bandwidth. Online games may never need to use as much bandwidth as streaming video or music, but it's a certainty that the demands of gamers will increase at the same pace.
There is an exciting future for online content. While some may whine about the current bandwidth caps, we are not far away from a race between providers to deliver the best value for the money. In the end, this will be a win for the fans of high quality online content.
