Is Internet going to die in two years?(0)
That is what AT&T would like us to believe. The company says unless a lot of money is spent on network infrastructure we will run out of bandwidth by 2010. But before you panic remember AT&T may be to coming up with these dire warnings for selfish reasons and they may have little to do with helping the average people like us.
One possibility is that they want to jack up the price. It will go something like this: some of the spending in the infrastructure will be passed on to the consumer as a premium service. That means unless we pay up we will get a reduced rate service under the current plan. Today’s regular service will be tomorrow’s premium. Then there is the net neutrality debate that is raging in capital hill. Companies like AT&T would love to charge different price for different traffic. That way they can make more money. That argument goes like this: the bandwidth is limited and to make sure everyone gets a fair share companies like AT&T should have the right to allocate who gets how much. Sounds logical until we realize it is just another way of controlling price to make more money. People are already complaining that companies like AT&T are engaged in prioritizing traffic giving preference to data from certain source and ignoring others.
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