Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

I have Verizon as my ISP. I’ve been pleased with the service, but for the past two months or so, I;ve noticed that I often get slight “disconnects.” I do not download videos or music (although my husband listens to music). The odd thing is that my connection is almost always interrupted, and constantly so, when I drop Entrecards. Weird.

Anyway, I saw news today that some ISPs are starting to cap usage. Remember those early days of Internet service, where you were charged by the hour? I can’t imagine some businesses would be dumb enough to return to those days, they were as annoying as nose blackheads, but there have been stupid CEOs before, and no doubt there are stupid CEOs now.

The phone company, Frontier Communications Corp., is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more.

This could have consequences not just for consumers – who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails – but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

As you can see, ISPs aren’t intending to cap time usage, but bandwidth usage. This is unwise. Bandwidth usage is not something you can really control. What if Aunt Bertha’s anniversary photos roll in unexpectedly, using up 10% of your bandwidth for the month? Too many uncontrollable variables. But unfortunately, I expect ISPs to start doing this.

If an ISP would offer “unlimited” usage (by changing nothing as it stands right now), they would make a ton of business. We’ll wait and see how this works out.