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

I am happy to see this news from Netgear, although the news about bandwidth usage caps is disheartening.Here’s more information from the Netgear site:

If you haven’t heard of “Internet throttling” by now, you will soon in all likelihood. Major cable-based ISPs are considering (if not implementing) hard bandwidth caps on their users each month, which is really putting devout Netflix streamers and Hulu watchers in a bind. After all, if you get all of your TV/entertainment from the web, it doesn’t take long to suck down an incredible amount of bits and bytes.

While Netgear certainly can’t make those guys have a change of heart, it can help users stuck behind those walls keep tabs on how much they’ve used. Many people have argued that the companies enforcing the caps should provide consumers with a way to monitor throughput, but until that happens, it looks like the burden of responsibility is on you. In August (meaning next month), Netgear is planning to ship its WNDR3700 wireless router in America, which will be the first from the company to actually show users how much data they’ve used during a certain window of time.

I have DSL; I sure hope I don’t see any bandwidth caps anytime soon. Everyone in the family uses the computer ALL the time, for everything from research for term papers to weather videos, to movies and viral videos, to Internet marketing and working. A cap would really stifle our computing.

But even if my ISP never caps anything, I’m still very interested in our bandwidth usage, just from curiosity. I wouldn’t go out and buy a new router for that reason, but Netgear speculates that they may include this bandwidth-tracking technology in future firmware updates for people who already own Netgear routers.

It’s an interesting development, one that I will be keeping my eye on.