Monday, January 08, 2007

Are download caps capping development?

I came across an interesting post on OUT-LAW.com recently.
It discussed how using the much praised "Venice project" could result in exceeding your ISP's download cap/limit within as little as 20 hours.
For those of you that do not know what the "Venice project" is; The Venice Project is the new system being developed by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the Scandinavian entrepreneurs behind the revolutionary services Kazaa and Skype. It is currently being used by 6,000 beta testers and is due to be launched next year. It basically bring online video-streaming to the masses. Think YouTube for grown-ups..

Anyway, the article explains that the service generate such a download & upload volume that it is easy to exceed the limits imposed by your ISP. A lot of us already know of the network demands imposed by using Skype. This just ups the ante some more. There is no point using a service if it bleeds your connection dry within a day.

This again illustrates that most ISP's are behind the facts on what their users want/need. Imposing download & upload caps as well as port blocking, bandwidth throthling and blocking various services (such as P2P) are still the standard with most (if not all ISP's). This is just indicative of the "old fashioned" approach to Internet usage that stems from the Telco industry of old. Most Telco's came from a monopoly or semi-monopoly position and were abusing this to dictate the way consumers could use their service.
This approach to the market is outdated and will hopefully lead those companies imposing such restrictions losing out to ISP's that will provide customers with a service that meets their demands..

E.

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