Friday, January 18, 2008

Tiered Pricing Better Than Net Neutrality

Net neutrality legislation -- which would prevent ISPs from giving priority or blocking traffic to specific websites has been highly contentious, but this issue is attacking the wrong aspect of the perceived problem.

ISPs shouldn't worry about any type of peer to peer application or destination, individual customer bandwidth use is the real issue.

If Bit Torrent or text messaging is a popular application, so be it. ISPs have the right to set thresholds for megabytes downloaded, such as Time Warner's plan to set pricing based on the volume of downloads per month. Hosting companies have similar agreements based on a website's traffic, and tiered pricing should likewise be offered to consumers.

We all want fast downloads, but I shouldn't be paying the same as the next guy who is using his connection 25x more than me in a given month. Bandwidth available at any given moment is a slightly different issue, but I think we'll find that by charging the most aggressive downloaders/uploaders more, they'll be more discriminating in their usage. And this would not require any federal legislation or lawsuits.

Posted By John Gartner at 09:17 AM
Permanent Link: Tiered Pricing Better Than Net Neutrality | Comments (0)

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