Just this week, AT&T announced that its DSL customers would have to abide by a 150GB per month cap or pay a $10 penalty for each additional 50GB of transfers. While that sounds like a lot of data at first glance, it only accounts for about 3 hours a day of HD video viewing, as watching a typical two-hour HD movie on Netflix uses about 3.6GB. And that’s before you do a full online backup of your 320GB hard drive, call the family on Skype HD, check your e-mail, surf the web, hp presario cq72 battery and download that new 5GB MMO you’ve been dying to play.

Those numbers loom a lot larger on mobile broadband where the caps are far lower. For example, Verizon Wireless charges $50 a month for just 5GB on its LTE data plan or $80 for 10GB. T-Mobile just announced an $85 for 10GB per month plan for its 4G network . If you exceed those rates, T-Mobile slows your connection, hp cq72 battery and Verizon charges you a whopping $10 per GB overage fee. When it comes to handsets, Verizon still has a $30 unlimited data plan, but has promised to end it in the near future. Clear hp envy 17 battery and Sprint are the only carriers who offer truly unlimited 4G bandwidth for both handset and notebook users, but you have to wonder how long they will continue that pricing plan when all of their competitors are instituting caps.No More Casual TV Viewing

No matter what the size of your data cap, you now have to think carefully about everything you watch online. If you’re a home user, even a high cap means you simply cannot cut the cable cord unless you don’t watch that much television. g72 battery And there’s little chance you’ll choose to eat up your bandwidth allotment watching a program unless you really want to give it your full attention.

The fear of exceeding bandwidth limits could fundamentally change the way we think about TV viewing. Many people, myself included, like to have TV on in the background while they’re doing something else. There are many shows and even entire channels that I’ll watch out of the corner of my eye while I’m working on my computer, but I’d never stop what I was doing g62 battery and give my undivided attention for a full two hours. Would you pay $10 per GB in overage fees to watch an episode of Cops, three hours of senate debate on CSPAN, or the full two hours of Mansquito? Would you even use 2 or 3 percent of your monthly home broadband allotment on an hour or two of those shows?

Just think about the chilling effect that cautious viewers could have on programming if the unlimited world of cable hp presario cq62 battery and satellite were replaced with metered Internet programming. Would anyone even produce cheesy reality shows such as Hoarders or straight-to-tape movies such as Dolph Lundgren’s Killing Machine if people had to think twice about paying the bandwidth charges to watch them? Or would everyone start watching things in standard def, just to save gigabytes?

How to Stop the Caps

While the FCC’s authority to regulate net neutrality issues such as the Comcast vs. Level 3 dispute is in question, there’s no form of consumer protection against broadband caps hp presario cq42 battery and overage fees. However, there’s always the court of public opinion, and that’s where we all need to change the way we talk about bandwidth caps.

Too many times, journalists who write about this issue parrot broadband industry talking points by calling users “data hogs” for taking full advantage EliteBook 2530P Battery of “all-you-can-eat” Internet services. Unfortunately, as Jesse Brown of Macleans notes, today’s typical usage patterns were yesterday’s excesses.

If we can change the conversation from one which insults consumers to one which empowers them, we can change the stakes of the game Pavilion DM4 Battery and encourage providers to offer the best and cheapest bandwidth instead of trying to take a piece of the action at every turn. The stakes for the future of entertainment, computing, and commerce are much too high to just let this slide.

tag:HP Pavilion DM4T Battery, latitude e6510 battery, latitude e6410 battery, latitude e5510 battery, latitude e5410 battery, inspiron 1440 battery,HP/Compaq Laptop Battery,laptopbatterymag.com