Video Killed the Broadband Buffet (opens in new tab)

Welcome to the stone age! Metered Internet is what I had in 1997 in Russia. So much for predicted death of desktop applications and "keeping everything in the clowd" computing model, that so many tech journalists are predicting for everybody.

How can I expect to keep my ~200GB of data "in the clowd" if there is greedy Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T between me and my data? One is going to charge me more for pushing gigabytes monthly, another will throttle my not-so-good connection even further and another will spy on what I keep in my cloud?

This would certainly damage my bottom line, but the fact is there are a lot of people who pay 30/month for their connections (the same as myself) but literally download 1/100,000th as much. It's hard to justify other people subsidizing me except for the fact that they're the losers in the transaction.

I just don't get it. Has no one ever heard of linux and tc??? NetBSD?? Its a damn 3 line bash script to faily share the bandwidth among users and give the power users any excess at any time. Instead, they wait until you hit the "magic number" of gigabytes and then just cut you off?!

Of all of the problems facing broadband carriers, this ones is the simplest to solve.

Try hooking up the 10s of thousnds of users who are still on dialup after a decade of being on the "waiting list" for broadband. Now that would be worthwhile.

ISPs act like miserly pricks, pundits blame it on paying customers and new web services. Yawn.