America's Bandwidth Problem

Justin Jeffre, musician, onetime political candidate, and occasional contributor to the Cincinnati Beacon - emailed recently with some concerns over "Net Neutrality". A campaign has begun under the auspices of saving the Internet from telecom companies that would seek to regulate access to various sites and online resources.

[Potions of this post appeared in an email to Jeffre and other bloggers.]

After some time looking into the issue I've decided that, with some exceptions (notably the AOL blocking case), this appears to be much ado about nothing. This is not about selectively limiting access. It's about bandwidth. We're sucking down massive, massive amounts of bandwidth these days - from YouTube to Google Video to all of the songs getting downloaded from iTunes. The trend is phenomenal - all of the charts on usage look like "hockey sticks".

Like many things, there is a hidden cost. We can't ask the same network that supports phone calls to handle videoclips downloaded to a Blackberry. In terms of data volume it's not apples and oranges - it's apples and 800-pound gorillas. Sprint and Verizon and the others simply cannot manage all of these expensive media-clogged pipes if they are forced to use the exact same pricing model that worked in the days when "Mmmmbop" was on the radio. In 2006 we have wireless broadband connectivity added to the mix - cool stuff, laptop cards that guarantee access anywhere. But these new networks don't pay for themselves.

It's a facile, familiar conclusion - it's all just greedy corporations fattening up profitability. But ultimately the best way to guarantee we don't get innovative products and services is to force companies to act according to increasingly outdated business models while their markets and customer habits are evolving rapidly in another direction.

(Another great conversation to have would be how increased bandwidth usage directly relates to server-side electricity consumption - another hidden cost. Google, Microsoft, all of them - they're frantically building out massive, massive data centers worldwide - but one of the dirty little secret of the IT world is that the lifetime operating cost of a server costs more than the hardware itself - and most of that operating cost is Mr. Electricity - which comes from the grid, which mostly comes from coal and natural gas, not oil. Our alternatives are going to narrow down quickly over time: Build nuke plants, build refineries for natural gas, scrub sulphur emissions, or, if you like things Green, turn a plot of land slightly larger than Canada into a wind farm and hope it's always really, really windy. But I digress.)

We should always be vigilant about preserving a system that provides fair access to the Internet. But this particular issue seems somewhat over-inflated.