IP Democracy: Could Metered Broadband Foster Longer "Work" Hours?

Time Warner's plan to test metered broadband service has sparked a firestorm of fears that residential broadband service will get too expensive unless we all exercise surfing self-restraint. The good old days of mindless surfing, in other words, might be coming to an end. Fanning the flames is the fact that Time Warner's test calls for metered usage beyond 5 to 40 GBs, barely enough, at the low end, to watch one HD movie online per month and do everything else too.

It's too soon to tell exactly how these ceilings would play out in the real world if Time Warner (and other cable companies, such as Comcast) actually proceeds with a metered usage plan. But University of Chicago Law School professor Randy Picker (one of the speakers at the Internet Video Policy Symposium, btw) raises an interesting question: If metered broadband becomes the norm at home, we will start shifting our broadband usage to the office?

He calls this "bandwidth shifting."

As to bandwidth shifting, once we are all on metered plans at home, how much of our downloading will we do at the office? Will we all turn into bandwidth shifters?

I'd wager a lot of money that in a world with metered broadband usage, workplace Internet usage would soar. From 1999 to 2002, I had only a one-way cable modem (yes, remember that? a stopgap measure before true DOCSIS devices were ubiquitous) at my home and I couldn't wait to get to my office to use my pricey shared T1 (or whatever I had.)

Before that, I had dial-up at home, as did everyone in my workplace, and we all spent more time than we should have on non-work matters during the day simply because dial-up was such a drag. With a meter running on home broadband usage, it's almost a no-brainer that folks are going to wait until they get to the office to download films from iTunes or play video games or watch online TV shows.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 25, 2008 1:12 AM to IP Democracy