A few blocks down the road, a Chinese family runs two small businesses. One is the only corner store/gas station at this end of the city, the other is an adjacent all-you-can-eat buffet.
While I don't frequent the buffet much, the gas station is simply too convenient to ignore, and it's where I get most of my fuel.
I was thinking I should head down there and tell the nice lady behind the counter who hardly speaks any English that I'll offer them a set rate each month, let's say $200, and they should fill up my truck and my wife's behemoth, gas guzzlers both, as much and as often as we like. Just keep on pumping. And when we're hungry, we'll bring the clan down and belly up to the trough, again for a flat, monthly rate. We don't use a lot of their services now, but that shouldn't be an impediment, should it? Even if we're topping up the tanks and bellies now every day?
I wonder if the bewildered look on her face would soon translate into her husband chasing me off the property with a broom.
Ridiculous, right?
Yet this is precisely the kind of mindset that has become pervasive in the debate on Internet usage based billing. People are freaking out about the supposed end of unlimited usage plans, even though nearly everyone is on a metered plan to begin with.
I would consider myself a high-usage subscriber. I pay more every month to have faster download and upload speeds. But I don't do file sharing, and don't stream a lot of TV or movies. I'm probably not as high a consumer as I first thought. I'd guess my usage is around eight to15 gigabytes per month on the download. However, on the uploads, I can be as high as 10 gigabytes, much, much higher than most people. When I upload a hockey tournament to www.zinchuk.ca, it can be 2,200 photos and take four hours, choking my Internet connection to a crawl.
My new TV has a built-in Ethernet connection, as does the new home theatre system. Even the Boxing Day special Blu-ray player to replace the now-dead DVD player has an Ethernet port. All are capable of Netflix, when Netflix Canada decides to support LG TVs and home theatres. Theoretically, I could be pulling huge amounts of data from each of these devices at the same time. Each hour of video is about one gigabyte of data.
If I decide to get an $8/month Netflix account, I will stream more data in one lazy Saturday than I currently use in a month.
Weirdly enough, the upgrades to my television service show there is already a lot of bandwidth out there. With HD television service through SaskTel Max, the puny little copper wires that feed from the pedestal to my house have been squeezed about as much as they possibly can.
To get full HD to two TVs in my house at the same time, the install guys had to use not just one, but both pairs of twisted copper lines running into my house. This was a problem, since one line was faulty, so I now have a temporary line running from the pedestal, along the fence, to my house, at least until they can dig up my backyard in the spring.
SaskTel Max is simply TV streamed over the Internet, by the way, through a dedicated box running a variant of the Windows operating system. Since I have three boxes turned on all the time (whether the TV is on or not), that is a tremendous amount of data flowing into my house every minute.
These upgrades tell me that there is still a lot of room for much, much higher usage out there in the network.
Just expect to pay for it.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
