The inevitable has finally happened and Charter has followed the other cable providers in instituting a bandwidth cap of 100GB (I won't even consider the higher caps found in higher tiers because of the outrageous pricing of those services). Charter says only 1 percent of its users will be affected and that the average user only uses about 10GB a month. I contend that 100Gb is an unrealistic amount and that the 10GB average is either false or will quickly become antiquated. Now, I fully admit to being a power user and not someone who just uses email, facebook, and chat. But, the world is moving to a digital distribution model that is internet-centric.

Just casually browsing over an evening takes about 200MB (U/D), not to mention router maintenance packets as well as unwanted ad traffic (x2 people, that's 12 GBs a month right there). At this point, we can see that there is less distinction between "my computer" and the internet. I continually have a stream of news coming into Google Desktop and these days a lot of work can be done on Google Docs instead of local software. But, this, of course, is done through data transmission to "the cloud". And, a fully structured back-up plan would include online services such as Carbonite, where your data is uploaded to a secure server, replacing a local hard drive. Here we can see where limiting large data transfers can be detrimental to productivity.

Moving beyond the basic functions of "work", we next look at entertainment, a large portion of what we use PCs for. We add Youtube videos and the many TV streams such as Hulu and the traffic starts to quickly climb. Next a few Netflix streams adds gigabytes and then there's the streams I like to watch from Twit and Revision3. From there, we have to consider the digital products. I am increasingly buying more things directly over the internet. Besides the gigabytes of free podcasts I download, there's the music. Now mp3s from iTunes and Amazon don't constitute much traffic, but I've started buying full-quality CDs by download such as Marillion's Front Row Club, plus there are now more filmmakers making their films available for download. Next, we move on to bittorrent. Putting aside any illegal use, they are many legitimate reasons to use this, such as Linux distros and more film footage (I guess I won't be getting all 450GBs of NIN tour footage that Trent posted). On top of all this there is online gaming, which uses bandwidth I haven't even measured yet.

Now, I understand the argument that if everybody starts getting all their entertainment online, that takes business away from the cable providers. BUT, I already pay them money for the internet service. That's money I could pay to someone else if all I wanted was email. Furthermore, I also still pay them for cable TV, regardless of whether I watch it or not. At 60+ dollars a month, I pay for full digital cable to get all the non-premium channels. In any case, I never have and never will use pay-per-view. I can always run to the video store instead. So , I would think that the least Charter could do would be to provide the higher cap or no cap to those customers that also pay for digital cable, since I'm not threatening their business. Time Warner's cap of 40Gb is just plain laughable, but at least Comcast has a realistic cap of 250GB. Since cable companies have a legal monopoly though, we don't have the freedom of choice to change our provider.

As more content providers move their distribution to internet-centered models, and as the "average" public begins to embrace these by choice or by necessity, the bandwidth use of these average users will skyrocket exponentially and will show Charter's standard to be very unrealistic.