You better watch out, Comcast and Time Warner have announced they plan to charge you big bucks to use the Internet. These no good, money grubbing cable TV shysters who operate in a largely uncompetitive market, offer tiered ‘pay for everything’ TV plans that force consumers to pay for a bunch of crap stations that no one watches. As an afterthought, the cable companies had piggybacked phone and internet services onto your cable, using the same ‘one price fits all’ scheme to get millions of people off Telco based services like DSL and onto their networks. Now that they have baited millions of unsuspecting subscribers, they intend to switch and to begin charging customers for the amount of data they use. And the charges are going to be big.

Cable Companies, who become internet service provider’s simply because at the time they could bring a faster service to the users than DSL could, have argued that all of the Internet Based entertainment services like HULU, ROKU, SKYPE, XBox 360, PS3, and NETFLIX use much too much bandwidth and there is not enough to go around. They feel that if we continue to watch these programs on our computers, the Internet is going to run out. So, to keep all the Bandwidth Hogs from using up the Internet, they are going to charge by the Byte. The truth is, the Exaflood just isn’t happening.

In reality, Pay per Byte is just another trick they are using to keep you, the customer, from downloading content in direct competition to them, the cable companies. The scare tactic, the potential for a $200 bill from Comcast, will make many families vow never to download a movie, watch a TV show, or play an online game again for fear of going broke. The Cable Companies are hoping and praying they can kill the fledgling ‘on demand’ business by making it too expensive for the average family.

And to make matters even more obtuse, there is no way you will have any idea how much you consume since reliable bandwidth meters just don’t work. It looks that for now, your choices are limited. But there’s fiber at the end of the tunnel. 

Verizon, a hard core telco with ‘fiber to the house’ or FTTH, is in fact building a brand new network. In direct competition with the Cable Companies, Verizon has no plans on charging ‘by the byte’. The service, reliability, and cost of fiber optics when deployed make cable look like the Dial-Up of old. 

Telecommunication is Verizon’s core business and they are willing to give unlimited data to all users regardless of ‘how much’ they need. For $100 a month, you can even run a server from your home. It doesn’t sound like Verizon is going to ‘run out’ of Internet like the Cable Companies anytime soon, and although they are now providing TV as well as Internet, they have every intention of welcoming power users with reasonable charges that don’t scare the average Family of Four away from the Internet. Lets just hope they hurry up.