Readers over at Broadband Reports are noticing marked differences between AT&T’s measurements and their own. One user found differences of several orders of magnitude. Now, if AT&T (and of course Comcast and others) are unwilling to allow for wiggle room in their GB caps (fees start the byte over 250GB), why should we allow wiggle room in their measurement? After all, we don’t let grocers use poorly (or maliciously) calibrated scales.

If we’re going to be paying by the byte, we need real legal protections against being taken advantage of by companies that have their customers over a barrel. The average AT&T customer would likely recognize if their electricity bill was far more than they expected, and of course at the grocery store, they’d be surprised and concerned to find that a single apple tips the scale at ten pounds. But if they were told that they’d exceeded their bandwidth limit (uncommon today, but bandwidth use is growing as streaming video becomes more accessible), what could they say? Unlike the readers of Broadband Reports, they don’t know how to tell their router to track packets, or set up a software monitor — many would be hard-pressed to access the online meter provided by AT&T.

Without a legally standardized, reliable, and understandable way to track the bandwidth we’re using, we’re completely at the mercy of the telecoms. There are legitimate questions as to how traffic should be tracked. Is it before or after the router? Should it require separate hardware? Will there be exceptions for “promotional” packets, overhead introduced by the service, bits we didn’t request, or wijacking? If the service is down, will we be reimbursed? At what rate, and by whose measurements? These aren’t trifling technicalities or rounding errors. They’re essential regulatory questions that mean the difference between being charged for what you use, and being charged whatever they say. It’s a fundamental conflict of interest that the telecoms are the ones tracking this usage.

How best to proceed isn’t really clear, but here’s what I’m thinking: a few pioneering cities or counties (depending on the jurisdiction required) should implement pilot programs with simple, certified, publicly-developed hardware designed to count bits accurately and report them securely (a big university would love designing this). Work out the kinks with a study of a town or neighborhood, make the device (or integration of one into a router or cable modem, or central cable box) required by law, and with luck others will follow suit. Yeah, it’s rather optimistic, and the money will have to come from somewhere, but it’s not complicated and it is necessary.

AT&T has, predictably, attempted to account for the huge discrepancies by suggesting user error. They’re working tirelessly to ensure accuracy. Yes, but whose accuracy, AT&T? Your accuracy or mine?

Update: AT&T has reached out with some information, which I include here in the interest of fairness. AT&T was the subject of this post, and their methods of measuring bandwidth may or may not be accurate (they tell us they are, but they would either way), but the criticism in this post is intended for the other companies as well. I stand by my assertion that it is a conflict of interest to have as an impartial observer of usage the same company that charges for said usage, and sets its own rules and measures. Here is the email I was sent, with contact information removed:

I believe this is what’s called “softly, softly, catchy monkey.”

[via TechDirt; image: Cobalt on Flickr]

Australia’s Special Broadband Service has warned that the steady increase in broadband speed, and its increasing availability, may lead to “digital ghettos.” The premise is simple: faster and more reliable broadband means that more and more people can participate effectively online. As affordable broadband access spreads to different ethnic groups, argues the SBS, these communities could form tight-knit “communities” online—ghettos, in other words. Instead of broadband, and more generally the Internet, bringing people together, it threatens to further separate different groups of people from each other.

The SBS warned, in speaking about Australia’s plan for a national broadband network, that broadband will encourage different ethnic groups to “retreat inward,” rather than embrace different peoples and ideas.

Such a phenomenon could also be described as narrowcasting. Rather than create programming that attracts a wide audience, you instead create programming that appeals only to a small niche. There are networks that only show sports, networks that only show movies, networks that only show reality TV, networks that only show the news. The same principle applies online: Web sites that only cover sports, Web sites that only cover tech, etc. Sirius XM has discrete channels that appeal only to a certain audience: I doubt very much that fans of The Boneyard listen to BPM all that often. (I listen Sirius XM, but I primarily only listen to The Virus. I have no idea what happens on the several hundred other channels on the platform.)

The danger, of course, is if this separateness moves beyond simple pastimes and becomes part of a community’s larger identity. Group A only visits Web site A for news, while Group B only visits Web site B. What happens if these sites have different editorial slants? Group A and B may see the very same story in two totally different lights, which could lead to problems down the line.

The point, I suppose, is that increased broadband availability won’t automatically solve the world’s problems. Just because you give people access to greater communication doesn’t mean they’re not going to use it as an extension of their already present communication channels or biases. And if people only see their opinion online, and see it constantly reinforced and validated, well, that could be problematic.

I understand this all sounds somewhat backwards—give people greater access to communication and they’ll merely turn inward—but let’s not pretend we can’t already see that happening.

It’s hardly a secret that many of us here are big fans of Steam, Valve’s digital download service that makes buying PC games pretty painless. Who among us hasn’t spent more than a few dollars during one of those big Steam sales?

The only problem with Steam sales is that, having purchased a game, you have to sit there for at least several (long!) hours, waiting for it to fully download. Meaning, if that you were waiting all year to buy, say, BioShock 2, then when you finally buy it when it’s on sale for 75 percent off, you’ll probably have to leave the download running overnight, the servers being swamped with other, like-minded folks. That’s not fun at all.

It’s a problem that only manifests itself, at least for me, during the big sale weeks; Steam usually can nearly saturate my Internet connection, which is 101 mbps down, or around 12MB/s.

But that’s the thing: not everybody, particularly people who live in rural areas of the U.S., has an Internet connection that can download an 8GB video game in a few minutes. And if that’s the case, then just how convenient are services like Steam (and Good Old Games and Direct2Drive, and so on)? Why would you wait for Big Game to download over an eight-hour period when you could just as easily drive over to Brick-And-Mortar Store, pick up the disc, and go home a satisfied customer?

Curt Schilling, the former baseball great and current executive at 38 Studios, knows the reason: retail is dead, both online and offline.

The only experience worse than having to physically go somewhere to get a game is having to wait a day and a half for that game to download. Don’t get me started on the game that makes me drive somewhere to buy it and then wait 6 hours while it patches!

A valid complaint, yes, but that’s probably just as much of a problem with this nation’s broadband infrastructure. Again, not everybody can rely upon anything even approaching a fast Internet connection. (I can barely stream Sirius XM in the TechCrunch office in New York without it stuttering, so I can’t even imagine downloading something like Napoleon: Total War on that connection.) If you’re one of those people with relatively slow Internet connections, then services like Steam, Netflix streaming, Rdio, the PSP Go, etc. might as well not exist.

(Schilling’s other complaint, that there’s too many digital download services out there, is barely even worth mentioning. Yeah, who wants choice when it comes to shopping? I much prefer when I’m beholden to capricious whims of the only shoppe in town.)

I suppose the point of this was to pull a Bill Clinton, say “I feel your pain, ye with the slow Internet connection,” then nod my head in a reassuring manner. Hopefully actual broadband (as opposed to the barely-faster-than-dial-up that qualifies as broadband these days) spreads across this country so that such download services work as advertised for more than 32 people.

The FCC has just released its latest report on the sate of broadband in the US of A (PDF alert), and the results are… less than encouraging, and for a number of reasons. The agency found that around two-thirds of Americans’ broadband connections don’t actually qualify as broadband under its definition. (Broadband to the FCC is 4 mbps down/1 mbps up.) What’s sorta odd is that this isn’t a result of the lack of infrastructure or anything, but a result of people choosing low speed plans.

The data used in the study is accurate as of December 31, 2009, so any changes between then and now won’t show up till the next report.

There’s a few things going on here. For one, the Free Press, sorta of a watchdog group, says (PDF alert) the FCC really ought to be measuring things like broadband availability and not broadband subscription. The argument is that it gives a better idea of the state of broadband when you measure actual availability rather than what people happen to subscribe to.

But there’s value in knowing that—subscription rates—as well.

I don’t have to tell you guys, the blog-reading tech enthusiasts, that bandwidth-heavy services have really taken off this year. Streaming Netflix is practically embedded in refrigerators at this point, and music services like Rdio and Pandora (and Spotify, but that’s Europe-only right now) are becoming more and more “normal,” if that makes any sense. Then you look at the number of people playing online video games with Xbox Live or PSN, to say nothing of new services like OnLive…

The point is, we’re reaching the point where there’s actually a legitimate use for a fast broadband connection. I mean, I pay for a 101 mbps down/15 mbps u connection, but it’s been nearly impossible to saturate with legitimate traffic (or otherwise). So if we have an idea of what broadband subscription was like in the past, we can then see how people moved to faster plans as the aforementioned services became more commonplace.

Now we just have to ensure that ISPs don’t start playing favorites when it comes to actually delivering all that data.

There’s good news and bad news about broadband coming out of newly released Census data, courtesy of the Commerce Department. The good news is that more people than ever before now have broadband, with 63.5 percent of all households now subscribing to a broadband service. That’s up from 9.2 percent from way back in 2001. Read that carefully: that’s up from 9.2 percent, not merely up 9.2 percent. The bad news?

The bad news is that there’s a very real “broadband gap” that appears to be developing along socio-economic lines.

Roughly, the more money you make (which generally correlates to your level of educate) the more likely you are to have broadband.

If the Internet, and broadband specifically, was supposed to be the great equalizer, how is it supposed to equalize anything of only the well-off have access to it?

It works out like this: 94.1 percent of households making $100,000 or more per year subscribe to broadband, while only 35.8 percent of households making less than $25,000 or less per year subscribe to broadband.

84.5 percent of households with at least one college degree under the roof subscribe to broadband, while high school degree households come in at 28.8 percent.

As for race or ethnicity, always a prickly topic in the U.S., 47.9 percent of Hispanic household subscribe to broadband. African-American households are at 49.4 percent. Non-Hispanic white households come in at 68 percent.

The most broadband crazy? That would be Asian-American households, with 77.3 percent of such households subscribing to broadband.

Now you know.

The Pew research center put out survey results today on broadband adoption and Internet use in America. There was one data point that I found startling. According to the survey, 21 percent of American adults say they don’t use the Internet. One fifth of all Americans.

This isn’t just people who do not use broadband (which is 66 percent of American adults). It also includes people who don’t use dial-up (another 5 percent). These people don’t use the Internet at all. That is like not using the telephone.

The number is a bit inflated because a third (34 percent) of these self-described non-users live in a house with Internet access or have family members who use the Internet regularly. They just don’t think the information on the Internet is relevant to their lives (48 percent), are uncomfortable with computers (60 percent), and are not interested in getting online (90 percent).

Who are these people? I can understand why elderly Americans who didn’t grow up with computers not seeing the need for them. And that is certainly reflected in the broadband numbers. Only 31 percent of people 65 or older are on broadband, compared to 80 percent for those 18-to-29 years old. People without a high school education, with low incomes, or who live in rural areas also are less likely to use broadband. It is likely that these demographic groups also make up a disproportionate number of the non-users.

At least race is becoming less of a factor. One of the fastest growing groups of broadband use is among African Americans. More than half (56 percent) use broadband (compared to 67 percent of white users), up from 46 percent of African Americans last year. And most people (53 percent) don’t believe the government should get involved in making broadband more broadly available. They think the market is doing just fine on its own.

Well, except for those 21 percent of Americans who are apparently still communicating by telegram.

The Cousins were mulling over a broadband tax, but the new Government has put a stop to that. (Now they’re considering using some of the BBC license fee to fund broadband development.) The idea was to charge people 50p (around $0.70) per month to fund the expansion of broadband into rural areas. Would such a move work here in the U.S.? Would you be willing to pay, say, $1 per month, paying toward some sort of Broadband Fund, to ensure that people in the middle of nowhere have access to reliable broadband? What’s more American than wanting to help your neighbors?

The UK plan, as I understand it, was supposed tack on an additional 50p (that’s read “fifty pence”—watching Sky Sports News has made me familiar with the Pound Sterling, especially during football transfer season) to your monthly tax bill. Doing some maths, that works out to £6 per year. That’s £6 per year to ensure that the fine people of Hull and the North East have access to broadband.

Let’s take that idea and apply it to us here in the U.S. You send the IRS an additional ~$10 every April, ~$10 that goes to a Broadband Fund. That money is then used to develop a modern broadband infrastructure in places that otherwise would go without. I don’t know if the good people of, say, Wyoming or Nebraska currently have access to 100 mbps broadband, but it sure would be useful.

Imagine an entire United States of America wired for broadband! And by “broadband” I don’t mean some crummy DSL service that’s marginally faster than AOL dial-up. No, I’m talking 100 mbps at a minimum for everyone. What better way to spur the likes of Netflix to increase the quality of its streaming movies? (I shudder to compare a Blu-ray with a Netflix stream!) Maybe Hulu could bump up the resolution (while dialing down the compression) of “Parks and Recreation”?

Broadband for everyone! Who’s with me?

It’s a brave new world of health and technology, coming together to keep you as healthy as modern medicine allows. The Senate Committee on Aging was witness to a show-and-tell of sorts last week, getting a first-hand look at some of the hi-tech innovations that promise to annoy people who cringe at the idea of universal healthcare. Because keeping people healthy is pure, pure evil, apparently.

It all sounds a little like Blade Runner. Laptops with built-in blood pressure monitors, a device that can automatically pump out the appropriate amount of insulin without having to consult a doctor (keeping the good doctor free to check on more complicated issues), little alarms worn on your person that would call 911 if something bad happened to you (like you’ve slipped on ice), and so on.

Then there’s the benefits of giving doctors access to electronic medial records, delivered to and fro’ in the blink of an eye thanks to broadband.

It’s the future~!

Remember when 56K modems first came out? I remember walking around the mall thinking to myself, “Man, the Internet must be so fast with that thing!” I mention this because Akamai Technologies, the company which pretty much powers the Internet’s biggest sites, has published a list of the fastest Internet cities in America. The winner is Berkley, Calif., which has an average Internet speed of 18.7 Mbps, followed by Chappel Hill, NC (17.5Mbps), and Stanford, Calif. (17.0 Mbps). Notice anything? Yes, those cities are the home of large research universities. Gotta trade noted across the world lickety-split!

You could say something like, “Well, having broadband so fast sure is nice and all, but how many regular folks have access to it?” Yeah, PhD candidates have access to those speeds, but what about Joe Public?

Then again, I have a fairly fast Internet connection (101 mbps down/15 mbps up), and all the sites that Joe Public would use are still dog slow. Just because you have a fancy Internet connection doesn’t mean YouTube is going to load any faster than it does now. You’re at the mercy of Google’s servers.

via TomsHardware

Kudos to Comcast for embracing the year 2009. The nation’s largest—and quite possibly worst—ISP has finally committed itself to deploying 100 mbps broadband beginning this year. That will make the FCC happy, what with the loft goals it set with its National Broadband Plan. It’s also good news for people who know their way around things like Usenet—taps nose like a spy. Will it be affordable, though?

The big rollout will happen within the next 12 to 18 months. Most, if not all, of Comcast’s customers will be able to sign up for the super-fast service. You can thank DOCSIS 3.0 for that.

Price may be an issue. Right now, Comcast offers 100 mbps down/15 mbps up service to business customers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for $369 per month. There’s no way you’re going to convince residential customers in this economy to shell out nearly $400 a month for Internet access, no matter how fast—that’s the price of two car payments. Now you’d have to figure that not even Comcast would be that silly to charge that kind of money for residential Internet access. I don’t know what’s involved with business-level Internet access at Comcast, but presumably it comes with free ostrich egg omelets once a week.

For comparison’s sake, I already have 100 mbps Internet access from Cablevision, an ISP in the New York area. For $100 per month I get 101 (!) mbps down/15 mbps up. I am, in fact, able to max out my connection when using Usenet (I have Newsdemon). But a fair warning to people who think the Internet is magically going to fly once they hop aboard the 100 mbps train: it won’t. Sites like YouTube are still dog-slow, Gmail isn’t any faster than it is using your regular broadband connection. In a sense, you’re faster than what these sites can handle. That will change over time, of course, but don’t think getting 100 mbps is going to change your life if all you do is check your Facebook and watch the occasional YouTube clip.

It’s sorta weird: sites won’t upgrade their capacity until there’s enough people with super-fast connections to make it worth their while, and it may not be worth it to the average person to upgrade, and perhaps pay $100 per month, until it’s worth their while.

The FCC would like to know what you do with broadband. This is what I do, and what I imagine 99 percent of Americans use it for.

Up until a moment ago, this was going to be a standard “newsy” post: the FCC will announce its National Broadband Plan on Tuesday, here’s what it’s all about. Then I read the comments of a PC World article discussing that very same plan—many people are outraged that the government would muscle its way into the free market! If Americans wanted fast broadband then the market would provide it on its own terms. That, of course, is complete nonsense: plenty of Americans live in one-ISP towns, and if said ISP provides terrible service, well, though cookies, chico. This is America! Love it or leave it~!

And really, the FCC isn’t doing anything particularly controversial, at least I don’t think it’s controversial. All it’s doing is saying, by 2020, we’d like to see 100 million homes (out of an estimated 130 million homes come 2020) have access to broadband with speeds of up to 100 mbps. Some people already have access to that type of Internet connection, myself included. Other ISPs, including universally loathed Comcast, plans to roll out 100 mbps service in the coming months. So it’s not like the FCC is making some sort of unreasonable demand: the market has already decided that it’s worth its while to deploy 100 mbps service all over the country. A cynic might say that the FCC knows this, that 100 mbps service is closer than you might otherwise think, and is merely latching itself onto the ISPs so that it can be all, “See, FCC = leadership.” But don’t be cynical, don’t hold grudges: while you’re holding a grudge, the other guy is dancing.

I don’t know, I suppose it makes sense to get into this a bit more when the FCC actually makes the Plan public on Tuesday. But for now, all I have to say is: chill out. Not everything the government announces is tantamount to quartering British soldiers in your house without permission. I suppose I’m talking to people right now who actually believe, and understand, that a wired country is truly in the best interests of everyone.

About a year ago I signed up for Cablevision’s Optimum Online Ultra, and aside from a little snafu that I’m trying to fix right now (don’t ask!), it’s been great. How could you go wrong with a reliable 100 mbps down/15 mbps up connection? Only $100/month, too. Other ISPs are getting close to offering similar speeds, thanks to Docsis 3.0, but some people are wondering: will people even need that sort of speed, and if so, then for what?

So, Cablevision already offers 100 mbps Internet connections for $100 per month. Verizon has fiber to the home, right now topping out at 50 mbps, but there’s capacity for up to 400 mbps. Even outright awful Comcast is getting in on the 100 mbps game, but so far they’ve been charging trial customers in Minnesota $370 per month. So, what I pay $100 for, Comcast wants $370. Makes sense.

The point is, thanks to Docsis 3.0, even the worst ISPs will soon be able to offer 100 mbps connections. You’ll just have to be prepared to pay a little more than you’re used to. The FCC, which wants 100 million homes to have access to 100 mbps connections by 2020, must be happy.

But, what do you do with that kind of speed? (Right now, people in South Korea and Sweden are laughing at us poor Americans for getting excited over a puny 100 mbps connection!) Like I said, I do a lot of Usenetting with Newsdemon—it’s Oscar season, what do you want? Well, if someone like Hulu or Netflix sees that’s X-Number of people now have 100 mbps connections, maybe they’ll start to offer higher-res content? Why offer something if nobody can use it?

If you give people a fast Internet connection, they’ll find ways to put it to good use, believe me.

Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go prepaid 3G data service made a splash last summer by offering no-contract plans that came close to competing with two-year offerings from the likes of Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. The major drawback was that the top plan, at $60, only allowed for 1GB of data usage, whereas you’d get 5GB on a contract plan.

Well Virgin Mobile’s just given everyone a big reason to go month-to-month by upping the data allotment of its $60 plan to a full 5GB. It’s increased the data buckets on two of its other, lower-priced plans as well.

The base $10 plan still gets you 100MB of data that must be used within 10 days, but the $20 plan now gets you 300MB instead of 250MB and the $40 plan now gets you 1GB instead of 600MB. As previously reported, Broadband2Go uses Sprint’s EVDO Rev. A network.

Mobile Broadband Service [Virgin Mobile]

They’re trying to balance the books over in the UK, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has proposed a tax that may interest you. The proposed budget for the next year includes a broadband tax! The name is a bit misleading in that it’s not a tax on broadband, but a tax on telephone landlines (POTS), the money of which will go to making sure people in rural areas have sufficient access to broadband.

It’s not a very large tax at £6 (around $9.72) per year, but I’m sure it’ll annoy a number of people.

The goal is to have 90 percent of the UK wired for broadband by the end of 2017. And considering the UK is about the size of Oregon, maybe then you’ll understand why it’s so difficult to wire the entire U.S. for broadband. If you live in a rural area, well, tough cookies.

There’s several criticisms of the tax. One is that it won’t raise enough money to wire the UK for broadband (the tax will raise some £170m), while others are all, “We prefer a market-led solution.”

The “others” would be leaders in the Conservative party, which are pretty much a lock to win the next general election.

Imagine such a tax here in the U.S. The federal government levies a tax on, say, car purchases or TVs bigger than 50 inches (or whatever, it doesn’t matter) in order to pay for broadband in Middle of Nowhere, USA. If you think broadband is important to economic growth then it’s hard to be against such an idea. Yes, there will be the people who scream, “Don’t tax me, you scoundrels!” but they’re always like that.

So if we have any UK readers, here’s my question: is there a “buzz” around the broadband tax, or does nobody give a damn? That the tax only applies to hard landlines probably means that nobody under the age of 30 will be affected.

More FCC news for you, this Wednesday morning (and before Droid news consumes us all). The agency is considering taking some of the bandwidth that is currently allocated to digital television, and auctioning it off so that broadband companies can bid on it. The point, of course, is to increase the availability of wireless broadband.

There’s a few sides here, each with some valid points. You’ve got the current TV station owners who, as you might expect, don’t want to lose any spectrum, even if you compensate them with giant bags of money. Then there’s the broadband companies who are all, “Please oh please let us have the spectrum, so we can create some new broadband service, and sit back and watch the money roll in.” You’ve got people who are against the move because it might put in jeopardy the spectrum that the federal government spent billions of dollars convincing people to switch to (the switch to digital TV). And then you’ve got people who just hate the FCC, and think that regulating the Internet isn’t even part of its charge.

It’s important to keep in mind that, by definition, the spectrum belongs to all of us, as citizens. It should be used in such a way that is beneficial to the most citizens and not just a handful of TV station owners, for example.

Now, will this even happen, auctioning off some spectrum so that broadband companies will bid? It might happen, but no rules will be put in place till February at the next big FCC meeting.

A strong argument in favor of this: broadband access is simply more useful than traditional TV. You can only watch TV, which is fine. With broadband, you can watch, sure, but you can also participate (in debates relevant to you: PS3 vs. Xbox, the public option vs. something else, etc.), which is vital to having a fully informed citizenry.

But don’t freak out: the FCC can say, come February, “Yeah, we can’t do that broadband spectrum auction thing. Sorry. Next question.”

What’s the deal with Comcast, Verizon, and other ISPs petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of broadband? It’s all about money—broadband stimulus money—MG Siegler explains on G4′s Attack of the Show.

As the Obama administration looks to expand broadband access to rural and urban areas that are still under-served, the ISPs want to lower what constitutes broadband so that they can get some of the billions of dollars in stimulus money without shelling out as much to actually deliver the broadband access the stimulus package is designed to create.

Those phone and cable companies are tricky. Watch the video above.

There’s two ways to look at the story that many of the country’s biggest ISPs have refused government stimulus money for broadband infrastructure investment. One, the ISPs patently don’t need the money, and are more than capable of delivering broadband to as many Americans as possible with their own capital. Two, the ISPs could use the money, but they’d prefer not to accept it lest they be beholden to all sorts of government-imposed restrictions, one of which relates to net neutrality.

Let’s take the first one, that the ISPs, including Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, have a sufficient amount of capital to invest and build the country’s broadband infrastructure. (I write this using Cablevision’s Optimum Online Ultra, which is pretty much unnecessarily fast.) Since they have the capital, they don’t need to accept any government stimulus money, unlike, say, GM, which was about two minutes away from bursting into flames had it not received sweet, sweet government loans. That really is a Perfect World, Kumbaya scenario, I think. If the ISPs are so flush with cash, how come people complain on a daily basis about how rubbish Comcast is; how come they have to impose bandwidth restrictions on connections? If their networks are so robust—made robust, mind you, with all that money they supposedly have lying around—then they shouldn’t have to worry about Timmy High School Student streaming tons of video all day long.

Hence, the second way to look at this, that the ISPs damn well could use the money to invest in this country’s broadband infrastructure. No one expects rural Georgia to be zipping along the Internet at South Korean or Swedish-esque speeds, but surely the days of dealing with “slow Internet” should be behind us. This has to do with net neutrality. In taking the broadband stimulus money, the ISPs would have to agree not to “favor any lawful Internet applications and content over others.” So if AT&T, for example, strikes a deal with Video Site A instead of Video Site B, AT&T can’t turn around and give Video Site A preferred access to its network. That’s the crux of net neutrality, ISPs want to cut deals with their preferred partners at the expense of everyone else. It hampers innovation—Develop a cool Web site? Better cough up the bucks, otherwise people accessing it will be bitching about the slow speeds that’s entirely not your fault!—and rewards the smoke-filled-room shenanigans that have been a detriment to consumers for years.

Of course, no ISP will admit, on the record, to refusing stimulus money because they’re afraid of all the restrictions and unwanted attention.

Not that I’d worry about it: as we all know, the Market solves every single problem!

By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte, according to a new forecast of IP traffic issued by Cisco today. What is a zettabyte? It is a trillion gigabytes, dummy. (I had to look that up too). And that number represents more than a fivefold increase in IP traffic from today. (See the forecast in the tables below).

What is driving this growth is video. Cisco forecasts that 90 percent of consumer IP traffic (which makes up the majority of total IP traffic) will be video in 2013. Cisco also predicts that mobile data traffic will also be overtaken by video, reaching 64 percent of total mobile IP traffic by 2013. Part of this might be wishful thinking on Cisco’s part, which needs broadband usage growth to continue apace in order to sell its networking gear. But part of it is also the fact that these numbers are based on the percentage of bits traveling over those broadband pipes, and it doesn’t take a lot of fat video files to fill those up.

Cisco is a big believer in the growth of mobile video, expecting it to grow from 33 petabytes a month in 2008 to 2,184 petabytes (or 2 exabytes) a month in 2013, which represents a 131 percent compound annual growth rate. (No wonder it bought the maker of the Flip video camera). As impressive as those numbers sound, at that point, mobile data will only make up 4 percent of total IP traffic. (Good thing Apple finally decided to get with the program and add video to its upcoming iPhone 3GS). In the chart below, you can see how big a role Cisco expects video to play in mobile data traffic. Video is the green part of the bar graphs. Standalone data (dark blue) is also expected to grow quickly.

The devices expected to drive this 131 percent annual growth in mobile data are not so much current 3G mobile handsets, but next-gen “3.5G and above” (in green), as well as laptops and other portable computers (in orange). By 2013, I bet it will be pretty hard to tell the difference between those two segments. Until then, Cisco is offering free apps for the iPhone and Blackberry that lets you check your network speed on the go.

Table 1. Global IP Traffic, 2008-2013

Source: Cisco VNI, 2009

Table 1. Mobile Data Traffic 2008-2013

Source: Cisco, 2009

This all in turn leads up to AT&T’s next upgrade, from HSPA to the oh-so-fast LTE. Trials of the latter begin in 2010, also scheduled for completion sometime in 2011. In other words, mobile internet speeds will be downright ridiculous come 2011.

AT&T’s promised road map:

• Near-Doubling Radio Frequency Capacity. In 2008 and 2009 to date, high-quality 850 MHz spectrum has been deployed in more than half of AT&T’s 3G network footprint to improve overall coverage and in-building reception, with additional markets planned for later in the year.
• More Bandwidth to Cell Sites. We are adding fiber-optic connectivity and additional capacity to thousands of cell sites across the country this year, expanding the critical connections that deliver traffic from a cell site into the global IP backbone network. These upgrades will support the higher mobile broadband speeds enabled by both HSPA 7.2 and LTE.
• More Cell Sites. Deployment of about 2,100 new cell sites across the country.
• Wi-Fi Integration. Many AT&T smartphones will be able to switch seamlessly between 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. AT&T customers with qualifying smartphone and 3G LaptopConnect plans have access to the nation’s largest Wi-Fi network – more than 20,000 hotspots, including locations in all 50 states – at no additional charge. AT&T’s global Wi-Fi footprint covers more than 90,000 hotspots, and AT&T also can create permanent or temporary extended Wi-Fi zones in areas with high 3G network use, like a grouping of hotels or a festival.
• MicroCells. Customer trials leading toward general availability of AT&T 3G MicroCell offerings, which utilize femtocells to enhance in-building wireless coverage.