A recent trip to Europe and perusal of a recent OECD report (check out their StatLinks) caused me to consider the vastly different rates that consumers have to pay depending on where, when, and how they want to receive bits of data.
Imagine using an 'internets' where you had to pay for the distance the bits traveled to reach you, where rates depended on the interconnecting networks they had to traverse to get to your desktop, and the time of the day that you accessed a server altered the price of the web-page you viewed. How crazy would that be? And yet many service providers are still charging for web services as they do for 20th century voice calls.
Just consider that if you want to send a 160 byte text messages from a US mobile to another US mobile AT&T will charge you the equivalent of $983 per MB (International text messaging works out at over $1300 per MB!)
US broadband users pay roughly 15x the price per Mbit per month ($3.18) than subscribers in Japan ($0.22) where Japanese fiber customers can download and upload data at 100 Mbit/s.
Sweden has the lowest always-on broadband rates at less than $11 per month for a 256kbit/s connection and recently provisioned a fiber connection for 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg to cruise the Internet with a 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection from her home in Karlstad (in less than 2 seconds she can download a full-length movie on her home computer.)
With the coming of fiber to the premises and cable MSOs demonstrating DOCSIS 3.0 will consumers still be asked to pay for bandwith? Or will content and the value of data drive revenues for service providers? The interactivity that consumers will enjoy will create billions of events and tracking these is the key to generating deserved revenues in an information world.
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