The Internet.
Take a second to imagine your life without it. Actually, you can take a few minutes — there’s nothing to check on Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg is probably off developing codes for a major computer company) and the news doesn’t come on until 6 p.m.
Having a hard time visualizing that life? That’s to be expected, according to Douglas Pase, adjunct faculty member of engineering online.
And it’s this dependence on the Web that is driving three Internet providers — Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Comcast — to look into charging for bandwidth use by the gigabyte, he said.
In an interview last month, Stan North Martin, the director of outreach, communication and consulting in the Office of Information Technology, said this charge won’t apply to students using NCSU’s Internet. The reason for this, he said, is that the University purchases a certain amount of bandwidth each year from NC-REN, which provides high-speed Internet to some of the state’s universities.
There is no cap on incoming bandwidth, Martin said. That means students can download as much information — software, books, music, videos — as their computers can hold. To prevent filesharing, however, he said there is a cap on outgoing bandwidth.
Martin said that, at the time, he was not aware of any plan to cap incoming bandwidth on campus.
In the ‘business of making money’The bait-and-switch tactic that other Internet companies, such as Time Warner Cable, are using resembles the one credit card companies and banks employed when they first introduced credit cards with only low interest rates.
“The banks that offered the credit cards really wanted you to start using them and become dependent on them,” Pase said. “We’re in that stage now with the Internet.”
In North America alone, 73 percent of the population uses the Internet, according to the International Telecommunications Union.#
A few abuse that connection by continuously downloading music, streaming videos and movies, and playing video games. In doing so, Pase said, they place a weighty load on the Internet’s “backbone” — an “enormous series of networking lanes that connects East coast with West coast.” As the burdens pile up, the connection slows for others.
“If I have broadband in my house, which I do, that gives me faster access to anything outside,” he said. “Broadband speeds up my part of the connection.”
As the link between the backbone and the computer that’s accessing it become faster, the line that separates what the Internet can and can’t do starts to fade.
“You add more dynamic content to your family’s Web site. You can add 100 megabytes of family photos, or even movies,” Pase said. “Take that a step further and you can have interactive tours of the backyard.”
The downside of infinite possibility is the backbone’s “very large but finite” cap.
“The more houses that you have connected with broadband then the more you’re loading up that backbone, and the more I use the backbone the more it takes away from someone else’s ability to use the backbone.”
But those who have already grown accustomed to broadband won’t want to revert to dial-up, which places a smaller strain on the server at the cost of a “miserably slow connection.”
“There’s not a whole lot that I’m gonna want to do with it,” Pase said. “If I set up a Web site with dial-up, the person trying to access my Web site would die of boredom before the page finished downloading.”
In this way, Pase said, people have grown so dependent upon the Internet that if their access was revoked, “a lot of chaos would happen.”
“The fact that taking it away would cause such a mass amount of chaos means that the Internet service providers, much like credit card companies, have an awful lot of power,” he said. *”These corporations are not in the business of being benign and philanthropic organizations. They’re in the business of making money.”
And businesses that yield this power mean they have the ability to increase their charges, Pase said.
“They’ll test the waters and see where people fall and stop using their products, or where they grumble and moan a lot but still use their products,” he said. “That’s where they can continue to charge the customer higher fees and thus make more money.”
Monitoring your useTo test these waters, companies will start — if they already haven’t — to monitor their customers’ Internet use via routers.
Every time a customer sends a “packet” — or bit of information — it goes through a router, which directs that packet to where it needs to go based on its direction.
The router acts a bit like a high-tech traffic light, Pase said.
“Imagine you’re on Hillsborough, and Dan Allen is crossing at Hillsborough, and you’ve got a stoplight. All the packets come through like little cars,” he said. “The stoplight allows traffic to pass through. It also shuffles the cars.”
“Say it takes a look at your license plate and say you’re going to Cary. It’s going to send you forward onto the direction of Gorman Street. If you’re another car, and you’re heading south, it’s going to turn you onto Dan Allen. It does this for every piece of network traffic that goes through.”
Using this, and sometimes more advanced, technology enables companies to see exactly what their customers are doing. They use this information to monitor bandwidth use and, in the future, will use it to see whether you’ve gone over your allotted bandwidth.
This future isn’t too far away. Although Pase said there is no set date companies will start to implement bandwidth monitoring and charging, he said there has been a “lot of discussion about it in the past year.”
“It could be as early as later this year, it might not be until next year or 2010,” he said. “I’m fairly certain that, by 2010, we will be seeing the caps.”
As for the bandwidth usage choices, Pase said it will depend on how customers react to the caps.
Samantha Roth, one of these customers, said she feels that the only people who will be very affected by the caps will be those who let the Internet dominate their lives.
“It would affect me, but I wouldn’t really care,” Roth, a freshman in psychology, said. “I use the Internet a lot, but just if I don’t have anything to do. If I had to go without Internet, I’d be fine.”
