This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.
As people continue to cut the cord from traditional services like cable TV and cell phones, the small number of giant companies that control how we connect to the internet are fighting back with higher prices and fees designed to make us pay for switching away from them.
For instance, two headlines out of the recent news:
Verizon to raise price of grandfathered unlimited data plans by $20
Verizon doesn’t want to be the bad guy and completely get rid of its old unlimited data plans, so it’s pursuing a new strategy: price customers out of them. The Verge has learned that Verizon will soon raise the monthly cost of grandfathered unlimited data plans by an additional $20 per line to $49.99. A friendly tipster clued us in on the change, and when contacted for comment, a Verizon spokesperson confirmed the news. The new rate will apply beginning in November.
Most of us are used to seemingly infinite access to the internet at home without worrying about how many websites we visit or how much video and music we stream. But one day, that worry-free feeling of unlimited consumption might come to an end.
In the last couple years, some internet service providers (ISPs) have been experimenting with limited residential internet plans in certain areas, and it’s similar to the data plans you have on your smartphone.
The future is mobile and wireless, and new technologies on the horizon will make wireless speeds as fast, or faster, than most regional broadband — Verizon is already working on their next-generation 5G that is supposed to be even faster than Google Fiber. And they can give people internet access at a fraction of the cost of laying fiber-optic cable to tens of millions of houses.
The costs are a fraction for the internet companies, of course. All they need to do is put up a single tower to give service to people all around it, rather than going through red tape and having to deal with construction and digging into neighborhoods and along roads, not to mention the costs of all the equipment to run cable everywhere. Related thought: when’s the last time you drove by a road construction crew and saw more than one person working at a time?
The government has cracked down on the networks’ plan to raise costs for certain types of traffic (that compete with their offerings) by defining them as common carriers — remember how the internet exploded over net neutrality? So instead of raising costs on certain types of traffic, they are going to make it so everybody has to pay per GB for their traffic. Which means if you want to stream movies over your internet connection instead of get them from the cable or wireless company, you’re going to pay a lot of extra money for the privilege.
Some of the smaller networks, like T-Mobile and Sprint, have better, cheaper, unlimited plans. But their service is pretty terrible — and Sprint is really struggling to even compete on the low end. So if you want solid, reliable, and fast internet access, you’re left with the larger companies who are charging crazy rates.
Remember when you could buy a bag of potato chips for half the price and it wasn’t 2/3 full of air?
Note: I’m sure the comments are going to be full of people going off about how their little country has better internet access than the US — but most of those comparisons are pretty unfair. The US is a massive country with a lot of open space and rural areas. If you take an average on internet speeds, the numbers won’t look good.
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