As internet service providers race to offer comsumers faster speeds, a new area of competition is underway. At first, there was a race to provide the fastest possible internet service. Recently, however the speed race has outpaced the abilities of PCs. This created a new factor for internet service provider. The bandwidth cap is quickly becoming the new battlegrounds where companies will be forced to compete.
There are market cost limitations on monthly bandwidth. While users may feel like there is a big business conspiracy that prevents them from getting the bandwidth they want at a affordable price, in reality there are massive hardware costs involved in getting data to your computer at speeds that most consumers now feel entitled to. However, prices are typically determined by the amount a customer is willing to pay for a product. As it stands, the costs being charged by most internet service providers seem to be acceptable. However, a change in consumer behavior looms on the horizon. This threatens the present comfortable foundation on which service providers rest their business models. The normal consumer will in the near future want to watch high definition television content on their PCs. This will be the death knell of the cable television station.
While cable companies have an interest in preventing this by limiting monthly bandwidth, they will be unable to maintain control of the market forever. Wireless internet is being made available nearly everywhere at lightning fast speeds. This will make it impossible for the transition to online media consumption to be prevented by any company.
This means great things for the consumer. As companies start to boast that they will give you more bandwidth for your money, these caps will increase very quickly due to market pressure. Companies that offer hardware to internet service providers will be forced to lower their prices in turn. This is of course simply how the market works.
With all the different methods of transferring data, there needs to be a huge focus on value. For the consumer that desires to view high quality content, this will be a dramatic improvement. High quality content inevitably comes with higher bandwidth demands.
Bandwidth limits will also affecthave an impact on the quality of content produced. For example, most current media files are compressed to meet bandwidth limits. If it's possible to transfer more data at faster speeds, these limitations would become immaterial. This might result in new advancements in music storage software. Why not increase the size of music files if they can be transferred very quickly? The same goes for video files. If providers can move bigger files, then movie files would be available in better quality. Over time this will allow for serious growth in the quality of audio and video files.
Online games will participate in this expansion too. As data transfer rates explode, you can count on games to take advantage of all the newly available bandwidth. Online games will never need to use the same amount of bandwidth as streaming video or music, but it would be a mistake to ignore the demands of the online gaming market.
There is an exciting future for online content. While some whine about the current bandwidth caps, we are not far away from a race between providers to deliver the best value for the money. In the end, this will mean great things for the consumers of high quality online content.
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