Matthew Ingram notices the fly in the video and peer to peer ointment:

Steve O’Hear -- who also writes for ZDNet on social media -- has a great post up at Last100 about how bandwidth-stingy Internet Service Providers threaten to stall many online-video apps such as Joost by throttling the download speeds that their users get. He looks at how some ISPs cut back your bandwidth after you’ve downloaded a certain amount per month, which with video isn’t difficult to exceed, and how some put a cap on downloads period. Many ISPs also use “bandwidth shaping” to restrict the flow of peer-to-peer apps such as Joost and Skype.

I've been wondering about this for awhile, and Doc Searls has made it a mission to write about this stuff. Basically, the way we get internet service is built on a broadcast model: someone else produces, and we consume. There's simply no thought given to non-professionals pushing content out, and the puny upload speeds we get are an indication.

However, it's worse. Take stories like this one - Comcast in this example - with services like Joost (or heck, iTunes - I just downloaded 1.5 GB of data this weekend, and I'm a light user) end consumer "bandwidth hogging" is inevitable. If something doesn't change, ISPs are going to end up cutting off a lot of "normal" users of the internet as "hogs".

Technorati Tags: bandwidth, ISP