It’s refreshing (and validating) to have a prestigious news organization like the United Kingdom-based Economist, write an article that supports the position I (and many others) have taken that ISP bandwidth caps and authentication are nothing but control measures to protect Cable TV revenues.
This past week, the Economist published this article about what’s happening in the United States as it pertains to the explosion in internet video viewing and the threat this poses to cable companies and started off like this:
“IN THE land of free enterprise and the home of discount shopping, there can sometimes be an appalling lack of competition. High-speed access to the internet is one. Cable television is another. The reason is that in America cable-television companies, which provide a lot of the high-speed access, do not want their customers to cancel their contracts and watch television over the internet instead. (SB: my emphasis).”
The article goes on to discuss what’s happening, how the cable companies sell bundles — sometimes with 100 channels or more — though the average consumer watches only 15. Now that we have an unprecedented ability to watch online TV, movies, video podcasts, and rent from Netflix or iTunes, many of us are asking a fundamental question: why do we want to continue to pay for what we don’t need or want?
The author does, in fact, cut to the chase and get to the essence of what’s happening (which I explained at length in previous posts):
“Consumers’ new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet television’s steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snail’s pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favourite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte.”
PUT DOWN THAT REMOTE FOR JUST A MOMENT and connect NOW with the Minnesota Ultra High Speed Task Force members and let them know why and how this issue matters to you.
The Task Force needs to hear from you. They’ll be making their recommendations to the State Legislature this Fall and key portions of those recommendations are being formulated as you read this post. If they don’t hear from you and soon, they’ll never know an open, unfettered internet matters as much as we online participants do.
Minnesota Ultra High Speed Task Force Member Emails (full contact info here). Task Force chair, Rick King, has asked that all email correspondence be directed to Diane Wells (email) as she’s compiling them and releasing a daily digest to the members.
Having information and facts at-your-fingertips about the internet and web is absolutely critical whether you’re a startup needing content for your pitch, a marketer needing to understand a 40,000 foot view of trends, a corporate user needing to understand mobile access to the ‘net or international usage, or if you’re just someone like me: an info-junkie who needs a constant data fix in order to constantly track what’s hot and what’s not.
Anyone born in 1978, and now in their early thirties, never knew a time when there weren’t mainstream personal computers. For the most part, those who entered this world in the late 1980’s (and are in their twenties like my daughter), haven’t lived in a time when PC’s weren’t in their school or at home, and this thing called the ‘internet’ was in place before they were out of grade school.
Are you enjoying the ability to watch TV shows and movies streamed through the internet to your computer or media center with the likes of 
The only “clouds” in sight were the proponents and would-be adopters of the latest, new hotness in enterprise computing. Two events, on Wednesday and Saturday, attracted a wide array of these IT professionals, some 350 all told, who were hungry to learn more about… well, “the orange that’s the new pink,” as Larry Ellison would say. It was beyond impressive that so many people would give up being outdoors last week after the winter we’ve had in these parts! Goes to show how deep our IT roots run in this state. Geeks are everywhere here and, doggone it, we’re proud of it! We still have many old-school enterprise IT folks who remember the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and way more than our per-capita share of Fortune 500 headquarters in this state, all with huge (well, getting leaner) IT departments. But, along with all that, Minnesota has a seemingly endless supply of boot-strapped Internet and software startup developers — folks that are finding they love what cloud computing is doing for them.
I’m personally aware of over 40 projects here in flyover country that are not only leveraging — but are wholly reliant on — 
In a world that is shifting from serial and linear processes (which can be easily outsourced) to one rapidly moving toward higher value being created by those people who can deal with the flood of information and ideas coming at us in parallel by making new associations, any of us who care about our kids and the next generation of workers and leaders intuitively understands the value of mentoring. This past weekend’s 
