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Larry Borsato

Communications: Is price all that matters?

Larry Borsato03.11.2008
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Consider Internet reliability. If your ISP throttles traffic, then you are probably paying for promised bandwidth that you aren't getting, because your favorite application happens to be the one being downgraded. The FCC clearly sees this as a problem. I don't know about you, but I want a guarantee that my ISP will not arbitrarily block or otherwise limit the Internet bandwidth I'm paying for.

As a society, we've become accustomed to low prices, but these services don't come for free. As consumers, we should demand guaranteed levels of service. If we don't, service providers won't have an incentive to increase reliability in order to meet market demand. Moreover, no company is going to be motivated to provide better service if the competition isn't -- assuming that there is competition where we live and work. We'll just have to depend on the kindness of strangers -- the anonymous executives at profit-driven service providers -- and hope that the services we use will be there for us when we need them.

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