There's no right to unlimited bandwidth

Conserve everything. Except bandwidth.

By John Cox on Wed, 06/09/10 - 1:24pm.

We're supposed to use less energy, less oil, conserve. It's the right thing to do. Except when it comes to mobile bandwidth.

AT&T finally found the courage to say something about wireless data that's completely obvious in every other part of life. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Pay your way.

The carrier announced last week that new wireless data customers (hello, all you prospective iPhone 4 customers) will have to choose between two capped service plans: one starting at a lower monthly price of $15, for up to 200 Mbytes of data, and a second, at $25 per month, for up to 2 Gbytes, and $10 for each additional Gigabyte after that.

According to AT&T, about 2/3 of its existing smartphone users use less than 200 Mbytes; and 98% -- nearly all of them -- use less than 2Gbytes.

Will they use more in future? Sure. And you can expect AT&T and the other carriers (which will sooner or later follow AT&T's lead) to adjust the data caps.

But you'd think the Apocalypse had arrived, based on a bunch of blogposts and comments. The End of the Golden Age of Mobility even before the Golden Age was actually here.

When the price of gasoline goes up, people adjust their behavior. Like gas or oil, bandwidth is a scarce resource. The true cost of anything gets reflected in when and how much people decide to buy.

Will wireless subscribers now start to watch how much data they "consume?" Duh. We're already encouraged if not hounded to do that with gasoline and electricity.

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