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Double Billing for Bandwidth

If the traditional phone companies have their say you will be soon be paying twice for optimized broadband content.
You first pay for a high speed connection and then you’ll be forced to pay additional tiered fees the phone companies hope to charge your content providers like Movielink and Google and Vonage and Game Servers to deliver uninterrupted multimedia broadcast content to you. 

Uninterrupted” or “streaming” content is the key here. Unlike email and instant messages, high quality content demands a data stream be strong and open and continued 00 it doesn’t work well in spurts. Here’s how The Wall Street Journal reported the issue last week:

The phone companies envision a system whereby Internet companies would agree to pay a fee for their content to receive priority treatment as it moves across increasingly crowded networks. Those that don’t pay the fee would find their transactions with Internet users — for games, movies and software downloads, for example — moving across networks at the normal but comparatively slower pace. Consumers could benefit through faster access to content from companies that agree to pay the fees.

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