So there’s an article on the Washington Post talking about Comcast capping bandwidth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/28/AR2008082803858.html

My understanding is that Time Warner is looking at a tier-rated bandwidth program as well with a total per-month cap on downloads. Cox apparently already does it. How sad… they are heading the opposite direction from the voice companies, who learned their lesson the hard way and couldn’t hold a customer to save their lives.

I don’t pay for usage on my cell-phone plan… I can talk 24×7 and my price stays the same. When I had a landline I didn’t pay for usage… I could talk all I want. The problem here is a real lack of competition among the cable providers. I already ditched my TV. I ditched my Vonage landline (not because I didn’t like it… I just didn’t use it). I am prepared to ditch anything else related to Time Warner here shortly as soon as I can find a better alternative.

I don’t think I am an abuser. Once in a while, I will download the latest Ubuntu or Suse .iso. Once in a while, I will get on a kick and buy a bunch of music or movies at once. Once in a while I will listen to Internet streaming radio like Frequence3 or Virgin Radio. But now, if I do jut about anything outside of ordinary web-browsing I am going to be punished?

All this made my gears turn and I started thinking. Now is the time to open a coffee shop that has lots of good free bandwidth… people will be clamoring for it. Or better yet, I have 86 homes in my neighborhood… maybe we ought to build an Internet co-op.

I tend to hang out at my local Caribou Coffee, snarfing up caffeinated goodness and free WiFi. Sometimes I work, sometimes I just surf, sometimes I do research for work… but the point here is; I take advantage of Caribou’s free WiFi when I am here.

For the past week, the service appeared to be down. This particular Caribou sits next-door to a bagel-shop that also has free WiFi, so instead of complaining to anyone, most of Caribou’s patrons appear to have simply connected to the bagel-shop’s WiFi and continued to do “their thing”, whatever that is.

Well, the user-experience when Caribou’s WiFi is down is that a user just gets a page that says to close your browser and try again, do a “repair” action (Windows thing) or to call a tech-support number. I have been in this particular Caribou every day this week and experienced the issue, but have always seen people using their computers. I finally went up to a couple of them this morning to ask how they were accessing the Internet. Of course, they wanted to troubleshoot my connection on my Macbook. When I finally asked them what WiFi network they had joined, because I was having trouble getting access through Caribou’s, they admitted that they were using the bagel shop’s and not Caribou’s.

Well duh… I can do that…

So… having run in and out of here several times this week, and having checked it 3 or 4 times, and it being down each time (I left when I saw this and went back home with my coffee to work) I started thinking… what makes a person “settle-for” something less when something they wanted was not working… even when they’re given information to make it work? Is it because it’s free and so therefore they feel bad about complaining? The folks behind the counter here are oblivious to the fact that it’s broken because they aren’t computer users. They see people on their laptops and assume everything’s fine. So maybe the patrons think that it’s pointless to tell them that they are having issues? One thing I’ve noticed is that all these people are well-equipped from a computer and phone/PDA standpoint. Maybe they figure someone else will call, and since they can use the bagel shop’s WiFi, they won’t bother with calling themselves? Whatever the reason, I find it fascinating that people settle for less that quality when you wrap the word “free” around it, or when it’s a technology.

Since it is Saturday, and I am not in a hurry, I dialed up the support # and let them know is was down. They fixed it in about 5 minutes. Wow… now I need free coffee!