So, happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone out there! I know I really haven’t added much to the blog/portfolio here because I’m not much of a blogger ever since MySpace took a turn for the worse, but I figured I would add a little something something before I go out with my girlfriend tonight and get some green beer!
Yesterday I was reading some news on my phone about AT&T putting a cap on peoples monthly bandwidth limits and one paragraph really piqued my interest and a bit of nostalgia for me:
One of the major fears is that stifling broadband caps will strangle the online economy, which is the only one even sort of working these days. That’s probably not the case, however: Website designers will have a veritable boom phase as companies scramble to reduce their bandwidth footprint, while the more thorough designers can just straight up retire — all they have to do is comb through their archives and sell companies back their own website code from 1997.
Which in itself is very true, and if it does happen, I definitely have a ton of archives to comb through! I still remember the good ‘ol days of 56k, 33.6k, and even 14.4k modems where you would be lucky to get 2-5 kbps and it still took forever to download anything, so one would have to build a website accordingly. Remember the splash pages that used to say ‘low bandwidth users click here’ and ‘for the flash intro click here?’ Let’s hope that the rest of the ISP’s don’t follow suit and restrict bandwidth because that would start putting an end to online gaming such as World of Warcraft, video sites such as YouTube, and would create a general disinterest for the internet. Let’s face it, the average user has no idea what the heck a gigabyte is and no concept on how many megabytes are in one, let alone know how much of their 150gb allowance they are actually going to use. In addition to that, what about all those wifi hotspots that places such as Starbucks or McDonald’s offer their customers or even personal home wifi connections for a large family where you have a handful of people connected? There’s really no way to gauge usage on them unless the user has an idea and logs it… They say the caps will only affect the top 2% of users, but there’s really no way to capitalize off of that and would be only a matter of time until they started capping even more.
