Skyrocketing internet usage could spell the end of all-you-can-eat broadband – but new technology is finding ways to keep pace with demand

Faster with fibre optics (Image: Jin Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

DO UNLIMITED data plans for your smartphone seem like a distant memory? Broadband might be going the same way, with your home connection pinned down to metered pricing schemes.

Such schemes, so far confined to a few customers of big internet service providers (ISPs), have been met with predictable howls of protest from consumers. The US Department of Justice is even looking into the practice to see whether the shift would violate anti-competitiveness laws, as it may throttle businesses like Netflix, which rely on fat pipes of broadband to stream movies and TV shows.

Underlying the controversy is a technological scramble to keep pace with skyrocketing internet use. At the turn of the millennium, the 860 megahertz of radio spectrum carried by a coaxial cable was mostly taken up by cable companies sending standard analogue video in 6-MHz bands. The rise of broadband changed all that, and repackaging the signal as digital video allowed companies to pack channels much more tightly, “getting a 10 to 1 efficiency improvement in frequency use” compared with standard video, says Chris Busch of Incognito Software, whose products monitor internet usage. That freed up spectrum for broadband.


Yet demand continues to push the infrastructure to its limits. This is mostly driven by video usage: last year Netflix accounted for an astonishing one-third of all downstream internet traffic in the US, with YouTube videos taking another 10 per cent. And online gaming can run to 10 gigabytes a month per person. Australian carrier WhistleOut, for example, urges gamers to sign up for at least 20 GB per month, and video downloaders 100 GB.

Bandwidth demand continues to push the infrastructure to its limits, mostly driven by video

AT&T recently announced it would cap some customers’ usage at 150 GB per month. At around 4 GB per HD movie, that doesn’t amount to much. Time Warner has tested caps as low as 5 GB, and Comcast, which has had a 250 GB cap in the past, says it too is experimenting with more stringent pay-as-you-go schemes.

ISPs could try to adapt, rather than trying to tamp down usage with increased prices. Fibre-optic cables already carry broadband signals part of the way to most customers, and running fibre all the way to a home could deliver 1 gigabit per second of bandwidth. This is common in South Korea and Japan, and some 8 million North American homes now have fibre connections, according to the Fiber to the Home Council. But scaling up would require major investment of the kind of that firms regularly cite when raising rates.

Another fix could come by improving the efficiency of the vast tangle of switching systems that link ISPs to one another. The switches are vital to making sure traffic is routed quickly from source to destination, but companies don’t pay one another to keep the switches in their finest fettle.

As a result, copies of entire websites and services are instead cached inside servers at broadband companies. Netflix recently installed huge caches of content inside Comcast’s network. “If they are streaming video, it streams much better from inside Comcast than across the network from Netflix,” says Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies, which offers caching services.

This patchwork system spells pain for the customer. Unless it is fixed, the era of all-you-can-eat internet is likely to be drawing to a close.