Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Don’t go throwing away those video store membership cards just yet. The Xbox Live video store and those game demo downloads might not work as well as they do today — or are they already slowing down? Bob Cringely’s latest column talks about how the future of our internet connections may involve a lot more waiting through slower download speeds.

And it’s not because of the networks reaching capacity, but because the ISPs feel like choking off subscribers’ bandwidth on demand.

Network neutrality has been debated a number of times, and the US Government and Congress haven’t seen fit to do anything to force internet service providers (ISPs to you and me) to carry all traffic equally and not prioritize their own stuff and slow down their competitors stuff. Think of your cable company or DSL company throttling your computer-based Skype long distance you’ve paid for to force you to buy their own VOIP service just because they can. While ISPs have generally said they will support network neutrality, Cringely notes that they are ready to make sure their data gets priority on their own network.

So how does this involve gamers? Cringely says the terms of service for ISPs are changing, with new insertions talking about worthless promises of bandwidth — not guarantees — at “up to” certain levels, and with ISPs taking on the ability to quietly set upper limits for the total number of bytes transferred, say per month. The critical factor in these caps is how they are interpreted — do they enforce them monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly? Why would you enforce them daily, goes the thinking, because then the bandwidth hog has already abused your network. If someone’s starting to pull down data at very fast rates on an hourly basis, it’s in the ISP’s best interest to rein them in sooner by slowing them down.

“Let’s say, for example, that your ISP limits you to downloading 20 gigabytes per month. Most users are happy with 3-5 gigs per month so 20 seems like plenty. But another way to look at 20 gigs per month is 27 megabytes per hour. Yes, you can still download a 320 meg episode of Ugly Betty from iTunes, but don’t be surprised if your ISP throttles your total download capacity in the next 10-20 minutes to something approximating dial-up speeds. The idea is to punish chronic offenders and I am hearing of ISPs imposing these new terms on users — terms that since they are not imposed on a per-packet basis do not in any way infringe net neutrality. And since your download speeds pop back up fairly quickly, most users won’t notice, though they may decide that downloading shows from iTunes — or any competitive service — is more trouble than it is worth.”

And that’s another thing. When the cable company throttles you because of your own bandwidth consumption when using a service like iTunes or Xbox Live Arcade’s video download service, or the PlayStation Store, THEY DON’T TELL YOU. So you come away thinking those video services are just slow and can’t keep up with demand, when they’re actually operating just fine. So why not subscribe to the cable company’s video on demand service? It’s always fast because it never gets throttled by them. Why is throttling internet service and not video on demand not a violation of network neutrality? Because the FCC has ruled that VOD (as well as VOIP) are not internet services. (Plus network neutrality isn’t in any laws or regulation, so they can say one thing and do another entirely — can you tell the difference?)

I’ve heard from a few people that the download times on Xbox Live’s movie service can sometimes drag on, and I myself am finding the PlayStation Store download rates to be quite pokey at times, so I have to ask the question. Is it because of the service or is it your ISP capping your downloads because they don’t want to invest in any infrastructure upgrades as they add more customers?