In America, and that’s probably an “only in America”, one of the Senators on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Ted Stevens from Alaska , made a very strange speech last year. He described the Internet as running through a series of “tubes”. He thought that as soon as commercial pressures grew on the Internet, it would get clogged-up like an overused sewer pipe. All the TV shows, videos and movies, file-sharers, down-loaders and porn merchants would take all the space in the tubes so he wouldn’t be able to send his email.

It was surprising because the Committee are charged with overseeing legislation concerning the Internet and were deadlocked on an amendment to the tele-communicatons bill that would add just a little provision to keep the Internet’s neutrality. Ted’s speech was probably unrehearsed, possibly ill-advised and disconcertingly misunderstanding for someone who makes decisions concerning the future of the Internet. Nevertheless, does he have a point?

Big Brother reads our e-mail?
At the moment we take it for granted that we will have unrestricted access to the Internet and share our bandwidth with whoever else is on-line at the same time depending on our contention ratio. Traffic through the routers is, we think, unregulated and apart from peak times, almost instantaneous. Thankfully, there is no big brother snooping into each data packet as it zooms by, reading our emails and bank details in the nanosecond he has as traffic passes. Nor is there any company stating that theirs is the most important and should go faster than others. Or is there?

When the Internet arrived in the UK, we were all given our unique IP address and largely left to our own devices. If we wanted to set-up a file-sharing server or ftp site, it was okay if a little slow to send data at a miserly 256kbps. Gradually things changed and within a few years ISP’s started to limit how much we send and receive, some more severely than others. Aquiss, our own for example, limits us to 45GB per month but as we’ve only ever managed to use 12GB in any one month and most of that uploading, we have a ton of leeway. Others are not so generous and more often restrict certain types of traffic. They throttle back bit-torrent and game packets while at the same time offering bandwidth-hogging streaming TV and movie rentals.

The Good Old Days
A lot of the control of the Internet is via vertically integrated companies such as BT and Pipex, who supply both the telephone as well as acting as Internet Service Suppliers. In doing so they have an enormous influence in how we use our data communications, unlike the old days when BT supplied the lines to ISP’s who in turn supplied the data service to individual users. It was possible then to persuade your ISP to grab a huge download for you over their T3 line and have it ready for you to pick up at their office, and vice versa to send large files. Nowadays they want to charge extra just so you can ensure you actually have a stable Internet connection and pay heavily to access their “helplines” even if it is to sort out the problems they caused in the first place.

As the country moves to even further integration of entertainment with the Internet, are we going to see more services throttled back? Perhaps it is time for other forms of infrastructure to come into play.The much vaunted powerline transmission for example, could be used for TV services since every house in the country with a TV is already wired up. More importantly, if we have TV services coming in via our ADSL, what happens to our own data transmission? Will we be able to send and receive at the same speeds we have grown used to if TV is also on the same line, Freeview uses 1.5MBps (or so I heard).

Then there is VOIP and the rise of wifi. I’m sure the mobile phone companies are delighted that their hugely expensive systems could become obsolete in cities as free wifi and VOIP-enable phones take over. But is this going to affect our ordinary use of the Internet? Especially as some of the mobile phone companies also supply Internet services. Could it all become free?

Somehow I can’t see it happening and more to the point, I bet that we shall have to start paying for Internet services as commercial pressures take hold. Like the very reasonable idea of paying for our water use via meters, or equally reasonably pay for actual actual road use as recently suggested, rather than flat-rate charges for both. Will we start to pay for metered Internet use?