Rich Media Search May Become Expensive and Slow
August 5, 2011
Bandwidth hogs, watch out! ReadWriteWeb warns, “AT&T to Start Data Throttling, How Will It Affect Users?”
The impending throttle will begin on October first. AT&T 3G users who have “unlimited” data plans (hah!) will see their speeds artificially reduced if they reach a certain bandwidth threshold. Just what that threshold will be is still a mystery, but writer Dan Rowinski dug up some details:
“9to5Mac gives some guidelines on to what kind of usage will achieve reaching the throttling threshold. The site says 12,000 emails or website visits, four streaming movies or five hours of streaming music. That all makes sense except for the last bit, which may be a typo as five hours of music certainly will not eat anywhere near 2.5 GB of data that is expected to cue the throttling.”
AT&T helpfully points to some activities that tend to gulp down data: streaming video, remote web camera apps, sending large files (like uploading to cloud storage), and online gaming. In other words, everything that makes the Web what it is today.
Bottom line: tiered data plans (you know that’s where this leads, right?) are a money machine and AT&T wants to have its share. Ironically, better search leads to more data flow, so more search is good for AT&T; what’s good for AT&T is good for America.
Consumers who just let background processes update, download rich media without much thinking, and gobble up chunky online apps will be paying a lot for their data gluttony. Users will just have to cope.
What are the implications for rich media search? “Free” will come with a price. Welcome to the new datasphere!
Cynthia Murrell August 5, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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