Last week saw two sets of stories tied to a single report that made bombastic assertions about changing mobile data usage patterns.  While the assertions themselves are a bit misleading, they do point to an underlying truth – when using data on the go is easy and useful, people do it.

This week the tech world will descend on Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show.  While there is nothing subtle about a 152-inch 3D plasma TV there are plenty of subtle forces coming from DC that shape what you see at shows like CES and at retailers like Amazon and Best Buy.  Here are just four examples.

AllVid or Why Can’t Apple, Google, Microsoft, Roku, and Boxee Boxes Get Cable Channels?

Just in time for the National Football League playoffs, Public Knowledge today opened a new Website, http://www.whatismycap.org, to help consumers stay under the usage caps imposed by wireless carriers.  The site is sponsored by PK, Mozilla Foundation and the Open Source Democracy Foundation.

The National Football League (NFL) has announced it would stream this weekend's wildcard games, the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl to Verizon customers' mobile phones.  What Verizon didn't say, however, is that watching all of those games would exceed the cap on data usage the company has imposed, and would cost customers extra money.

This Public Knowledge whitepaper on data caps is available as a PDF.

A special note to all the unpaid family tech support specialists out there …

For years you have been giving advice to your family about what technology to buy and what technology to skip. You have told them that when they are buying a laptop it is worth paying for extra RAM, but that the base hard drive will be fine for holding their holiday photos. You have told them that the five dollar HDMI cable is just as good as the 100 dollar one. You have told them that more megapixels does not always mean a better camera.

Internet data caps are monthly limits on the amount of data you can use over your Internet connection. When an Internet user hits that limit, different network operators engage in different actions, including slowing down data speeds, charging overage fees, and even disconnecting a subscriber. These caps come into play when a user either uploads or downloads data. Caps are most restrictive for wireless Internet access, but wired Internet access providers are also imposing these caps.

Public Knowledge’s Position

Whatever the variation of data cap, they all have the same effect—they discourage the use of the Internet and the innovative applications it spawns.

Today's podcast is full of a month's worth of news including AT&T/T-Mobile, Net Neutrality rules, Authors Guild and orphan works, the Hotfile case and automated copyright takedown notices, and updates from the Open Video Conference, the Open Hardware Summit (including this talk), and Makerfaire.

Oh, and of course this.

You can download the audio directly by clicking here (MP3) or stream it using the player below:

Want to subscribe to our podcast? Click here for the MP3 feed.

Verizon's announcement that it is going to throttle the top 5% of its 3G wireless customers serves as a fantastic illustration of the difference between reasonable network management and using network congestion as a pretext to gouge your customers.

The basic details of Verizon's new policy appear to be well within the scope of reasonable network management.  When a specific cell site is congested at a specific time, Verizon plans to throttle the connection of its heaviest users until the congestion clears or the customer moves to a less congested site.  Verizon plans to classify its top 5% of data users as its heaviest users. 

We have been talking more and more about the arbitrary limits that ISPs (both wired and wireless) have been imposing on consumers’ internet connections.  These limits are arbitrary because they do not seem to be based on any sort of technical evaluation.  AT&T wireless and Verizon wireless impose a 2 GB limit on their standard data packages – why 2GB as opposed to, say 1 GB or 3 GB?  Similarly, AT&T (wired) imposes a 150 GB limit on customers [update: AT&T imposes a 150 GB cap on DSL customers and a 250 GB cap on U-verse customers].  Comcast’s limit is 250 GB.  Where did these limits come from?  No one (outside of the company) has any idea.  For all we know, the companies just spun a big wheel to choose the cap.  In this murky world the only thing that is clear is that, while AT&T and Comcast’s network supports hundreds of TV channels, their internet limits prevent you from getting rid of their pay-TV offering and replacing it with a competing internet video service.

Wireless carriers have started to push their new 4G networks.  The carriers say that these new networks are amazing, and will allow you to do more, faster, than ever before.  What they do not tell you is that you will not be able to use the new 4G networks for very much.  That is because the wireless carriers (with the exception of Sprint, which offers truly unlimited 4G connections) have imposed arbitrary limits on their 4G networks.  For the average user, this limit is set at 2 GB per month.  As a result, just about everything that you would use the 4G network for will put you over your limit.

AT&T's announcement that it would start to throttle the "heaviest users" on its wireless network is only the latest in a series of developments that place the idea of a thriving, useful Internet at risk.

No one knows why rationing schemes like data caps are triggered, what they are supposed to do, much less if they are successful.  Serious doubts have been raised whether caps are necessary at all to manage networks or to cover costs from increased Internet use.  But consumers who wants to use the Internet more are the ones who will suffer.