Who Am I?

Who am I?
I am a consumer of the internet. I have had an online presence since the early 80's starting with modems and BBSes. I even had a CompuServe account for my Radio Shack Color Computer. My first ISP was back in '92 when the World Wide Web was just a single paragraph in a 500+ page book about the internet. I have had internet access ever since.

I was a subscriber to AT&T WorldNet.
I was the first person in my apartment complex to get AT&T DSL when it first became available.
I was the first person in my apartment complex to get AT&T Uverse with internet when it became available.
Every time a faster tier became available I was quick to upgrade. 3Mb, 6Mb, 12Mb, 18Mb, 24Mb!

As I said, I am a consumer of the Internet. I have done almost so much over the Internet. From running a few sites, using it to make phone calls, watching video, listening to streaming music or radio stations from my home town, I even controlled treasure hunting robots via remote control. I watched the rise and fall of so many internet start-ups, saw the birth of Google and watched AltaVista die.

I have had so many internet aware devices that I can't even count them. From portable game systems, robot dogs, media players, clock radios, phones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks, desktops, TVs, game consoles, toys, Etc.

I live online and now AT&T wants me live a more conservative life. AT&T is already selling me internet at designated speed levels based on megabits per second. If you just want a little bit at a time you can buy 1.5Mbps of you want a lot you can buy up to 25Mbps. I'm totally fine with this. But now they want to tell me that no matter what speed I want the Internet delivered they will only let me have a certain number of bytes delivered to my home. Now the Internet is not like electricity, AT&T does not have to generate it. It's not a resource like water or gas. There is no risk of running out of Internet. So why does AT&T even care how much I use?  Stay tuned.

Live free or die on the Internet!

Welcome to the end.

On May 2nd of 2011, the internet as we know it will be dead. The mighty AT&T has decided that instead of giving it's customers what they pay for, they will dictate your online actions through the use of capping your internet usage.

• Want to stream HD movies  from Nextflix? Fine but you can only watch X number of movies!
• Want to Skype call Grandma? Fine but you can only talk for X number of minutes!
• Want to buy games from PSN, Xbox Live, Steam? Fine but only buy a few because you may go over!
• Want to use a streaming game service like OnLive? Not on our network Mister!
• Want to use an online backup like Carbonite? You may have to wait a month to restore you data!
• Want to start using the Cloud? 
• Want to sling a TV you recorded to your laptop?
• Want to use Apple TV or Roku?
• Like to watch video online?
• Want to legally use the internet however you see fit? Build a time machine because those days are over!

 So I plan to use this blog to document my experience with the death of the internet. If you are in the same situation I encourage you to start a blog as well, only don't include any pictures or graphics because you may exceed your allowance.

Remember, live free or die even on the Internet!