Thursday, March 31, 2011

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!

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