Post #4

This, as Stephen Colbert would say, "The Wall Street Journal" article does a decent job of quickly describing recent developments in the net neutrality battle and how they might pertain to AT&Ts new smart phone data plan rates. AT&T is going to start charging users $15/month for up to 200 megabytes of data usage and $25/month for usage up to 2 gigabytes. Any data usage over the plan will be like if you use more minutes than you have on your phone plan. The part that will cause problems for some people is that there is no unlimited data plan. AT&T is basically avoiding the net neutrality problem by charging for the amount of data used, whereas most ISPs charge a flat rate based on the speed of the connection. I wonder what happens when more people are using portable devices as their primary digital device. The iPad has a version that works over the cell network. People with these devices could quickly use their allotted data by downloading movies and music from the iTunes store. I mostly use the iTunes store from my phone because I hear something when I'm out and just download it right then before I forget. The new iPhone will have face to face video chat which will take up quite a bit of data for people that utilize the feature. People are going to have to learn to monitor how much data they access, which is slightly harder than monitoring how many minutes you've talked on the phone. Instead of making a robust network that could handle more data and more users, AT&T seems to be cutting off its biggest users at the knees.