When it comes to broadband internet access, you can have speed or large volumes of data transfer. You can't have both. One certainty in the broadband world is that for those of us with cable or DSL modems connecting us to the internet, there is still a finite amount of bandwidth available. When a user consumes a disproportionate and significant amount of bandwidth, it can and will slow down everyone. I hate that.

If the choice is between your being able to download more movies or other video and my getting the best possible speed from my internet connection, I'm thrilled when you get kicked off. It can't happen soon enough. Speed is what I need. Take all your P2P downloads and get the hell off my internet.

I have no sympathy for bandwidth hogs. You all are productivity killers for the rest of us. People who are working, people who are trying to play games, people who are in virtual worlds, people who are networking, people who are just trying to watch a Youtube video or their favorite TV show, you all are the reason why we get incredibly annoyed by slowdowns and buffering.

Leave and take your bit torrent client with you.

Its been amusing to read all the blog posts with the math telling all of us just how many standard def or high def movies tiered subscribers will be limited to. You can have 2 or 3 of your favorite SD TV shows per day, or X number of HD movies per month. Say what ?

I have news for all of you that want to dedicate their internet connections to downloading movies. There is a new and exciting development. Its called an Application Specific Integrated Video Service (ASIVS) . What is an ASIVS ? Its a computer dedicated specifically to downloading and playing both standard definition and high definition video. You connect it to a network that is dedicated to delivering GIGABITS PER SECOND of high quality video with ZERO buffering. Its amazing, it always works and connects right to your standard def or High Definition TV, easily. Most of the systems I have seen have a pretty good programming guide and scheduling system and they will let you download AS MUCH VIDEO AS YOU WANT , limited only by the size of its hard drive!!

If you haven't heard of the ASIVS, its because most people call it a DVR.

If downloading TV shows is so important to you, add a DVR to your cable or satellite service for 5 bucks a month and download all you want. If you want to watch those shows on your laptop, connect the composite video out in your DVR to the composite in on your laptop. Same with movies.

Cant download movies illegally, tough.

The internet is a great resource for unlimited quantities of video. Downloading video is an internet given right. Using he internet to fill up your PC turned DVR at the expense of the performance of every user around you is not.

Im a heavy internet user. I'm online hours per day. To me, the promise of the internet comes not from how many bits I can download, its in finding new ways to leverage the utility and stability of the internet as a platform for new applications. The performance of the net is key to new applications working and gathering users. Internet consumers avoid new applications that are slow. Even when they don't realize that the application is slow because the latency on their net segment has skyrocketed because of bandwidth hogs disproportionate consumption of bits.


Now some of you might think that the reasonable solution for all of this is for your provider to create as much last mile bandwidth as is necessary to make everyone happy, with no limits on use and at a low price. In a lot of respects, I would agree with you. It would be nice if every network were upgraded so that the amount of bandwidth available to us would be bottomless. Nice, but not here and now.

Until that day comes, the only real option is to push the bandwidth hogs to slow usage periods and create packages that allow for increased consumption of bandwidth during off hours, or to push them off typical ISP network. If tiered broadband offerings enable that. I say thank you.

Speed is what I need. If that means that those 5 pct of users that consume 65pct of bandwidth are kicked off or charged per bit to reduce their consumption.... so be it.

Mark Cuban

This piece was originally published on Mark's blog Blog Maverick and is posted on DMW with the author's permission. Mark's bio can be viewed here. The views expressed in this post are the author’s own, and do not represent the views of Digital Media Wire.

Image by Oliver V. Müller