In the company's latest report (sample) "Mobile Broadband Traffic Across Regions 2009-2017," they've determined that this increase will account for nearly three quarters of all global traffic via mobile broadband portables. The top region for video consumption will be Asia Pacific which will account for over half (53%) of the traffic. That will be followed by Europe (26%) and then North America (14%).

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

According to Steve Smith, founder of Coda Research Consultancy, "the sheer amount of traffic people will consume worldwide will put pressure on operator revenues and network capacity, necessitating radical efficiency drives." He also notes that, in the short term, end user frustration with bandwidth and speed will increase. To illustrate this point, he mentions that today as many as three-quarters of Europeans are dissatisfied with the speeds they currently receive. That's an interesting comment, especially considering all the grumbling we hear about AT&T in the U.S. and their general failure to deliver on the promise of high-speed internet for iPhone users. (In many urban areas, they can't even consistently deliver a signal!) Although this report didn't focus specifically on smartphones, it's somewhat comforting to know that overseas users are experiencing the same struggles as we do here in the U.S.

However, once mobile broadband operators complete their build-outs and upgrades to this high-speed data network of the future, the resulting impact it will have on the internet as a whole will be mind-blowing. One could even argue that bandwidth speeds have accounted for many of the major revolutions the internet has seen over time - since the invention of the hypertext protocol and the web browser, that is.

The Next Revolution for the Net: Extremely Fast, Lots of Bandwidth

In the early days, slow dial-up speeds left us with simplistic, HTML-coded web pages where the most action to be had was an animated GIF. As bandwidth and speeds increased, pages became more robust, too. This change led to sites like Amazon and eBay, both of which launched in 1995, allowing people to shop from home using their PCs. By 2001, the usefulness of the net encouraged enough people to come online to make sites like the crowd-sourced Wikipedia possible. By 2003, the still-increasing speeds meant users could now download music from the newly launched iTunes store, customize (and overload!) their online profiles on MySpace, and play in online virtual worlds like Second Life. The following year, online photo-sharing prepared to go mainstream thanks to the launch of Flickr. Facebook, too, launched this year and eventually became the largest photo-sharing site in the world only three years later when they announced how they hosted over 10 billion photos on their site.

Also in 2005, the abundance of high-speed data connections made video-sharing site YouTube a hit among a new generation of user-generated content producers. By 2007, broadcasters banded together to launch Hulu, a video-streaming site for commercial content in an effort to compete with pirated peer-to-peer downloads as well as iTunes, which by now was serving up TV shows and full-length movies. In Europe, the BBC iPlayer was doing much of the same. In 2008, the launch of the 3G iPhone brought the high-speed internet to the handheld and revolutionized the mobile phone industry. This year, the handset's hardware was upgraded to record video, too.

As you can see, many of these changes were either directly or indirectly impacted by the increasing speeds and bandwidth provided by both mobile operators and ISPs. But currently, it's the mobile broadband networks which are having more of an impact on the latest trends. Even with all their struggles (cough AT&T cough), without the bandwidth provided, phones like the iPhone wouldn't even be possible and the smartphone revolution wouldn't be underway as it is now.

So what will the world look like by 2017? It's almost hard to imagine. But the promise of 4G could deliver things like live streaming HDTV, real-time updates from a variety of services, video chat, abundant use of MiFi, mobile cloud computing, streaming via iTunes instead of downloading (we like that!), and much more. In other words, the high-speed net that you use at home could go with you everywhere via your netbook, tablet, smartphone, or some other device in between. What will that mean for the world of online applications and cloud computing? Only that the next big shift for the internet as a whole is underway and we're privileged to be watching it happen now.

Comcast's announcement tries to put this limit into context. According to Comcast, 250GB amount to:

• 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It's interesting that, judging from this, Comcast seems to add up uploads (photos) and downloads to get to these 250GB, making it an even smaller number - especially for those who upload large numbers of photos or videos, and, of course, for those who share a lot of files on Bittorrent. In Comcast's defense, the cap is agnostic to what service you use to burn up those gigabytes.

But Not if You Are a Power User

Comcast also cites that the median monthly usage be customer is 2-3GB a month. While some commentators have thought that this number is too low, we don't think it really is. For most broadband customers, broadband is simply always-on Internet. They don't necessarily make use of al the services available to them.

The problem here, however, is that the more advanced users also tend to use an exponentially larger amount of data. A standard movie might clock in at 2GB, but an HD movie can take easily take up more than 10GB.

It's All About Video

Also, these kind of limits are bound to stifle innovation in the streaming video business - and not even necessarily because people will start running out of bandwidth, but because there will always be a little voice that will keep nagging Comcast's users that they might be hitting the data cap if they download that movie.

We have to admit, though, that 250GB are a pretty high cap and, as Larry Dignan points out, it sure beats having metered Internet access. However, looking into the future, 250GB might be nothing once more people start using more data-intensive applications.

Will it be the end of the Internet as we know it, especially once other ISPs start announcing similar caps? Probably not - but it might just put a damper on the Internet we had envisioned for the future.

Flickr image courtesy of dmuth

The company is expected to roll out a test of the pricing scheme sometime next quarter for new customers in Beaumont, Texas.

Even if just 5% of users are currently considered high bandwidth consumers, as Time Warner is quick to point out, activities like streaming video are growing in popularity. Charging per usage -- and effectively penalizing high bandwidth users -- may only serve to stifle the growth of rich media on the web, even as things like the new Apple TV and the unlimited Netflix streaming plan seek to push these activities into the main stream.

We expect that most users won't be happy with the idea of being charged based on usage. Even those who might actually save money may initially respond negatively -- psychologically, unlimited use sounds like a better deal than being charged by usage.

Outside of the US, in Europe and in Australia, I have many friends whose broadband plans have usage caps of a few GB of data transfer each month. They often complain to me about the inconvenience of having to plan and monitor their Internet usage to make sure they have enough data transfer left to do the activities they want to do. It is unlikely that consumers in the US, who have so long enjoyed unlimited data usage, will be open to a change to per usage billing.

But which is a better option, per usage billing where the more you use, the more you pay, or data throttling, where certain activities are just made automatically slower at the ISP level? Are there any other solutions that ISPs should be considering to keep network congestion in check and costs down? Let us know your thoughts on the subject in the comments below.