If you think regular bloggers get trolled in their comments sections, the discussion on Blogband is likely to get heated. Comments will be moderated before being posted and any off-topic rants will appear on the Off Topic Comments page. While the page is currently empty, depending on the decisions made about fiber, ISPs and infrastructure, it's likely to light up like a Christmas tree and read like The Best of Craigslist.

According to the authors of this report, many of these households that aren't currently served by broadband connections would probably move directly to higher tier, 'super-fast' broadband services up to 40Mbps. The government will remain technology neutral under this scheme and look for the most cost effective means of providing availability, while also encouraging competition between different vendors and ISPs.

Next Generation Internet

Besides its direct focus on consumers, the report also argues that Britain's communications infrastructure for mobile and fixed broadband still compares favorably to the rest of the world. But is starting to show strains, as companies and the government haven't invested enough in the backhaul infrastructure (also known as the 'middle mile') in recent years.

The report also argues for the establishment of a fund to invest in creating the next generation of broadband access and services. The authors argue that in twenty years' time, countries where consumers are only connected over 3.3Mbps lines will be woefully left behind.  We have no idea where the author's got the number of 3.3Mbps from, but we would argue that 3.3Mbps will probably seem inadequate within just a few years from now.

Of course, even today, 2Mbps can barely be considered high-speed access anymore, though it is definitely a good baseline, as it will allow users to play back most of video content on the net without major inconveniences.

ISP Forced to Cut Back on Illegal P2P File Sharing

As the Guardian's Charles Arthur reports, however, British ISPs will also be required to cut illegal file sharing by 70%, and Ofcom, the "independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries" will be charged with getting ISPs to comply with this. Chapter 4 of the report also claims that P2P file sharing currently costs the UK music industry around £180 million per year, and that the TV and film industry is loosing about £152 per year. Those numbers always have to be taken with a grain of salt (not every copy represents a lost sale, after all), but if Ofcom doesn't see a 70% reduction in file sharing within a year, it will have the power to force ISPs to block specific sites and protocols (like Bittorrent, for example).

The Music Ally blog features a more detailed breakdown of the proposed anti-piracy measures.

Check Your Own Connection

For now, Google has made three tools available to users that are running on the company's servers in Mountain View. A basic networks diagnostic tool lets you test your connection speed, while the aptly named Glasnost checks if your BitTorrent transfers are being blocked or throttled. A network path and application diagnosis tool allows you to run some basic, low-level diagnostics on your broadband connections.

Google will also soon host DiffProbe and NANO, two tools that are especially geared towards examining whether an ISP is selectively degrading performance for a subset of users or a certain application. DiffProbe can also examine whether an ISP is giving priority to certain kinds of traffic.

The data gathered by Measurement Lab initiative will be made public.

Google and Net Neutrality

These tools, of course, are not new (Google is just hosting them for the researchers), but it is interesting that Google is putting its weight behind these efforts through the Measurement Lab. In the announcement, Google doesn't directly take sides on the net neutrality issue, but instead, the announcement refers to the importance of keeping Internet users "well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband." It is also interesting to note that the announcement on the Google Blog was coauthored by Vint Cerf, the "father of the Internet" and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, which puts even more weight behind the importance of this initiative for Google and the message the company wants to send by supporting this project.

For the first time in three years, net neutrality will once again be discussed by the U.S. House of Representatives today, so it seems safe to assume that this announcement was timed to coincide with this.

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

There's also a problem of congestion. In densely populated areas, as more and more people set up home networks, throughput is dropping as the airwaves get cluttered. David Heinemeier Hansson posted today about noise on his urban wifi connection, and judging from the comments his post received, it's a common problem. The solution? Perhaps mobile broadband.

Moconews pointed to Ericsson’s marketing chief Johan Bergendahl, who said mobile broadband will supplant wifi hotspots as the preferred method of on-the-go web access. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," he said. Moconews also pointed to a report that mobile broadband uptake is on the rise, and another report that city-wide wifi deployments are also growing -- perhaps indicating that wifi isn't ready to go away yet.

But let's just suppose that mobile broadband does become the dominant method of connecting to the Internet. Let's pretend that high cost, limited service territories, and speed barriers are overcome. What would the result be?

Perhaps the most interesting result would be that cellular voice networks would be forced to give way to VoIP, and services like Skype or JAJAH might be well positioned for a mobile broadband dominated world. With fast, reliable, and ubiquitous mobile broadband access, cellular voice plans would be irrelevant given cheaper VoIP options. We've already seen some voice-over-IP services target mobile users, such as JAJAH's iPhone optimized version.

That would be mean less costs for consumers -- no more free public wifi (presumably), but a slimmer cell phone bill and a single broadband connection that could cover mobile phone, web access, and landline telephone. Throw in a VoIP television service like Joost (which is starting to test live streaming this month) or Livestation, and the future might be one connection that covers all of your media and communication needs.

That simple future is a ways off, though. Mobile broadband isn't cheap, it isn't as fast as wired broadband, and it doesn't have the coverage necessary to be a truly reliable alternative to wifi hotspots (let alone voice networks). But is that future coming? Probably. HSPA+, which may arrive late this year, will offer speeds of up to 42 Mbps down and 11 Mbps up, which is significantly faster than my 20/2 Mbps cable line, and astronomically faster than the iPhone's current EDGE network (which is around 240 kbps down).

There are a lot of barriers to overcome -- not least of which, how to handle billing consumers when roaming on other networks and how to make the various competing standards play nice (or get networks to conform to a single standard). But once those issues are solved, fast, cheap, ubiquitous mobile broadband may be on the horizon.

When do you think mobile broadband will be fast enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous enough to supplant wifi? Will that ever happen? If it does, what other side effects will we see? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.