Todd Wolverton: Unlimited data plans coming to an end. (San Jose Mercury News, 7/11/2011)
Excerpt: The move away from unlimited plans is like a step back in time. In the early days of the Internet and online services, providers such as AOL charged customers on a per-minute basis. Because of that, you always had to be aware of how much time you were online -- and limit your activities accordingly.
When AOL, then the largest Internet service provider, went to a flat-rate monthly plan for unlimited access to its service in the mid-1990s, the Internet went from a network for geeks to a mainstream medium. When wired broadband providers later followed suit, offering relatively low-cost, unlimited data plans, broadband adoption likewise took off.
Unlimited data plans also spurred innovation. YouTube, Netflix, online game services like Steam or OnLive and even social networks like Facebook would never have become popular or profitable -- and maybe not even viable -- if consumers had had to constantly monitor how much data they were using. Unlimited data plans have helped foster similar innovations in smartphone applications.
It follows, then, that the new data plans are likely to curtail such innovation. Who's going to develop an app that might consume a lot of data if most users won't want to use it for precisely that reason?
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