AG and BBC on 4G and the Future of the Internet.

Very interesting report from BBC on 4g Internet (and how it might change the way we connect to the Internet).  As someone whose resisted getting a cellphone data plan and often scoffed at the idea of anything other than wireless, I must say..it's a brave new world.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9672822.stm

 In someways though, I fear this is an attempt by various companies to call a "do over". Once they started offering unlimited Internet usage it was going to be very hard to take that away (Anyone in the US remember when you had to watch your Internet usage  and keep it to less than 5 hours a day? I'm sure there are other nations that still have this problem).  Now that everyone and everything is hooked on the Internet, making it almost as mandatory as having electricity for some people. I think companies feel it's time for a "do over" so they can make more money. After all there is currently a "cap" on how much money you can make off of a DSL service for example. Say you target a population of 15,000. You have one competitor. At some point all 15,000 people will have Internet. And while you might get some of your competitor's customers to come to your side with a sale, they too will get some of your customers with their own sales. So you enter a state of equilibrium. Where you have let's say 50% of the market share. Those customers are going to keep paying their $1,000/year of Internet so your income becomes "fixed" (as in, every year you get 7.5  million)  but whether to please board members/investors or just to pay the bills and keep the same profit, you have to keep making more money every year than you did the year before it.  Which is just not going to happen under this economic model. For a while companies got away with introducing faster speeds at higher fees. The past few years we've seen that come to a screeching halt. AT&T has offered the same exact speeds at the same cost for years now. Only fairly recently have they started introducing their fiber network but even that is taking lots of time and I imagine costs. Enter: 4G. You don't have all the costs/effort of laying cables (well you have to install new towers) and you can now compel people to pay for the data they use with more restricted plans. As that becomes faster than home speeds you can introduce the service with "home" plans so people can use their much faster connections on their desktops (yes, yes, I know people do that now but it's often laptops on the move and not used in lieu of your home connection and people may not think to do it unless it's marketed correctly). Suddenly people are paying by the gigabyte (or terabyte as it likely will be at that point). 
 
  Young people often ignore their parents and grandparents when they talk about how "cheap" everything used to be and they often have no concept of what the "right" price is. So if you only increase prices/restrictions slowly most people will keep paying and the future generation won't notice when they are paying 5-10x more than their grand parents did.  So all in all that's the danger of being so dependent on something. Eventually the companies will capitalize on this and start pumping you for more and more money because they are, by design, also forced to come up with more and more money. Of course, infinite growth is almost impossible so where does it all end? /rant 

Disclaimer: I'm not that knowledgeable in economics this is all my own conjecture written almost in stream of consciousness style :-P. Please feel free to discuss your own opinions on this as well as flaws in my reasoning in the comments :-).