Internet Bandwidth

I previously wrote about the need to increase internet bandwidth to make the internet more usable and provide the Jordanian internet surfer with more access to media rich content from all over the world.

Today I was looking at the websites for three ISPs in Jordan to see if they actually increased the bandwidth since they were "upgrading the servers" last month. To my horror, I found out that they actually decreased the bandwidth by 30%.

There is actually a trick here. Yes they did increase the maximum possible internet speed more than 400%, but at the expense of the reduction in bandwidth.

To put things in perspective, let us say that using my 1mb/sec ADSL account, that I want to watch two authors@google.com talks everyday. Each talk is approx 1 hr, so this amounts to approx 250mb. Based on a bandwidth limit of 7Gb, I would run out of Bandwidth on the 25th of each month.

I am not sure what the people in charge of strategy in these ISPs do, but it would appear they have never seen a proper plan or road map. Or maybe they did, but their plan involved internet speed but not bandwidth.

In any case, I think this sort of set back will not help Jordan progress, assuming it wants to. I really think that Jordan is more in need of internet bandwidth than it is in need of speed. What good is an 8Mb ADSL line if you run out of bandwidth after 8hrs of continuous downloading.