Ironically, those fee increases will occur as operators have to provision lots more bandwidth and as users begin to cut back on legacy distribution such as cable TV, satellite TV or telco TV subscriptions.
"Expect your Internet bills to go way way up as ISPs make it clear that all this video over the internet is going to require billions in upgrades," says Cuban. "The irony is that while you may not like paying for cable channels you don’t watch, you will end up paying for cable channels on the Internet that you don’t watch as well."
"In this case you will be paying via higher net bills for the extra bandwidth required to stream cable channels that your neighbors like to watch," Cuban argues.
One might argue that is a good thing for service providers, as it will allow them to raise rates in a business where rates generally have dropped. It arguably will help access providers rebuild their business models from services based on voice or multichannel video entertainment.
The issue is that consumers likely will stubbornly resist such rate increases, especially if they keep shifting expenditure into wireless services. Not to mention a bigger version of a broadband problem ISPs have faced for some time.
Many ISPs have found that profit margins on broadband services do not scale in a linear way: prices per Mbps of service produce slimmer profit as the amount of bandwidth provisioned increases.
Also, the incremental revenue from investing in lots more access bandwidth is likely to be slim to non-existent. Cable operators will have to boost capacity to provide broadband-based video, even as they lose revenue from legacy video services.
Telcos faced a variant of this problem when they upgraded to broadband, and found that entertainment video was the only big "new" service they could offer, as the older copper network worked fine, or well enough, for voice and broadband access.
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