Bandwidth is another market set to be reshaped by the internet
Our expectation is that, far from killing unlimited-use subscription models, this development will save them, because it will tend to smooth out usage during the day. Most (almost all) consumer and small-business wifi usage is very lumpy (I'm at work, so my FIOS connection at home is totally unused; when the office is empty, the T-1s go dark). This means that customers are buying service they are not using, but it also means that ISPs can't invest as much as they would otherwise -- in the end, investment is driven by utilization, because only utilization is monetizable. These developments -- I'm including KeyWifi and our competitors -- will tend to discover off-hours users. In my case, my neighbor works from home and we should probably share our bandwidth; over time, if that replicates, Verizon will get more usage from its investment and greater profitability -- higher utilization of a sunk cost. That's good for them and will probably make high-upfront-cost services like FIOS more profitable to deploy.
While we at KeyWifi are not free-market utopians, we do expect the free market to operate here, and it's very interesting to us that the internet itself, in this "collaborative consumption" scenario, is making it happen.
