This is fantastic news, and I say that with not even an ounce of my traditional sarcasm.  Anytime I hear about a new WiFi hotspot in my area, I’m happy about it.  If I had my way, I would see every square inch of Sumner County covered in a giant net of WiFi.  (And I think that day will come… but not yet).

Hendersonville residents visiting Drakes Creek Park can now surf the web for free.

According to the article:

Its wireless Internet access has been available off and on since mid-May, parks Director Dave LeMarbre said. “Within the last week to 10 days, it’s been up and operational 100 percent,” he said. LeMarbre said it cost about $5,000 to install the Web access.

Now I can go to the park on Friday nights, and live-blog the pick-up volleyball matches.  Or check email while I sit in the Little League stands.  Or download White Castle nutritional information before walking across the street for some tiny square burgers.

Outstanding news.  The park is already a favorite spot in town for many–this news only makes it more attractive.  Instead of buying a Starbucks card just for the privilege of using their WiFi, I can just buy my grande latte and walk on down to Drakes Creek… and get my Internet for free… no hoops to jump through, no strings attached.  Thanks Hendersonville!

Time Warner and the other cable companies are trying to find a way to deal with the rise in bandwidth demand.

Their genius solution?  Let’s meter out how much Internet each person can have, and charge them extra when they go over.  For instance, if your plan is 50GB per month, and you hit 53GBs, you’ll have to pay overage costs on those 3GBs.

Wonderful.  Now my Internet service is becoming more like my cell phone plan.  Except, with cell phones, the industry trend lately has been the opposite:  they used to charge you for going over your monthly minutes, but more and more plans are becoming “unlimited minutes” plans.

Time Warner is testing this metered access approach in Texas as we speak.  Comcast is rumored to be looking into it as well.

How is this any different from the airlines saying, “You remember how we used to let you check 2 bags with every ticket purchased?  Yeah, we’re going to stop doing that.  Now you have to pay for every bag you check.”???

This is not going to sit well with Internet power users like myself, who are online for several hours a day.  In fact, there may well be some sort of revolt.

Metering out the Internet access is a giant step backwards, not forward.  Remember dial up?  Yeah, in the early days of the web, you had so many hours per month of dial up access.  Then the cable companies got wacky with the broadband and trained all their customers to expect unfettered access.

And now they want to take it away.

It’s like taking candy from a baby, after training the baby to think candy was a regular feature of baby life.

From the article:

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail have little reason to pay attention to the traffic caps: a gigabyte is about 3,000 Web pages, or 15,000 e-mails without attachments. But those who download movies or TV shows will want to pay attention. A standard-definition movie can take up 1.5 gigabytes, and a high-definition movie can be 6 to 8 gigabytes.

And there’s the rub.  Movie and television downloads (legal or otherwise) have caught fire and are clearly the direction that industry is headed.  Very soon there will be more people downloading digital copies of movies than those buying DVDs in the store.  So it’s hard not to see this new metered Internet approach as anything but a way to make more money.

Maybe it would be easier to take if there wasn’t such a clear problem with monopolies in the cable/broadband world.  If I had any other cable company to choose from besides Comcast, for instance, I could at least go see if they’d offer me a better deal.  If I want broadband cable Internet, though, I have only one choice… and soon they’re going to be telling me how much Internet I can use.