Virgin's kinder gentler bandwidth cap

Virgin Mobile outlines a new wrinkle in their Broadband2Go $40 unlimited broadband service. For users who go over 5 GB in any one month, they'll limit data rates for the rest of the month.

Not shut you down; not charge you ridiculous overage fees; but simply slow you down.

My customer experience I am a Broadband2Go customer. I use my Virgin Mi-Fi as a backup network when my primary wireless ISP goes down and for travel.

In my experience the service averages about 800 Kbps - intolerable for multi-hundred megabyte downloads but reasonable for smaller payloads. I suspect I'm a fairly heavy user when I use it - I do lots of research online - and at this years CES in in four days I used almost a gigabyte.

Virgin tells me that the average cap will be 256Kbps. While that would certainly cramp any frequent surfers style, it seems like enough for basic e-mail and blogging. My first modem ran at a then state-of-the-art 1200 baud, so maybe I'm easily impressed.

The Storage Bits take While I don't welcome a bandwidth cap, hard or soft, Virgin Mobile has struck a reasonable compromise between controlling bandwidth usage and meeting customer expectations.

Most casual users will never bump into the 5 GB limit, and those that do will still get reasonable performance on Internet essentials such as e-mail and basic web surfing.

This also works better from a net neutrality perspective: instead of limiting certain types of traffic at the telco's whim, it puts the choice in the hands of the consumer - where it belongs. You can still download that gigabyte file, it will just take you several times as long.

But there is a larger message for telcos: Americans like bandwidth. The telco that figures out how to bring the most reliable bandwidth and capacity to users at the lowest price will be handsomely rewarded with many new and loyal customers. And those who can't, well, the trashcan of history still has room.

Comments welcome, of course.