Maybe tiered broadband isn’t a bad thing

You know, the more I think about “AT&T’s warped view of the Internet,” I think it might not be such a bad thing. Seriously.

I’m a gamer on both Windows 7 and a PS3, and I play a game over the Internet for a little while at least every other day. Sometimes I play for a solid 3-6 hours on the weekends. We download a ton of video content from the web and iTunes, and I work from home. Why should John Doe broadband user who just checks their Yahoo email and watches a YouTube video or two a week pay the same $50-60 for a base broadband line as I do?

I had a used car in Denver while I worked at home. I barely drove—I took it out maybe once or twice a week for a grocery run, or to work from a Starbucks for the morning. Sometimes I just took the bus. Should I have paid for the same amount of gas as a person who commutes two hours a day, five days a week? Or should I have had to buy the $80 monthly bus pass that a heavy mass transit user does?

If anything, the only real problem with AT&T’s chart is simply that it’s mislabeling some tasks or, at worst, intentionally misleading customers for the upsell. But as much as I hate to say it, a tiered system like this might be the way to go—not everyone needs $60 worth of broadband, just like not everyone needs a $2,500 MacBook Pro (but dear Lord is this thing a sweet ride). Plus, it could get the US broadband adoption needle moving again, which would be a win for us all.