Bandwidth Caps, Streaming Media and Virtual World Architectures

There has been abundant debate lately about Comcast's impending implementation of a 250GB/Month bandwidth cap on it's users in the United States.  Time Warner had started capping in June of 2008 by limiting subscribers to 40GB/Month, and many international ISPs regularly implement bandwidth limitations for their users. 

The reason behind this is simple, the majority of providers of Internet access come from a metered-service background, be they telephone calls or cable channels.  Now they want to apply the same model to Internet Access.  This is going to work out badly for many emerging Internet application classes.