Hey Baby Bells & Cable, We need multiple tiers of service
it always amazes me when people talk about content delivery on the internet. They discuss it as if there is unlimited bandwidth available. Well guess what. There is not. — Sure, new bandwidth is being added on networks every day.
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing on Blog Maverick on January 15, 2006, Mark Cuban makes two explicit moves: he rejects the premise that content-delivery debates can assume effectively unlimited network bandwidth, and he calls directly on the Baby Bells and cable operators to sell multiple tiers of internet service. Both points are stated as his own position, with no syndicated pickup or recorded public reaction in the record at publication time.
The argument matters because it flips the usual framing of broadband economics: instead of treating access as a flat-rate pipe whose capacity questions are someone else's problem, Cuban puts the scarce resource — bandwidth — at the center, and asks the last-mile owners to price it accordingly.
First-order effects
- Baby Bells and cable operators face a direct proposal to replace flat-rate broadband packaging with multiple service tiers, which would change how their retail plans and wholesale delivery arrangements are structured.
- Under Cuban's model, heavy internet content publishers become the paying customers of the access networks, since guaranteed delivery capacity is what gets purchased rather than assumed.
Second-order effects
- If tiers take hold, whoever controls the last-mile bottleneck gains pricing power over the content layer, shifting value from applications and sites toward the network operators Cuban is addressing.
- Content companies facing metered or tiered delivery costs would have an incentive to buy dedicated capacity or acceleration services, opening a premium-delivery product line for carriers beyond basic consumer subscriptions.
Third-order effects
- A durable tiered-pricing regime would turn bandwidth allocation into an explicit commercial negotiation between carriers and content firms rather than a best-effort commodity — and raises the unresolved question of whether paid priority amounts to discrimination against traffic that does not pay, a determination no regulator has made in this record.
- If the pattern holds, broadband converges with other scarce-infrastructure businesses: capacity is capped, prioritized, and sold by class of service, with the access owner as gatekeeper for how much of the network each content provider effectively gets.
The trend: Broadband access is being pushed from a flat-rate commodity toward explicitly priced, tiered capacity, with last-mile owners positioned to charge content providers for delivery.