Last week I attended a Rose Cafe where Jeff Prince, a professor from Indiana University, talked about cutting the cord. Cutting the cord is the phenomenon in which people cancel their cable plan in favor of internet streaming.

He talked a lot about internet speed, one of the biggest concerns in terms of product development and marketing for internet service providers. There are two major components to internet speed, bandwidth and latency. Professor Prince explained that bandwidth is the amount of data that can travel at a time, and latency is the lag between when you click something and when you get a response. Some consumers will care more about latency and some about bandwidth. For example latency is extremely important to online sellers because if a page to purchase something takes too long, the customer might change their mind.

All while Professor Prince was talking about this I couldn’t help but think about net neutrality especially as it is about to be reviewed again by the FCC. And of course it came up later in conversation. Although it was interesting to hear an anti net neutrality viewpoint, I still support net neutrality. There would be some benefits to consumer to ending net neutrality, but I don’t think it’s fair for Walmart’s pages to load faster than Etsy’s because they paid ISPs more.

I realized during his talk that I never gave much thought to internet service providers and marketing internet service products even though I use internet everyday.