Incoming outgoing

More and more of the world is getting put on hold every day in response to the spread of COVID-19.

Movies are being postponed, including "The New Mutants," which just can't catch a break. This is a movie that finished filming in 2017 and has been delayed six times since then. It almost feels like a time traveler is trying to keep this movie from ever coming out and utilizing increasingly extreme measures to do so.

Two more major conventions have been hit. E3, the biggest gaming convention in the country, won't be happening this year. Though considering major platform developers have been moving away from the expo this cancellation may be more of a mercy than anything else.

WonderCon, slated for next month, has also been postponed. WonderCon is run by the same organization that puts on ComicCon International and you can bet that they're getting more nervous by the day that they may have to postpone that as well.

Outside of the entertainment world, states are stepping up measures to stop the spread of the virus. The Iowa legislature is shutting down for a month, and Governor Kim Reynolds is advising, but not mandating, that schools do the same.

Iowa hasn't yet reached the point of forcing the closure of bars and restaurants like larger populated areas have, but I suspect it won't be long before it'll be hard to find a gathering of more than a couple dozen people one way or another.

In short, people are being asked to stay home as much as possible.

Can do!

I'm far from the first person to note that this is the crisis that the nation's nerds have been waiting for. Staying inside for days at a time with no job and no social interaction that isn't over an internet connection? That's not a quarantine. That's my early 20s.

It's rare that I go out when work doesn't demand it, and if all the newsworthy gatherings are canceled, there goes a big chunk of my incentive to leave the house.

Most of my work is already done from my home, and right now millions of people across the country are figuring out how to do the same.

Which brings us to the main topic of this column. Internet data caps.

Whether working from home, taking online classes, or just staying in to watch a movie, expect internet usage to spike as people wait out the pandemic. Naturally, increased usage means that households may bump up against the monthly limit that their data plan allows.

Under normal circumstances, crossing that threshold would automatically result in a penalty fee. However, some of the nation's ISPs are being uncharacteristically generous during this emergency.

Major ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have both pre-emptively declared that they will be suspending their usual data cap fees for the time being. Likewise, cell phone carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint have also announced that they will be offering unlimited data for the next two months.

It's a nice gesture, albeit a doubtlessly calculated one. In a time where people across the country are being asked to work from home, no internet provider wants to be the one that gets a black eye for profiting off of people trying to make a living during an emergency.

Locally, Mediacom may be the one to get that black eye. As one of Iowa's major broadband providers, the company has been relatively quiet about how it is responding to the Coronavirus outbreak. Their website's news page hasn't put out a press release since November, but in a recent interview with Ars Technica, the company says that they will be merely giving all of their customers an additional 50GB of data through the end of the month.

For me, that "generous" offer amounts to about a five percent increase to the 2TB limit my household already has. Fortunately, there's little my roommate or I could really do to significantly increase our normal internet usage.

Still, major ISPs dropping data caps during a time of an expected increase of usage is pretty revealing about their necessity in the first place. Maybe at one time data caps were a necessary preventive measure to discourage internet users from overwhelming the available bandwidth, but we are long past that point. On the contrary, several ISPs are actually increasing availability and boosting speeds for their low-end users.

Again, a nice gesture, but it essentially confirms that data cap surcharges are less about managing congestion than they are about squeezing some extra dollars out of their customers.

If these companies are capable of offering unlimited data when the whole country is being told to stay home and binge watch Netflix until this blows over, then they're going to be hard pressed to justify restoring these data caps when the concurrent usage drops back down to pre-COVID levels.

The world is going to be different when we come out on the other side of this thing. Companies with jobs that can be done at home may decide to keep those jobs at home. Online classrooms may become more the norm than the exception. Necessity is the mother of invention and once we are forced to develop these new standards we might not go back.

Recognizing the internet as a public utility and expanding broadband access is going to be a higher priority than it was before.

It probably shouldn't have taken a global pandemic to get us to this point, but it will be interesting to see what the new normal ends up being.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and secretly likes going out, but rarely has a reason to.