As I have stated many times, the internet backbone is stretched quite thin these days, even if the leaf nodes of the internet have much greater access to it.

Check out this link, about Comcast's plan to implement a 250GB/month bandwidth restriction across the board, starting Oct. 1:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9837

You can expect other limitations to follow over the years.  I'm going to stick my neck out and say that, eventually, you'll be paying long distance charges for internet usage, just like you do with the telephone system.

100% Digital Distribution has a lot of hurdles to overcome, and some of them may be insurmountable, from a financial perspective, until it becomes prohibitively expensive to manufacture and physically transport media (i.e. oil crisis).

Lol I mistyped the title while editing the post.  What a great title I accidented.

Cable's on the way out, bring on fiber. Cable companies suck.

I had fiber a decade ago due to a trial program from my local phone company ... It was quite amazing, and also amazingly expensive having cost the company (something like) $17,500 per household to install. In my opinion, the most likely next step in high-speed internet will be a larger back-bone to a person's street and a wireless connection to a person's home.

250 gb is alot so i dont think even the hardcore gamers downloading games would reach that limit

But guess what happens when you unknowingly reach it.

Comcast's threshold is a lot more than other cable companies. Only hardcore torrenters will reach the limit. They call you and tell you to throttle back your usage once you go past it.

As they said, Comcast has pretty much always had that limit.

If you were seriously downloading 250 GB or more per month, you probably would have gotten a notice from your ISP telling you to stop, threatening to terminate your service. It's happened to a couple of my friends when they were torrenting day and night.

Now it's just official, and it's FAR more than many other countries' ISPs allow. I think a lot of UK ISPs limit to 40-60 GB.

When the internet gets faster, with fibre optics and such, and if the average user uses more bandwidth, they probably will raise the limit.

Related to digital distribution, I don't see this as a problem at all. The biggest games on Steam right now are still under 10 GB I believe...most large games are closer to 6 or 7 GB.  And I don't know anybody who's going to download 30 full-sized games in a month in order to get past 250 GB...that's a Half Life 2 or a Call of Duty 4 download each day for 30 days...no.

Good points.  Also, playing games online uses very little bandwidth(unless the coding is poor).