The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle produces some edgy video targeted to younger people who probably aren’t getting home delivery of their newspaper everyday (shame on you), but are still plugged in to high technology issues.  So it didn’t take long for the paper to track down two young entrepreneurs running small businesses in the area who would be directly impacted by usage caps and punitive overlimit fees.  One, Justin Kirby, has been well known in the telecommunications circles I travel in for a very long time.  He’s out in Albion, a small town in Orleans county northwest of Rochester.  Albion is served by Time Warner for cable service, and Verizon for telephone.  It will be several years before Verizon FiOS ever reaches into the smaller towns well outside of the urban/suburban communities Verizon now targets for fiber optic cable.  DSL would likely be the next best choice, assuming it is available.

In rural areas, the impact on small business and residential customers is even greater, because these are the communities most unlikely to see robust competition from multiple providers.