.Mac now with 1TB of Bandwidth!

This morning, I read an article at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) stating that .Mac
now comes with 1 TERABYTE of bandwidth per month. That’s 1024 gigabytes! and
a lot more than the previous 10gb maximum. A recent trip over to my .Mac account
confirms this.

The article suggests that this could be more signs of a media focussed iDisk
coming at Macworld.

For those who haven’t heard, the rumor sites have been suggesting that iDisk
will become a place to store, and possibly stream, your music and video files
through iTunes. Some articles have taken it a step further, saying that iDisk
will eliminate storing these files on your hard drive.

Does this mean full length movies are coming at Macworld? Maybe. It is a huge
amount of bandwidth for just music.

Personally, I don’t think hard drive storage of these files will be eliminated.
For this to happen, every iTunes customer would have to subscribe to .Mac.
Not going to happen, and I think/hope Apple realizes this. I see it more as
an added benefit to .Mac subscribers, and another carrot to lure new members
in. Plus, just because .Mac will allow this much bandwidth, doesn’t mean internet
companies are going to raise their allotted monthly bandwidth for subscribers.

Whatever it is there for, I’m happy to see it. I store my "World
of Witherspoon" podcast
on .Mac. This increase in bandwidth has eliminated my worries about reaching
the old 10gb transfer limit. (Shameless plug- visit www.worldofwitherspoon.com for some great children’s poetry books which I have illustrated and more on my podcast.) I’m sure
a lot of other podcasters are happy to see it too.

Who knows…maybe Apple has increased the bandwidth solely for the purpose
of attracting podcasters to .Mac.

We shall see….