The network is made of four main commodities: bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and storage. Eventually, all four should be available for free and without limitations, assuming that you comply to standard terms of use. The real question is not so much IF, but WHEN, and HOW.

Virtually unlimited CPU and RAM became available to a limited number of consumers with projects such as SETI@home, which pooled the resources of up to 3 millions users in an attempt at discovering signs of extra-terrestrial life. In that particular instance, the consumer was the University of California. It spun several other projects aimed at finding cures for some diseases, or discovering very large prime numbers, but in all instances the number of consumers for such resources remained fairly limited.

Companies such as 3TERA [Disclosure: I am an advisor for the company] are attempting to bring such computing commodities to the masses, through the development of grid operating systems and the establishment of innovative business models. In the case of 3TERA, CPU is free and consumers only pay for RAM use. Down the road, I would expect RAM use to become free as well, and consumers to pay for value-added services, such as guaranteed Quality of Service levels, high availability and fault tolerance, to name a few.

Free bandwidth on a wide scale is being pioneered by companies such as Google, which initially plans to offer free WiFi service in cities such as Mountain View or San Francisco. Down the road, I would expect most metropolitan areas to provide free WiFi access to their residents and visitors, much like they provide free access to their roads and streets today.

Until recently, the last commodity that was not available for free was storage. Quotas for email accounts have been increasing steadily, nevertheless they remain too limited, as was discussed in this past article. I am now using 42% of my quota on Gmail, and will soon have to move my older emails to a backup account used for archival purposes.

Fortunately, there is hope that storage quotas will soon become distant memories, as more and more online services will provide All You Can Eat accounts. One of the first services to provide such a convenience is AllYouCanUpload, a free image storage service developed by Webshots and offered by CNET Networks. Once bandwidth and storage capacity become cheaper than the ads carried by a web page using them over generally accepted amortization periods, there will be no reason for such commodities not to become free. The same is true for CPU and RAM, and the availability of such free resources should open the door to very interesting services.