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Time Warner to Charge Extra for Over-Quota Bandwidth
duckygator writes: "I just came across this article on NetworkWorld discussing Time Warner's announcement that they will begin charging users a fee for exceeding a monthly download limit. The actual limits and associated fees aren't discussed. Guess I knew this would be coming sooner or later ... Now I guess I'll just have to guess where the threshold will be. Anything more than email? Active gamer? Graphic artist?"
but welcome to the real world.
new technology spring up
wild west
big guys have to compete and make little money
big guy can afford to buy little guys out
big guy has no competition and rakes you, joe average over the coals
go to the competition? what competition.
shock the monkey
If atnt follows TW's lead then I may have to finally drop Broadband.
Though I hear AtnT will be debuting a tiered pricing/speed scheme soon. Perhaps they have already considered it?
I hope not.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
Honestly... I wouldn't like this either, but remember when DSL companies (and cable) were dropping left and right? Bandwidth costs money, and it makes sense to charge people for usage, not just connection. In theory, it allows lower costs for light users, though I know that they'll only boost rates with this plan. But think about what the equivelent to a standard cable connection (100 - 200 K/sec) would cost if it was bought as a T1 line, and ask how their business plan would look if they provided it for $39.95/month
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Dang it. I just got my MAMP (MacOSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP) box going in my living room! I should probably shut off Netjuke at the very least, now.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
A major ISP actually realized you can't stay in business by charging less for bandwidth than it costs you. If just a few more ISPs make this startling revelation there may just be a chance that the industry will become stable.
If it ends up that 5% of users end up paying extra, good. If it ends up that 95% of users end up paying extra, there's a problem.
I think the biggest thing I fear is that the latter case will become the norm. Just like those per-pound salad bars, you never know how much you've used until you check out. I'm sure the cable companies would love to use that model, and want everyone to have $200 bills at the end of the month.
What percentage of users paying "extra" is appropriate?
Soon, that'll be the only porn you can afford to download.
In my area, a cable modem costs $40 on top of cable, but a very nice DSL feed with 5 static IP's is only $65. This is only a 25 dollar difference monthly. If the differences closes up any, I'll simply switch. 5 static IP addresses are in and of themselves worth quite a bit to me. TW only offers static IP's with their business class service, which, IIRC, is $150 monthly.
C//
As long as the threshold is at a reasonable point, I can't say I'd complain about it. It's only fair that those who use the most should pay the most, rather than having those who use the least subsidize the hogs.
:-) As it is, the guys who use their connections for low-traffic everyday uses like checking e-mail and websurfing are paying the same rate I do, and that just isn't fair to them.
And I say this as one of the hogs who'd have to pay more if I were on that cable system. I regularly transfer about 1.2 GB *a day* so, yes, I should have to pay more than the relatively small sum I pay per month now.
The problem would be setting a reasonable scale of bandwidth and rates, and I somehow doubt the limits are going to be very reasonable...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
...or is he doing an awful lot of guessing?
Why not? If I follow the terms of the terms of service, I see it as the providers problem, not mine
I paid for the service - essentially you're telling me if I go to McDonalds and eat all of the food I ordered, I have bad manners. I draw the line at breaking the terms of service - I see it as a contract for the service rendered. "Back in the old days", the internet was an academic resource. Now it's a commercial resource. It costs money. For money, I get a service. If I don't use that service, it's my perogative. If I use the service as much as I possibly can, it's my perogative. It might be their network, but for the time I "rent it" for $40/month, I'll do the hell I want with it.
Those who can get DSL, isn't is the better choice now?
I know for me, everyone keeps trying to influence me to "switch to cable, switch to cable." With this, my decision to stay with DSL seems a whole lot better.
Stripes: Because stars are overrated
"But if you consistently go over the limit, you're going to have to pay."
This to me sounds very reasonable. It doesn't sound like you're just automagically going to receive a bill for twice the regular service. They plan to warn you about just how much bandwidth you are using. Sounds reasonable.
My school does this with e-mail. Some people would bang away at the POP3 server every minute or less just so they could get the e-mail almost instantly. If you checked your e-mail over something like 500 times a day, you got a friendly warning that such practices are not good for the community. If you didn't stop, they would block your e-mail until you started to understand.
I guess I don't see a problem with this--at least not at face value. Sounds like TW is just trying to do their best to serve all their customers at some minimum level.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Kinda goes against the purpose of "broadband" doesn't it. Wonder if Comcast is next.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
C'mon people. How many of you have unlimited downloads on cable or xDSL - all the time?
Charging for data is the only way an ISP can fairly doll out its data expenses, given that it's the way most ISP's are charged by their wholesale provider.
I'm all for a dead cheap ADSL monthly rent, and bandwith charges for every meg, so long as my ISP keeps it's rates fair to all, and plans it's charges in such a way that it won't go out of business in 18 months.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
"Hint: the reason that @Home and its descendents won't let you use IPSec or run servers on their network is that it's their network! Either pay more for better service (like a T1) or rip off some other provider's bandwidth."
The question I have is:
Would they even have a network if people stopped paying for that network?
Remember, this site is littered with Linux zealots who want everything to be free, not just source code.
In the end - Capitalism is the main enemy of this 'free' movement.
--
Crazy Linux Using Anarchist Zealot
I have adelphia, which they state a normal use of bandwidth is 3.5gigs a month, somewhere around that area..
Im happy about that because they dont enforce it =) Ive transferred about 40gigs up and down one month with no sort of warning.. id just hate to start getting charged per mb on anything higher then 3.5gigs a month, it would be a nightmare.
So light more fiber!
I think its acceptable to draw a line if someone is abusing bandwidth. For instance the warez server example should result in outright termination of an account. However, this is like the mysterious reason why candy bars and large sodas at the movies are getting smaller. The service is getting worse at least in my corner of the world... Comcast's DNS servers are screwed up and its making life hard... This happens once a month with other odd problems here and there. Until I'm convinced they're doing everything they can do to offer the best service possible... I'm going to take back what I'm entitled to in downloading ISO's late at night and responsibly consuming the most of my fast, if not reliable broadband. Entitled, you bet I am... My cable and internet is $80 this month... Its not like I'm on their network for free...
Alot of times, these Cable Modem guys sink thier own boat. They KNOW they can't handle additional users, but then I see adverts all over the freaking place for Road Runner. This is like selling pepsi when you ain't got none. Why in the world would you market it if you know you can't handle it? Although I am not holding my breath on this happening either. It could happen, but my guess is they want to see how pissed people would get. The funny thing is, all of the things they advertise ARE heavy bandwidth uses. Streaming Video and all of that are high users of bandwidth.
Gorkman
people using more bandwidth will have to pay more than people using less? how outrageous!
There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling!
I guess racking up $200+ of fees on the web before you even go to work is closer than we thought. Does that mean I get to graduate this year, instead of 2004? If Time-Warner can charge so soon... (See article below this)
"who regularly upload and download large graphics files, for instance, stand a greater risk of being affected than those who use their cable connection mostly for e-mail."
Who would get $40/month cable internet mostly for email?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ME: I'm calling to pay my cable bill.
Cable Operator: OK, we charge a $5 fee for paying over the phone, you can pay on-line for free.
ME: I can't pay online.
CO: Is your internet access down. ME: No, if I load the billing page, I'll go over my limit, and get charged an extra $5.
CO: I'm sorry I can't wavie the fee.
ME passes out due to bleeding from ears
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
Now THAT was funny.
graspee
- Fraud. Several prolific warez kiddies figured out how to
change their MAC address to bill their service to their neighbors or even
to our own router (!). We're still not sure exactly how that
happened. Sure, we cut them off and connected their modems to a high
voltage source as punishment (our contract allowed it), but how many more
are there who we didn't catch?
- Billing issues. People who obviously ran up a very high
bandwidth bill would call us and complain when they got their statements,
asking us to lower their bills. Our position was that it wasn't our
responsibility that they couldn't figure out how to close Napster or stop
downloading porn. When they paid with credit card we would sometimes lose
the dispute, but things were okay when they paid with cash or check.
- Expectation of quality. As you know, a cable modem is a shared
medium and cable companies are not at fault for your neighbors' downloading
habits. However, it was considered a potential legal liability to be
providing a service of varying quality.
For these reasons and many others, metered cable modem service just won't work.So i take it you're probably one of those annoying gnutella users who keeps on canceling my downloads from your machine
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if it would be possible to setup a few processes to ping a range of IP addresses to cause accounts to run over their quota. Would they distinguish real traffic from garbage such as that?
sounds fine to me - this isn't anything new - many of the dialup ISP's do the exact same thing -sending you a nasty email if you keep your modem connection online for an excessive use of connect time - all of this when paying for a 'unlimited access' -
Additionally, I'd be willing to bet that your average Terms of Service for consumer broadband includes the ability to change the Terms of Service, they can change how they meter at any time.
Everybody is paying for 'always on broadband' I don't see that as promising a 'always full pipe' service.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> I'll just have to guess where the threshold will be. Anything more than email? Active gamer?
Please spare us the drama. I've done benchmarks and an active gamer who performs regular web surfing and casual file downloads does not approach the quota limits. Quotas are designed to thwart the WaReZ PuPp13z of DC, Kazaa, and WinMX fame who are not only throttling the backbone, they're the reason your cable modem drops carrier every Saturday morning. Cry "wolf!" all you want, I signed up for internet access with a quota and I can't wait until my ISP starts to impose it on me and (more importantly) my k1dd13 neighbours. Spare us the social diatribe...
I can only see if this is fair if the ISP's pay metered rates for their traffic. If they get all you can eat and then charge metered, they're being rather shitty.
But hey, it's their business. If you want to go to Ryan's Steakhouse and fill your pockets with pork chops and then go sell 'em on the corner for a buck apiece, sure. go for it. but don't be amazed if they get their pork chops somewhere else once they realize you're paying 6 bucks for thirty of them.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Doesn't it seem like this would be an effective way to kill off P2P sharing? Suddenly those divx movies aren't free anymore, and the idea of shifting large files around becomes a lot less attractive.
Sucks for people transferring legit stuff though.
I'm sick of seeing companies changing the price model for bandwidth. Once you have an OC-192, what the hell does it matter if you fill it, or not. You're already paying for the whole damn thing, whether it is full or not. Some people will use the network like mad, and some won't. That's how it works. Not to mention, that's why we pay for your fucking service.
I may download 18 full 650MB isos one month, and the next month I spend all of my time writing code and checking my email. That's the way it is supposed to work. What one guy doesn't use, the other will.
Besides, if you're tired of your users filling up your OC-192 24 hours a day with peer to peer filesharing apps, why don't you try doing something truly innovative. Start your own server to act as a proxy, and firewall the users from actually passing through your router. Now you've just removed all of the pointless "I'm still here" packets, and only left the data transfer packets. What's better, your network users can share all they want over your internal network, and it won't cost you a dime in additional internet bandwidth. What a fucking idea!
Sorry for being such a prick about this, but I've had my fill of clueless network admins who insist on fighting what their users really want.
If they charge monthly bandwidth usage, would the end-user be liable for the bandwidth that spam eats up? All that spam adds up in the long run.
If you're not a LEC you pay the LEC for the infrastructure to offer DSL. That's what sunk them. It wasn't the bandwidth costs as that is extremely inexpensive right now due to the glut in the market.
No one saw a problem with Time Warner owning the cable companies in places like my hometown of Charlotte, and now they have no competition, so they can pull this crap despite having already implemented bandwidth caps to supposedly avoid the need for it. Companies like Carolina Cable tried and tried to get their foot in the door, but when TW/AOL can just put off access to the pipes they control, those companies have a better chance of going bankrupt first (CC ran out of money a long time ago). Some free market this is. Uggghhhhh, fuck it all.
Does anyone recall the time when services like Prodigy, and most certainly AOL, charged a per hour fee for their use? If I remember correctly, AOL's rates for dial-up were in the range of $10/first five hours, and $3 for each hour over that. Actual speed of your modem didn't really matter, but the time you were tying up their hardware was where the cost was.
Today, it seems AOL/Time Warner wish to return to this, in a certain sense. The bottleneck isn't hardware for dialing into, as it once was, but an utter lack of bandwidth and the ability to handle the traffic. Theoretically, they could use the extra charges to upgrade their networking and allow for more traffic, but I'm not especially trusting of AOL to do the noble thing for the cable modem subscribers.
I'd love to avoid the whole situation and just have a T1 to my home, please.
-agent oranje.
One thing I guarantee - you will pay more and you will get less service in return if you qualify as a "heavy" user.
If the other ISP's that have already tiered their services are any indication I can well imagine TW deciding that a reasonable monthly transfer limit is somewhere in the neighborhood of a few gigs per month. Just imagine!! Download a few of your favorite linux distros and then you can't use your connection for the rest of the month w/o paying extra!!
So I don't imagine that they'll be so obliging to give customers a little applet that monitors their bandwidth use on their desktop, will they?
No, I suppose they'll just start charging whenever you run over, yet not offer any easy way of tracking it, right?
That's capitalism. Capitalism is also the fact that they'll still get plenty of stupid customers.
People, don't you get it! This has nothing to do with how much bandwidth really costs. It has to do with "deregulation" -- thus the recent decision by policy whores (such as Michael Powell) at the FCC who believe that the net doesn't belong to us. Remember all the decisions recently to prevent government from forcing phone companies to open up their lines to competitors, allow cable companies to "open up" their services while charging exorbitant rates to other cable companies, etc. This "deregulation" pawned off as government out of the way of business is just another way of saying the biggest companies make all the choices. Also known as monopoly power bought by the big-fish donations in the last election cycle. Who do you think Time Warner gets their pipe from? Also, have you tried to switch cable companies (or even local phone companies) since the government deregulated these big-business entities. This is about the big-pipe providers deciding that the regulatory climate is in their favor so that they can start raising their bandwidth prices however they see fit. We should expect to see more of this. Oh, and yes, it is Time Warner's fault, too, because they certainly support this type of charge-everyone-for-everything business model. We are witnessing the final stages of the commercialization of the net. Don't blame anyone but yourself, though, as you -- the American public -- voted for the people who are putting these policies in place today.
an extremely addicted user of KazAA.
;)
Now we'll see what people see as the real value of mp3s. Is it still a good idea to download it if the download is going to cost you 10c/meg? We'll find out shortly.
I already live in the world of the monthly free traffic quota. Here in New Zealand, I have a 2meg down/256k up cable connection, with 1Gb of (international) traffic free for ~US$40.
Traffic charges are tiered with national traffic (NZ) is at US$.008/meg and international traffic is at US$.08c/meg. So, downloading that image of Serious Sam SE will set you back US$52. All of a sudden, it makes sense to go out and buy the thing for ~US$40.
I can't see this as anything other than a positive development.
Before anyone starts, think about what this will do for the packaged linux software business. It might actually be cheaper to go out and buy the CD than download the ISO from Red Hat. All of a sudden RH turns a sale with a cost to them into a sale with profit! That _has_ to be a good thing.
Jason PollockMy web host is $9.95/month for an 8 GB transfer limit. Many others are around $19.95 per month for 4-5gb monthly limits.
If they set it right, then it may be ok, but too low and it will impact the legitimate users they are claiming to protect.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
You know, if there was any REAL competition in broadband, I'd say that this is good, because it'd sink AOLTimeWarner, as all their subscribers flee to alternative providers.
But, since getting broadband internet is a lot like getting cable television, I think that the consumer is going to get screwed big time by this.
Seriously, has deregulation ever benefited consumers? I can't think of a time off the top of my head when it has. It seems to me that it always benefits big business at the consumer's expense, and this is yet another example of the consumer getting screwed by a deregulated conglomerate.
I have read the 60 or so replies so far and no one has stated the fact that bandwidth is ultra cheap right now. There is over capacity in the industry and lines can be had for 50% less than they were two years ago.
... when a cable company adds a new subdivision their costs are in the components that are necessary to connect each house not in the actual bandwidth used by the houses.
What hasn't gone down is the infrastructure costs for DSL and cable companies. The rise in costs is due to the expansion necessary in the infrastructure and not the back end bandwidth. The costs do not rise at the same rate.
Think about it
This is the beauty of the model as anyone who has worked for an ISP knows. You can "oversell" bandwidth capacity without any issues as the lines are very rarely taxed.
Add to this the stranglehold the LECs have placed on independent DSL companies and you really see where the costs are.
I thought that there was a bandwidth surplus? If that's true, then why is it so expensive? Someone should look into this, because I'd bet there are some seriously sleazy deals going on here to keep the price higher than demand justifies. If bandwidth is so expensive, then WTF is Hollings doing trying to encourage broadband adoption? I know, TANSTAAFL, but that doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing as price fixing at unrealistic levels for the market and such. Damn, the future of the internet is turning out to be truly $hitty:
pay to connect
pay for the amount of data you download
pay for the content of the data
pay every time you view the content of the data
and you have to do this from a crippled computer to boot (you think the internet will be immune from the CPTBA? Ha! You won't be "permitted to connect to the internet with a computer without DRM, and there will be stiff penalties if the network detects you trying to connect with a DRMless computer [small prediction of mine]).
Damn, that future sucks. Maybe I should consider moving to Russia, China, or maybe just become some hermit like those gun nuts, though I'll be a computer nut, if crap like this comes to pass. If I'm lucky, they'll be colonizing Mars before I die, and I can go there. I'll need to stockpile some good, old fashioned paper books, though, to keep myself occupied. This all, of course, assumes that Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, France, and Japan all follow the U.S. lead, since I think I could live in any of those places before I move to Russia or China.
Bah! Yeah, I'm just bitching.
BlackGriffen
Will they just count what you download to your machine? I.e. will stuff downloaded from their Usenet servers count the same as stuff downloaded from outside their own network? I wonder where their bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is getting data from the rest of the world into their network, then downloading stuff from their servers wouldn't hurt too much.
Have any of the other companies that have done things like this made any distinction between the two?
In the DSL world, you normally have a existing dedicated pair back to the central office, and bandwith from the CO usually isn't the limiting factor. And all the equipment is either at the customer or in the central office.
Didn't the media companies (Time Warner, et. al.) just pitch that they needed more regulation in the broadband market so that they will feel free to roll out rich content (movies and music on demand) and now they want to cap out the one selling point of broadband...bandwidth. Contrary to what you have heard, the cable systems bandwidth stays mostly on their networks which are rapidly paid for by us, the subscriber. They are not being strangled by the Bells for bandwidth like the DSL's and CLEC's. I am a TimeWarner subscriber and very heavy user (I usually have streaming video, audio, browsers, email, and a game server all chugging away at they same time) and I will switch quickly to a frac-T1 or DSL (DSL service here is terrible because of Ameritech).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
DSL users share bandwidth too, just in a slightly different fashion.
the point is that the central line has a finite bandwidth, and letting some users disprortionately saturate the line means other people aren't getting the throughput they expect and paid for. The fees discourage abuse.
With virus scanners and other programs set to check for updates automatically, email programs set to check for new mail every X minutes, not to mention the little leaks from programs with the potential like Kazaa, I would think it would be a little like all the electricity that trickles into all the appliances in the modern home when they are "off". How much "wasted" bandwidth would the average user lose in say a year? I guess I will have to start remebering to turn off the light/computer when I leave the room.
yeah, real competition in the cable markets eh?
Will I still have to buy the mandatory basic cable television service that I never fucking watch?
--Richard
From the article:
.tiff files before sending them across the wire.
"But if you consistently go over the limit, you're going to have to pay"
and also this:
"If they doubled the price, it might be a problem, but I doubt they'd do anything that drastic."
Before everyone screams bloody murder, there are a few points to consider here.
First, I'm guessing you're going to have to do some SERIOUS downloading to meet quota. It's the 24-7 Kazaa junkies that will suffer from this. And as my posting history will show, I have exactly zero sympathy for these people. But the graphic artists, etc, should be ok, as long as they actually *compress* their fscking 800MB
Gamers will *never* hit this cap I'm betting, as online gaming isn't really very bandwidth intensive - it's more latency dependant (in which case DSL 0wNs anyhow)
The other point is this: they aren't going to charge you some insane amount. Like the second quote says, it'd be shocking if they even charge double the monthly rate, which given what you're getting, isn't very much.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Unfortunately for anyone that hasnt worked for an ISP, telco, or cable company they dont realize what they are posting and that these businesses (ISP's and broadband) are goldmines, scratch that you make less money mining for gold.
The scary thing about all this is if telephone companies adopt this model. They have no problems squeezing every last dollar out of their customers.
Everyone's whining about how horrible this is and how they'll have to stop playing Action Half-Life twenty hours a day and such.
Think of the poor fools who do something cool, and then, out of the blue, suddenly get a bill for several hundred dollars after they're slashdotted!
If they're gonna charge by bandwidth they had better do a VERY good job filtering spam. And how much bandwidth is 5,000 hits from Nimbda?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
In most suburban areas, the trunk lines are antiquated and are easily saturated by DSL users. This is a fallacy of the DSL vs Cable debate. The twist is that cable has such a much higher bandwidth that even shared, most cable modem users have greater actual bandwidth than DSL users.
What if there is a dispute over the amount of bandwidth used? Will users be given a bandwidth meter? My cablemodem is routed through a Linux box so I guess I can keep track of my usage, but I am sure TWC will not accept that as evidence.
Cablemodem is the only option in my area, and Time Warner is the only cable company. Monopoly? No, no monopoly...
rooooar
I don't consider myself to be a heavy downloader, but if I look at my recent activities, I wonder if Time Warner thinks I am. I purchase software for download and then download it. I download beta software (50-60 MB per file at times). Oftentimes when downloading large files, things hang or timeout and I need to start the download over. I choose to download software to get it when I want it, but also to avoid the additional fees associated with boxed versions.
In my case, Time Warner could very well be making the additional "boxed copy fee" from me in "excessive download fees." I agree it makes sense to charge on a usage basis (the Toll Booth on the Information Highway). The reaction to this will not really unfold until the limits are known and affect the top 5%, top 25% or top 50%. Prior to that, it's only speculation.
se habla CD-RW?
if you're using the network to transfer a playlist methinks you're wasting a lotta time and effort.
I would consider paying any fees associated for going over bandwidth for upstream traffic. No way in hell I can agree with them charging for excessive download. Someone's already paying the upstream charge on the other end. Taxing my horse at both ends I say.
Ever seen that movie Kidco? http://us.imdb.com/Title?0087550
Similar issue there. Sorry, but this post made me think of that movie.
Ok, lots of people are saying this is right and that it isn't a company trying to price gouge. You guys are right in the purest sense, however I highly doubt this pay for what you get will move downward only upward where it benifits Time Warner. Meaning what about the guy who only uses his account for email and surfing? Under say 5 megs a month? Will he pay less? I don't think so. They will still want their $50 from him. If they are going to have a mettered service they better go all the way or I will cancel my account. They already force me to pay for Digital Cable with my internet. Apparently I am not gauged enough! Don't get me right Mettering is fair if it is done right, but I garentee that it will be a combination of mettering and fixed price which will allow the maximum gauging of the customers.
Try cable here in Oz.
AUD$90 per month for 3Gb traffic. At least the speed is uncapped - although 500Kps transfers swallow up my quota fairly swiftly.
You guys have been on too much of a good thing I say. Nah, just joking, but really - doesn't it have to come to this because of the juarez junkies creating so much darn warez-spam every second of the day?
would the typical heavy user really need more than 1 gb or so a day?
If it was 30Gb per month, I'd be happy, I don't think I would exceed that in downloading (in uploading, I barely scratch a meg a day, just a couple e-mails and some simple browsing). However, if I was capped at 1Gb per day, It would take more than one day to get the latest Linux distro. I just downloaded the full Redhat Skipjack beta in six hours, 650Mb per disk, two disks for the basic Redhat install, plus three more for powertools, etc = 3,250Mb. That would annoy the crap out of me to have to wait four days to get my isos.
I don't think I'm alone here, either.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Almost certainly it tells you that they reserve the right to reshape your bandwidth without warning you.
...the fact that a +5 post in another thread is now moderated as a troll.
To the confused reader: I distinctly remember seeing this exact post in a previous slashdot story (goddamn I spend too much time on slashdot). I couldn't track it down within 5 min but it's true.
To Anomolous Cow Herd: Now that you've been moderated troll, would you care to link to the original post? Passing someone else's text as your own is very immoral.
A former net admin I know (he consults for 1000 a day now) said that once he was forced to create a policy that charged divisions 10 cents an email. What he noticed after announcing this (it was more of an experiment where he had insiders reporting to him) was that email usage droped to 14% of what it had been. People were just being silly and waistfull. Had they been more vigilant, they would not have had ANY charges... but that is the result of a lack of vigilance I guess.
Some here say that 'soon wireless communications will be free'. How can that be until we come up with a self sufficient system that requires absolutely NO maintenance and works over systems that require NO administration or cost themselves?
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the whole points of The Bill Formerly Known as the SSSCA was that people weren't buying and using enough broadband, because media companies didn't put any content on the net.
Now, we have an example of the broadband providers charging more and more for the people who *are* using the net for watching movies and listening to music (illegal though it may be, the bandwidth used by a legal movie download wouldn't be signifigantly different than an illegal one).
So, if AOLTW is having problems with a few ( 5% ) of thier customers using thier connection for movies and music, how do they feel about Sen. Hollings plan to have as many people as possible using this much bandwidth?
Perhaps there's a connection, perhaps there isn't -- just an occured thought.
everyone thinks socialism is bad. however, wouldnt it be great to live like they do on star trek? morons.
one cable company tried all you can eat internet in this country some time back - namely chello.
although their cable connection were aimed at the residential market and were low speed, their network got hammered very badly by a few select users.
when they tried to cap the limit, people complained - including those who never even reached the limits. chello aren't here any more.
now we have cable and adsl, and both services from all providers have monthly caps. if you go over the cap, you pay for traffic by the meg.
i've personally got a high speed cable connection and I only have a 400mb/month international traffic limit. I get completely free national traffic, so I have to be careful not to go over my limits or I'm paying nearly 20 cents per meg.
of course, different plans are available. the slower your connection, the more your monthly traffic limit is.
that's the best way of controlling it, and it works well.
the worst i've ever seen is compuserve cutting the connection off if you go over the limit. not good in a business. the old company I worked for that had a dedicated connection thru compuserve were spending about $1000NZ per month and during december when everyone sent xmas images, and junk, the limit was reached in a couple of weeks. and they cut us off.
needless to say, we dropped them like a hot stinky sack of doodie.
moral of the story - paying extra is ok, getting cut off is bad. when time-warner change their policy to "suspending" accounts for over-use, then people will really start seeing red.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
...except for the fact that there is no competition for many cable connections.
I get my broadband through AT&T. What if they decided to impose ridiculous limits on bandwidth downloads? Where else would I go?
I'm all for charging people who use bandwidth up the yazoo for warez crap, but without some competition to define appropriate limits there is no limit.
I pull most of my pr0n off the local RoadRunner usenet server. I don't really hit the backbone much. Will they count local server access at a lower rate? It's pretty much free for TW.
No, they are doing the "right" thing from a business perspective. If they charge people who overuse, or force these heavy users out, then they have made room for many casual users. As for advertising high bandwidth, they want causal uses who only hit those levels in infrequent bursts, not the person who is there 24/7.
The fastest I have ever gotten my upstream to work is 30kB/s.....at best......at three in the morning. During the day, it's more like 15KB/s. This seems to be true for everyone I know in this market. I couldn't run an mp3/warez server if I wanted too. Oh gee, I can DOS a dialup user off the net my connection is so 'leet.
As for downloads, you may have a point but I'm paying enough for this as it is. They cap my uplink, tell me I can't run a secured private server (at least they aren't bitching about ssh.....yet), scan my ports and now they want to put a meter on it as well. What a bunch of @Home CRAP!!
This is bad. I installed Debian on this thing with nothing more than a couple of floppies and my net connection. If I wanted a connection that is good for nothing more than websurfing I would have stayed with dialup.
Can I expect to reamed for the price of a Windows CD the next time I build a box?
Arrrrggggghhhh!
Welp, I'm a long-time Road Runner user, 5 years and going. I've always been happy with them, but now it might be the time to switch over.
;-).
I have no loyalty based on past-performance of RR.
I might still stick with them; it depends on whether I think I'll be affected. I think I'm a pretty heavy downloader, but I'm not sure how they define that. I download lots of MP3's, WMA's, and OGG's, as well as programs and data.
So, I'll e-mail Time Warner and ask them for future specs.
Ultimately, I have no problem with this type of system. It makes sense that if you use excessive amounts of bandwidth's, you should pay more money. This isn't a way by Time Warner to screw over their customers. Rather, it puts customers into appropriate payment classes based on how much bandwidth they use.
Someone who has Road Runner simply because they want fast web-surfing shouldn't pay the same rate as someone who uses Road Runner to download gigabytes of movie, music, and data files each day.
But I'm not Road Runner, and I'm not other customers. I'm ME, the most important thing in the universe (don't you know, the sun revolves around me
Anyways, if I'm one of the users who's using "excessive" bandwidth as defined by TW, I'll look for a better deal. If I'm one of the users who is being charged a higher bill for other users excessive bandwidth, I'll stick with TW.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
... I don't use Time Warner. If this trend continues, I'm going to go hide in a cave someplace before I rack up trillions of dollars in debt... Dave
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http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
the setup is around $300 and you have to buy their routers and sign a contract. With cable you dont. However that being said i'm switching my cable to dsl a week after my wedding. Wow you want to talk about expensive try having a "traditional" wedding. Unbelieveable.
And despite what fairy tales you free-market champions may have been told when you were little children back in the Reagan era, corporations when left to their own, will gouge the hell out of the consumer. That's their job.
From what I've seen from web hosting companies, it costs about $1.50 per GB. And that's probably way overpriced for ISPs whom I'm sure get huge volume discounts. But I'll stick with the $1.50 figure anyway. Just wait until they cap users at 3 and 4 GB a month for $40...
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
a fucking T-1. I have one for my office and it was only 815/setup and 715/month. If that is a little more then by all means. Otherwise shut the hell up.
This is guaranteed to bite TW back... In what other "utility" service is my bill determined by the behavior of other people?
For example, if some script kiddie wants to seek revenge on a neighbor, what is to stop him from initiating a distributed ping flood against him? Over a month, all of those replies could seriously add up. Or maybe have a couple dozen zombies request the default page for his linksys administration web?
There are dozens of ways for people external to the bill payer to effect the usage of the customer, most without the customer's knowledge.
This also blows a hole in Sen. Hollings "Broadband adoption initiative"... especially if a user is charged $4.95 to rent a movie, then has to pay an additional $10 fee to the cable company to download it.
I run a rather unpopular website with some pictures of my coral reef tank. Sadly, Time Warner doesn't want me to run a server because of the traffic it could consume.
Now that they have a per for traffic model, can I run my server?
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Isn't it about time we started treating these budding monopolies for what they are -public utilities- and insist that their books be open and their networks too to all comers hauling whatever they want to haul?
Maybe the cable providers should refund users for each minute they suffer an outage. Now that is a great idea if I don't say so myself.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Why? Because now my cable modem bill could potentially be at the mercy of stupid people. Think about it. If some disgruntled person on a nice fat pipe that doesn't worry about bandwidth usage just sits there and, gee, I don't know, decides to ping you all day with fairly large packets, there isn't a whole lot you can do about it. Charging extra for something that is quite possibly out of the user's control is just wrong.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Imagine the poor bastards that haven't removed that Brilliant crap. The first month they get hit up with a $500 TW bill...
This is just pure greed, I'm sorry. They just raised the monthly rate 4 or 5 months ago, and now this.
Goddamnit.
Oh well, I'll just have to download twice as much now, before this goes into effect, that way I'll get my money's worth for a little while.
Notice how the article says that TW won't care if heavy users leave because of this.
That's such a great attitude.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Uhhh... didn't companies like AT&T lose a crap load of money by putting in this funny little technology called fiber optic under my damn street. That's right... that 10 year investment that turned out to be over kill.
SO, if there is this HUGE over capacity in the lines all over the place since fiber laser repeaters and technology increased bandwidth on those same lines beyond anyone's expectation...
Where the hell is it? Seems to me that the bandwidth gods must be with-holding the supply, because I see demand everywhere!
Vital Idea
Wow. That's quite a deal. Where I live, I pay Qwest $70/mo for the physical 640k up/down pipe and then my ISP (Easystreet.com) another $70 fot the 640k up/down service and another $15/mo for half a dozen static IP's. That comes out to about $155/mo for 640k (or more than $1,800/yr). Plus, they don't care if I run whatever kind of servers I want and they don't block any ports or filter anything I want to use.
This is the same model us here in Australia have been offered. With my cable ISP, Telstra BigPond, you can download a maximum of 3GB a month before you are charged 11 cents per MB (there are different plans available with more or less data, but the 3GB one is the one most users are on, and is the best value).
All Telstra content is exempt from this, and does not count towards your quota. Telstra mirror the major Linux and *BSD distros, service packs, game demos, movie trailers as well as providing video streams (including full replays of every NRL and AFL game).
The other major cable ISP, Optusnet, allows users to download up to 10 times the average of all customers over a 14 day period. Currently, the average user downloads 75MB a day. They have a tool called Netstats that allows users to get this information. Optus does have a fairer system, but they haven very limited availability (only selected parts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; nothing outside those cities), and you cannot run servers at all (Telstra allows this). There are also rumours that since SingTel bought Optus, they are looking at changing this system to a flat download limit.
I'm going to go against popular opinion and say that I don't mind this system at all. I download less than 3GB's a month, I get all the Linux distros for free, and can comfortably download whatever I like. It costs a hell of a lot to send data to and from the US, and I'd rather that my ISP is profitable and won't sink.
I also don't see why I should subsidise 12-year old warez kiddies; if they want their warez, they can damn well pay for it.
You get charged for what you download across the border (and sometimes inside border, if you have fat pipe).
Border being something that surrounds free internal traffic exchanges.
And if you are not in US you will get alot across-border traffic, since many sites are in US.
By the way, that results in local resources flourishing (like hotmail replacements for example)
Now you too can feel the wrath of shitty ISPS as we do in Australia! 95$ AUD gets you 3gb ADSL..
:)
that lets u, umm.. check email.. bout it
There is a wireless isp service by my area. They have a 2 gig transfer limitation for the month. If you go over the limit, the isp drop your bandwidth to what they call "a good 56k modem". They didnt say what speed when i asked them so... The following month they give you your full bandwidth back until you go over again.
Would this apply to their High-Speed AOL users as well? Or are they fore-seeing their AOL user-base switching from dialup to their cable lines? If this did happen, this would severely cripple the available bandwidth in TW areas forcing this rating system, although I personally believe a reasonable download cap would be more appropriate.
At least with a download cap (we're already capped at 40 kilobytes per sec upstream) the users could have something consistance to look at. Maybe they could even turn on some sort of automatic management system which would limit the download rate for N amount of hours if a user breaks a download limit per day.
If they did use something like an automatic management system it would not be all too hard to deploy; they already have their network masks for the IPs subnetted to 255.255.248.0. This leaves all traffic for each subnetwork going out through a single point, limiting the shared bandwidth in that network (this may be stated a bit confusing, but hopefully everyone gets the idea). Each subnet has its own gateway for these connections which also serves as the dhcpd.
Since I live in the Triad of North Carolina (outside of a major city with no DSL availible) TW's RoadRunner is my only reasonable option for a residential subscription; just to put out in the open that I am going to be forced to pay what I have to pay. The only thing keeping MANY people in my area from switching to Road Runner is that they are not able to use AOL through it (they just dont realize there is a Bring Your Own Connection option availible which reduces AOL's monthly cost by $10).
Just some thoughts, although I do think this is a bit ridiculous, but could push some innovations (load-balancing for bandwidth and P2P through public 802.11a networks anyone?).
They could always start charging like the cellular folks. A tiered structure that increases the fixed payment portion while decreaseing the variable portion. Kinda like: $29.95 for 5GB/mo $1MB thereafter, $39.95 for 10GB/mo $.50MB thereafter, etc. Personally I think this would suck (complex and confusing, just the way they like it), but you can easily see it going this way.
....
The way some people think around here, we should all pay a flat rate for gas per month. Hey, now that's an idea
I live in Australia, and have cable access here.
There is only ONE cable provider in the capital city of South Australia, Tel$tra.
They charge the equivelent of US$50/month, in return for which we get 3000 million bytes.
(As opposed to 3 GB, which would be more.)
This isn't just downloads metered, but uploads as well! So, all the backchannel acks from your http/ftp sessions are counting towards your total.
You can download at around 660 KByte/sec, so you can hit the limit very quickly. After exceeding it, excess bandwidth is charged at the equivelent of about US$0.40 per megabyte.
I just thought i'd let you know how things are on this side of the lake.. It could be worse.
...Corruption in the goat herd Flesh crumbles in the real world.
expensive bandwith.
I have internet access, very fast, cable internet access. I often get 120kB/sec on my downloads. However, if I want to share my opinion, I have to settle for an advertised rate of 16kB/sec, more like 8kB/sec with typical usage.
And this, much limited access, it only to sites I control. My cable company (Charter Communications, in Los Angeles) has deemed it necessary to block all incoming ports on my so called "Internet" connection. While I have complete freedom to DOWNLOAD information, I have almost no ability to UPLOAD anything at all.
It's true that I can connect to outside servers and place information there, however I can't publish information on my own. All incoming ports are blocked at the router level. I am forced to be a passive "consumer" of the internet.
I have a friend who lives across town. He has Charter Pipeline (more like Charter Spigot) also. If I want to play a multiplayer game with him we have to find a third party to host our match. I can't make a direct connection to his machine: nor he mine.
I've often thought about contesting the "ISP"'s definition of "Internet Service", but I don't have the resources to pursue this.
In fact, a good, "legal" definition of "Internet access" would go a long way toward solving these problems. As it is now "Internet Access" is like selling "Freedom Access" through a barred window...
"It shore is purdy outside, jest don't try to get out..."
-dameron
...and I don't mind. The cap is 2 GB/mo of uploads (unlimited downloads), but they compensate for this, imho, by explicitly allowing servers in the TOS.
That's the problem with consumer broadband: people running web/ftp servers (specifically, ones that get popular). Too many providers ban this or even firewall port 80. I think it's fair to have an upload cap to collar the warez d00dz who eat my bandwidth while I can run a low-volume server (and I have my router throttle my outbound data...).
Of course, some providers will cap and not change the TOS one iota...
for the average surfer, much of the bandwidth used (i think) comes from d/l-ing advertising. i wonder if this will push people towards things like junkbuster. skipping all the advertising could save surfers with d/l restrictions real $$.
After panicking about this I have a thought: why not separate cable usage times like the cell phone companies have? You would have your anytime bytes and you night/weekend bytes. After all, if they are worried about businesses hogging the bandwidth then it would make sense to put incentives in place to not use the service as much during the day. Then at night we can all still get our kernel/kde/gnome/pron downloads without worry! Could the big guys be convinced to go for this idea?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So you finally save up to buy the 80gig per second cray harddrive and get it hooked up to the internet. Five minutes later TW sends an email saying "your cable bill is currently $4725274562"
Are you new to Linux?
Caps on memory, bandwith, etc are nothing new...but what would be new is for these companies to develop, promote, and offer support on the use of their services. For instance, cell phones; most cell phones have an easy to access number of used minutes. If they are going to cap, then they need a real-time tool to allow the user to get to their bandwith numbers, otherwise one has to wonder where they get their results.
AOL, while awful in many ways, at least keeps track of their hours.
On the negative side, I cannot wait to pay extra to download these larger than ever ads that keep "popping up".
Charge, but add service, benefit, like a real company!
I think that the better way to cap is uploads. My DSL provider, DirecTV (nee Telocity) has a 2GB/month upload limit. That's more than enough for me to run a mail server, ssh, and a little Apache. They also specifically allow servers in the TOS. I think it's a good trade-off.
Lots of comments here about how this makes sense, about time, serves the warez kiddies right, so on and so forth...
I always thought the idea was that bandwidth would get *cheaper*, not more expensive. The pipes are only getting fatter all around, and anyway, prices are supposed to rise when a commodity gets scarcer, not more abundant. I can't believe that the best solution the cable companies have for shared bandwidth hogs is to meter everybody. So much for video over IP, huh?
I remember talking with my friendly local DSL ISP about how much I can reasonably transfer in a month without being a "problem" user. They shrugged and said, hey, download bandwidth is not an issue - you can pull down as much as you like and it's no big deal. It's the outbound bandwidth that costs us real money.
I can understand how that model works, but still, flat rates are a beautiful thing. The best part of the net is the free exchange of information... one person can set up a homepage and reach a practically unlimited audience. The average joe can compete with the big corporations, and all that. Personally, I would just as soon subsidize some MP3 and warez kiddies if it meant that my neighbor could also serve a popular webpage of something useful or beautiful and not have to worry about how he's going to pay for the bandwidth.
The only way I'd be cool with metering bandwidth would be if it prompted the rollout of alternatives. So what if the cable companies have a lousy distribution model -- as long as there's DSL, wireless, satellite and powerline broadband also available, then hey, no big deal. But as long as there are just barely a handful of companies setting themselves up to dominate the broadband market, metering bandwidth is just not cool. What'll you say when downloading from Time-Warner websites is unlimited, but everything else is metered? Where does that lead us?
I feel sorry for the guy who submits an article to slashdot and links back to his home server running via TW cable modem service.
would the typical heavy user really need more than 1 gb or so a day?
i currently use Adelphia PowerLink, in my TOS, im told that my limit is 2.5 gigs a MONTH... i used to download more than that per month on dialup lol.
the day they try to enforce that 2.5g limit, is the day they will lose me as a customer... i dont ecpect a fully functional T1 pipe into my house for 50 bucks a month, but i do expect to be allowed to download more data than i could each month with my dialup modem!
Streaming video, music, etc is *nothing* compared to the guy who runs a 100 gb 0-day ftp server from his cable modem. Those people send several gigs a day over the pipe, and its hurts everyone.
Wow, I almost feel angry at those theives that are stealing my bandwith, thanks for pointing out the evils lurking on my local cable net. I'll be sure to phone "r-u-shutup" if I notice any unauthorized port 21 traffic.
Now let's get real and pull apart what you said. Let's start with the purpose of the internet: to share information and computing resources. It was made for "servers". ISPs that don't let you run a server are not Internet Service Providers, but something else like a Browser Provider of Adverts. Now let's think about those 100 Gig/day ftp sites. When was the last day you made 100 Gigs of original content? I hate to admit it, but my ftp site does not see anything like that kind of creativity or traffic. People downloading Warez, movies and other comercial garbage deserve to have their line cut and will. It has NOTHING to do with what is happening here which is a pay per the minute fee for downloading adverts.
What you see is the inevitable result of the death of "broadband" competition. The local Bells feel free to crush their DSL competitors and the cable companies have municipal monopolies in most of their areas of domination. With your coices left to two or fewer providers, is it any supprise that you will pay for the minute? People once tollerated this for phone service and seem destined to put up with it again, even if they decide to re regulate the whole mess.
Attitudes like yours make the local Bell, large publishers and the government happy. None of them want you to publish, and all of them want as much of your money as they can grab. "Shut up and give it up, Bitch" is their song. Why would you want to sing it?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Does not charge if transfer how much I want. I can run gigs per day, and not get charged for it. And as long as it remains that way, I will stay with them.
--------------------------
Is this a sig?
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Um, right.
Try PERSON DOWNLOADING GIGABYTES OF STOLEN MOVIES AND SOFTWARE.
Like me. 10-20 gigs a month just in downloading movies.
Unless the limits are truely restricting, anyone who seriously is getting self-righteous about this is an idiot.
I have many complaints about this, but my largest would be that of the monopoly they have created. In my area Time Warner is the _only_ cable provider, in which you either have basic or digital cable (which I recieve a letter in the mail every other week about). They are also the _only_ broadband provider. If these bandwith restrictions are enacted and I have to pay more for my connection - I might as well go back to dialup, considering there is no use in having broadband if you cant use any of the bandwith that you pay for. Oh wait .. I forgot, AOL is just about the only dialup isp - and sadly, probably the best around here.
Looks like Time Warner owns all of my forms of entertainment and ecuation. How about we toss away our TV's and Computers and all go back to shortwave!
Steal This Sig
Aren't we talking about download limits here?
This isn't about the warez FTP your neighbor's kid has running in his basement. This is saying if you like to listen to lots of streaming radio, or keep an eye on a bunch of websites, or just happen get a ton of email (spam?), you could get hit with extra charges. Obviously I don't know yet what the limit is, so I don't know how much of a problem this could turn out to be.
Sure, bandwidth is bandwidth, and sure, it's expensive to provide. But when I'm already paying fees for content (commercial NNTP, for instance) shouldn't I take notice when an ISP starts coming after me for more money, above and beyond my normal bill?
Maybe I missed something.
Cheap, high-speed internet is great for web surfing, and ideally suited to it. You get your content loaded right away (fast) and then your connection sits idle while you use it (cheap).
It was always designed for that kind of use. However, it wasn't sold that way. As you say, they push high-quality streaming video and similar nonsense that uses 100% of your bandwidth for extended periods. Worse, they just assumed people wouldn't find any use for the free bandwidth during the supposed "idle" periods.
Sure enough, everybody and his dog is finding some way to suck it up with high-bandwidth games or P2P systems. That "it'll just work out somehow" attitude, basing feasibility on unfounded assumptions, was the main mental illness of the e-business boom and bust.
These bandwidth limits should always have been a part of the system. They should even have been part of the advertising, the way they are for the server market. "20 GB/month, burstable at 1MB/second!"
Of course, they shouldn't bill for bandwidth unexpectedly. They should just throttle the connection down to a harmless speed, and then give the user the option to buy more bandwidth.
This is standard practice here in Australia - if you want unlimited traffic on your account, you have to pay a premium price. The rest of us are used to shopping around for the best deal (except for the morons who go with the big ISPs for no other reason than that they've heard the name)
I hope my download of Gnome2 and dependencies from cvs on a weekly basis isn't too much. Otherwise, say bye bye to Gnome2 until a major distribution includes it on cd.
Also, what about all that porn I download? Will I have to go back to video tapes and magazines? Can't watch porn on cable until after 10pm due to stupid local laws.
This is the reasons I bought broadband in the first place - lots of bandwidth for cheap!
I think I should go with satelite now.
Know of any good Internet Satelite Providers?
I agree, this, on the face of it, is a good thing. If your usage causes increased costs, you should pay more.
Though, the real cost is provisioning for peak usage. Having enough bandwidth to keep users happy at 6-12 pm (time varies in different environments, but this pretty much covers it for residential usage) is what drives the costs up as they need to engineer and provision for that load. The rest of the day it is (for the most part) "free".
What I think they should be doing is only metering during those peak periods and leaving it status quo the rest of the day. They would find users would start those ISO, Warez, etc. downloads before they go to bed, or setting up a cron job for 3am or whatever, turn off their P2P server during the billable time, etc.
I think this would solve the problem they are trying to solve and more accurately pass on costs. The phone company has been doing this forever, it only makes sense.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
...Time Warner has on their front page several links to live video, music, etc, but if we use them, and like them enough to use them a lot, they'll charge us EXTRA to use them?
Does anyone see a problem with this?
And, how much is too much? I'm currently streaming NASA-TV to watch the Space Shuttle mission. I watch it a lot. What kind of bandwidth does that take up?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
No, I don't see it that way. How am I to contribute to large software projects with these leaches charging me so much to check out? No development, no code, no Red Hat. While distros like Debian are streamlined as is, this will still add costs and trouble to the average user. Cheap people will disable their hits on security.debian.org, and we might just see some breakins on Linux computers. This is all very backward and eliminates the advantages free software has over crappy boxed "products": quick responses to venerabilities, configurabilty and ease of upgrades.
A curse on these asses who wish to return to the bad old days of boxed software, Ma Bell, and all other manner of greedy grabbing oppresion. Ludites all!
So many attacks on free software from so many directions. It is just so depressing. September 11th was bad but what people are making of it is worse.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For the consumer, wireless is king. Hell, 10 companies can broadcast from the same tower, and I get to choose who I want. Any fool could start a compnay doing this. No streets to dig up, no gaint BabyBell to dick with. Rent a preexisting cellphone tower and duck tape up your little antenna. Herein my little part of Dallas, I've got 1.5Mb/1.0Mb up/dn. Yeah, you have to share the spectrum with your neighbors, but tower only covers a couple mile radius. And when there are only 30 customers signed up, you get great tech support!! p.s. do not point the antenna at your stereo. Damn thing can make your speakers hum from 10 feet away.
20 years ago when at&t was the only game in town? A good plan would be a quarter a minute. And that was when a quarter was worth a hell of alot more.
-
I'm confused. I subscribe to Time Warner cable, and I have a cable modem. But the cable modem is provided by one of three ISP's: Road Runner, Earthlink and AOL. When the article says that Time Warner is going to charge extra how will that work? I used to subscribe to Road Runner and now I subscribe to Earthlink. Who owns the bandwidth?
I'm so confused.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Going through my Snort logs, I find that I'm hit by CodeRed (I and II) and a number of Nimda variants at least 4 times per day. (This is extreamly better than 4 months ago!) As a good Netizen, I inform the ISPs as soon as I'm notified of an attack (often within an hour).
I've found that university administration is often on top of it before I contact them, while some large ISPs take forever. After getting attacked by one IP at US West Minneapolis several times per day for a week, I blocked their entire network at the firewall. For some reason, the NNNNNNNNNN variation of Code Red seems to be very popular this week, though. I don't know if this is all that bad a thing. Idiots who don't patch their bone head machines "from a certain company" are going to be hurt where it counts.
The entirely experience of Internet would not be the same when they charge per bandwidth. I'd be very careful for every download, since every bit of download means money. That kills mobile Internet buiness in the past - why do they want to kill their own business?
If they really have to do this, I wish they'd allow us to the unused bandwidth to next month. However, I think it's very unlikely that would happen.
Congress and the FCC is now not requiring that local telcos keep their networks open to competitors. This means that your local telco/DSL provider now has no one to compete with...so you get crap DSL...low bandwidth...service restrictions..etc.
Cable companies know this and are starting to turn down the bandwidth valves. As little as two months ago I laughed at the Verizon sales guy that was pitching $50.00/mo 640k DSL...and no servers allowed. I told him that I have a 3-6Mbps cable modem connection for $29.00/mo. Sure, Cablevision doesn't let me operate a server either (they block inbound port 80), but I've got 3 to 4 times the bandwidth of my T1 at work!
This will not last forever. Cable companies will get greedy...who wants to pay for a fraction T3 when you can degrade the services to the point where a couple of cheap T1s will service an entire cable area. With only crap DSL to compete with, they will start degrading their service to cut costs. They know that after taking a hit from the broadband crackpipe, you won't go back to dial-up.
Write to your congressman! Let them know that this is intollerable! If you give monopolies to the cable and telephone companies they'll screw the consumer every time!
-ted
Do I also have to pay for script kiddies hitting my modem?
Time Warener is letting all of that blatant copyright piracy go on? Something is just not adding up here.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I am a Roadrunner User and I have a few questions: 1) Will they have Peak and off-peak rates? (just like my good old cell phone) 2) Will they have different rates for their local bandwidth and internet bandwidth (Roadrunner has some great Newsgroups) 3) How high is the limit
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
Great... I'm all for letting them charge people who massive abuse the service, but if they are going to do this, can I have a few things like port 80, 443, and 1443 back? I'm not willing to pay $150 a month to have a "business" account for the 3 people a month who might come to my page (hell, I'm not even Google...)
So what do I get for being under the quota?
My brother is still on dial-up. Not because he can't afford a cablemodem, but because he knows he will only use a small portion of the $40 value. Personally the cable company is throwing away his $15/mo for nothing.
I just think the angle of the article is obvious and boring. Of course they're going to curb the bandwith hogs. But they've designed their service to attract the bandwidth hogs first. The people that only need $15 of capability are going to keep the service that only costs $15. But there's no reason that they can't offer a $15 service that's maybe only 5x as fast as dialup but still doesn't tie up your phoneline. I would think people would stampede to this kind of service.
I have a choice of ONE cable company, and ONE DSL company. Where can I go when i'm not happy with Cablevision or Verizon?
-ted
If you purchase an ADSL service as a Home user and spend your time downloading Music, Movies, ISO's of the latest Linux Distro, and anything you can find on Warez sites; or a Business sending and receiving large amounts of email and data such as web hosting should be charged use of extra bandwidth. (Below is a personal bias due to working at a ISP ADSL helpdesk)Although a business in vital need of a highspeed net connection should always consider a managed ADSL connection over a consumer ADSL connection. My ISP sets a up and download limit and the abuse dept suspends accounts after warnings of bandwidth abuse. Personally ADSL and Cable net connections in North America are low priced for the amount of bandwidth you receive compared to a few years ago when ISDN and dial up were the the only real options for home internet connections. (See disclaimer above) Oh and Businesses who think network techs and admins are part time jobs think again, if you can't afford it have someone learn some basic network admin who is in the office all time.
So what happens if someone on their network sends out 10 million spam messages and 50,000 of them hit my servers.
Will they pay me for allowing a spammer to send that much crap through my lines?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
A better plan would be to have no bandwidth cap.
.5x of what it was in case 2, and 0.01x of what it was in case 1). In either case, User A will not notice a thing; he will not call the ISP complaining. However, user B will notice a 2-fold (over case 2) and 100-fold (over case 1) improvement.
But wait, this isn't an invitation for some people to hog all of the bandwidth, leaving other's with none. Read on a bit...
You would pay for levels of priority. Paying $60 would give you twice the priority of $30. At any given time, any user COULD have ALL of the bandwidth on the entire network to himself (if things were right); however, if everyone was using bandwidth for equally intensive tasks, individual's would get an amount of bandwidth proportional to the amount of money they pay to the ISP.
Lets say that road runner has 10 users total (yes, not realistic, but its simple math).
Lets also say that during a particular time, ALL of those 10 users are downloading infinitely large files, so all of the bandwidth of the ISP will be taken up.
Furthermore, lets say USERS 1-5 pay $60 a month, and users 6-10 pay $30 a month. This means that the road runner will be getting 60*5 + 30*5 = 450 dollars total from these users per month. Assuming maximal bandwidth usage, each user would get x/450 fraction of bandwidth of the net total bandwidth, where x the amount of money they pay the ISP. So users 1-5 should each get 6.7% of the net bandwidth, and users 6-10 should each get 13.3% of the bandwidth.
In other words, when there is competition between two users demanding bandwidth, the bandwidth is alotted in proportion to how much they pay.
Such a scheme could be scaled up.
But aside from that, other parameters should be considered. Minimizing the net wait-time should also be a concern. If your directing a shopping line, it would be most efficient to let the guy with 1 item through first, even if the guy with 1000 items got there first. The idea is to do the "fast step" first.
The idea is to minimize the net wait time all of the users experience as a total. As an example, lets say that there are two users on a network, and each has equal priority, and lets say there is 2MB/s of bandwidth available. Lets say user A wants to download a 200MB file, and user B wants to download a 2MB file. Lets take three cases: in the first case, we give user A All the bandwidth; in the second case, we divide the bandwidth between user A and B equally; in the third, we allow user B to download his file, then user A.
1. User A (the "greedy" user) gets all the bandwdith, then user B is allowed to d/l. If user A gets all the bandwidth at first, it takes him 200MB / 2MB/s = 100s to download his file. Then afterwards, it takes user B 1 second to download his file. Thus, user A has to wait 100s, user B 101s. Thus, there is a net wait-time of 201s..
2. Bandwidth is alotted equally between user A (200MB file) and user B (2MB file). This means that, while both users are still downloading, each uses 1MB/s of bandwidth. Thus, it takes user B 2s to download his complete file. Meanwhile, during those 2s, user A downloads 2MB of his file (198MB remaining). After user B no long requires bandwidth, user A will require another 99s to download the remaining 198MB of his file (99s * 2MB/s = 198MB). Thus, user B had to wait 2s for his file. User A had to wait 2s + 99s = 101s for his file. Thus, there is a net wait time of 103s. This clearly better than case 1.
3. Bandwidth is all initially alotted to user B. It will take user B 2Mb / 2MB/s = 1s to download his file. After that 1s, it will then take user A 200MB / 2MB/s = 100s to download his file. Thus, user A has a net wait time of 1s. User B has a net wait time of 100s. Thus, the net wait time is 101s. This is clearly better than case 1, and slightly better than case 2.
So, which of these is best? Obviously, the third case is the best. User A, the greedy user, hardly has to wait any extra time at all (user A's wait time only increases by a factor of 1.01); user B, however, sees enormous reductions in wiat time (user B's wait time is
Hope this was helpful.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This sucks I know I use a hell of a lot more bandwidth than most people, but that's the only reason I got Time Warner cable to begin with. If I was an average check my email/spend maybe 1 hour on the web a day user, I'd save myself $30 and use dial up.
I wonder how much bandwidth I use a month, on a slow month it's gotta be over 10GB, but I'm sure I've used well over 50GB a month once or twice. Either way I'm sure my usage would be well over their limit. Guess that pretty much means I'll switch ISPs.
The companies have two types of costs:
fixed ones and ones more or less proportional to bandwidth used(like need for infrastructure upgrade).
Therefore the most honest way would be to charge customers proportionally to both so company
makes X% profit on both fixed and per MB investment.
Of course this means that if they rise the price
for heavy bandwith users - they should lower
it for light bandwidth users.
Otherwise this is just a price rise not more
honest pricing.
Kubus
You hit the nail on the head. Bandwidth caps are all about monopolization, artificial scarcity, power, control, and greed. It's unlightened self interest at it's worst. So the broadband providers are happy to provide us with broadband speed, but want us to settle for dialup bandwidth usage. You get to the heart of why the internet hasn't become the engine of economic growth and societal change that it could be. When only corporations can afford the bandwidth to handle millions of users, small content providers are unable to make themselves heard above the corporate din.
evildude# ping -f
==> $$$$$$$ for them!!!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Right and left, I see personal sites dropping like flies or going members-only because they're being hit with multi-thousand dollar bills because they suddenly got popular. Why does it cost so much? What resource is being consumed that justifies these huge amounts of money?
It's an honest question -- I really don't know how it works, and I'm curious to know.
Well, with wide spread of 802.11b systems I guess ...
pay GB fee will be necessary. So many of us are sharing our connection with our neighbours
Kubus
I "pay" them for earthlink high speed, my account is supposto be 2 meg/sec down, 1.5 meg/sec up... bull shit ofcorse... upload is capped to 45k, download... i have seen it get up to 189 when pulling from a fully unloaded t1 line.
If they are going to charge more for "overusage" then I want the caps gone, so I can really use what I'm paying for.... ofcorse... if I just made another 500-600 a month, I would get a t1 line and tell rr to fuck themselfs.
"Now I guess I'll just have to guess where the threshold will be. Anything more than email? Active gamer? Graphic artist?"
...Porno movie fanatic?
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
After reading this thread I went to my local Roadrunner newsgroup to see what others were saying, and someone had posted, TODAY, a message about TW starting to charge over quota users. The message header was there, but when I tried to access it, it said "message not available on server".
Hmmph.
I also went through my TOS and tried to find anything about what my bandwidth limitations are. I can't find any, nor do I remember agreeing to any in the past.
First of all, about those posts that say its not fair that the users that only use so many megs a month should have to pay for heavy users. Thats bul****t, those users with such little bandwith should^H^H^H^H^H^H are using dialup...they would notice almost no difference, outside of connection time/drops which isn't a problem with a decent ISP. And if you say it is a problem you just need too look harder, if you can't find a good one, start one you'll make a fortune if your the only good shop in town.
I have a better idea just contact those doing ***GB month transfers. And ask them to lower bandwith usage...and if they don't just change their contract to a $/MB system. I mean I sometimes transfer alot but I know its less than a 1GB/day on average...which for what is supposed to be broadband is not that much.
If I get some letter from TW saying they are charging me more I'm going to bitch like there is no tommorow....IF everybody does that they'd have to listen. If they don't theyll have to rename it something other than broadband:)
And when all that fails, because I know it will, considaring how shitty its getting in the US, less freedom, pay-per-use everything. I'll have to resort to a few really big harddrives to prevent haveing to download anything more than once. And setting up a big caching server. And disabling all ads. That will really help all those websites trying to survive on ad money. I really don't mind ads, at least non popup/under type ones. I often click on the ads in slashdot. Now with broadband popups/unders are minor annoyance, just a few clicks a day to close, but If i'm being charged per MB screw all ads, I can't aford it. Ads will have to die. That and lynx will become my browser of choice.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
First, they oversell their bandwidth like crazy and make up all sorts of lame excuses for why they can't provide the service as specified in their contract (but never give credits... oh no!). Their latency sucks (although, it's gotten slightly better in the past few months), and they **STILL** haven't opened their networks despite being ordered to by the FCC as part of the AOL merger.
Where is my Cable modem ISP choice, Time Warner? Why aren't you in court explaining why you didn't live up to your contractual obligations both to your customers and to the FCC?
The eternal arguments that "companies need money to keep running" for something like this is utter hogwash; it's not like your cable company is starving with $50 for TV service + $45 for computer network service. Take for example, the argument that "bandwidth hogs cost cable companies money". I'll admit it, it's true, but the light this article puts the argument in would give you the impression that Time Warner is losing money in this operation. Trust me, they aren't. They'd have shut your bitpipes off if they were. It's all about increasing profit margins, pure and simple. They aren't spending more on labor - they're spending less and laying off workers left and right.
If they had that magical "NO admin/maintenance" network, they could just stop charging for data services altogether and make it into a free incentive included with TV service. But they wouldn't, even if it cost them $1/month for data service they'd still nail you for $45 a month (with rape-rate pricing if you didn't get muscled into buying their TV service).
At shaw here in BC they just call up every month the 6 worst offenders in an area and hassle them. My son got on the list by doing 146 gig up in 50 days.
One simple and well-known algorithm to implement this solution is a token-bucket. (More information from Cisco's web site) The basic idea is that you have a bucket that collects token at some rate. This rate corresponds to the peak rate of transfer. The bucket also has a maximum capacity which corresponds to the size of the 'burst' you'll allow. When a packet arrives and the bucket is non-empty, the packet is forwarded and one token is removed from the bucket. When the bucket is empty the packet is queued or dropped.
Going back to the above example, consider a token-bucket where tokens arrive at 56kb/second, and the bucket can hold (60*60*512) kbits of tokens. This bucket would allow full peak allows full use for a hour or two, at which time the bucket would be close to empty and packets could only be sent the sustained rate.
This kind of setup would not effect most users at all, but would limit the worst offenders to 1/10th or 1/100th the bandwith usage.
U Heard Me!!!
A problem I see with this will depend on how they measure bandwidth that is used. For example, if I just spew udp packets to your machine, do you get charged even though you may be dropping them on the floor. This will be interesting.
get a REAL life NOW before its too late!
guess that means for those occasional FreeBSD ISOs and such I download I'll have to do that on campus... the university is certainly charging enough that I ought to be able to use that much bandwidth from time to time :)
but still i wish time warner wasn't going that route, i rather like being able to use as much bandwidth as i need every month. it'd be nice if they'd let it rollover at least a little each month... just in case i need some more one month over another!
Here's hoping that just such a thing comes to pass. The FCC could be a sticking point, but if it's possible to use those, I think they're called, UWB radio broadcasters to get around FCC detection (I doubt it, though, since they don't need to read you're signal, just pinpoint it, and a large network would require the connections to remain open longer than a spy would need), we might be able to build up a ham internet! It's a beautiful dream, maybe someday we'll be able to make it a reality.
It'll never have the capacity of the fat pipes, mind you, but it would do for usenet and other text mediums, and it might even permit some file sharing.
Who knows...
BlackGriffen
From a pure business prospective, since a 56K modem can do approximately 4k/sec in the "real" world. 8k/sec over a 24 hour period is about the same as downloading an entire CD's worth of material (approx 650 megs a day).
The only reason anyone needs to upload or download anything beyond 50 megs a day is to get porn or warez.
Businesses might need the bandwidth, but home users do not. In spite of all the talk about broadband multimedia, the truth is the old fasioned television is far superior to viewing a dinky little presentation on your PC.
Ok, if you read the ToS, it is said that they can change any part of the service agreement at any time. However, the reason they need to do this is because they oversold the market. They don't have the resources to keep up with demand, and now they're doing what AT&T did back in the 80's when they started to run low on pairs: charge more for them. The only problem is, as I hope they'll soon discover, that solution doesn't work. People will still pay for the service they're accustomed to. Kinda like cigarettes. They'll keep jacking the prices up and people will keep on buying them.
Don't get me wrong, they have every right to do this, it is their network, it's just a shame we have to pay for their lack of foresight. I'm not a pr0n/warez/music junkie, but I do use Usenet extensively to download TV shows, seeing as how I work odd hours and my VCR's crapped out on me. And seeing has how I just purchased a house in a TW area, I'm kinda stuck. Yay.
The interesting question is:
Once the costs of bandwidth are distributed equitably to the people who consume all the bandwidth, will the old 'apt-get' brigade begin paying their fair share?
I have no problem paying for the ammount of data that I send however I am not going to pay for that data and f**king wait for it. If I'm paying for the bits I send I want the pipe to be huge. At least ds3 to the curb bitches. :) we can dream right
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
If I was the RIAA, I would really be pushing for this. This would be the most effective means I can think of to get people to stop sharing songs.
This is crap. As someone posted earlier about their college network methods, TW Could do the same. Their main problem is that they have an uneducated network engineering staff. They run primarily Cisco routers on their access points in which the the cable modems terminate. They could simply rate limit the traffic and drop it. Instead they are going to rate limit and charge. They are looking to make a buck and their trying to guise it as something helpful.
I read thru all the post and it amazes me that nobody (Maybe I missed it) has picked up on the fact its Time Warner. This is as much an attempt to protect their Music and Film biz as its a "cost of bandwidth" issue. We are just about now getting to the point where its somewhat practical to download DivX movies in addition to Mp3 music. If they can cap the bandwidth at this point they have bought themselves a few years to try and figure out how to avoid movies going the route of music.
Help fight continental drift.
While I don't know too much about typical pricing plans for leased lines (i'm assuming cable internet providers get an unlimited bandwidth stream through their parent isp). I'm wondering why cable companies haven't looked to colocation/hosting services to help generate revenue by taking advantage of the upstream (being most cable users are capped at 128kbps upload). Could something like this ever work?
This seems all-too-familiar. This is similar to something that happened to me a while ago.
Once upon a time a number of years ago (5 years ago February actually) Concentric instituted a policy on their "$19.95 unlimited" dial-up account where they monitored how long you were dialed in. If you dialed in for too long they offered you two choices: Pay $245/mo (Plus $100 setup fee) for a "Professional Business" account, or get out. Needless to say I cancelled the account.
They claimed I was idling or using an automated program to stay connected, when in fact I was only ever dialed in when I was actively using the Internet. They refused to disclose how they determined how long was "too long" and basically used it as a way to get rid of people who were actually using the service.
Now I admit I dialed in a lot more than the average person (I was a college student with no job at the time) but I would at least have appreciated an explanation as to exactly how much I had gone over their usage limits.
Now with respect to AOL/TW, I hope they are a little more forthcoming with bandwidth usage stats. I'm sure the problem users will know who they are and the bill will be a shock (to them, or more likely their parents.) however it is the users on the borderline that really get screwed. Especially those who have no idea how much they use on average, or even what "bandwidth" means. I wonder how many people will turn off their computers because they think they can't have them on without running up the cable modem bill.
Thankfully, I have DSL which is currently unmetered. However, if this practice becomes more widespred the age-old arguments against spam (It directly costs me money for download time.) will be even more prevalent, and more people will be using ad filtering software on the justification that they don't want to waste their money on downloading ads.
(Side question: Has anyone collected any stats on exactly what % of content downloaded is advertisements?)
I understand all of the arguments here that exclaim this to be a good thing, but as a small business owner and as someone who has worked for a number of non-profits, the death of unmetered low-speed (I mean DSL, Cable, etc., as compared to T3, etc.) is a killer.
Many small businesses and community organizations can more than get by with an in-house DSL line to their server, or by hosting with their web developer, who is on a similar small pipe. Many, many websites today, still, I believe serve a very small community of people but serve that community well. Once you bring usage metrics into this, I think you may well end up with an upside down model where the zillion small community websites (for a short time) subsidize the fewer sites that have larger audiences. These larger sites would of course be owned by the very people selling you the bandwidth at an ever increasing cost.
Further, this will punch up the price of commercial hosting by increasing demand - some 15% or so of the folks shut out by increasing metered cost would move to commercial-priced, more expensive hosts. That 15% is a huge immediate boom in demand, which will in turn affect pricing.
Again, as someone who has self-hosted (mail and web in the early days, more now) for years, and counseled other small businesses to do the same, I say that this trend just sucks.
Disagree with me at will...
-astro
When I first read this article, I had a fre ideas. After reading some of the better comments, I had suggestions on how the cable company can do this. SO I'll start hitting comments randomly.
First is the bandwidth choice: Limit or no limit. Well, with no limit, you dont. With Limited, how do you do it WITHOUT (keyword) being accused of 'I was hacked'. Mac hacks, redirection, and floods are rampant with the abusive menbers. First, use Port Secure. This essentially makes sure that ONLY that MAC address is on that port. The port doesnt work if it has other addresses too. Second tier is the chew'ers. These guys are the constant linux cd junkies, warez doods, movie pirates, and other poeople who go on to file sharing services with 100 people allowed (and gigs of mp3's). Well, let users download/upload stuff unfrettered, but log people who suck up data (maybe some sort of tag to let local net-admins know). Check up on these people... see where they're going/downloading. If thier warez junkies, either kick them off or put couic on thier account at a random interval ( http://michel.arboi.free.fr/UKUSA/couic.html ). If they seem legit (as in legitly downloading stuff), slap them with a warning. They may chew bandwidth, but they pay. If they dont heed the warnings (even a little), reluctantly kick them off. DO offer readmittance, but then resort to a temporary quota/"pay x after quota" system. I don't like it, but bandwidth isn't cheap.
Secondly is the issue with bandwidth. Since it seems that many users are trading inside and between cable/dsl providers, why not have some sort of fiber going to/from major providers? Going through the whole internet costs a lot more than having router tables going from comcast to att@home through a big fiber pipe. Of course, you could have each provider spider each connection to each other high bandwidth ISP. With this spiderweb of connections from cable/dsl ISP's , it could only be inbound or outbound traffic. Even with warezing, this plan should be cheaper.
My big beef is of the limited, and quota'ed bandwidth. How exactly are they going to take into account of unauthorized use? What if one of your 'friends' decides he doesn't liek you anymore and sends you a few dozen copies of a core dump... do you think Time/Warner will care? They're still getting payed, and you're just asking them to accept less. Or how about that spyware that was unwillingly and unknowingly installed on your machine? It turns out it has contacted the master server and tattled that you have enough bandwidth to be a tier-2 server. You'll now share the server responsibilities of a class b network. Too many things could go wrong with that high speed with monitoring and charging extra bandwidth.
I do like my tehcnicial reasons, but the last is more of an opinion. Take it as you will.
Everyone: It's time we do IP over DNS or some other subversive tactic... if TWC tries to halt it, switch to ICMP.. etc.. Sooner or later, the service will become so bad that people will stop using it and their business model will cave.
Excuse me while I sell my TWC stock...
-- dforce
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
I live in Canada but this could migrate across the border. It is funny that this article was posted as I talked to a friend today about his cable provider calling him as he was using too much bandwidth. 26 GB downloaded and 17 GB uploaded in 1 month. I know someone else who managed to download 81 GB in one month and got a call from shaw cable. I am not that bad but use at least 10 GB every month. What is a reasonable cap? DSL in my area is capped at 5GB/month. Hopefully Shaw cable can keep it up. Limiting it at less than 10 GB/month would be too restrictive i think.
...that fierce competition, if applied to a bunch of morons, can produce monopolies that jack up the price immediately after gaining control, and still provide a shitty product. Flat rate was the standard since the time of dialup, but when DSL and cable companies started the price war they ended up:
As the result, anyone who attempted to provide decent quality was losing money on supporting low-priced service to run at some tolerable level, and the only people who survived were ones that provided only or mostly high-priced services (Covad -- and it barely survived), or ones that simply had a shitload of money to burn (SBC, USWest/Qwest, TW). Now the survivors are trying to bring the prices to the level where they can actually make money, but since the public got accustomed to low prices in the advertisements, former low-priced services are becoming high-priced through more sneaky tactics, and customers overall lose compared to the hypothetical situation when prices and service were reasonable to begin with. As some fictional character said, "dodge this", free market worshipers/propaganda workers with degrees.
Necessary bit of disclosure: this is written over a Covad line that costs me $114/mo and works.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This will help encourage people to install adsubtract and other bandwidth savers.
Of course, increased adsubtract usage will decrease ad revenue at commercial web sites.
Perhaps you were thinking of laws that act in the public interest? Well, you get what you vote for, I guess.
But you knew that already, right?
Cables = Roads, and we're moving more towards a future wherein the roads are metered. Ever lived in a country where roads are badly designed and toll heavy? Living gets mighty expensive. The best example here is Japan. The cost of living is so high because two very important things are expensive.
Real estate and transportation.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
My provider offers Tiered pricing, but it isn't for how much you send but how much bandwidth you get. I got in before they set up the other two tiers. Mines smack in the middle but I am happy with it. To me the problem isn't the hogs, just charge them at the top tier or drop their bandwidth. The company should damned well have enough use experience to know what the AVERAGE usage is and be able to set prices accordingly. This is just another money grab from big companies probably trying to recoup the costs of their last dot.bomb buyout.
Gimme a Linux box and a two weeks and I'll whip up a prototype[1]. We'll be rich.
[1] Ordinarily I'd delegate this sort of task to my grandmother, but she'd need three weeks.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Since software producers more and more are skipping the middle tier (stores, distributors) and sell software directly over the internet (requiring you to download the whole CD).
And the music and video industry, though slow and backwards, also begins experimenting in this direction.
Those plans would be seriously hurt when metered access is introduced (depending on the cost per gigabyte of course), which would be a pity.
Anyway, contrary to your statement, there are legitimate uses for large downloads and according to current plans this shall only increase (download a DVD instead of renting one). The bandwidth cost should be lower than sending the CD/DVD by mail, otherwise a lot of future appeal of the Internet is lost.
This is not a problem for Time Warner's Road Runner at all -- this is an opportunity for them to make more money.
If they have the ability to determine bandwidth utilization by means of MAC address, then they have the ability to control that access, assuming that this feature is supported by their cable router vendor's software. This would provide them with a method for providing quality of service, or actual per MAC address metering. With a Cisco, this would be easy.
Furthermore, this is not going to be prevent illegitimate bandwidth users. MAC address spoofing is easy and does not affect the switching mechanism because it is a physically shared medium -- you were getting those other systems data anyway.
Time Warner just wants to bill people more. They could make an attempt at providing quality of service for their users very easily. If they can track down the bill to a house, then they can meter it too. Do you think that Norel, Cisco, or whoever their equipment provider is would not build in that feature if they asked for it? Hell yes they would -- they are a source of revenue in hard times, and a threat can really shake a vendor. It would get done, if they asked.
Time Warner wants your money. Time to bail or move.
For DSL ISPs, this issue exists no more significantly than it does for standard modem users. They oversubscribe in order to make profit, but if their oversubscription ratio is too high then they have the issue of users bailing and negative publicity. Individual DSL circuits can be metered by two methods. They being by the ATM VPI/VCI address, or by the individual DSL layer two protocol (DMT or CAP) negotiation speed. Most DSL providers that I know of simply use the default VPI/VCI of 0/32 and simply set the DSLAM port to negotiate at a given maximum speed. This prevents any user from being able to use more bandwidth than they have paid for.
Given a choice between DSL or cable, I take DSL all of the time. I pay about $200 a month for a 640/640Kbps ADSL line with Qwest Communications and a
...download all the pr0n you can before it's too late!!!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
WHAT!? You mean that *stealing* other people's property has sideffects? Well so much for the "it doesn't hurt anyone else" argument. Mission control the BS has come home.
Totally agree with you. I have read one other comment that mentioned this. I think they just want to guage us like cell phones instead of fixing it in much simpler ways, IF it is even really problem which I doubt.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
This is the way broadband in australia has always been, every broadband service in the country (there aren't many) has some form of download limit. Some ISPs here are fair (optus) while others are rather stingy (telstra, my ISP) when it comes to download quotas.
and we all know how important those "large graphics files" are in everybody's work...
You see, I have this theory that very few of the Napster downloads do not represent lost sales. They represent someone downloading heaps of songs because they can download heaps of songs. They represent someone else downloading a heap of songs out of curiousity, only to delete them after a quick preview because no, that band actually sucks. The represent someone else downloading a heap of songs because their friend recommended the band... and then it's off to the CD shop cuz yeah, it's worth $15ish to hear that in the car, living room, and anywhere else the computer's speakers can't be heard.
Of course, there's occasionally the download and CD-burn of a compilation of songs from albums that basically sucked except for one or two tracks that kicked much ass (any Skinny Puppy fans out there? I'm sure many of you know exactly what I mean). That probably does cost the industry. But that problem contains it's own solution: don't force your customers to spend $15 for a track or two, sell user-specified compilations containing only the tracks customers want - for $17, with luck.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
All the advertisements constantly tell you to buy cable modems to download the latest movies, music, and *huge* files at lightning speeds. Almost as if you should throw out your TV and CD Player because you wont need it anymore. They basically advertise for their users to go burn up their bandwidth. Then they decide they want to charge people for actually using it? Wouldn't that fall under false advertising? I know when I signed up I was under the impression that I could now finally download entire CD images just like they advertised 200 times faster than by modem. I would say this will kill a company outright, if not get them up to their neck in legal cases from people being overbilled. My cable company constantly over charges me for my normal set cable bill which ISNT metered montly, god knows what would happen if their tried metering my internet access. I would suggest people who are afraid of them open a case with your local state cable regulatory representitive and have them look into your tracking. Every state has one, and they DO put pressure on the cable companies if they even screw up a single billing cycle.
I recently ran out of room on my server machine, a G4 with a tiny 9GB hard drive in it. I knew it had alot of stuff and was getting full, but completely out of space? COme to find out the Apache logs had swollen to over 150MB EACH with goddamn Code-Red scans, many of which originated from other Road Runner addresses. To this very day I have to keep a cron running to watch the logs and wipe them if they get over 50MB.
My house here has 2 computers sharing the connection, so we get a little more than average traffic between surfing/downloads and AIM being on all the time.
If they try to charge me extra because of this scanning activity, I'm going to not pay my bill until they unplug me and even after that never pay them. Screw my credit report, if they can't even scan for and warn users about viral activity I'm certainly not going to pay them to gauge me on how often I get scanned by viruses!
Of course, the people who are still infected and scanning 24/7 will be hit the worst, but the money in my pocket is what I'm trying to protect, because there isn't much of it anymore...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Upstream bandwidth is usually around 128k, 256k if you are really lucky. A decent video or music link will saturate that just as much as busy FTP site. Now, that wasn't so hard to figure out, was it?
I have no problem with companies charging by volume, as long as the volume charges are reasonable (at most a couple of bucks per Gbyte during peak, much cheaper or free free during off-peak). But stop judging what kind of traffic is valuable. FTP is no more or less valuable than video gaming or video conferencing with your grandma. Who knows? Maybe someone is distributing the great American novel from their personal web site.
So be annoyed. You and Redhat using a horribly inefficient way of transferring software updates, and then you get annoyed at having to face the consequences of inefficiency? Awwww, you poor thing.
If metered traffic becomes common, then Redhat will either switch to a saner way of sending diffs, or they'll be replaced by someone else.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
yes, that's right, AOHellSlimeWarmer are the very scum of the earth.
they are a multi-tentacled beast that is bent on 'embracing and extending' (read: assimilating through buyouts) every other media outlet imaginable.
some day soon, very soon, we shall wake up to find that there are only a very few companies, a handful or less, that control every damned media outlet there is. students of journalism are well aware of the phrase "gatekeepers". fewer gatekeepers in the media means a certain death for free speech. to any sufficiently intelligent and aware individual this is not arguable and is *not* debatable. shut up, i said *NOT* debatable.
in short, AOHellSlimeWarmer are an abomination. period. end of story.
now, kiss your ass goodbye.
I live in Alaska, and our local cable internet provider gives us 512/128 kbit connect for $50 per month. Great service, and patient tech support.
Unfortunately, we are limited to 10 GB transfer per month. For every gig over per month, we pay $20 (absurdly high). But, this limitation has prevented me from downloading Divxed movies.
There is one problem with that though: what about downloading of legitmate, legal movies?
There is a fiber glut...that's for sure. Most of it is still unlit since the gear to light up the fiber costs mega-bucks.
So what about the fiber that is lit? It's in all the wrong places! What good is a gigabit ring if it doesn't pass by your house? The bandwidth glut merely refers to all the unlit fiber stringing between major cities. Until someone figures out an economical way to get the data down the "last mile", there will be a bandwidth shortage where it is needed.
-ted
Depends on financing and a few technologies that are in the "beta" stage right now. If it all comes together, expect some changes in things. No, I can't tell you more than that- it's under NDA and I'd have to kill you.
I thiiiiink I'm gonna have to sort of disagree with you on that one.
The day that Mr and Ms. Joe Internet User run over their RoadRunner quota and form an ad-hoc wireless network with their neighbor Frank, will be the day that Rush Limbaugh joins the Democratic Party.
It's way too improbable. Unless Linksys starts selling wireless routers with roof-mount antennas and BGP routing software (complete with easy-to-use "routing wizard"!!) for under $100 at CompUSA, it just won't happen. Maybe they'll prove me wrong. But I won't bet on it.
Only the people who have watched socialism fail miserably think its bad. There are some poor, ignorant, idealistic and naive souls who haven't figured it out yet.
It doesn't need but ONE access point done up right to handle a neighborhood. Access points can be done without LinkSys (or other vendors, for that matter) access point to do it either- a PrismII card with the right drivers or the Sputnik software package will produce an access point. And many of the PrismII cards seem to have an external antenna jack.
No, Joe Internet couldn't do an access point- but he DOESN'T need to. All it takes is one tech-geek in a neighborhood to start up the wan access. And, since it's easy enough and cheap enough for most of that crowd to do it, it's going to happen.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sorry, but they advertised the service as faster than DSL and about the same price. Toss in quick installation and you've got yourself a customer base. Now you've got people *gasp* using the bandwidth they're paying for. It doesn't matter if you never turn your PC on or if you never shut Grokster down, you have the right to what you paid for. If their business model wasn't profitable to begin with, then they are being the disingenuous jerks that conned you into connecting into their cable network when you could be on a DSL connection instead.
This is another example of short-sighted business plans, a desperate grass at building a customer base, and then selling-short until most of the competition in the area gets finacially hurt.
Why people feel that the grokster 24/7 kid should be punished is beyond me. They sold him the service now they must deal with it. Conversely, if heavy users are going to be punished then give breaks to lightweight users. Of course that means the same pricing plan as DSL, which is who they're fighting and distancing themselves from. Sorry, but this is more corporate bullying than anything else.
No mister, I don't know what you're talking about. How dare you call Skinny Puppy albums suck ass except for a few songs. I curse you do have metered bandwidth! HAHahhHAHAH!!
offtopic, sorry
This would be a really good attack against open source, since open source software users would tend to take more band width then you genral user.
This would be a big help to selling those boxed linux disto's though.
How much band width do all those graphics on AOL take? This could be the death of that junky AOL service.
Just a bunch of random thoughts.
Joshua SS Miller
I am a republican not by choice, but rather by lack there of.
... something like this if you're not careful!
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
why not just impose a more stricter cap for those who pass a download limit? With RR im limited to 250k/s down and about 43k/s up. If i decide to download my limit, my cap should become, for say, 50k/down 25k/up. With a nice email explaining that till the start of the new month my bandwidth is capped.
ANother thing, if im only allowed 250k/s, there must be SOME reason they chose this number. Now i am going to be told how i can use my 250k/s.
I forsee DSL, and other services getting a nice boost in money in the future. Too bad this didnt happen before alot of the DSL providers went bust.
That 95% of backbone capacity is unused. Welcome to Capitalism.
Now, catching Code Red could potentially cost someone lots of bandwith money. Those stupid pop-under downloads might install a P2P program without your knowledge or consent. Online media files are often much larger than you expect.
This makes me think that the cost of administring these quotas (paying phone operators and tech support staff who will have to put up with hours of my constant bitching and excuses about my bill) will be higher than the cost of adding fatter pipes to the network and keeping everything uncapped.
I would honestly prefer that my download bandwith be cut (expecially during peak hours) than to have to constantly fret and worry that I'm close to my bandwidth cap, so I'd better turn off Shoutcast.
I hope they do a test run of this program in some small district, to see how users respond. I suspect that once people see their bill and the cryptic charges, many will try to dispute them. I promise I'll be on the phone the day my first metered RR bill arives. Will they "itemize" the usage fees like any other utility? Will they do it by port number? By time? By source? Will they charge the same for Usenet downloads, even if it puts no pressure on their connection to the internet? Will there be a warning when I've reached 75% of my monthly quota? Without these things, customers will bitch endlessly, and the workforce necessary to accomodate all the bitching will be more expensive than the overdue RR network improvements. Everybody who thinks this is a bad idea should put the RR customer service number in their speed dial and call them all the time to ask a bunch of really obscure questions, like "Oh God, I don't know what my daughter did on my computer just now. Can you please check how close I am to my cap? Oh, really, well, can you check how much I downloaded today? What? That's not what my meter says..." and so on.
On the other hand, most broadband users wouldn't know a megabit of downstream traffic if it bit them in the ass
Just because a user doesn't know that they can monitor their bandwidth doesn't give them an excuse.
In Win2k or better, you can just look at the properties for your network interface and see how much traffic has been passed. I am also 90% sure that there are countless freeware tools that do the same. In fact, the provider probably has a web page where a user can track their usage.
The bigger issue here is trying to get users into the habit of watching their usage. If you leave a room, you turn off the light. Do you know what a "kilowatt-hour" feels like?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The ISP I use here in New Zealand offers you real-time (in the last hour) traffic data. They tell you which site you went to, how much traffic you downloaded, everything.
You check it every day or so and you'll know when you are downloading too much. :) It only takes a couple large traffic bills to convince you that leaving gnutella on overnight is a "bad thing". :)
As a CMTS technician and head end operator who was around for the first rollout and one of the few who actually read the DOCSIS spec, I can testify what Time Warner is proposing is going to be difficult. Given the current state of the network, it's a wonder it even works. When I was there, we were doing things for the most part ad hoc and flying by the seat of our pants. The user database, cable modem SMS database, and interactive user content were completely separate on isolated systems, running on a variety of architectures and different places.
For example, the typical account server that manages BOOTP requests and allows modems on the network is operated by the national Road Runner, while we operate our own DHCP servers. The TFTP server that transfers configuration information to customer modems to adjust settings is hosted and operated by a 3rd party service. In the first case, the BOOTP server runs on an AIX system, the DHCP server is Win NT, and the TFTP server is run directly off of the Cisco UBR.
Currently, we have no way of knowing what users are even on the system (e.g. IP's or MAC's to names). Why? Because our user database isn't connected to the CMTS. When we have to turn off a modem for non-payment, we have to go in and add a line in the UBR's file to map specific MAC addresses to a disabled DOCSIS configuration file. So yes, it is controlled by your MAC addresses but still the config file can be forged to give you access anyway. Cable modems have voluntary network access, that is, they must restrict themselves from going on the network if the head end tells them. That doesn't mean they can't somehow still go on the network, albeit not 'authorized'. Quite literally, there are no network locks other than the customer's modem.
Things were more of a mess just a few weeks ago. The configuration files weren't even using shared secret or message integrity checks to ensure customers didn't tamper with the files to gain unauthorized service. We only found this out after our OC-192 was getting heavily saturated connected to the Road Runner backbone. Doing a dump of connected modems (which displays frequency info, signal info, etc. and is generally used for debugging), yielded over 65 modems operating in excess of 10 Mb/s up and down. Talk about getting a deal for $39 a month. I had no idea how long these users had been exploiting the system, but I suspected at least a few had done so for around 11 months based on old logs from one of our router, which keeps bandwidth info for specific IP's (we could determine it was these users because they were also using static IP's).
Currently, there are around 80 modems on the system that technically shouldn't be. The reasons for this are varied, from mistyped MAC addresses to fraud, we don't have time to investigate and the current DOCSIS version we are using doesn't offer fixes for these types of problems.
Clearly, Time Warner needs to do a lot of work if they want to do anything like bandwidth limits. This may be a franchise-only problem, but the way I see it is the combination of the very much flawed DOCSIS spec to cable operators who ARE NOT internet service providers leads to these kinds of network abuses. Just look at TR's national web site that ends in errors every turn for proof they are running are glued together operation. This leads me to wonder if that article was to scare users into using less bandwidth, thus solving the problem for them? Otherwise they need a serious investment in infrastructure in order to make it happen in real life. Personally, I haven't heard anything to the affect of bandwidth limiting. We don't even have the capability to monitor it now, as I've said all along...
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
You are a fucking moron. Welcome to the truth.
Well, here the bandwith for the bradband has been limited since it came out. As a matter of fact, you have 3-4 choices, these prices are average:
....
500MB/Month at like 25/Month
10GB/Month at 40/Month
20GB/Month at 65/Month
Unlimited at 90/Month
Each additional MB is invoiced at 0,05
Maybe this is what will happen in the states too??
Good luck!
So, when media companies finally get around to streaming movies over the internet, Road Runner users will be charged up the butt for downloading stuff from competing movie houses, but access to the AOL service will be unmetered (though there will be usage fees, of course). There will be AOL-approved (and hosted) streaming radio stations, AOL-approved news sites with streaming content (Time, CNN, etc.) and this will be the only stuff users will be allowed to look at without the fear that their RR bills will sink them.
This is a brilliant vertical-monopolistic strategy. This way, AOL will leverage their cable monopoly to feed us exactly the media content they want us to see (i.e. theirs), and we'll be greatful, because it's "free." Any opponents ("competitors") will be ignored because downloading stuff from them will cost you heavy usage charges. AOL will say "why would you want to go anywhere else when we have so much great AOL content for free?" This way, the internet to an AOL user will basically look like an AOL sandbox.
We are entering some scary times...
What it comes down to is this. Don't sell me a Cadillac and tell me I can only drive it to the end of the parking lot.
Pretty simple stuff really.
2 things -
1. If the pricing policy is reasonable, then it will only affect those who are "abusing" the service. Without any sort of stats it's a bit unfair to say that this is an evil plan. Ideally, the only people who do get charged extra will be people sharing videos and dl'ing music 24/7. Regular users - even those who use heavily but only none to normal use for 18 hours and heavy for maybe 6 hours a day - shouldn't pay any extra. Unfortunately the anti-capitalist in me says that this will not happen, everyone will end up paying a bit extra - any new's on the pricing structure?
2. What about the innocuous bandwidth? When your 60 meg download hangs five times before finally actually appearing on your HDD? Are we responsible for that? Or the website? Or the cable company? What if it's from the cable company website? This could be an irritation, especially with the fact that the content on the internet is so bandwidth-unintensive (i.e. the text you are reading) - the pictures and more importantly the ads are the bandwidth users in regular surfing - so more and more people would turn off images, animations etc. - even use a text browser like lynx (which I've been using recently on dialup for email and is great). The big companies would not be happy to see their investment into ads being ignored like this, but should we really pay to view their ads? That would be like American TV...
ok, it's been established that it's time-warner, who distributes/creates/produces movies & music. they're trying to protecte this. who hosts 85% of all movies/music? cable/dsl users. why not just put a 200 MB a month cap on data uploads, excluding file transfer download requests, html requests, ect? the real warez kiddies would find a way around this, but like shitting down napster, it would kill approximatly 90% of the casual user from sharing at best more than a couple of songs or sending a Q3 mod to a friend so they can both play b/c filepnaet sucks ass. there's plenty of downstream bandwidth avalible.
moox. for a new generation.
the real cost is provisioning for peak usage. ... What I think they should be doing is only metering during those peak periods and leaving it status quo the rest of the day.
Charging for bandwidth usage is garbage, based on models of consumable resources rather than shared instintaneous resources. Bandwidth disappears when not used. You can't save it up during low usage periods to provide extra during high usage periods.
- If they charge you when you're NOT competing with other users, they pulled money from you when the difference between you having used the bandwidth and having NOT used the bandwidth made no difference to their costs and to their other customers' experiences.
- If they charge you when you ARE competing, they're charging you when you're no more of a problem then any one of the other customers you're allegedly causing a problem for. If they charge you more then those other customers because you used bandwidth when nobody else wanted it, they're just ripping you off.
The proper thing for them to do is:
- Divide the bandwidth evenly between everybody who wants to use it on an instintaneous basis.
- Add more bandwidth if things are too slow during the peaks.
- Charge all the users for their share of the cost of the provisioned bandwidth (times a profit multiplier).
No matter how hard you suck on the pipe, you can't consume any more bandwidth than they chose to give you at any instant. No matter how many packets you blow into the pipe, it won't pass any more packets on than they chose to let it pass. If you blow in more than that it will drop them - and TCP will automatically drop rate and retransmit until you're using the available bandwidth and still getting through. If you can take an "unfair share", it's THEIR fault for using routers that can't divide the bandwidth fairly, not your fault for trying to use what's available.
And if their business model assumed broadband users wouldn't actually use the bandwidth, that's also THEIR fault, not yours.
Bandwidth usage pricing is not a way to be fair. It's a way to gouge the customers with an unpredictable price hike.
Can you imagine the consternation when an email virus, moustrap animated advertisement package, or distributed DOS client gets loaded on a bunch of their customers and runs their bills up to astronomical levels? Or when users bills skyrocket because the ISP didn't filter out spam?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You should have seen it happening. Think about it 3-4 years ago the companies could not even dream of just how much business they would get. They didn't care; they wanted an easy cash source. But when the PC market popped off, they kind of knew it, but just wanted to wait. We have so many people now that barely know how to use a PC, but they can d/l all the crapp they ever wanted. And yes the companies want to make as much money as possible without investing into it. So I don't see the light for the future. These companies are holding back the innovation like some one stated
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
This scheme is common for Europe, too. I believe, this is because ISPs themselves pay per gigabyte for the overseas traffic, and this share of traffic is much larger than what ISPs have in the US (the Net is still US-centric, remember?). Here in Moscow, they start ripping me off after 300 Mb *groan*
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
You know, reading through this post, and the comments leads me to one conclusion.
Slashdot wienies belive Bandwidth is an infinate available resource, and that ISPs choke hold on it simply to annoy.
Well, its not. Someone has to pay for all that bandwidth being used, because the ISPs have to pay the owners of the cables. (Those 'DarkFiber' layers who went around putting in high bandwidth cables, you know, there were Slashdot posts about it.) Useage of a cable is rationed and controled by these people to maintain their income, and severly controled.
So if a small group of users starts to overwhelm the normal users in your bandwidth you have a couple of choices. Rent more bandwidth and increase the ISP charges to *everyone*, or charge the small group.
Most Slashdot wienies dont belive in paying for what they want aparently.
We have this kind of limits already in our 100 Mbps Internet access@home.
There also is a destinction between the "internal" network (citywide) and the rest of the world.
See my page (already hit by /. a few months ago, 62 000 visitors) at http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand.
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
Good by Voice over IP, Video Conferencing, online Gaming, etc.
at least for the "have nots"
So what are they going to do, say "we were selling these 512kbps connections but now you'll get 64kpbs at the same low price! how about that, is it a deal"? -NO! So they can't make their services better in such ways that ordinary people can understand and only thing ordinaries understand about internet connections is: "more bandwidth is GOOD, broadband is GOOD".
What they're trying to do here is fix that problem people most often are complaining about, "it's too slow on middays, only evenings are acceptable".
They're segmenting their users without touching the bandwidth because that's their sellingpoint.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
would the typical heavy user really need more than 1 gb or so a day?
The need whatever they payed for, nothing more nothing less. Simple math.
With bandwidth so expensive, people might start switching back to dial-up to get around the extra costs. Real world prices = real world decisions. Bandwidth + Variable setup cost is very close to the proper telco cost model. Free lunch is over people.
Charging for bandwidth could kill P2P systems because everyone must pay for upload bandwidth. To survive P2P node software e.g. Kazaa must make sharing compulsory and disallow the "kicking" of uploaders.
To draw a parallel, the majority of people have 15-year old Buicks, they would love an SUV but can't afford it, and can't afford the fuel to go with it. But with their own Buick they have just as much flexibility as someone with an SUV, it's just not as nice. If you look at it objectively though all these dot-com layoffs should sell their SUVs and buy 15 year old Buicks
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Sure, it was marketed as flat rate. Then they decided that wasn't a good business model, and they're switching away from flat rate to metered past a threshhold. Nobody guaranteed you perpetual flat rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For home users your solution isn't that good. Home users on average do not need a constant bandwidth 24/7 like servers do, so it's a better deal for them to get higher burst service in return for having a limit on total data transfer.
As even for servers, you'll note almost no major colo facilities offer flat rates -- you pay by the gigabyte past a certain threshhold. Otherwise Slashdot would be paying the same flat bandwidth rate as Joe's Knitting Site.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm not stealing at all, but rather, I'm taking full advantage of the service that I pay for.
I see this sort of stuff more and more. You get slapped an extra charge because you're one of the few that actually uses the entirety of what you pay for.
It's not my fault that ISPs etc.. take on more clients under the assumption that not everyone will be using the bandwidth they pay for at a given time. The assumption is correct, but when ISPs get greedy, they stretch their estimates of peak usage and take on too many clients. As a result, clients end up with a degraded service, more so if some of them actually use the entire bandwidth they pay for.
Hence ISPs get annoyed by the bandwidth "hogs" and slap on an extra charge to cover the cost of expansion.
This isn't limited to ISPs, I see this with other services too although none spring to mind just now (time for more coffee methinks).
</rant>
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
Take me as an example. I run my companys website and sometimes I have to correct some urgent errors at home (i dont like to do that, but i get some extra money)... last weekend I had to download the whole site because of urgent repair I had to make, ok, the site is 470 mb, I had to upload it back 2 hours late! :(( I also run a FTP server at home however its limited to 2 users, but both of them have 256kbps cable connections (just like me) and we change files and CD images frequentely. I also run 2 personal websites, there are some heavy home-made video uploads to them and limiting upload/download bandwith would make me stop maintaining them. Altough I dont believe that there are much users like me out there (excluding /. audience) I believe limiting bandwith is just like limiting our freedom, I choose a service that expensive so I had enough speed and availability to maitain my hobbies/work.
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
Guess I knew this would be coming sooner or later ... Now I guess I'll just have to guess
where the threshold will be.
Well, yeah, I guess you're right, we'll all have to guess, I guess.
I like what Iglou.com (my DSL ISP for Cincinnati Bell's Zoomtown) does. For my payment, I get a certain amount of "guaranteed" bandwidth per month. If I go over that then I'm at the mercy of however congested their network is at the time. So no extra bills but the router will drop my traffic over the people who paid more if I go over my limit.
Miami University does sort of the same thing. They carved out a chunk of bandwidth from their T-3 with router rules for their library. There it was because of a grant to give it Internet access so they wanted to make sure the dorms weren't slamming so much traffic it stalled the library.
Less administration, less hassle. And I'm happy.
Things just don't magically appear at the other end of your local pipe. Millions upon millions of cables, switches and routers around the world build up the backbone. I can run a 100mbit cable over to my friend's house, no problem. But I see the price tag of running it to {insert very remote area here}. There are very good reasons for ISPs to build large and local mirrors. They don't like big internet bills from their providers any more than you do.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let's spend a ton of time and effort and money developing and deploying DSL to the masses. It's "More than they'll ever need" is what they kept saying.
:-) ).
Just like 256KB of Sipp memory was more than I'd ever use in 93, and that 1GB HD (Gasp) would be impossible for me to filll up.
It's pointless to keep asking "Why the hell don't they learn." They aren't dumb. They want to be able to bitch and whine to the government so that their pocket polititians can convince everyone else to look at their woes instead of what they are doing. They are raping the consumer with "local market monopolies" perpetuated by county and city regulations which keep out competitors.
I'm speaking mostly about Bell South, I don't know about most of the rest, other than the company I used to work for.
Do the math: In the greater metropolitan area of Atlanta, GA there are about 3,142,857 people, of which I estimate about 1/3 have phones (students, families, etc...). At an extreemly conservative estimate of $40/phone bill per month (and none of that is DSL) Bell South groses about $125,714,280/month from Atlanta alone.
Based on the fact that I have worked for a large telecomm company I can (probably over-)estimate their total number of employees at about 25,000 with perhaps 8,000 service techs(probably BS, because they take forever to respond to a call) in Atlanta which is their base of operations. At an average rate of $12/hr for a 40 hour week they can pay these 8,000 full-time employees $15,360,000/month.
I know my estimates are probably grossly inaccurate on the conservative side, but they aren't even touching this monopoly's corporate revenues! All of the telecomm companies are making money hand-over-fist as fast as they can pump their friggin arms (all 24,000 of them
I'm glad more people don't understand the problem because their would probably be riot if they did.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Seems like this would DISCOURAGE adoption of broadband by consumers for digital TV purposes etc (the alleged goal of the CBDTPA). On one side of the fence we have Sockpuppet Hollings attempting to give our hardware and software a labotomy so the content holders can (supposedly) make content available to us online. And on the other side of the fence, we have the content holders (or at least one here, and a major one at that) trying to make it harder for us to get at the content in the first place. Does anyone else see anything wrong here? If these people are allowed to continue running their businesses, they are going to destroy their own industry (and then blame it on piracy no doubt).
*sigh*
Broadband services here have been byte-charged from the word go. They're sold as "user pays", "pay for what you use", "fair", etc. Telstra even bytecharges its-self so that it can "fairly pass on the cost to end-users".
Next step: Expect new "low use" plans for 300mb/month or less, with 5 - 15 c/mb download charges.
Yay! Broadband: more expensive and less useful!
DSL in Canada (BELL) does the same thing... there's a 5Gb per month limit in the fine print in their residential and business packages.
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Having lived in a few places that lacks competition, I'm happy every day I'm on a 24/7 connection. Time-metered modem, ISDN sucks so completely donkey balls as possible. I've *never* lived a place where even local calls are flat rate either, in case you're interested.
I don't mind getting metered pr. mb or gb or for different time periods, I just hope some fairly skilled MBA out there will know how to distribute the fixed costs, including repairs, support, expanding to more ports, more IP addresses and other things that is fairly equal with every customer, bandwidth hog or not, evenly. Personally I think bandwidth would be overpriced, hopefully I'm wrong...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If I pay from every megabyte I get, then ISP should be damn sure that I get only what I order. That applies also to Spam mail. Why they have right to bill me of something I don't have ordered, or want?
Problem is, of cource, to make sure that right mails are identified as spam, and deleted automatically.
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Why are slashdot readers so cheap ? Its like they resent having to pay for ANYTHING. I wonder why anyone would bother to put banner ads on slashdot when the attitude here is so anti-capitalist...
So, let's turn the question around - if the threshhold were set fairly high (only affects, say, the upper third of users), but if they also guaranteed no spam and that any traffic you paid for, you requested, would it be more reasonable?
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
As someone that spends 90% of my waking hours at my machine, working hard (read: hardly working), and exceed my ISP's stated (Yet, unenforced) bandwidth-per-month limit of 2.5gb by the 2nd of the month (Downloading 'legal', i.e. 'unlicensed' fansubbed anime via IRC. Hey, I gotta watch /something/ while I'm rendering! :P ), this scares the living sh*t out of me.
I give my ISP a good 2-3 months (weeks?) before they try and do the same...
And I thought I had trouble paying before. And they're the ONLY show in town too... T_T
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
There have always been households which "abuse" the flat-rate pricing of local phone service. Imagine if the telcos tried to limit phone usage to 1hr/day.
The cable co.s OWE us a FAIR DEAL, they should be required by law to play fair.
If THEY don't like OUR rules, they are free to finish up their existing municipal contracts, take down their ugly poles/wires and GET THE HELL OUT.
and are all slaves of the RIAA and now cable companies lol
If ATT follows suit I will find another method odf accessing the Internet. I'm not going to pay for
pop up boxes in my browser. Even though I have my
galeon/mozilla browser set to filter out pop up boxes, you still get traffic from them. Also what
about SPAM? This charging us for overbandwidth will cause us to actively sue spammers and the
pop up ad companies. If TimeWarner wants to promote video on demand they better stop this.
Also we should be able to filter out graphics
if this is the case. Gee I'd use lynx and just get the information I want. Coporate america made the internet evolve to this bandwidth pig, not the internet users. I was perfectly happy with lynx, gopher, and ftp and usenet. Now website have
ties into doubleclick, that sucks bandwidth, plus
all the ad popups, that sucks bandwidth.
I encourage all Time Warner cable users to drop
thier provider all in the same week, to send them
a message.
the internet is so very over
Now I can ping my evil neighbors to bankrupcy from the l33t shell account I have at a university!
If you really go with traditional and don't accept the ridiculous illusion that the wedding industry has concocted. Our wedding was a total of about $4000 - plus another $1000-$1200 if you count the cost of the rings (the big cost being the engagement ring due to the standard DeBeers price fixing).
The big key is to not go absolutely nuts on the reception - we had it catered by the church women in the church meeting hall for a $1000 donation. I don't understand people who do crazy things like rent out a hotel ballroom for ten times as much. I really can't understand people who go into debt to pay for their wedding.
My wife found her wedding gown for only about $500 plus maybe $100 for alterations - and I have no idea how. I understand that some people pay a fortune for those too.
I suppose that some people could use a professional wedding planner, but that just seems like you're asking to get talked into spending more. Emily Post's guide was all we needed.
First, I don't use the proxy, and neither do most others. This means they need to track incoming/outgoing packets. But this means a cracker could flood you with packets, and cause you to be overcharged...
I agree with the principals of capitalism. (Not mercantilism, which is something very different.) So I think Time Warner should have the right to change their fee structure. Their service agreement says they can change their service if they want, and we all agreed to it.
Capitalism also means the consumer is part of the market, though, so I hope Time Warner understands that if they overdo their rate hike, I'd have to cancel my Roadrunner service, and I'd also drop my cable account and switch to satellite. They'd lose three times as much revenue they're receiving from me for Roadrunner.
How can I be considered a bandwidth hog? I'm *paying* for a pipe and heaven forbid I have the gall to actually *use* it. Note that they cleverly omit the bandwidth caps. No complaints from customers and it'll be low. Lots of complaints, it'll be high. Customers need to make some noise.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
That Cisco costs a LOT more than the Linux box solution and performs about as well. The ROI's not as good with the Cisco as it is with the Linux box for this specific application. This is not to say that Cisco's a bad fit for some networking applications- but it's not a panacea like some seem to think it is.
We're capped. This is total crap. Downstream I barely pull 20k anymore (on average. I've seen peaks of around 70, but that's way down from the 250 AVERAGE I used to pull), and upstream is an 8k joke.
If TW/RR can't deal then their network model is fucked. All I know is to get a packet to my friends house down the block, RR transmits data all the way to Albany, NY (about 45 miles west) and back (he uses Verizon DSL, I'm not sure about their routing) and that seems like a waste of resources when this area could have it's own local pipe which takes bandwidth problems off of us and Albany. I bet all that fiber Qwest laid along the railroad bed is still dark, too, and that goes RIGHT past the TW office. (IANANE but it DOES seem odd, wouldn't you say?)
And Road Runner is still clogged with Code Red and NIMDA, there are security notices out and everything. Maybe jerking the connection of those users would free up some bandwidth, I know my ~70MB a week logfiles could use the break, or perhaps I can charge Time Warner when my disk finally burns itself out. They sure don't do anythign about it, whether I report it or not.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I used to work for Broadwing and all the other large providers are just like them. What I found to be true is that they will over subscribe their lines 100% or greater to increase revenue and minimize cost. That is why when you read the fine print they only guarantee that you will get 14kbps or something like that with a DSL connection that they sold you at 1.5Mbps. That is due to the fact that if everyone they sold bandwidth to got on the line at the same time, this "worst case scenario" would be 14kbps for everyone. They currently hide this behind the veil of well "we can not control the environment of our cables and some people just live to far out...." what a bunch of bull*hit. Let us be realistic, copper is copper, fiber is fiber and if you paid them enough they would install the right equipment to get a signal to you. Until something happens that dictates to the tear one companies that they have to provide what they sold you,... here is your paddle and the *hit creek is that away.
This brings up significant privacy concerns. Today, electric companies are required by law to report "inordinate amounts" of electricity being used in residences. This is because people growing marijuana in their closets use UV lamps, which require gobs of power per day. The electric companies contact the cops, the cops get a search warrant, and the drug dealers are taken to jail.
In the scheme described in the NetworkWorld article, Time Warner will keep track of how much you will upload/download. Download too much, and the police may suspect that you're getting illegal software or music. See the logical progression? I don't relish the idea of the cops snooping in on my business because I u/d too many packets while deathmatching...
They have enough bandwidth to satisfy demand - and there is enough black fiber to keep them going for another couple of years even with a large increase in subscribers. But by placing quotas on your access, they can make the pay-per-play model for digital movies look legit.
To me you either used every bit they gave you of your 24/7 connection... or are they going to charge you more if you download stream reaches 501k/sec or you upload stream reaches 129k/sec?
Someplace I think they lost the concept of 24/7 connection and stream caps... of course I am not saying some people to 'hog' the bandwidth more than others... but if you did pay why not get what you paid for? Will you accept 5% of your new car? What about 50% of you new car? Will they refund your money if you didn't use all of your quota?
Sounds like they want the income benefits of metered, but still maintain the guaranteed income. If they wanna go metered, they should go metered. So if I download 5 gigs a day, I should pay for it (I don't have a problem with that). But if I only download 200 megs in a month, I should pay accordingly.
Also, they should open up their usage policies. The reason why certain services (like web servers) weren't permitted before was that those services had a potential to eat up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth - however, this would no longer be the case. So I should be able to host if they can bill me for excess bandwidth.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
In the UK, we seem to be reasonable lucky - even though high speed ADSL is still hideously expensive (a 2Mbit down/256kbit up link will cost you a couple of hundred UKP a month), there is a huge choice of ISPs that are accessible to everyone within reach of an ADSL enabled exchange. Coupled with recent moves to lower prices, things are actually looking good for once in the UK. I have a 512kbit/256kbit link, with a /29 subnet, can run whatever servers I choose to, and am paying 30UKP/month. I'm limited to 20Mb/hour during peak usage times (9am to 5pm), but outside these times there are no real limitations at all (as demonstrated when I accidentally mirrored ~9GB of the kernel.org website...). For anyone who's interested, check out aaisp.net (and they're linux friendly too: sod.ms
Will scumbags like Gator, with their pop-up downloads (April 8, 2002), be held liable for any bandwidth costs incurred by the customer?
As was pointed out, it's bad enough what they're doing to people with dial up connections. What happens when people start getting billed for crap like that?
Ok, we'll give you a fast connection, but you can't use it very much.
Or you can have a slow dial-up connection with unlimited use.
Take your pick. Sheesh. No wonder people are banding together to buy a fast connection and distribute it wirelessly.
What I've always wondered is why are all lines, network speed, and general capability defined in speed (mb/s), but charged via the integral of that (mb).
I mean there's something inherently shady about selling (or even leasing) John Q a 768kps line, advertising the speed of the line, and then only giving him 200mb/month (.08kps)
OK, so per-unit bandwidth charges are coming back. The amount of spam email, pop-up/under ads are getting more popular and larger in size. Some ads are using audio/video instead of just a banner. I don't remember what site it was, but someplace I clicked ona link to another page of theirs and it went to an audio/video ad page before moving on to the real thing I actually linked to.
So effectively we're all going to end up paying more money for less interesting content, with more and more of our money going to all the spam we don't read and ads we don't look at. Great.
I'll have to look into replacing my Linksys gateway/router with a Linux box to filter out the known big-time ad sources andlearn how to filter emails by header before downloading the messages. I have an old 486 I'm trying to get Linux running on as a CVS server, might as well make it a router as well... Only problem is the old machine doesn't seem happy with a 40gig drive, even with a BIOS update ISA card meant for this purpose, and worked great with a 5gig drive previously. RH 7.2 appeared to install fine, but neither LILO nor GRUB seem happy with botting this way. Any ideas??
hey stop talking about time warner's secret business plan out in the open!
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Where are you going to find a company that doesn't have it's head up its ass that has a cable running inot your house..? The phone company? Satellite TV? Time Warner is a local monopoly and will do what ever they please when it comes to providing broadband internet connections. So you better download as much porn and warez as you can. Because it will all be taken away soon. Anyway FBI/Homeland Facist software will be slowing everything down as it snoops into every packet sent on the internet and loaded into some big-ass background check database.....better worry about having a job to pay for food in the future much less worroy about downloading 300 mp3's to your player.
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pulled from their investor info page http://www.aoltimewarner.com/investors/quarterly_e arnings/2001_4q/release.adp
--
AOL Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: AOL) today reported financial results for its fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2001, which were consistent with the preliminary results announced on January 7.
Revenues for the year rose 6% to $38.2 billion, up from $36.2 billion in 2000, led by a 12% increase in subscription revenues to $16.5 billion. While content and other revenues improved 4% to $13.2 billion, advertising and commerce revenues declined 3% to $8.5 billion.
EBITDA for the year increased 18% to $9.9 billion, and cash EPS for the year rose 26% to $1.18. These compare to EBITDA of $8.4 billion and cash EPS of $0.94 in 2000.
Revenues for the quarter increased 4% to $10.6 billion, from $10.2 billion in the comparable 2000 period. Subscription revenues increased 16% to $4.4 billion, and content and other revenues increased 4% to $4.0 billion. Advertising and commerce revenues declined 14% to $2.2 billion.
--
yea i can see how theyre going broke because of all us evil cablemodem users taking up all their bandwidth
This is actually pretty funny since all of these wiseguys promote bandwidth heavy uses of their services in advertisements. Now they are pissed that people are actually using the advertised bandwidth heavy applications?! WTF.
--- C00l
First, Time Warner can enforce download limits. Then, Time Warner Music can create their completely secure uncopyable music format. So, I will be able to pay extra for the bandwidth it takes to get music and then I can pay $11.99 to download the actual music in a format that I won't be able to copy around. Sounds like a great plan.
i mean look at em, theyre only making 38.2 BILLION a year! how anybody can exist on that paltry sum is beyond me!
- -
AOL Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: AOL) today reported financial results for its fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2001, which were consistent with the preliminary results announced on January 7.
Revenues for the year rose 6% to $38.2 billion, up from $36.2 billion in 2000, led by a 12% increase in subscription revenues to $16.5 billion. While content and other revenues improved 4% to $13.2 billion, advertising and commerce revenues declined 3% to $8.5 billion.
EBITDA for the year increased 18% to $9.9 billion, and cash EPS for the year rose 26% to $1.18. These compare to EBITDA of $8.4 billion and cash EPS of $0.94 in 2000.
Revenues for the quarter increased 4% to $10.6 billion, from $10.2 billion in the comparable 2000 period. Subscription revenues increased 16% to $4.4 billion, and content and other revenues increased 4% to $4.0 billion. Advertising and commerce revenues declined 14% to $2.2 billion.
Well, this really puts my nuts in a vise. Living in Minneapolis as I do, my broadband choices are Qwest DSL, which is switching over to MSN, or AOL-TimeWarner-Conhugeco, which wants to charge extra for bandwidth usage. I'll be damned if I'll go back to dial-up, but I may not be able to afford DSL or cable modem now. I guess I'll never be able to archive all the Futurama episodes before they're taken off the air.
Assuming the limit is something like 3GB a month for $40 that's not too bad, unless you're really an MP3/Warez junkie :-)
But how will I know that I'm approaching the limit? Personally, I have a Linux box that can measure all this crap, but I tend to think that it's a bit like the cell phones. You get X minutes per month, but that "month" is when the "billing cycle" happens, and how many of us actually remember that it's on the 10th, rather than the 1st? So those counters on the phone are pretty much worthless... Likewise, with personal monitoring... But I digress...
What kind of traffic will count against the limit? Email, HTTP? SSL? SSH? Downloads? Uploads? Pings? Streaming radio? Streaming video? etc...
Given that, if a limit has to be enforced, then I want several things:
1) The ability to know, instantly, 24x7, precisely how much bandwidth I have used, and how much remains this month. I must not be charged for receiving this information - no matter often I ask for it.
2) I don't expect to pay for ONE SINGLE BIT of information that I don't want, didn't request, and don't authorize. That means, I am not going to pay to download (and then delete) SPAM. I am not going to pay to forward SPAM off to uce@ftc.gov or providers, etc. I am not going to pay for advertisements. I am not going to pay for useless Flash/Shockwave crap. I am also not going to pay for emails to my account from TW-AOL saying "You're going over your bandwidth limit...", blah blah blah...
3) I demand a method to dispute bandwidth charges applied to my account. No bullshit like "oh, you have to come to the arbitrator's office in New York... Sorry you live in Iowa..."...
Given that #1 and #2 are impossible to pull off, I won't pay for going beyond a limit. Set the frigging thing up like DSL - commit to a specific pipe size, and allow it to go about that amount until the bandwidth is needed by someone else - then drop the spurious packets (sounds like frame relay...). People who can't handle it will leave on their own...
You didn't actually believe the "unlimited" claims did you? Everyone knows they base their business models on a few users using the system at any one time and on no one hogging it. Was this news to you or something?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Actually, for a local service, this could be used, though. Contact the power company, tell them you want to put some cables & some 802.11b boxes up on their lines. Wire the whole thing up, and you've got broadband to the community. I don't know how well it might work in a densely-populated area, or on the other side of the spectrum, out in the sticks... but for the burbs, this might not be a bad idea.
When AOL went unlimited for a flat fee, they couldn't keep up with the usage they offered. Now that TW and AOL have merged, the AOL users that had been using dialup and DSL have been offered the TW pipe, and they have clearly overestimated their ability to absorb new users... again.
i think what this guy says makes sense.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
For all those people who thought I was crazy for waiting for DSL to be available, and for setting the dogs after any cable salesman who stepped on the property....
THIS is exactly why I won't do business with cable companies. They've got the monopoly, because once you're signed up it's hard to switch to someone else. Face it, when you've got some serious TV to watch and some web surfing to do, who has time to call up Dish Network to order a satellite dish? Who has time to get a DSL line?
My DSL line will be installed this month. I'll have the contractual ability to run my own mail server, and my own web server. My TV is through Dish Network. No cable companies get my dollars.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Web surfing $3
Patches/Software downloads $7.50
Everquest $250
---
You hit a monster for 105 points of damage ($.50)
You hit a monster for 75 points of damage ($.35)
You killed a monster. ($2.95)
Did anyone else catch the tid-bit at the bottom of the article that said for Cox Communications: To introduce 128K bit/sec symmetrical services later this year. ?!!?!?!
What the hell is their sales department going to do now ??? "Yes, we're over 2 times faster than dialup !"
Screw that !! I'll get DSL !
I'll be expecting a refund for any month I stay under said download limit.
It doesn't say anything about uploads ...
i have followed broadband activities for the past years. while most consumers want lower prices, it is not feasible to provide a low price with high quality of service - as the saying goes "you get what you pay for"
let us look at the typical scenario, in setting up any broadband network, the best price is estimated to be around $100 or even more in order for the service to be profitable and theoretically good. look at the following costs involved: bandwidth to the internet (this should be redundant and high speed); technical support (call center equipment, people); local loop (hfc network and copper lines - they should be redundant); transmission network (atm, cmts, dslam, routers, switches, mux, daccs, etc - they should be redundant as well); customer premise equipment (dsl/cable modems - which really cost a lot and not paid for by the user). When you sum that up, getting very fast for paying only $40 won't get you anywhere.
my advice to people doing this thing (and i hope they do read it):
1. it is best to charge usage based billing - could be bytes transferred, average bits, percentile. no more bandwidth limitations, this maximizes the network
2. it is about time that the americans get to know prepaid system. by purchasing credits in advance, the consumer does not have to worry about overspending and budget
3. with regards to fraud, this always happen. however, the problem may be overcomed by using multiple policies of block/allow access including but not limited to mac address/ip address combinations, mac & ip addresses and port info. this can also be overcome in subscriber management systems by implementing technologies such as vpn and pppoe. although they may not be good for the advanced user (and there should be a separate plan for them).
4. the billing system should be very strict. automatic disconnections with certain overdue. regular usage computation for charges.
in my country (philippines), i do not really understand how the telcos are able to earn. the problem with us is that we have a reliable service (like we can get connected with the service for months without any interruption - that is for my dsl connection and my former cable provider) but we have slow internet access - due to congestion because the bandwidth costs here is 3x more than in the US.
well i hope you people stop complaining and build? your own network (as what we are doing here by trying to rent dark fiber and running gigabit ethernet around.
:)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I don't think this is as bad as some are reacting. If you use your connection legitimately and aren't some luser with morpheus/kazaa running 24/7/365 "downloading l33t I50z d00d" then I don't think you're likely to be charged.
Additionally I don't think this is going to be adopted on every cable network in the world either.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
This is similar to when they initially advertised "24/7" usage for dial-up connections. Which, when people actually started USING them 24/7, they changed the "meaning" to CONNECT rather than CONNECTED. Which basically stated, instead of having the ability to be connected 24/7, you could connect for a limited time 24 hours a day.
This made the dial up worthless IMHO, because there were times I NEEDED to be connected 24 hours or more.
I pay for an ALWAYS ON connection. I run a Mail Server, a Web Server, and I LIKE to play online games. I made the smart decision when ordering my connection and got a Business Account with my ISP. If they start charging by the MB, or even try to cap my limit of transfer a month, it won't be because they need to build a better infrastructure. it will be because PEOPLE ALLOW them too. All this grabage about "If you d/.l or u/l more than ... you are doing it for Pron/warez/something"
If you don't use your connection more than 50MB a week, thats YOUR issue. Not my problem. You have no basis for saying what a NORMAL user does, because the normal user would be the idiot who barely knows how to click the mouse, much less actually have to depend on the service and system he PAYS for as a BUSINESS. If you ALLOW them to Charge more for Less....they WILL. Everytime.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Considering I am currently rate capped @ 2M down and 256k up
My max DL speed is 256KB/s.
That's 15MB/min 900MB/Hr 21.6GB/Day ~650GB/Month Maximum.
I currently pay $44.95/Month
What percentage of the service will I be able to use?
20% -- 130GB
10% -- 65GB
5% -- 32.5GB
1% -- 6.5GB
1/2%-- 3.25GB
1/4%-- 1.625GB
Anything less than 5% and I'll laugh at them openly while I cancel my account
Is overselling by 20X enough on your highest users..
Considering all the people who only use it for "Fast E-mail" who are oversold by about 1000X
Will they have Peak Bandwidth Times?
I don't think I'm stepping on too many toes DL a Linux ISO @ 3AM
TW tread very carefully...You won't just lose my Internet service...
You'll also lose my Cable service!
Satellite and DSL are and easy fix..
You stand to lose my $140 per month....WATCH IT!
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
w3rd
For example, if you use a lot of bandwidth during peak hours, you would pay more, but if you went over your quota during low usage hours, you'd pay more. The problem is, everyone would try to monitor the web usage to find low-cost niches. Eventually it would reach the point where the network is utilized at peak efficiency at all times. Or not. Rich bastards could jam the net up nice and well. There are bastards, always. No offence to love-childs. I mean the other kind of bastard.
Another solution is to just pay more and have no quota. Also, separate upload-download-quotas could become handy if you like to download a lot but don't upload much.
AOL Time Warner recently upgraded a vast majority of their cable/network to fiber at a cost of billions. What that means is much greater capacity than their old infrastructure. It also means that they have to get a return on their investment in the most expeditious manner possible. They have already upped the price of subscription to road runner by five dollars in the past 6 months (how man subscribers are there? x $5). Now this. They have nearly limitless bandwidth capacity due to this upgrade. Remember that they did this upgrade with video on demand in mind. This is ultimately a way for them to even gain greater margins on the services they provide.
Bah. phuken innernet. what mirrors did you use? Two weeks ago, to get the ISO's (Enigma), I used one mirror at a wobbly 8k/s and it disconnected me once every hour or so. Thank Developers for resume FTP d/l!! I used the redhat ftp at the same time and got a walloping 4k/s. The D/L was so insignificant I played UT while those were coming down and i was still an LPB (helps when the the cable company finally brains up and doesn't route your packets ALL THE WAY TO THE OTHER SIDE OF CANADA to a server that is only a 5 minute drive away).
Eventually got the 4 ISO's but it took from Wednesday night till Saturday night for them to come down.
It's too bad these cable companies can't mirror this kind of crap locally - proxy it, I guess. Then bandwidth could be cheaper - using the LAN instead of the WAN to get files.
Was just reading the Netfusion article and did a quick search and found the phone number for Mr. Lufton at http://www.pbs.org/insidepbs/news/timewarner.html
... well ... lets just say I would find it hard to believe that they would even be able to find the folks using the bandwidth that THEY PAY FOR anyway.
.
203-328-0613
You could always call him yourself and express your opinions. My feeling is I pay $45 a month for 1.5mb download, if it happens that I use more than that because they can not limit me, than that is their issue.
If this does come down that they start this, I would love to see how they enforce it. My dealings with the level 3 support team of time warner could not find
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
aoltw sees the writing on the wall, and controlling the distribution means is the easiest way to squeeze p2p trading and insure steady revenue
my disgust is with the notion of having to pay yet more money to have my access stay at the level i am already paying for. and i don't trade movies.
pity the aol customers who have tw cable as well. "getting it from both ends" barely scratches the surface.
alas, this is the thin end of the wedge
what mirrors did you use?
Honestly, I have no idea. I think most of them were from universities, I remember specifically seeing Duke fly by.
I use a wonderful program called Getright by Headlight Software. It does automatic FTP and filemirror searches, gets up the list of all places it can be downloaded from, and breaks the isos up into eight pieces, and downloads each iso from eight places at once. I never get less than 200KB/s combined.
I've heard that the program contains spyware, but I really don't care since I run it in Wine, and just kill it when the downloads are done. I don't have to worry about it sneaking up in a background process (or service if you're using NT-based windows).
You should try it.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Helsinki Television (HTV) has two plans: Welho Pro and Welho 525.
The Pro is their former only plan, with unlimited rate (technical limit is I think 34Mbps downstream limited to 10Mbps by the 10BaseT ethernet on modem), while the 525 is rate limited to (guessed it) 525kbps. Now that they have the new 525 plan, Pro plan has "limited availability".
Cost is about the same (I think that the 525 was some even number of euros, as it was introduced only this year, where the Pro plan was even number of Finnish marks) - roughly 40/month, or 54.66 with static IP which I have.
At least the Welho Pro is pretty fast - in Finland. But any traffic elsewhere is slow. And I mean slow as in dial-up. That's why I didn't dump my ADSL when I got the cable.. Had planned to keep them both for a while to see which worked better. Turned out both are of unacceptable quality, but keeping two consumer grade connections was still cheaper than one business grade, and they didn't have outages at the same time.. Unacceptable quality means that I did get refunds and free months in the beginning, but at least now they work more than six days a week, so no more refunds.
That's funny: my cable company promised me 1.5M/128k service, 24/7. They never indicated there would be any other kind of cap, nor that using the system 24/7 - *as I contracted for it* - was a problem. If this *is* a problem, does the fault lie with me and the contract I signed, or with the cable company for refusing to live up to their end of the bargain?
Really, now, who has the rocks to say that *I'm* the problem when I'm using the service that I paid for? The problem isn't me, it's the cable company for promising something they couldn't deliver. *If they couldn't fucking deliver they shouldn't have offered*. In the real world we piss on these lying sons-of-bitches and move on to a competitor.
But wait! In the cable world there *are* no competitors? Silly me, I forgot that capitalism has no place in this market, and Congress - as it's done with so many other things - has guaranteed this with legislation.
(sigh) One tired citizen looking for a country with a bill of rights and a (mostly) capitalist economic system. Mine no longer makes the grade.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The business-level accounts (~$150/month) are unlimited.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
.... if legislation to let the ILECs and cable-providers monopolize high-speed internet access continues to gain so much "support" from the ILECs, groups like SVMG etc., and the rest of us aren't heard nearly as loudly. /. stories) want to start paying for our internet service to download their pop-ups and other nonsense that interfere with this "quota"?
Just think- wireless phone service could soon be superior to our broadband choices- at least you'd have your choice of providers to find the plan for you (by-the-minute or flat rate, a combination of the two...)
Now consider what you "need" to download (anti-virus updates, patches) and what you might want to download (shareware, Groksterness). Do advertisers (see previous
First, I have used both DSL (Verizon, Central Illinois) and Cable (ATnT, NJ). I love my cable, DSL was tolerable when compared to dial up but Verizon has the worst cust support.
Neither are/were capped, per say, but a bandwidth quota... DSL was sold in incremental access packages, but that's about it.
I would have paid extra to get bandwith and higher limits on initial offer, but if they change mid stream with existing customers I say fuck them. I am not sure how this is even legal... I have read through my TOS and all ATnT/Optimum Online docs online and no where does it reserve them the right to change midstream in a clear, legalize to english manner. Worse still, they have NEVER even disclosed a TOS to me directly and I was never informed of one at sign up (minor point, but if you get enough people together with the same 'problem', the TOS could be tossed according to our company lawyer... this is why we ALWAYS introduce the TOS prior to any contractual sign by a customer).
I think that banning servers and capping bandwith to a reasonable number is okay if it is part of the acknowledged TOS for each customer before signing. Any mid-stream change should result in the severest of legal remifications for the provider in question however as they really have no right... they advertized and sold a prodcut or service to a customer and they should have to deliver.
They can get you with those 1 year contracts, upping your costs and changing the TOS upon renewal (shady but legal).
In the end, as long as I can game online as I want, surf, send emails (with attachments), and download a few gigs a month, I am fine. If they cap at like 1 gig, piss on them, I will go with the T1 (I can get a T1 for under 200 in my area with NO bandwith restrictions, and my money doesn't go to ATnT or Verizon)... cable is cheaper and more convienent, but I will only take so much crap from a big company out to watch their bottom line at the expense of solid business interaction and holding to the spirit of their advertising.
Apparently history repeats itself. That article is very reminiscent of some ideas proposed a few centuries earlier by a Mr. Karl Marx. I believe his society fell because of government management of resources. Or one by Aristotle...I believe the principals that where applied to Roman society from his work on government also led to Rome's fall (equal distribution of resources led to an almost non-existant working class).
"Basic economics" do indeed apply - but I think we should only worry about applying economics that have been shown correct in practice. Its strange that so many argue against laisse faire, and so many for forcable direction of resources, though the latter has been shown to work, and the former has been shown to fail miserably in almost every case.
I read that article, and I think I'd have to say that 802.11 networking would be capable of succeeding for the same reason that free market systems work (despite the comments in this article claiming that they don't) - resources could be reallocated as efficiently as possible according to the will of the consumers of those resources.
Compared to ALL other systems, resources in a free market system flow to their users the fastest. There are no hour-long lines at the supermarkets, or shortages, or anything else of that nature. Supply is very close to equaling demand.
I think you assume too much when you assume that the nets have to be "maintainted" in some way - maintenance is only a result of a high enough population of users and a better routing mechanism (on top of 802.11b) than we currently have - one that is ad-hoc. You think the computers are going to be getting tired of doing the routing?
I'd like to end with a well known saying:
democracy is a pretty bad system of government, but its a lot better than the alternatives.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I know of people who routinely transfer 8-10 Gb per DAY (yes, per day - they max out at around 1000 kilobits second, 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day = 88473600000 bits/per day = ~10.2 gigabytes per day!) of mp3s, warez, movies, spam, etc.
You're full of shit. Care to tell me just where these people are putting their 10GB per day of MP3s, warez, movies, etc? Hard drives top out at about 160GB and cost a few hundred bucks. You'd have to buy a new drive every 16 days.
Plain and simple, your claim is bullshit. Unless you have a server farm full of large drive clusters, you'll never get away with transferring that much information. Number one, you have to store it: No family can go through 10GB per day and actually use all the content. That's 166 hours of MP3s or 10 DivX movies. Nobody sits in front of their computer and takes in that much content every day, so they've got to store it in one way or another for later use. That storage doesn't come cheap, and within just a few days, most people's hard drives will be filled to the brim. So the 10GB per day, assuming it's a realistic number, won't last very damn long.
As for uploads, you can't upload 10GB per day when your upload cap is 128k.
Better rethink your numbers, because they make zero sense whatsoever.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
This is the same company that charges $300 a month for a static IP.
That's right, JUST for the static IP.
Let's say I find your IP and want to play a joke on you.. Can I ping-flood you enough to put you over the treshold? or, if I can find some sort of open port that is willing to talk to me, even better.. If they meter at L2 instead of L3, even better, even an attempted/failed connection would count..
Would RR be responsible for spam mail? if one week I'm put over the limit by spam mail, I'm complaining.
Next time a Code Blue or whatever happens, do we get charged? I remember when Code Blue hit, my modem light was continuosly flashing from all the ARP lookups...
I am fine with charging if:
1. they only charge for traffic initiated by me. I don't want to be responsible for junk mail or the latest cool worm wandering the net. DNS queries don't count. ARP requests don't count.
2. the rates would be different based on time of day. If you are downloading 1G at 9:30 pm, it should cost more than 5G at 4 am.
3. They make it easy for me to monitor my bandwidth usage.
On the other hand, I could care less.. I'm probably moving soon and will not go with TW just because of this limit.. I may never hit the limit, but just because it exists, I would not transfer my service. I am sure they will not miss my $40 all that much. On the other hand, if I don't get their cable modem, I will also not take their cable tv.. so that's $120 or so per month they will not be getting from me anymore.
Hey, I live in Palisades Park, NJ 07650.
Time Warner here forces its users to buy TV network although I don't watch a cable tv(I have no tv!) They are charging me $60.00 per month! Is this unlawful practice(technical wise it's possible that you only serve data signal filtering tv network signal right?) They insist that this is a company policy. Please, help. If requested then I can give you copy of billing which states $60.00/month!!!
By the way! How can they charge more for bandwidth we already paid for? This is a scheme? Do you know how many people sign up and never use their broadband? or just check e-mail? Because they don't know how to install right plug-ins and they new that you could do that?
Do you know howmany times nimda or code red scanned my connection last year?
Plus, I have no alternate! Because they have monopoly hogging the whole area!
Repeat After me! Cable modem and DSL are different! They are not the same! If somebody argued that they are same because they are both high-speed internet, then they should drop dead.
Is apple pie same thing from cherry pie? Because they are all pie, does not mean that they are same! If I am to eat apple pie? Why should I be forced to locked onto eating TimeWarner brand apple pie? Damn it! This is no different than living in China! I want to eat some other brand where I don't have to pay for the additional charge by weight on $5.00 apple pie! Wake up America? Surfing the net is not about conserving bandwidth & being curious to your neighbor because you might be hogging the network! You only have small bandwidth stream and you can use it all if you paid for it! It's ISP's fault for having too much people signed up for allocated slot!
They are being greedy and they are not losing money. If they are losing money then they should frisking turn off all the nasty NT exchange servers for e-mail service. They probably needs more than necessary number of MCSE who is there only to hit - rest - button. That's all they know to do it correctly!
No wonder they are losing money from over staffed engineers(repeat after me! incompetant engineers.) because they made choice of relying on unstable product!
CISCO's and Unix never goes wrong where Windows artificial intelligent mind often changes stuffs whenever they feel like doing it....blah blah blah blah
So, time warner should swallow their own decision.
Plus, can they change the contract on me? I already have piece of paper saying unlimited access to the network. Nothing here mentions about bandwidth limit and additional charges!
Bah....
Oktokie
FYI, Videotron.ca (a cable modem distributor newly acquired by Quebecor Media World) is charging extra for bandwith since 4 years! They restrict the download speed to 350kb/s and the upload to 15kb/s -AND- they also put a limit of 6Gb of download per month and 1Gb upload. Every 100meg/month cost you 10$ cnd. Actually, they got so much complain that they stopped to charge for the over 6Gb usage but kept the speed limit. And it REALLY sux hard!!! Unfortunately, its the only viable Internet access in Montreal(.qc.ca) for home access.
Sucks go be them, then--they shouldn't have made the claims, otherwise they're obligated to deliver what they advertised. Was that news to you or something?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
You forgot one thing about W32.Nimda.A@mm, its full name from Symantec. That @mm means that it spams itself to everyone in your address book without your knowledge like the love bug. Could the infected spam count toward the bandwidth limit?
Now they have you.
Oh, by the way, we're going to charge you for bandwidth exceeding some yet undetermined quota.
Isn't that special?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
TW is just looking for a way to pay for the code red and nimda virus'.
I get scanned 20-30 times a day. Now I have to pay for their scanning.
Also, I am going to be paying for this new wave in marketing. The silent applications that monitor web activity will now be paid for by me.
What is next? Will I be charged by the hacker for having his/her code on my machine unlicensed!
Wireless bandwidth leeching. ISP's are resentful of the potential for people to rebroadcast their bandwidth over the air for free, and are taking steps to end it before it gets started.
with only 128k up upload speed for most users,
no one is going to resell bandwidth.
I have 128k up/ and 684k down with At&T.
I have my own tools to measure traffic at my
interface, and I uploaded several files and my
location was at a T1, I only averaged 128k to my
server and I did 5 uploades of a 10MB file as a test. All upoloads capped at 128k. I then ftpd
the file back to my office at work, all 5 were at
680k. I wouldn't share this bandwidth, it's just enough for my boxes.
Yeah I hog bandwidth, all 512Kbit for a few hours most days, but not warez, and only a little MP3/pr0n. It's almost exclusiveley (legal) ISO's, just go here and look at the list on the left. I'm not gonna do what I did a year ago; try a few distros (inc BeOS
Ah, oh yeah, bandwidth charges... Well, 11Gb so far this month. NTL are £11billion in debt so I'm getting what I can, while I can, before a bandwidth cap/excess charge rears it's ugly head.
Yeah, activities like this are what might cause this, but considering that £11bn works out around £3500 per customer then there must have been some serious boardroom balls-ups somewhere along the line. Anyway, I'll be done soon, I promise :-)
On the other hand, NTL have 3 different speeds available in my area:
128kbit = £14.99/month
512kbit = £24.99 (what I use, does an ISO in just under 3 hours)
1Mbit = £49.99 *drools*
It's a 12-month minimum contract, which is fair enough. One cool thing is that I can still change the speed to meet my requirements, although when it comes to ease of use, it's a fine line between getting what I want from NTL customer service and doing a goatse.
So I think it's fair to pay for the bandwidth you use as long as those that don't use it get an equivalent discount in the other direction. You can't have it both ways.
I see it working out that 128kbit makes it reasonable for people to switch from dialup services, especially if they have a dedicated phone line for it. Granted, with patience you can do an ISO, but most people on this service simply will not bother with that sorta stuff. Even if they did, the load would be spread to off-peak times so that it does not slow down peak times significantly, which would cause NTL to have to invest in a fatter backbone connection. I see these users as partly subsidising the 512Kbit/1Mb users.
The occasional ISO taster such as me will strain it at times, but not too often. AFAIK my upstream is only 256Kbit, so that rules out any serious servers, not that I'd run any myself. As for MP3's, I'm a copyright theif, not a musical charity. :P
The 1MB service is overkill for most residential users. It appeals to businesses, meaning that it will be busier during the day rather than in the evening. That definiteley helps to smooth out bandwidth usage.
The bandwidth usage of customers on a certain package will tend to be decided by what activities are practical at that speed.
Ali
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
I have asked, I have e-mailed, I have talked to managers and I'm at wits' end. I would KILL to have more bandwidth. 10 MB/s would be just about right for me. I have offered to pay double.. even triple what I'm paying now if TW would just PLEASE uncap my modem so that I could get 5 MB /sec up and 5 down. If you have ANY information on how to do this I would be more than grateful.
Like I said, I've tried to do this the legit way, but I've basically been told to go to hell, and take my $150/mo offer with me.
I make no money playing with my network. It's just me doing something I enjoy. It just seems that no ISP is willing to work with someone who is just a simple hobbiest that wants to have more than average upstream at any price that a non-business can afford. I'd even be willing to limit high-usage to certain hours or just weekends.
I really think there's an untapped market here.
Please help.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I don't think P2P or servers is what AOL/TW is looking to fight.
They want to lock Video on Demand providers other than themselves. (Their VOD will not count against your quota, someone else's will.)
Is this legal? Sure...
Is it right? Sure.. their costs go up.
The problem is lack of competition. If base price of broadband goes up, competitors will sprout. If the price is kept artificailly low (like local phone service) there will be no competition.
Email and most web browsing can be done dialup, so customers will pay dialup like rates for that sort of broadband usage. If you want more bandwidth, you pay, pay, pay.
Robert
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
Its called "LITTLE FINE PRINT" in your service agreement. Was that news to you or something?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Little fine print that contradicts the big bold type tends to attract class action lawsuits and the attention of Attorneys General and the FTC. Was that news to you or something?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
They could also decide to only meter outgoing traffic.
That would help reduce competition...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Large companies tend to have lawyers who make sure their fine print is perfectly legal. Was that news to you or something?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
q.v. FTC's actions wrt Prodigy, et al with "limited unlimited" and get back to me.
Seti@Home and Protein-Folding will quickly die if users of cable are metered. I won't be running them any more. Newsgroups, email-groups and other special interest groups will find membership lists plummeting. So will automatic update and patch services, like SuSE's "YOU".
If you can't use cable to dl GB of software, video, etc... what use is it?
However, "reasonable" is important. Average monthly payments should remain the same or go down, and off-hour volume charges should be steeply discounted or zero.
Time Warner et al. are afraid that P2P which is going to be the 'next big thing' on the internet with consequences comperable to the invention of http and which is going to be immensely popular as new applications are developed and which has the potential to use enormous bandwidth is going to eat into their profits by making their infrastructure which they have still not recouped their costs for obsolete.
These ISPs are trying to quelch the demand for P2P by making people afraid to leave anything running that would let people use the unused resources on their computers. Nobody would host a web page on their machine that could be accessed zillions of times if they could be charged for over quota bandwidth. Users need to switch ISPs when they try to pull this kind of stunt.
Eat at Joe's.