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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?"
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?
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
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.
"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?
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drop broadband because of download limits? you're kidding, right? i mean, dial-up has monthly download limits as well... they're just built in... you can't download ten gigs of bs in a month with a modem. the cost for the two is almost the same, so you can't use that argument. (assuming a second phone line) i'd rather be limited and get fast slash.
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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.
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 PollockYou 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.
No less attractive, just offline with CDRs or DVD-RAM or online with ad hoc wireless networks that will displace the corporate mavens if this becomes widespread. Just like the death of Napster spawned Gnutella, the death of the flat-rate Internet will spawn loosely confederated wireless networks. If the governments and corporate whores think they have a problem controlling the flow of information now, they ain't see nuthin' yet.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I understand the net access limiting in college dorms - most people in college don't give a shit about bandwidth, so they just let kazaa/morpheus run unrestricted all they want - it isn't their money. They just end up fucking the people who really need the bandwidth. These people NEED bandwidth limits.
However, excedding bandwidth limits on a cable modem is not supposed to happen. That's what the 12k/sec cap on uploads is there for, right? If they want to charge me for the extra bandwidth i use, why not allow me to take all my alloted bandwidth in one lump sum? If i upload the latest release of my Linux distro once a month, i'll be using, say, 600 megs of "bandwidth" that month. What difference does it make to them if i spend 10 hours uploading it, or 2 minutes? I still use the same ammount, and still have to pay extra when i go over.
I don't think its fair that they implement upload caps to limit our bandwidth usage, and then say how much we can use what little sending speed we have. Of cours, this is corporate America, and nothing is fair from the consumer's point of view.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I think that's the main problem. I wouldn't mind paying for what I consume if I had some reason to believe it was fair.
The problem is, they may be charging $44/month for some guy who only consumes 1MB or 2MB per month. The percentage of people consuming much less than 200MB is certainly very high. That's a "free ride" for Time Warner.
The other end of the spectrum is the bandwidth hogs. They consume the bandwidth that they've supposedly paid for. Is that really a "free ride?" They contracted a cable modem and they're using it. On a more macro scale, they're compensating for the large majority that don't use a fraction of what they're entitled to.
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.
That said, isn't Time Warner one of the companies that wants to sell us all this new-fangled digital multi-media content? They'll have to analyze their pricing structure in that context. If it costs more to acquire a movie-on-demand via their link than it does to rent it at Blockbuster, they're on-demand service aint going to go far...
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
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
P2P piracy? Someone please just come to my house and shoot me...
I can't imagine how low we've all come since just 2 years ago.
In another 2 years will there even be an internet left? The day I see a 10 10 220 plan for paying for internet time...I'm just gonna pull the trigger.
Everything that's happening is the THE EXACT AND DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE of what was supposed to happen!
We were all expecting BETTER service, FASTER service, MORE applications, MORE companies, MORE global communication. And just look at what's been happening!
Then this asshole posts that P2P is just about 14 year old kids trading warez and pr0n!?!!? Are brainwashed chimps like this guy all we've got left in the geek community?
P2P is a godsend!
BUT WE'LL NEVER GET A CHANCE TO IMPLEMENT IT IF CONNECTING TO THE NET COSTS 10 CENTS A MINUTE!
P2P is piracy
P2p technology can be used for piracy, and that is frankly the most common use for it, but it's not the only possible use for it. That's why it should be legal, just as VHS tape is legal - there are substantial non-infringing uses.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Mail? Dude, personal mail is pretty low volume, even mail for you and all your friends is pretty low volume. I don't think running your own mailserver is an unreasonable activity.
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
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.
-
The upload caps are the answer to people running P2P and FTPs. My Verizon DSL is limited to 90 kbps uploads which means that when people are lucky they can pull stuff off me at 9 or 10 KB/s. Not that much bandwidth, and if I am using the internet myself at the same time I put my own limits at about 3 KB/s because I start getting unacceptable pings if too much of my upload is used. So generally I might fileshare at 3 KB/s during the day and at night when I'm not using it I let people pull the whole 10 KB/s.
Also, P2P would fall apart if people couldn't run it on their $40/month line.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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.
The issue that I have with that comparison is that most people know what a pound feels like by heft. If you end up with more salad than you wanted, you only end up paying a buck or two more at most. If you think that the cashier's scales are off you have a reasonable chance at proving them wrong.
On the other hand, most broadband users wouldn't know a megabit of downstream traffic if it bit them in the ass (no pun intended). A user could very easily exceed his bandwidth limit and end up with a bill several times his current rate. Without some sort of accurate bandwidth consumption measuring tool that TW/RR and the users agree on as accurate, what recourse would a user have if a database error mistakenly shows that they owe $200 extra that month? How can an average user be expected to know how much bandwidth they are using per month?
Yes but I subsidize other people in my neighborhood for phone service. I still pay the same rate for my phone even though I very rarely use it. Now there are other people that gab on the phone all day long, do they pay more? No.
I have a subscription to DAoC, yet I haven't logged in in 3 months. Other users will play it 24x7. In effect, I subsidize their playing time. Am I bitter? No.
Your cable modem rates are not going to go down I can guarantee you that. Your quality of service is not going to go up. The cable company will allocate bandwidth in the cheapest terms possible. You will get the same service for the same price, while the users you consider 'annoying' will get less service for more money.
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
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
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.
...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.
You'd be surprised at how much you've been ripping your provider off all these years.
I have to disagree. I haven't worked in the NOC of an ISP in years, but this is much is still true. If you own the network, you don't have to pay to use it. Also true, if you own a big enough network, other peer networks allow you to connect to them at what amounts to a reciprocal cost. (I connect to UUNet, and they connect to me. In that way we usually use the same amount of each others network, and thus we charge each other the same price for connection < the charge is a formality >)
All ISP's have to build staff, support, maintenance, and growth cost into their billing. And so while those are huge expenses, if the company is loosing money on those services it's because they made a choice to do so.
There is no additional cost to the provider if i download 1Meg/Month vs. 100Meg/Month, because they own the network. Now someone who downloads 1Mbps vs. 100Mbps is a real issue. While the company owns the network, the network is still a finite resource. There are only so many Mbps at any given second. And if you are using 80% of the company's bandwidth, then you cost them more, because all of the other customers share only 20% and then leave the service because they are unsatisfied with the speed. So in that you drive away customers by hogging the bandwidth, you cost the company more money.
That being said, let's say "47&7" company owns a network big enough to let each of their customers have 50kbps simultaneously. If I keep my 50kbps open at 100% 24/7/52, then I cost the company nothing. I am only allowed to use what I am allotted and I am not using someone else's bandwidth. There is an algorithm out there that says that between X o'clock and Y o'clock z number of people is using the network. So then if they calculate the number of people that use the network, and the average amount of time that they spend, you can lock in a bandwidth number that doesn't infringe on you bandwidth limit.
Now, The problem with what they are doing is they are going to charge you guys for using what they have already allotted me. I keep my bandwidth open as much as mechanically possible, but people like me are part of the fore mentioned algorithm. I'm way ahead of the yahoo games playing mom, or the porn-browsing dad. But I'm not new to the game. ISP have been dealing with the likes of me for years. I don't have a problem paying more than the average Joe. I would gladly pay $10/Mth more to keep my bandwidth open, but It's not fair to those who have "excessive" downloads 1 or 2 times a month.
Corporate greed it still nothing more than greed. And when you say that I have no idea how I'm stealing from my ISP, you're wrong... I do have an idea, no I have the answer. And the answer is, under the user agreement that I signed, and under the limits that they set on my connection, I'm not stealing at all, but rather, I'm taking full advantage of the service that I pay for.
</soapbox>
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Capped bandwidth reduces the cost of the service to ordinary users by not making the rest of us pay for what is probably P2P piracy.
Which could possibly be the big reason behind this.
It's also going to kill net radio services like shoutcast.
Another thought: It's going to make people (well, me at least) even more resentful of advertising.
I have to pay for (1) simple access, then I have to pay for (2) metered usage, then I have to be bombarded with (3) advertisements to see anything of value -- which I am paying to (4) download, and I have to (5) register with the content provider to get the content and advertisements.
I've got an internal network for testing and development. But I've been spoiled by the net. Maybe I'll just switch back dial up, and use lynx to read slashdot, google groups, search.cpan.org and java.sun.com. And pine (though Evolution is pretty nice) to read email. Maybe I'll resubscribe to a print newspaper and a weekly news magazine for news again.
I'll miss having so much technical information immediately at my disposal, but I've paid for all these technical reference books on my bookshelf. And many of them come with a digital version of themselves. Maybe it's time to use them as a first resource instead of google groups.
Yet another thought: I've been lazy wasting all this "precious" bandwidth by continually accessing content that doesn't change regularly. I'll start using local copies.
I'll have to look inito creating a caching server.
I'll certainly get some junkbuster software running now.
If they want us to *really* pay attention to bandwidth, it will kill a lot of the internet. Animation Express will die. That stuff is interesting, but I'm not going to pay to see it. Even stuff like Yahoo! Games (which I haven't played in while) won't last.
Think about it. A lot of the Internet is entertainment. What sorts of entertainment are people willing to *pay* for? Movies, Music, Pr0n... what else? This is all high-bandwidth, and outside of mp3, the online quality sucks.
Dancing Hamsters? 3 minutes Flash cartoons? Are you kidding?
Quickly changing information is useful to have. Weather, stocks, news. Which can all be distilled down to text and tranferred efficiently.
Technical documation, I can have a local copy of.
This is why I cancelled cable. If they started making you pay for each tv show you watched, how much of it is really worth watching? Not a whole hell of a lot, that's for sure.
So, for me, the internet boils down to two things: one-to-one communication (email and instant messaging) and e-commerce. I shop online to save trips to the store.
Here's a good question. If you had to pay for metered access, can you name any reason at that you ever, ever go to these web sites:
Burger King
7-Eleven
insert usless site here.
Lastly, one of the beautiful things about the Net was the smaller niche and fringe communities that conform without being bound by geographical boundaries. With metered access, those communities will have one more barrier. If you have to pay for acesss, people will more likely stick with the "tried and true" sites, rather that sifting through the mountains of crap to find the gems. This will undoubtedly result result in more concentration of users, content and money around the Big 10 Media Corporations. Which will incredibly boring.
Maybe this internet thing was a fad after all.
Don't mind me. I'm just bitter.
Software Wars
There is a difference:
What happens if you get infected by a trojan/virus?
It's unlikely someone can sneak into your house and use your electricity. It is perfectly possible someone uses your internet connection.
Also, if I decide to 'ping bomb' your box, should you be required to pay?
You can't have electricty forced down your wires if you haven't turned on the lights, you can have bits forced into your PC if you haven't powered up IE.
Thoughts, thoughts...
*r
--- My dad's political betting
Now, pop quiz. Do I:
If you answered A, you are either a Star Trek character or a .com venture capitalist. If you answered B, you are an actual member of the human race.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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)