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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?"
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?
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
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?
Yeah, but maybe not the company you're thinking of. The update packages available since the latest release a certain very popular Linux distro weigh in at something like 800MB. All of the "critical updates" to update an old CD installation of Win98 are only 30MB or so.
I sure wish they'd figure out how to issue binary diffs instead of complete rpm packages. How much bandwidth was wasted having millions of people download a dozen full packages for the 10 lines of screwed up code in zlib? (No, I don't want to compile it from source. I just want binary packages signed with the disto's gpg key.)
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.
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.
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.
Oh my god, what tripe you utter. One of the primary benefits, if not the primary benefit of Linux is how it is free for download, and for several very, very valid reasons.
a) It means someone (say, the 16-year-old using the familay computer)can try out a new operating system without paying $50. Seriously, how many people would have ever tried Linux, would have ever used anything besides Windows, if they had had to pay for a boxed distro instead of downloading one? (I know I sure as hell wouldn't have - let me tell you, when I started using Linux, I was in high school, and I did not have $50 lying around to test something I didn't need.) That's how Linux started - people in colleges freely downloading Slack to try out on their 386s.
b) You know Linux's vaunted stability and high bug-catching rate? Yeah? You know where that comes from? I'll tell you. People downloading betas and unfinished distros to test them. Your plan would entail causing the download a beta to cost more than buying a release version. You know where Linux's stability and security goes from there? Down the drain.
Repeat after me: Allowing people to download Linux gratis is good.
-raph