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Will Cable Unplug the File Swappers?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the plug-this dept.

netringer writes "The cable companies are planning to give the RIAA's case a hand and limit P2P file swapping. Yahoo has the Business Week story that cable companies are considering going away from the flat rate pricing model for cable Internet access. They plan to set a lower bandwidth cap for the flat rate and the raise the rates for bandwidth hogs who exceed the cap."

3 of 794 comments (clear)

  1. 'Vote' with your cable subscription by qurob · · Score: 5, Interesting


    They started to raise rates. They started giving lower quality of service, in both uptime, and stability. They wanted to charge $5.95 a month for modem rental. No more servers. No more static ip addresses. Blocking certain ports.

    What did I do?

    Turned it back in. $39.95 I have no problem paying, but $67.95, for crap?

    No thanks

  2. The Fat Cats by T3kno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    According to this Yahoo! page the CEO of Cox makes $1.5M a year, it does not list what the chairman makes but it's up there too. The sum total of all of the officers listed is $2.92 million dollars a year, and this is only for three officers. That comes out to $243,000 a month. So one way to think of it is that the big wigs want a raise :)

    --
    (B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
  3. makes me rethink my subscription by Hooya · · Score: 5, Interesting
    well, apart from the convinience of having an always-on connection, i can't think of anything that i'd need to fork over ~$40/mo to access. i stopped 'file-sharing' a while ago and my connection from home is starting to collect dust. i'm starting to realize that there's nothing on the internet that compelling (mind you -- not talking about graphics/flash heavy sites that i avoid anyways) that would warrent such bandwidth. except for slashdot and a few other news sites that update frequently, a cron-ed wget to 'mirror' the site is a very viable solution for me. and that can happen over a dial-up in the middle of the night.

    I think the cable providers are just shooting themselves in the foot. or at least the pinky-toe...

    isn't napster what fueled the demand for broadband in the first place? as soon as the market shrinks even a little, economies of scale will take hold and the whole broadband thing will be in the shitter. 'twas good while it lasted i guess.