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Time Warner Cable to Test Tiered Bandwidth Caps
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a leaked internal memo, Time Warner Cable is testing out tiered bandwidth caps in their Beaumont, TX division as a way to fairly balance the needs of heavy users against the limited amount of shared bandwidth cable can provide. The plan is to offer various service tiers with bandwidth fees for overuse, as well as a bandwidth meter customers can use to help them stay within their allotment. If it works out, they will consider a nation-wide rollout. Interestingly, the memo also claims that 5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth."
I think that ISPs need to take a different approach other than imposing hard caps on the users, even if you can choose your cap with varying amounts of cash.
First, the users that occaisonally download large files should be treated differnetly than those that leave their p2p clients/home webserver/internet radio on all the time. For example, I often need to download isos for linux livecds or install disks. If my average daily usage is low, this download shouldn't count against my bandwidth usage. However if I'm downloading isos all day every day, then some of that bandwidth should be counted.
Also, during non-busy times for that region, large bandwidth use shouldn't be counted, seeing as it isn't disadvantaging anyone.
There should be no "hard line" between free bandwidth and 1$ per mB bandwidth. The users average bandwidth usage per month should be used in calculating their monthly rate, and they should pay for the next month based on their projected usage.
I once had an ISP that had a monthly cap, it was awful. My two cents (how much they charged per mb over the 2gb/month) on the matter.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
And to think that I was thinking about switching to Time-Warner, however now I will not.
Why, because of the absurd notion that you should get what you pay for - and vice versa? Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
Right now they already offere tiered service but it's all unlimited. IE: 5Mbps or 8Mbps
What the difference is here is that they will actually not be "capping" the bandwidth per say but actually metering it. That's akin to buying 1Mbps on a Co-Lo that is on a burstable 1Gigabit link. That is, you get the sum total of bandwidth you could use if you were at 1mbps for the month but your connection is actually WAY faster(wider). Then you get charged for overages. This is great because it charges for usage and make it way less expensive for people who simply browse the net in their off time as opposed to those people who have no life and upload videos of themselves whoring on youtube all the time.
I am paying for X MBps download and Y MBps upload (it is dedicated). If I don't use it, that's fine. Nevertheless, I should be able to have that bandwidth at my leisure at all times (excluding other considerations like the server to which I am connecting). Please (Comcast/TWC/ISP) don't use the excuse that 5% of the users use 50% so we need capped service. It means they are taking full advantage for what they are paying for just like if I had a 50GB download cap (or 1 GB upload cap), I would probably use all of it. I would prefer both options (bandwidth capped or transfer capped) so I can assess my needs and minimize my costs. Thanks!
>As one of those 5% people, if they roll this out in my area, I'll become a DSL subscriber!
One of the 5% using 50% of the bandwith? Comcast would probably pay you to switch to DSL.
If Comcast follows through, the DSL providers will follow suit PDQ. They won't have a choice.
Will these new, metered accounts be less expensive than their current standard charge, making this a good thing for the budget conscious, or more likely, will their current standard price become the lowest tier and unmetered will be a new higher cost tier, thereby making this simply news of a massive price hike?
This space available.
Based on my experience as a TW customer, whatever the feature set is, it'll only be available for Windows.
How many average joes will get infected with a virus/trojan horse that spams out millions of emails, and not only have the hassle of disinfecting their computer, but also face a massive broadband bill at the end of the month for all of their bandwidth?
ISP's cant actually offer "unlimited" access to everybody, unless you want to start paying $300/month for home Internet. Its not realistic. People will do things like P2P that just eat up way too much traffic. They have two ways of dealing with the problem:
1. Charge people for how much network capacity they actually use, ie: this. This is how gas, electricity, and other things are portioned out, and I haven't heard many people complianing about how its unfair.
2. Start trying to get rid of some of the traffic. See: Comcast screwing with P2P.
Of the two, I like this a lot better. My mom can pay for a little bit of network capacity, I can pay for a lot, and we both get what we paid for.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
'm curious about the monitor software. Will it have options to shutdown internet access based on time frames and activity?
How about by user? I'm thinking of parents that will now have to settle agruements between siblings: "Moooomm! Jonny used up all the internet."
We are all just people.
Sure, that all sounds good, but what this actually translates into is more profits and higher costs for users going forward. The social shift in media consumption from tv and radio to the internet isn't done yet, and people will be consuming more and more bandwidth.
Whenever a corporation plays the "fairly" card, erase the word and replace it with "more profitably". And that's not cynicism, that's realism. Time warner is a for profit enterprise, not a public service, and that is what this is really about.
A public service to make things fair would choke the hogs bandwidth during peak times so that all users get a fair slice. But again, this is about profits and ultimately being able to charge us all more, not about fairness.
And your gasoline analogy was really bad. Time warner doesn't have to dig more oil out of the ground and refine it every month in order to maintain bandwidth.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
And to think, Time warner won't mind STILL charging you for the usage you're at, only moving the heavy users to a more expensive package.
Never seen a company that charges monthly rates go DOWN when introducing change.
You'll keep getting screwed so who cares if you share with the top tier?
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Give those 5% some virus scanners ! !
I think you're making the assumption that your price will go down because you'll no longer be supporting these "paying freeloaders" who are using the service they bought. It seems more likely that you'll pay the same, and the heavy users will pay more. Bigger profit margin versus giving you a lower bill when you already seem ok with the current rate.
It will be interesting to see what effect this has on digital media distribution online. How much will it stymie growth, if at all?
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Is there a way to set up a network so that the people who have used the least bandwidth get highest priority?
say i download linux distro iso's all month. i use up 99% of my ISP's capacity, then one day my neighbor starts up a VPN and telnets in. Since he's used hardly any bandwidth, his packets get top priority. my bittorrent client slows down a little bit then goes back up when he's done.
that's a fair way to do unlimited service.
it just seems like any throttling back beyond prioritization is just a waste of installed capacity.
You're lucky. Others and I don't have that choice. I live in a Verizon area and I am too far to get DSL (20K ft. from CO), no FIOS service here, etc. I am not rich enough to get a T1 line. No WISP services around here. Forget satellite services since they are too slow (especially for online gaming), have caps, and expensive. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Don't know who modded this funny, but it's what they want. You aren't a customer they want to keep- you stress their network and force them to reduce the number of people on a single cable, which costs them money far beyond the $50/month you pay back. They'll be much happier with the grandmothers who download a few pictures of their grandkids every now and then.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
"Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are."
Which is bullshit since most ISP's advertise "unlimited" access AND bandwidth. You're not "paying for the other user" according to CONTRACT. Sorry buddy. I just find it hypocritical to accuse another customer of "paying for him", when the company is itself at fault for false advertising and advertising bandwidth it doesn't have.
My ISP advertise full unlimited unrestricted bandwidth for a monthly price per month, if it can't handle that, that's not my problem THAT is what I payed for *in the contract*.
Just how much bandwidth is used up by ads? Over and over again its the ads that hold up the loading of pages.
Not sure what's wrong with the approach chosen. To me, this looks like it's been handled by my ISP (and others) for quite a while now. My cable provider has tiered plans and for me, it works fine. I get 20GB/month "peak" volume (12pm-12am) and 40GB/month "off peak" (12am-12pm). If used smart, it gives me 60GB/month. There are no excess fees but the speed will be capped to 64kbit. The imposed cap sucks a bit cos it also affects the IP-phone and I think they should give at least 128kbit. But to be honest, I've only reached the speed cap once and that was about 5 hours before the new month started.
Sure it isn't ideal but anything bar a REAL flat rate isn't ideal.
Have you all gone crazy?!? where am I? My browser window says slashdot.org but I feel like I'm at a luddite convention! You're all talking like a bunch of nansy-ass accountants and librarians.
Applauding the implementation of bandwidth hard-caps at the ISP level? You're all fucking crazy! 60GB/month?!? And you're happy with that?!?! You've got to be kidding, do you know how many Slashdot readers that kind of cap would cripple? (by Slashdot readers I mean people who actually value technologies like the internet, and call and complain to their ISPs if it isn't delivered properly...which is apparently almost noone in this thread)
As a poster further up said, this is a money grab. If I pay for a 3mbps connection, or a 6mbps connection...then dammit that's what I should get! If the infrastructure of cable is a limiting factor then they need to RE-INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE instead of putting out another dividend to their pigs-rolling-in-telecom-monopoly-shit stockholders.
I can't believe how many of you are bending over and giving a nod to the telecom monopolies, they should be INNOVATING! I.e. Improving services, reducing latencies, increasing bandwidth, expanding coverage, and ultimately PRESERVING THE YET UNTAPPED AND UNEXPLORED APPLICATION SPACE OF BROADBAND.
The next thing they'll do is standardize tiered billing for low-latency connections (not lower latency mind you, but the one you ALREADY HAVE NOW), are you all going to clap them on the back for that brilliant idea too?!?
my god wtf...
If used smart, it gives me 60GB/month.
What nauseating crap...I guess we should all count our blessings and be happy we aren't living in 1970s east berlin...that toilet paper isn't considered a luxury item...of course the 2008 east berlin has FAR better broadband coverage than we do now...but then what civilized country on this planet doesn't have better broadband than us? "Gimme 60GB/month, at least I can say I'm an american where consumers come first and we have access to the the best services and technologies"...what a crock. It grieves me terribly to read comments like these on Slashdot of all places...you've all turned into complacent kowtowing pussies!
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Why don't they start by shutting down the zombies?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I think the ISP's approach of selectively targeting the worst bandwidth hogs when they became aware of problems was the best one: it's easy to do and it doesn't limit what you can do unless there's a problem.
Bandwidth caps and tiered pricing are a result of a few people not being able to exercise some self-restraint. It's the tragedy of the commons again. And the result of it is that bandwidth costs will go up significantly and everybody suffers.
The culprits here are not the cable companies, it's people who believe that "unlimited bandwidth" entitles them to running BitTorrent and Joost 24/7, in clear violation of the actual TOS.
Consumers should never attempt to solve a corporation's problems by not demanding the full product or service. Corporations will not lower your fees when you are in a tight spot.
/. readers would without a doubt create several hundred times as much traffic as people who only use email and read news on the web. On the other hand, the casual users will make frequent use of the ISP's helpline to configure an email client or "fix the internet." The heavy users on the other hand would not be caught dead calling ISP support staff. Which do you think is more expensive, upgrading routers or paying people to handhold customers through everything remotely related to your product?
The first fallacy is to assume that there is a problem which can be solved by generating less traffic: New uses will always require higher bandwidths and generate more traffic, so even casual users will exceed any perceived "acceptable" limit. Back in the nineties, students were asked not to use the web (with its bandwidth eating graphics) too much. Internet access was much more expensive back then. Would the internet be as fast and as cheap as it is today if people had restrained themselves? The web dwarfed email traffic. P2P dwarfs web traffic. HDTV streaming or whatever is next will dwarf P2P traffic. The only solution is to keep upgrading the net.
The second fallacy is that generating much traffic is unfair towards casual users who pay the same price. There's always someone who uses the net much less. Even without any P2P, most of the
The third fallacy is that imposing traffic limits would reduce the problem: If you can't download all you want, are you going to use up your limit at night or when it's convenient, i.e. when everybody else uses the net because that's when it's convenient for them too? The problem isn't the total traffic, it's the bandwidth at peak times. Whether anyone downloads hundreds of gigabytes at night is totally irrelevant, because there is no off-peak bandwidth shortage.
1) ISPs implement surcharges for high-gigabyte-downloading customers
2) 5% of customers leave
3) Net traffic usage goes down 50%, while revenue only decreases 5%
4) Increased profit!!!
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
In fact, that is kind of what this reminds me of. I mean, hey, if I don't use my whole allotment this month, I want the extra back next month! I can just see the future now: "Rollover bandwith", "Night and weekend bandwidth", "Free mobile to mobile bandwith with other TW customers!"
Meh. No thanks.
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
60GB is only a lot if you are downloading low quality content. But if you aren't downloading the crappiest YouTube videos you can find thats about 7 dvd porn images(not hd) or 7 video games not including the bandwidth you used to upload. The idea with Bittorent is that you have to upload content during and after your download is finished until you get a decent sharing ratio which is around twice what you used to download the material. So a 60GB limit does not mean you can download 60GB of content. On Bittorent that could be as low as 20GB of downloaded material if your client doesn't download any junk with it. With the crappy service in the US it does not take much to be in a situation where BT is running all day at low speeds that aren't worth mentioning.
Disc image downloads are very common. Do I actually have to explain where you put it? Burn it to dvd. Have you seen the size of hard drives these days? You wouldn't exactly be filling 1TB or more of drive space anytime soon.