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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'm a Time Warner customer and I have enjoyed their service. If this is legit, at least, it sounds like the right direction for it, though I'm not happy about it.
1. Defined limits, overlimit fees, and prices for tiered service
2. Monitor software to show customers where they're at
I'm curious about the monitor software. Will it have options to shutdown internet access based on time frames and activity? This would be useful for people that want to budget their internet usage. Also it could useful if the computer is infected.
How about really giving customers unlimited bandwidth? If they lack the infrastructure to support what they claim, then they should get better lines.
That's just it! They DO have the infrastructure in my area. I never experience slow downs due to TW's pipes getting flooded.
This is merely a money grab!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
That would be fine if they charged more for heavy users AND less for light users... however, we all know that is not how it will work out. They will charge MORE for heavy users and THE SAME (as now) for light users. In other words, light users will never see a reduction in price.
Also as downloading movies and web-based apps become more mainstream, they need to be reasonable with bandwidth "tiers" and tiers should certainly grow over time. I wouldn't consider usage "heavy" at the present time until data transfer is >20GB/month.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
I moved out of the country before I could determine how it worked out, but some Norwegian companies tried a scheme under which you have two tiers of bandwidth. By default your connection uses the higher speed but if you exceed the quota it degrades to the lower speed until the end of the month. This works quite well since you will still have a fixed bill every month and you won't just lose your ability to use e-mail if you exceed the quota.
.... will be added to your bill automatically.
Of course, it is all about the marketing. You don't say "we degrade your connection if you exceed this quota", you say "In addition you get EXTRA HIGH SUPER SPEED for the first 20 gigabytes (ZOMG!!!! thousands of songs) each month". You then proceed to sell "top-up packs" at your website where users can pay for extra quota, and then offer an optional service by which quota... err... extra-bandwidth-top-up-packs
In Australia we've had caps since around when al gore invented the internet.
There's one dishonest company that is charging people 15c/megabyte for excess usage on a 200mbyte plan. There have been people with $20k internet bills.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=862549
http://users.bigpond.net.au/Ice_Cold/BPbill01.JPG
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.
I think the fair way to deal with heavy users is to give everyone the same fast rate for their first twenty gigs or so per month. If they exceed the cap, there are three things that can be done:
The first option is bad for customers because they don't want to have their connection cut off abruptly. The second is bad because it leaves open the possibility of getting a surprise bill for hundreds or thousands of dollars. The third option, imposing a bandwidth cap once users exceed their monthly limit, solves the problem and is much less intrusive: their internet still works (just not as fast), and they don't get any surprise bills. If they want their service to be fast again, they can pay a fee. (note: to avoid congestion, the payment cycle would have to be staggered so that everyone doesn't have their caps lifted the same time each month)
Another approach ISPs would like to use is to target specific applications (bittorrent, youtube) rather than users, but this is just a short-term remedy that doesn't address the real problem - users who don't care how much bandwidth they use.
How about really giving customers unlimited bandwidth? If they lack the infrastructure to support what they claim, then they should get better lines.
This statement is utterly stupid. It is harder to develop backbone capacity than last mile capacity, and ISPs have a very limited amount of backbone capacity. If they can supply a 10M last mile to 1000 customers and only have 1G of backbone, it still makes a lot more sense to give everyone a 10M line than to give everyone a 1M line, because not everyone's going to use it at once and this allows a lot more efficient allocation of bandwidth to whoever's demanding it at any given time. I think that in some instances they could do a better job of this allocation, but this is exactly what they are trying to do with a market solution, and it's no reason to choke off everyone's last mile.
Even if the technology was available to give ISPs a blazingly fast cheap backbone that would let everyone saturate existing last-mile technology, in such a case it would be likely that better last-mile technology exists as well, and you run into the same problem. If you're really so concerned about being able to saturate your line 24 hours a day, you can get a line with a higher SLA (and pay the true market value of the bandwidth). Alternatively, you could exercise some courtesy and just not leave BitTorrent downloading 24/7.
One thing this dosn't seem to allow for, is the differences on bandwidth demand based upon time of day. If you're stealing all the bandwidth downloading huge files or torrenting around 7pm, well, then you're going to slow people down. But if you're downloading alot at 3 a.m. and nobody is even online to notice, who cares? This system is going to end up with alot of unused bandwidth if they have hard-coded caps. If they're going to cap, they should at least make it dynamic. I suppose they want money though...
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
When I first moved to the UK and found that all my choices for ISPs had a metered usage plan, I was against it at first. My major complaint was that I had no way to predict how much data transfer I was going to use, so I didn't know what tier I should sign up for. Now that I've been on such a system for a couple years now I really do say that its more fair. The provider I am with now (plus.net) has a pretty good system I set a fixed monthly cost. For each £ I prepay I get so many GB of transfer. If I go over limit, I can choose to have my speed capped at 128K (Still plenty for email and most surfing), or optionally choose to pay a per GB charge that is slightly more expensive than the prepaid rate. Additionally They make a distinction between peak and off peak hours. So only transfers during peak hours actually count to my monthly transfer. The result is that I've learned to schedule my large downloads into Off Peak Hours. I have a had a few months where my home transfer was nearly 100 GB. However 80+ GB of that was Off peak usage which I did not pay for directly. Whats the result of all this? My ISP gets to manage their network performance during peak hours so all users have a pleasant experience. I still get big downloads, and I pay whats fair for what I use. The limits on my account are clearly defined. There is no mysterious 'use too much and we'll cut you off' amount.
I am very happy with this system, but to be clear, the reason why I am happy with this system is my ISP has provided choices. If Time Warner fails to provide similar choice then it will be awful.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
What is never entirely clear is what is excessive bandwidth? Over the past year I have used about 25 Gigs per month with a high water mark of 40. I'm not sure that this is high, low or what.
What is the norm?
I am not a script!
That's funny, because Europe is *STILL* offering unlimited access and with much higher bandwidth than here.
In Europe, you can get a service that offer phone (VoIP) + TV (over IP, with HD and DVR) + internet (up to 20Mbps/1Mbps) for 30 euros/mo.
No restriction on the amount of DL.
Then again, they have a weird thing in that domain: actual competition. All operators are actually trying hard to earn your money. But shh... Europe is communist, we all know that...
I tell you, there is no pleasing some of you people. First people complain about cable companies limiting people for offering "unlimited bandwidth" and say that they shouldn't say unlimited if they don't mean unlimited. Now someone comes out with a plan for limited tiers and people complain that there are caps in place. Personally I'd be OK with just paying for what is used say $5.00 per month + $2.00 a GB for example, however companies may never do that because you don't get the big profits on the people who use the min, which is most people. That way if you use more you pay more, use less and pay less. Internet would be far more attractive the general non geek public if it was cheaper than $45 or whatever a month when all they want to do is just surf the web and do some email.
Why does the cable charge more for digital cable than analog if they want analog cable to go away?
Back in '02 Internode http://www.internode.on.net/ introduced Flat Rate plans, whereby you could download as much as you wanted while the network wasn't congested, however when utilisation reached 100%, those with the highest downloads over the last 28 days (rolling period) would be progressivly slowed down, to as low as dial-up speed. Once the network was less congested, your speed would ratchet back up (again depending on network congestion and your priority based on your downloads).
Those that only occassionally downloaded large files would get full speed pretty much all the time, those that downloaded continuously would see their downloads slow during peak periods.
It wasn't rocket science, but that 28day rolling period and how it worked was a confusion that eventually forced the cancellation of these type of plans - which is too bad, as they essentially gave everyone a fair go depending on how much you downloaded. No excess charges, just a flat fee and as much GB as you could squeeze out of the link.
It was a great system and I was sorry to see it go. I'm sure the developer of the software was dissapointed in much larger ways - this system could have made bandwidth provisioning & customer charging a lot easier to predict and manage.
More info in an FAQ http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1037
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
Analog cable isn't going anywhere. Analog Broadcast TV may be going away (that story isn't finished yet), but analog cable to the home will be around for quite a while. The cable companies and their customers are going to very quickly realize that the cable company can serve as the Digital Converter box. All those old sets just need a cable connection and they will live a new life in the digital TV era. No need for all the subscribers to buy separate converter boxes. The cable company does it for you when they shove the signal down the line.
That will be an interesting time. All broadcast will be digital. The cable company will convert some of it back to analog, ship it plus scrambled digital to you, then charge you (again) for a digital converter box to descramble the digital portion of the cable signal so you can see it all on your TV.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
"The government is paying for the majority of the costs for fiber to the home, which isn't really to the home, its to the curb."
If you are speaking of FIOS you are most certainly wrong. There is indeed a fiber pair that is ran to your home and terminated at an ONT. The location on the ONT is either inside or outside your home. Inside the ONT there is an Ethernet port for internet, an F connector for "cable" TV and four RJ-11 for POTS. Unless my home is considered a curb, FIOS is true fiber to the home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS
parent is right. Everytime i read a story about internet access in the US i'm amazed how things have changed. 10 years ago everyone here (germany) looked enviously at the connections you had, now things have changed. 60 GB a month, what a joke. I have an 18mbit connection for 32 euros a month and i regularly transfer more than 100 GB a month. There is no way my ISP is going to cap me for that because it's just not that unusual. So why is this possible here and not in the US?
About a year ago, NTL (in the UK) decided that they were going to abolish speed grades and give everyone a 10Mb/s connection and tier the prices based on usage rather than peak speed. They seem to have dropped this idea now, and still offer three speed grades (2Mb/s, 4Mb/s and 20Mb/s).
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I am TheRaven on Soylent News
About a year ago, NTL (in the UK) decided that they were going to abolish speed grades and give everyone a 10Mb/s connection and tier the prices based on usage rather than peak speed. They seem to have dropped this idea now, and still offer three speed grades (2Mb/s, 4Mb/s and 20Mb/s).
:)
I've got to say that I prefer the idea of capping the total bandwidth used over the course of the month to capping the maximum speed.
I'm on PlusNet at the moment and their caps seem to work generally quite well. You get emailed when you exceed about half your quota, then emailed again later, and they progressively throttle certain stuff down as you get perilously close to the cap (once you hit the cap you get severely throttled). The caps and throttling only apply during "peak times" though (ISTR 16:00 - 00:00). Of course, when they initially implemented the caps there was outcry from all the torrenters and quite a lot of them canceled their accounts (needless to say, this was quite good for the service as a whole
http://blog.nexusuk.org
More to the point, who gives a shit? If they can provide me the speed that I need I don't really care if it comes into my house on fiber, coax, twisted-pair or tin cans with string.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.