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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."
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!
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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
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.
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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
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