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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/
crap outta bandwith
As one of those 5% people, if they roll this out in my area, I'll become a DSL subscriber!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Where is the news in this? Canadian ISPs have had caps and over usage charges for years. I can tell on any day exactly how much bandwidth I've used and how close to my cap I am.
I don't see a problem with this, having usage tiers with costs depending how much you plan to use is fine. The problem in the past has always been claims of "unlimited" until you reach a magical, secret cap. I don't think users will have a problem with tiers as long as you make the exact numbers completely clear, and of course that you charge reasonable rates.
US ISPs have charged different rates for different speeds for a long time, how is this any different? It brings clarity to users.
I, for example pay $35/month and am told I get 2.5Mbps down, 760kbps up, and 30GB total transfer. And if I want to transfer more, I pay more. It seems reasonable to me.
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!
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.
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.
Well, you're lucky. I'm already a Time-Warner customer...in the Beaumont division! I shall have to keep a very sharp eye on this...
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
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
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
I wouldn't really expect it, every ISP will be worried that someone will stick with the flat-rate scheme and customers will flock to it.
Back when AOL was actually worth getting (at least Neverwinter Nights made it so for me), they started out with the pay-as-you-go idea. You paid a basic fee for access and a few minutes and then they charged you for anything beyond that at a per-minute rate. Worked out OK, though I did find myself going over pretty regularly. But when they switched to the flat-rate all-you-can-eat plan, AOL exploded. The number of users shot through the roof and they had a lot of trouble keeping up with demand. In my own little corner of the world at that time, I could spend an hour or more dialing, getting a busy signal, dialing, getting a busy signal, etc. It took them a while to catch up with demand, once they did though I never looked back and never would have wanted to go back. Then they killed NWN and my account was canceled shortly afterwards, but that was just a matter of not wanting the hassle of AOL's crapware just to get on the internet.
The pay-as-you-go idea has been tried, it worked when there wasn't another choice; and, unless the recent changes in the requirement for access to small ISP's really does kill off all competition, I don't see ISP's going back. They will be far to scared that their customers will go elsewhere.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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
There are several places where ISPs are apart from reality.
First, there's abuse of the term "bandwidth", which has nothing to do with the amount of data downloaded. Bandwidth is how much of a frequency range is being used on the wire to provide the service. That's it.
"Date rate" is how much data the bandwidth, encoding, compression, and such allow you to get out of the bandwidth. It's also what ISPs limit you to when they say "megabits per second" or "kilobits per second".
Total monthly data transfer available for an always-on connection at a certain data rate can be calculated as the data rate per second times the number of seconds per month. Capped usage for total monthly data transfer, which is what this article is actually about, can be thought of as the data rate times the number of seconds time the percentage of utilization. What they're wanting to limit here is that percentage of utilization of what they're selling you access to use.
One way to lower total monthly data transfer for a customer is to lower the data rate. That means things come down slower all month. Another is to limit the amount of time for which the line is fully utilized. Many business users of truly high-speed access pay for what are called "burstable lines". You get the whole DS3 or entire OC-12 or whatever type of line it is. You get billed with the understanding that you use a certain percentage of data rate or less a certain percentage of the time, and that the rest of the time you can use all of it without paying extra.
When I was in the ISP field and buying our backbone lines from bigger network providers, we typically leased lines with the first 15% or 25% of the full data rate included, with the stipulation that 5% or 10% of the time we could use all the data transfer the line had to offer without being billed extra. That meant that if we experienced abnormal peak demand, we didn't get our lines saturated. It also meant we didn't get soaked paying for peak capacity all the time. We in fact got a report each month showing the percentage, on average over each 5-minute increment, we used of the line's data rate the whole month. We could look at the chart being built (by MRTG) as the month progressed, too.
The reason total traffic is the way ISPs want to deal with end users is that it's easier to explain "you can move 20 gigabytes" than "90th percentile usage will be at no more than 30% of the data rate capacity of the circuit". Still, I think people would understand easily enough if they were told, "For 60 hours a month, you can max out your line. The rest of the time, you're going to be at 1 Mbps".
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.
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.
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
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*.
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.
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
Maybe it isn't the same throughout the U.S., but in SoCal, that's PRECISELY how it works. Gas, electricity, AND water rates go up steeply as you use more and more.
Looking at my electric bill, the first jump after the "baseline" is ~2x, the 2nd is ~6x, and the third is ~8x.
I suspect some other major cities do this as well, but I grew up here, and it's just not a topic that comes up often.
Merde, il pleut encore!
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.
Why don't they start by shutting down the zombies?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
This is a slippery slope you guys are talking about. Fight this as hard as you possibly can, because if you don't you will sorely regret it.
Here in Australia, we have had caps for years now, after the only ISP at the time (the incumbent teleco, Telstra) introduced limits on it's Cable plans. It is normal to have an ISP offer a mere 10GB/mo or lower of bandwidth to normal people, often going as low at 400MB! And this is using cable (at 8mbit/s) or ADSL2+ (at 24mbit/s)! It takes seconds to blow your monthly allowance.
Most ISPs go for the rate limiting approach, limiting you to 64kbit/s after reaching your quota. Then, even dialup is faster as you have compression on dialup but you don't get that on cable and DSL. The incumbent teleco has it's higher level plans (12GB/25GB) as being rate limited, and it's lower plans having excess fees. These excess fees are 150$/GB - which is between two and four times the monthly fee!
What's worse, is three ISPs (two of them major); Telstra, Optus and Dodo "double dip", that is, they count your uploads as well as your downloads, and add it together to say how much you've used, rather than only counting downloads. It is quite common for kids to leave P2P applications running and not realising the consequence of this, and parents just think it is normal.
We somewhat have an excuse, we don't have a lot of uplink to the rest of the world, and surely if all caps were gone, it would flood these connections. They're talking about having a new uplink installed via Guam in 2009 right now, which is supposed to lead to higher quotas. Here's hoping...
At the moment, my ISP is rather nice. They have 128kbit/s download only cap once I download in excess of 40GB. I can upload as much as I like.
But, you're on a very slippery slope. This will not lead to lower prices. Your average user will continue to pay the same amount they do now (maybe 5-10% lower, so that the ISP can "sell" the idea to the customer) for a 10GB plan, and charge 2 to 4 times as much for the higher tiers, upto about 100GB.
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
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.