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Time-Warner Considers Per-Gigabyte Service Fee, After iTunes
destinyland writes "Time-Warner is now mulling a plan to charge a per-gigabyte fee for internet service. A leaked memo reveals they're now watching how many gigabytes customers use in a 'consumption-based' pricing experiment in Texas, which we discussed early last month. The announced plan was that they were considering a tier-based approach, as opposed to per-gigabyte fees. 'As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network,' Time-Warner complains, with plans to cap usage at 5-gigabytes, and more expensive pricing plans granting 10-, 20-, and 40-gigabyte quotas. Steven Levy at the Washington post suggests Time-Warner's real aim is to
hobble iTunes, raising the cost of a movie download by $10 (or $30 for a high-definition movie). Eyeing Time-Warner's experiment, Comcast cable also says they're evaluating a pay-per-gigabyte model."
This is why consolidation in media is such a BAD, BAD, BAD thing for consumers. When one single company (or even small group of companies) owns your newspaper, television stations, internet service, telephone company, cable company, etc. they basically own *YOU*.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...but its an absolute shot in the foot for their business.
Right now, I could call up Verizon and get FiOS. In about 6 months I'll be able to call up Verizon and get FiOS TV. Hell, theyre currently installing FiOS in my parents tiny village of about 5000.
These cable companies are facing the first real competition they've ever had and instead of reacting by making their service better, they're planning out ways to make their service worse.
And no, this isn't some sort of viral FiOS ad. I'm just a dumbfounded consumer.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
It's not a bad idea, but 5GB?
I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again: I love my ISP.
teksavvy FTW!
Spending much of the last several years in Eastern Europe, I've admired how ISPs there offer Internet connections for cheap even by local standards and are tolerant of heavy P2P usage. The technique used by one ISP I've used in Romania to reduce bandwidth usage was setting up a DC++ server where people could trade music and films at lightning speed with people from the same city.
In the U.S., meanwhile, Internet connections are pricey and companies like to poke their nose into what you are doing with it. How ironic that a country which was a major force behind the creation of the Internet is lagging in many respects to poor former-Soviet states.
Charge me for bandwidth usage or charge me true unlimited bandwidth usage. I think that either method could be accetaple provided there was no throttling, blocking or hidden charges or caps.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
...to FUCK OFF AND DIE, because I'll go back to fucking dial-up before I pay their ransom!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I, beavis88, hereby pledge I will immediately terminate my Time Warner Cable "service" in the event they implement this new scheme without SUBSTANTIALLY reducing the price of the "low tier". I don't even run BT or pirate movies/music, and I probably came close to 5GB downloaded *yesterday* - Vista and Windows 2008 .isos from MSDN, plus watched a movie online from Netflix. Now if they want to make it worth my while to reduce my usage, I might be amenable - but if they want to cap my usage, and keep charging the same insanely high prices, then fuck it, I'll put up with shitty, slow DSL.
Keep this shit up. Those "50% who use 5%" of the network will stop advising your idiot clients. When that happens, you'll see the same demise as "AOL" did. How many idiotic AOL dial-up users still exist?
Get ready for the apocalypse privacy-invading broadband douches.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
It will make it really easy for another broadband technology to take hold and utterly destroy them.
That's the biggest problem, Most cable areas have ZERO competition for broadband. DSL is not available as telcos like to drag their feet upgrading the infrastructure to get DSL working everywhere.
As soon as there is some real competition out their for broadband forcing time warner and comcast to quit playing their rape the customer games.
Also, the effect to people with open accesspoints will be chilling. Clueless people in their homes will be slapped with a shutoff or higher bill that month when a bunch of kids discover their accesspoint to download their stuff. It will create a underground "internet stealing" activity as people get their downloads without exceeding their own cap.
Cable companies dont give a rats ass, as long as they find a way to charge you more for what you already get and not upgrading their equipment, they are incredibly happy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But I really don't when it comes to internet service in my area. DSL just doesn't have what I need and Time Warner is the only solution and I'll be damned if they weren't down this whole weekend with not so much as an explanation or apology. Of course I'm going to be charged for the whole month even after sitting on hold for 20 minutes to be told there's nothing I can do but wait.
This just frosts me even more, I don't WANT to switch to DSL, but I may have to.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I didn't realize anyone was forcing you to buy it. If you don't like it, don't pay up. You vote for how corporations are run with your dollars, and as long as you keep shelling over, they'll keep pounding you up the arse as deep as they can.
>> 'As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network,'
They should lower the fees for the guys aren't using as much bandwidth rather than raise the fees for the guys that are. That will never happen though.
Bye bye, cable.
5%/50%, you whiners and your bullshit excuses.
What I hear, is it's DAMN LUCKY FOR YOU that only 5% of your customers actually use their service. If everyone downloaded the music and movies YOU ADVERTISE IN YOUR COMMERCIALS FOR THE SERVICE, then the network would not function at all.
It's not my fault you don't have the capacity to give your customers what they've been paying for.
In this age of streaming media and online marketplaces only a fucking dinosaur like the cable industry would propose a 5 gigabyte cap.
Too bad for Comcast, I'd rather rent a movie from XBox marketplace than watch it on your laggy, low quality On Demand service. Their answer is to make sure that wont be cost effective.
Goddammit FCC, where are you?
I'm calling for FIOS tonight, at least the telcos still have some regulation.
Godspeed, hurry up and ruin the internet for anything but pop-under ads, I can't wait for the new underground.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you implement this I will drop you for Internet and cable TV in a heartbeat.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
As someone who finds the "Dark Ages" romantic and exciting, I think this is a great idea. With the US so far behind the rest of the world already, it's time to just give up competing all together.
... well, everyone loved the first Renaissance. I'm sure we'll do it even better the second time around, because this is the US of Fuckin A!
And some day, when we do decide to make a come back
I'm looking forward to living a 22nd century stone age. Aren't you?
Not only is my FiOS 10x the speed of the archaic cable service from Time Warner (currently getting 50mbps), but there are no caps (yet). I watch tons of video online (mostly documentaries on google video) and I know it's about 40 gigs a month no doubt. That and streaming internet radio all the time as well as d/ling Linux and Solaris DVD .iso images I am getting what I pay for ($90).
I don't think a cap is the way to go. Perhaps price per gigabyte/terabyte??? Sort of like the electric company when they charge you for kilowatt hours. That's the way to go, none of this capping nonsense.
Also if you're getting charged by the gigabyte/terabyte, better MAKE SURE that you're getting 100mbps speeds or higher. So you have crappy service and now you have to pay more? Yep, sounds like the Cable companies to me. LOL!
Look, are they trying to lose customers? Are they trying to force people to switch to DSL or satellite? (Devil's advocate: Maybe this will spur competition, so it's a good thing?)
Maybe I'm wrong, but customers using more bandwidth don't add additional cost to the infrastructure, do they? The network is a sunk cost and customers are simply utilizing what's there. (Do I have that right?)
Here's what's worse. How do "stupid" consumers know what it high and low bandwith? Even many programmers and engineers would have a hard time knowing this, unless a monitoring tool or widget was on your desktop.
How to Download YouTube Videos
If they are charging for traffic, they had better have pretty accurate metering.
The few times I have watched my cable modem it is constantly being flooded with arp requests and other crap that are not originating from my machine. I know these are small, but it adds up quickly (penny rounding schemes anyone?).
I don't trust them to have a fair and accurate bill for consumption.
So of course they'll lower their pricing for the 95% of their users that use the other 50%, right?
Of course not. Yet Another Money Grab. Oh well, if they do change the terms of the service I'm getting, it means I can get out of that 1 year promotional package I have from Comcast.
Anyone know if Verizon is going to do this with FiOS? I'm fortunate enough to have a choice of high-speed internet service, so at the very least there's SOME market pressure here.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I wish they would just leave us alone. Everything is fine the way it is. Quit trying to make money out of nothing. They should ask the other 95% if they even notice the other 5%. I'm sick of being tiered to death. For just a little bit more, for a small amount more, for a tiny bit more. Enough! Just give everyone uber fast internet for a fair price. Don't worry your pretty little head about who uses it and how much they use of it. As long as it doesn't affect the other customers. Ok, I feel a little better now.
I think this is also an attempt to get people to secure their wifi routers so their neighbors can't get on-line for free.
I know my neighbor would be wondering how they downloaded 25 GB (LotR HD) last month...
It would be time for a new non-centralized wireless internet that didn't require ISPs to be created at that point. Create a mesh network kind of like bit torrent, but all hardware based and plug-n-play ease.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/04/researchers-tout-co-op-system-for-ubiquitous-wifi
You say that, but you won't. Will you.
As both living in Texas AND being stuck with TW, this has me a bit worried. I haven't had any issues with their service yet, but if I'm stuck with only 5gb/mo for the same price I'm paying now -- or something not incredibly lower -- I'll have to go with ClearWire or Embarq. Neither offer near the speed and service, but I'm not going to pay for a cap as part of a "test market". If enough people back away from it hopefully TW will take the hint and not roll it out on a wider basis.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
1) per byte pricing
2) penalty for excessive latency and delay
3) detail billing on paper for free
4) 99.99% uptime
5) intelligent 24/7 technical/billing support (not the reset this, reset that, I don't know nothing support)
Web 3.0 = internet circa 1994.
Is it time for broadband over powerlines finally?
The networking is already in your house:
"Providing broadband service to these customers would simply require adding equipment to their wires. The feature of BPL that would make it more attractive than DSL or cable modem is that BPL customers would immediately have in-house networks without having to purchase and install additional wiring in their homes."
Plug in a wireless hub or router and you're ready to roll.
Although all of this brings up the next problem: You're dealing with *another* monopoly. Bah!
How to Download YouTube Videos
It's not so bad that an ISP charges by bandwidth. It's bad that the pricing decision is tied up with other kinds of products they want to sell, in effect giving them the power to raise the price of other companies' products relative to their own in places where they have a broadband monopoly.
In this situation, the regulators ought to look at any competitive advantage this gives their content products and require them to price those products high enough that the bandwidth pricing is competition neutral.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Seriously. As one of the 95% who use comparatively little bandwidth, it's nice to see the other 5% finally pay their fair share.
In reality, though, the bandwidth is only "expensive" to Time Warner if it leaves their network. It seems like Apple could cut a deal where it places an iTunes mirror inside Time Warner's corner of the internet, with all TW users being directed to that server instead of the normal one. Seems like this is one of the problems Akamai was supposed to solve- distributed media delivery.
They have this in Germany and it is horrible. I think it is one of the worst things they can do to the internet. If they do end up switching to this method, I hope that some other providers will pop up. Hey maybe they will even use ipv6. I just hope they don't switch to this method.
Way to go TW! Brilliant! On the cusp of a new era where truly high-speed wireless is set to overtake your high-overhead land-line empire and you, oh Brigadier of the bandwidth, come up with a pricing plan reminiscent of yesteryear. AND, I'm sure the FTC won't put two and two together on this with regard to unfair competetive practices, iTunes, and such. Smooooooooth...very smooth. Don't give the customers what THEY THINK they want, give them what YOU KNOW they NEED. *wink/wink*
Every two years or so, the majority start using the amount of bandwidth the 5% that used half the capacity were using as they adopt the leading edge technologies made popular by those 5% of early adopters.
If they were smart, they would use those heavy traffic users to test their expanded capabilities lest they be crushed by the future wave of demand. But they're not, and they will be left in the dust when some faster ISP comes and steals their customers. The joke will be on them too, because whoever that faster ISP is that brings fiber to their areas is also going to steal their phone and video customers too.
Cable modems were fun while they lasted, but these types of decisions are a direct result of their inferior shared topology. It's time for these guys to upgrade or die. (In comcast's case, I vote die)
There are almost a whole cottage community of people who work from home and tele-commute via VPN into their offices. This; if allowed to proceed, would chase everyone over to DSL which to date does not have this intention, and for those that do not have access to DSL, they would be forced out of capability to work at home.
Most likely, Comcrap and their friends Roadrunning, Timewardoff and the like will ultimately say that if you are using a VPN, you must purchase a business account at most likely $200 per month or more not including cable TV. This will place internet out of the reach of many who cannot afford the costs associated with a price per gig system.
Lets remember people that the cable conglomerates are in this to make serious money at any expense.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I have a pile of machines at home. If Microsoft's Patch Tuesday puts me over my limit, who's going to pay for it? Am I even going to allow my boxes to auto-update anymore? Thus the Internet Pollution, all those unpatched boxes, will grow worse.
Are they going to count all the incoming connections from bots trying to hack my network? Like an incoming cell call, will I still have to pay for unwanted incoming connections?
If I don't like what they're doing, where the heck am I supposed to go? Back to dial-up? Oh, wait, I'll do my movie downloads at work. Just like health insurance, the burden will start to be placed on the employer. Expect office internet filtering to start to become more draconian.
The concept of competition and free markets in the US is only important until someone gets enough lobbyists. Sometimes this country really pisses me off.
As if I really needed another reason to get rid of comcast... 4GB??? Are you kidding me? ONE DVD is 4.37 GB So I buy one downloadable movie and I can no longer use my internet for the rest of the month? Two words: Suck 'em.
Suck one!
Sincerely,
Jackie Moon
...seem even better and forward-thinking than before. If Time Warner wants to lose market share that badly, they're certainly welcome to it....
Maybe they want to get rid of as many of the 5% as possible as they weren't making money off them anyway, and get the money out of the not clued in types who don't use much bandwidth but were bedazzled by their marketing campaign.
I can see what Time Warner's reasoning is. I just got my bill for AT&T Wireless 3G service (being in the Baltimore/Washington DC area that's blanketed by it). $60/mo unlimited doesn't seem so bad, until I look at the bill.
...for my grandparents.
...and I'm glad I'm on Verizon FIOS.
For checking email and websurfing about 30-60 mins out of the day, I would use about 128 MEGABYTES of data per month. I'm no-where near the 5GB "invisible signpost" where they start charging me an overage fee of nothing. If I was on 12 hours/day, I'd only get to 1.5 GB per month. 5 GB will easily cover it...
The 3G service I use when I'm mobile w/o a free hotspot. At home, it's a different story. I'm pulling podcasts to a Mac Mini each day, to an average tune of 256 MB each day because Systm and Tekzilla are huge for good quality Quicktime files (500-700 megs). That's 7.5 GB/mo already, from non-iTunes servers! I also do some graphics perusal on Deviant Art and the like (mmmm pr0n), and that's probably taking a fair chunk of bandwidth. Add on some brain-dead decisions by the BBC in not letting us American yanks pay to play Top Gear...
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I' just got rid of Comcast internet for ADSL thru my local phone company. The price is lower, the service is great, the speed is great (albiet a tad bit slower than Comcast when it was running right), the latency is low & I don't have to deal with the leeches on my cable node anymore.
Fuck Comcast & Time-Warner.
And the FCC for letting it come to this.
There is a war going on for your mind.
"I hate to say it but if we all downloaded legal video content the ISPs wouldnt have to look at this. They would just setup legal local mirrors for large files."
Why should you hate to say the truth? The people who pirate brought this whole mess upon themselves and they don't have the balls to take responsability for it. Leaving the honest to suffer and clean-up after them. Phoeey! They're no friends of ours.
Hey, maybe this will throttle the illegal downloading of movies over the internet. Would that it could be applied also to illegally downloaded music files. $10 a pop for illegally downloaded movies or songs would be a great thing.
STEALING is acquiring something that doesn't belong to you without the owner's permission. I actually fear for the future of the country because so many people do not know right from wrong any more.
People like my mother use about 2GB of bandwidth at the most every month. For someone like her, a deal to charge her say.... $6-$8/month for basic connectivity with only 2GB of downstream bandwidth would be a bargain. As it is, she pays the same rate as her neighbor who is a fairly recent college grad who, if I know anything about his downloading habits today from what he was like in our dorm (college towns can be a scary small world), he's milking that DSL line for all its worth. Guys like him are probably sucking down the full amount that they are theoretically able to get from the service, for probably the better part of the day.
He's not a freeloader because he actually pays for his service. The problem is, he is being subsidized under Verizon's business plan by users like my mother. She only uses the equivalent of a few dollars worth of bandwidth. Now no one would go for this sort of business plan with water or electricity if they could avoid it. It is just a matter of Verizon continually adding infrastructure in order for them to provide full 3 or more Mbps to each user, but who pays for that much extra backbone connecting each home?
That's the catch. Per-GB isn't inherently odious. If basic cable internet access were $15/month for 5GB of bandwidth, and each additional GB was sold for $0.05-$0.10/GB, you'd barely notice. For many people, it'd actually be cheaper than paying a big fee for what they get now.
With the larger issue here of network neutrality and preferential routing of packets from specific sites and such, I'll admit that as a libertarian I find it to be a hard issue. On the one hand, these are private companies, and on the other hand, their very existence is due to government intervention to let them build infrastructure. In my opinion, companies built with strong government influence or that are owned by the government should be subject to sanctions in the marketplace in order to protect true private businesses.
There is no guarantee that these companies will "plow" profits into improving their infrastructure. I would argue that its highly questionable that they will, as Time Warner is a huge business with ridiculous revenues that could already afford to do some major buildouts on their network, if they were concerned with the quality of their product. Media conglomerates are designed to move profits to shareholders. The primary issue is that in many locations there is little to no competition to speak of. To me, it seems as though the Internet is going backwards, in terms of usability and freedom. There is a desire to charge end users for every single thing (tm) while not providing particularly great service. I am a Speakeasy customer, because for the most part, you pay them for your DSL connection and they leave you alone, provided you do not do anything illegal or nefarious to their network. They dont limit my bandwidth, filter my ports, throttle my connection, and I can run almost anything I'd want to on my network. It costs more than Verizon DSL / Comcast / T/W etc, but its worth it.
Perky Charter chick: "We have this great new VOIP telephone service! Would you like to sign up?"
Me: "Why? Your Internet service sucks and you can't even get TV right. What makes me think you're not going to turn my phone service into a third cluster fuck?"
Charter: "Because it's new!"
(click)
Those "free" sites that consist of 90% adverts and 10% content are suddenly fairly expensive to view. Ain't capitalism great?
.nosig
I just want to repeat... I get 10 GB of downloads a month. Other plans are available (30, 40, 50, 100 GB etc).
Personally I have never gone over 10GB accept for P2P downloads of questionably legal stuff.
Not internet radio, not games, not skype... The legal stuff just doesnt use the bandwidth (as a CS major I hate using the word bandwidth in the wrong sense, but its the generally accepted way).
Im not going to cite the recent studies that say P2P and bittorrent is 60%+ of internet traffic as I know we can all find ways to attack it.. I will just appeal to your own internal judgment and say "you know its probably true".
In principle usage-based pricing is a good idea. We do it with electricity. Some cities do it with water. Heavier users should pay more. Lighter users should pay less. Grandma who just does email and reads the online newspaper every day and occasionally video-conferences with her grandchildren should pay a lot less than a guy who watches a two movies a week, and that guy should pay a lot less than a guy running a 24/7 broadcast studio out of his house.
In practice the devil is in the details.
Because Time-Warner can use its Internet-pricing and Internet-traffic-shaping power to steer people away from IP-delivery of movies and telephone service towards its own offerings, and/or use that power to coerce IP-telcos and IP-movie-delivery companies to "ante up," it runs a grave risk of engaging in anti-competitive behavior.
If Time-Warner were a standalone IP provider and they did not provide cable television, telephones, or have any direct or indirect financial interest in those companies or in movie theaters the devil would have a lot less room to play. Not only is TW a telco and a cable provider, but it creates content that it sells to television stations and movie theaters and it sells its content on DVD. If they choose to use their Internet pricing in an evil way, they could steer people away from ITunes and the like.
By the way, if the effective cost is $10 for 1 movie, that indicates that either:
* IP delivery of video is a lot less cost-effective than we though when the true costs are measured
or
* $10 is outrageous and it's well above the true cost of delivering that amount of traffic.
Anyone care to place their bets?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am not an expert but from what I've learned working with folks in the US electrical utilities, broadband over powerlines is extremely difficult due to the poor quality of power lines. They're designed to haul electricity, not data. Raw electricity is very forgiving. Analog signals (e.g., Ethernet) aren't. Very very noisy, poor lines, ancient (50+ years) hardware make high quality data transmissions unlikely.
If BOP would really work, why do we still have human meter readers? Why doesn't the meter transmit its usage back over the same lines it's pulling power? Meter reading is one of the biggest costs of a utility company so they have big incentives to fix the problem. Lots of companies try to make remote monitoring hardware but don't get very far due to the poor (data) capabilities of the network.
I'm not discounting the idea completely. Just saying that, in my limited knowledge, it's fraught with practical problems and is unlikely to be a solution anytime soon.
"It will make it really easy for another broadband technology to take hold and utterly destroy them."
Nice. A broadband technology that violates the laws of physics and is completely powered and financed by wishful thinking. I have a better idea sunshine. Why don't all the wishful thinkers get together and build this supposed "unlimited"* network?
*And let's remember unlimited means that I can do whatever I want even if it negatively affects other. After all you all wouldn't want to violate anyone's "rights", right?
You know, they haven't yet explored the brave new world of cable television! There are greedy, greedy people who watch tv ALL DAY! Maybe they should pay extra also. You could have a "3-hour plan" and a "5-hour plan", etc. When did the consumer become the enemy? RIAA and MPAA clearly think that is the case. As does Apple, it seems. And obviously Comcast and Time Warner. I want a company that says "thank you for your business." I know they need to make profit, that's fine. Price accordingly. If you really don't like consumers and think they're all out to rob you, it's time to go out of business (like SCO!!)
How much bandwidth does about 1 minute of pr0n per day use? I'm guessing I've got nothing to worry about except going blind!
Maybe I spend too much time on the interwebs, but does anyone else think that 5 GB per month is a miserly small amount for the "standard" tier? Restricting customers to such a tiny limit is like moving the internet back to 1999.
Ok, so what I'd like to know about their statistics, is "what times of day are these 5% using 50% of the network?" I'd like to think that tech savvy users do their heaviest work late at night when fewer people are utilizing the network. Myself, I do most of my heavy downloading late late at night (between 11pm and 5am) when most normal people are fast asleep. I'm sure others set up a download and then run off to bed.
Assuming that this is the case, exactly what impact on performance is this having on web usage to the "average" consumer? In my opinon, I'd say none. A better option to me, if their numbers are right, would be to shape traffic during times of day. Say, throttling non http/smtp/IM traffic increasing the performance during the day for "consumer" level usage that many small businesses use for communication or what have you. Later in the day, increase the speeds on the throttled traffic up a percentage, creating a "prime time" for those people who use other services like itunes/youtube/whatever file sharing they wouldn't normally use during the day. Then once this "prime time" traffic has died down, open the floodgates.
Granted an option like this doesn't help with them taking more of your money, but it would be an interesting approach to the problem that doesn't really cost them anything either.
I, beavis88, hereby pledge I will immediately terminate my Time Warner Cable "service" in the event they implement this new scheme without SUBSTANTIALLY reducing the price of the "low tier". I don't even run BT or pirate movies/music, and I probably came close to 5GB downloaded *yesterday* - Vista and Windows 2008 .isos from MSDN, plus watched a movie online from Netflix.
I think the point is, if you're watching streaming movies and downloading ISOs, you ain't the low tier.
Now if they want to make it worth my while to reduce my usage, I might be amenable
I think the general idea is to give consumers a range of options to avoid charging light web users the same price as bandwidth hogs. So you would be given the option to decide which group you fall into.
but if they want to cap my usage, and keep charging the same insanely high prices
I think that's their very motivation behind the tiered approach, to avoid doing just that. To remain profitable while offering a flat price to everyone, they'd have to either A) cap bandwidth usage with sneaky fine print like they're doing now, or increase everyone's prices to the point that they drive cost-conscious consumers to DSL. The first is bad PR for them, the second loses customers.
I think the general idea is to give you a DSL-like price for DSL-like aggregate bandwidth usage, with the advantage being that when you *do* use it, it's faster than DSL. Alternately, if you really are using a ton of bandwidth, you'll have to pay for it. Which is fair, because I don't feel like subsidizing anybody's internet connection.
I have absolutely no problem with this if they don't screw it up (which they may, but we don't know that yet). I think the only people who are really screaming bloody murder are the bandwidth hogs who are getting more than they're paying for now. The majority of consumers *should* get a bit of a price break for giving up the ability to frequently use bandwidth hogging services like streaming video, P2P, huge downloads, etc.
I don't know how this is so intuitive for cell phone plans but not internet usage. Your cell company charges you for the minutes you use, and no one complains. Your internet company wants to do basically the same thing, which should benefit the majority of their customers. What's the problem?
There... Corrected that for you.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I work for Comcast in the bay area and by spec our nodes are not to exced 70% usage. Which we managed just fine. We have tons of fiber not even lit in order to meet demand.
So these companies complaining makes no sense. In fact they just shared our regional numbers with us and HSI was profitable by some comparable sum equal to video.
IMO these companies should just become common carriers like AT&T and provide you access. Other companies should provide IPTV which would either be free or subscription based. Thats where I see the industry hopefully going!
I think this will just increase wasteful internet-surfing at work.
While networking over powerlines is kinda cool, it's not overly reliable (having seen it in action as a LAN, not a broadband uplink). Personally I also consider it a nightmare troubleshooting-wise -- with cat5 and phone cables, IF you get zapped, you probably won't even feel it. If you tinker with your powerlines to get your broadband to work, well, death-by-internet may become a lot more common than it is nowadays :)
Did these guys take a business class taught by Darl McBride? Why would any company go so far out of it's way to intentionally anger it's customer base?
Does the Board of either company actually believe this $/GB model would have anything other than a short-term revenue burst? I refer of course, to the people who will receive their statement once this plan has been put into effect (I'm assuming it will be made retro-active for the billing period when the policy is put in place).
And leveraging the price of iTunes movie downloads? First of all, if Time Warner is already being paid per GB, then why would they need to do this? To offset profit? I purchased a movie from iTunes, (Wargames, if you must now) and it was not a small file.
Secondly, a $10 increase? $30 for High-Definition? Why not just send out billing statements that have a 10% Off coupon for any TW-Library title at Best Buy, because I certainly believe the desire here is to push the physical media rather than the digital.
Finally, does Time Warner actually believe that Apple will roll over and say "okay"? Apple had it's arm twisted once over the price of songs and didn't quit. So why would they suddenly agree to a $10/$30 increase and hamper their own sales just so Time Warner can force their On Demand service to their customers? Apple may just do the opposite and end all dealings with TW once the contractual obligation ends. Add to that, customers won't want to download from the On Demand service if it will cost them per Gig.
This is an excellent method for alienating an entire customer base in one simple step.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
"Most cable areas have ZERO competition for broadband."
Do you have a source for this, or is this another one of those ubiquitous but also spurious slashdot claims that fall apart under real scrutiny?
Satellite is available throughout most of the US. That pretty much kills your un-sourced argument right there. Of course, now the trolls will try to act like satellite doesn't count, that always seems to happen when they're told it's existence makes their "cable monopoly" rant fall apart.
"This will place internet out of the reach of many who cannot afford the costs associated with a price per gig system."
Oh please! Get your boss to pay for it.
"Lets remember people that the cable conglomerates are in this to make serious money at any expense."
And the pirates are in it for the charity work. Who do you think you're fooling?
"If Microsoft's Patch Tuesday puts me over my limit, who's going to pay for it?"
You are, since you made the adult choice to use Windows and update each separate machine.
There are alternatives which let you download updates such as Heises Offline Update.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The problem with broadband over powerlines is that it wreaks havok on several of the HAM bands in the US. See http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/bpl-deployment.html
I'm at my office. I use the lowest tier of Time Warner's Business Internet (purportedly 1.5 meg up and down - but usually 600k up according to Speakeasy / DSLReports) for $200/mo. At home, across a state line, I have Time Warner home Internet at ~4.5 down and ~1.3 meg up - at $49.00/mo.
.PDF files all in excess of a gig.
.mov file? Besides the year it takes to encrypt it - most of my clients and most other attorneys simply don't use PGP.
I routinely use VPN contact with my office computer network and I have downloaded 2-3 gig video depo files. I can easily have evidentiary material scanned into tens of
I routinely use video streaming to take Continuing Legal Education courses and those also involve a massive conference call with all of the participants. If I am already paying $250/mo for Internet and $400 + for a Video streamed CLE and I make use of my VPN connections I'm going to be in the top 5% of bandwidth users and it is all 100% legit. How much of a surcharge are these twits planning? A normal month will be dozens if not hundreds of gigs of data. My primary email is through a web hosting company that I negotiated "unlimited" file size with (effectively that "unlimited email is about 600 meg) and posting unencrypted client data to a private server is a massive ethical violation.
Anybody want to guess what PGP does with a 4.2 gig
So, what do I do? Buy a ton of Firelite drives and Fedex data? Does this even make sense?
Hell, if I spend any time researching the law on Westlaw and Lexis (not to mention Thomas) I'll download a few gig. EVERY MONTH.
I'm a solo practitioner with an active litigation practice (primarily Federal) and I can't think of a better reason than this new scheme to REGULATE the @#$%^&* out of the access providers.
I could see what these guys at TW are thinking.
"If we implement this cap, the 5% of our user base will pick up and use another provider thus solving our infrastructure problems."
There just going to ward off the heavy users, and your typically dumb home user will continue to pay for their service. They are probably thinking that no one else will care but the heavy users, thus eliminating their infrastructure problem.
Sad thing is...it will probably work to.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
So far there haven't been any rumblings like this from Verizon. Hopefully it stays that way. Thankfully fios equipment will be in here soon.
It's like DSL, only worse. It radiates into the HF environment, interfering with things like ham radio and shortwave broadcast.
And it's a bad idea. You'll always be on shared media, fighting terrible RFI and on a medium that was never designed to move anything but 60Hz power. That's in addition to the fact that the medium also has deadly voltages on it. Bad idea.
By that reasoning, the average person should see their bill go down if these prices go into effect, right? After all, right now they are subsidizing the use of the bandwidth hogs. If the ISP is merely trying to redistribute their charges fairly, and ensure that nobody abuses the system, the per-gig fee should be low enough that most people's monthly bill goes down dramatically.
Of course that won't happen, because what they really want is to raise prices overall, not to make things fair.
A per-gig fee structure would actually be GREAT for consumers if it was priced fairly. After all, when you buy "unlimited," the ISP has actually estimated your usage and charged you a little more. If you don't use what they estimate, you're being overcharged. And if you use way MORE than they estimated, I'M being overcharged to cover your usage. That's hardly fair.
While we're at it, let's eliminate the convoluted "plan" structures of cell carriers and go to a per-minute fee. That would make it awfully easy to see who gives the best deal, wouldn't it?
Of course this is likely an attempt to go from the "unlimited use" shell game to the "overpriced, competition-throttling" strategy. Business as usual.
It just struck me today, but cable internet companies have a rather similar model to insurance companies. Insurance companies work by taking a large group of people, charging each of them a fee depending on relative risk, and paying out benefits when a few of the people die. However, in the long run, the insurance company will take in more premiums than give out in benefits, thus ensuring a profit.
Cable companies do the same thing: they take a large group of customers and offer them "insurance" i.e. bandwidth. Most of the users will not use a large amount of bandwidth, but a few will "die" and use up a LOT of bandwidth. Unfortunately for the cable companies, they didn't anticipate the "mortality" of the users very well, and the amount of bandwidth being used on average is increasing as time goes by.
I guess I'm just saying that it seems stupid for the cable companies to be complaining about the 5% of users that do use up a large amount of bandwidth, because that would be like insurance companies complaining about people dying. If the cable companies are losing money because they miscalculated the amount of "insurance" they were going to be providing, then they shouldn't be blaming their customers.
What can they do now? Well, if they've truly miscalculated the amount of bandwidth people were going to be using (and aren't just lying so they can increase their prices), then they can't keep charging the same fees or else they will eventually go bankrupt. This means that they must either increase their general or "aggregate" fees, or to increase the fees for the users that are anticipated to use a large amount of bandwidth (select fees). Alternately, they can get out of the "insurance" business altogether, and to go to this "pay per gigabyte" model.
As a rural guy who only has the option of one DSL line for every few miles, the idea seems really applealing. But the tolerances for staying in phase and frequency per generating plant are way to high to be able to allow that. Despite what is taught in physics classes, AC power out of the wall is nowhere near a perfect sine.
Even if it does, it will be short-lived.
People don't like metered service for this kind of service. They hate watching the clock, counting the minutes, worrying that they may cross over into the next pricing tier.
People love flat rate plans. It's what they have now, and they won't go back without a lot of kicking and screaming.
So far, the summary of all of the comments has been "I, Joe Customer, am outraged to pay another cent more for a service which I utilize - to the fullest."
I am not trying to defend cable telcos here, but let's look at it from their perspective for just a moment. One of the biggest things which telcos are fighting right now, is to not be treated like a "dumb pipe." Why? They have spent a significant amount of money to build complex networks (fiber and coax), data centers, and their goal is to recoup the cost of their investment. After all, they are a business as well.
Now, by setting the prices of access to this network, they are estimating that the average customer will stay with them for a period of, say, 5 to 7 years. This goes into the formula to figure out how much the monthly fees should be, based on equipment aging, breakdowns, etc... Usage and growth is factored in, as well.
Now, you have a service like iTunes, or NetFlix, which severely stresses your network infrastructure. This situation requires for them to start upgrading their network much sooner than expected, spending more on infrastructure than previously thought. Just another reminder: they are a business.
Why do I mention the business bit so often - it's pretty simple. You come to them as a customer, expecting a certain level of service. They have other customers who invest in them externally (stock market). As long as things are running smoothly, the company revenues grow, and everyone is happy: the home customer is getting good service, and the investor is getting good return. However, if the company starts to falter and provide shitty service to end-customers, customers leave. This reflects in the bottom line, which in turn, can be seen on the stock market. Investors see the company is not performing "well," so they don't invest.
What's the solution? I am sure that many telcos have toyed with the idea of charging an extra service fee to companies like iTunes and NetFlix. Call it a "network improvement fee." I think it makes sense - after all, these companies are relying on the telcos "dumb pipe" to deliver goods to customers, from which the telcos do not see any revenue. Should end-customers have to pay the same? Perhaps to a smaller degree. It should depend on a minimum guarantee which is established between a telco and an end-customer.
It is also worth noting here that the stress on the infrastructure is partly (a significant portion, actually) based on the amount of SPAM and "dark traffic" flowing across telco networks. Last year, SPAM topped 90% of all email delivered. Sure, maybe SMTP traffic accounts for only (say) 40% of all web traffic, but that is not an insignificant number. One way to combat this, is to filter traffic which enters and leaves a telcos "private" network. How would you feel about that? You can get more speed, but you won't be able to run a web or mail server on your cable modem. Would you be happy with such a compromise?
Sometimes, too many choices, or lack of direction, actually limits your ability to choose. I think as end-customers, we need to stop and think about the choices we are making, and become more self-critical. It's not possible to have everything all the time - we will end up paying for it sometime - sooner or later.
In certain areas in Serbia you can get Wifi this way. You buy an amount of data (the minimum is 100MB, which costs about 1.5US$), and then you use that on the city-wide wifi network until it runs out.
It is pretty successful I think, since the flat-rate users are capped in favor of the MB-based ones, so I bet that Time Warner will declare the experiment 'successful' and then use this new metric (in case the users don't revolt or start to flee the service).
Let me tell you, dear Time Warner users that this will SUCK bigtime. Better change providers before this happens.
I thought we were done with the "per meg/gig" pricing scheme back in the 90's.
Do you get angry when the Electric company charges based on usage? Or the gas or water companies?
Why is it that everyone gets steamed when internet access charges are based on usage?
What are they going to do with all of that incoming bandwidth usage from all of those port scanners / trojans / bots from external systems? Will they still charge us for that?
I am a TWC customer in the midwest .. I subscribe to their digital phone + digital cable + "turbo" internet package .. virtually every service they offer.
.. I'd do so in a heartbeat. I'd have to suffer with 1.5 meg DSL (15,000 cable ft from CO) .. but I can saturate that line with little trouble ..
.. not the fastest connection, but averaged out over 24 hour periods and it works out fine (just don't use VZ .. 5 gigs per month isn't enough for basic web browsing and VPN ,. let alone "casual" usage).
While it would cost me more per month to get these from AT&T
The only other option I think anybody could come up with would be to get a EVDO / HSDPA data card for one of the machines and have it act like a transfer mule
Can we then count on these ISPs proactively blocking all the ads since I don't want them contributing to my bandwidth usage? Oh and don't charge me for any spam that gets through either.
Didn't think so.
If it wasn't for the multimedia aspect of the web, which they helped to perpetuate, most would have never HAD to upgrade to the higher priced cable/broadband services. (Have you tried surfing the net with 56K dial-up...it's a nightmare! Now they want to get greedy and charge per bandwidth usage. They claim, "As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network." So?
First of all, how many of those are small-medium businesses, coffee bars and the like that are already paying through the nose for their business service? It's not like poor Joe Schmo can't join because all the bandwidth is used up! Don't fall into the trap--they just want to create a class of 'broadband enviers' to get users screaming for parity. But parity or "fairness" always ends up meaning EVERYONE's rate goes up. Who's to know if you're actually using as much bandwidth as they claim? It will be an easy way to raise rates...they'll just claim you're using more and so they need to upgrade your service.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
The biggest problem in my eyes is that it is *not* going to be billed like electricity, and it's really fucking frustrating.
See, the electric company doesn't tell you that you have to pay $30/month for 750 kWh, and if you use more than that you get cut off. If they did, you'd end up with a lot of really pissed off people, and there's be a lot of people paying $100/month for 2500 kWh -- even when their average usage might be under 1000 kWh -- because the penalty of getting cut off would be much worse than the extra money they pay.
But this is exactly what the cable companies are proposing. If they billed it like electric, say $10 base charge plus 25 cents per gigabyte, I'd be ecstatic. But no... they want to bill it as $20 for a 20GB cap, $30 for a 30GB cap, and so on. So I can't pay less on months that I use less, and more on months that I use more -- I have to look into my crystal ball and predict how much I think I'm going to use every month for the next year, figure out what the best plan would be based on my maximum usage, and always be looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm not getting too close to my cap.
BUNCH OF FUCKING ASSHOLES!
I'm sure the electric company would bill this way too if they could get away with it, but we have regulations in place so the electric company can't gouge you like this. We need the same regulations in place for the cable/DSL providers. If they like the local monopolies we grant them, then they should be willing to live by some fair rules.
Just call it, something like 'close to unlimited' and print very clearly the maximum transfer, should be a couple hundred gig per month. And setup a good policy for going over or close to over. The price for the 95% should STAY THE SAME or GO DOWN. Those 5% heavy users should pay MORE, but they should be clearly aware of the policy, and the service can NOT be called 'unlimited'
Those who can, do.
I've been a happy Verizon broadband customer for a long time (DSL for 5 years, FIOS for 2.5). So far, so good, but Verizon's hardly a benevolent company. What makes you think they won't go to per-GB pricing if everybody else does?
Instead of growing new capacity and adding capabilities, sit on what you got and charge more. Nobody really needs more capacity! 64k bytes is the largest computer anyone will ever need!
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
I think 40GB plain would be quite reasonable for most users, including myself (MMO player and occasional P2P user). It should also be a tad cheaper than the currently popular "unmetered" services because the really excessive downloaders would be removed from the cost calculation.
;-)
"Unmetered" in quotation marks because attempts of various providers to sabotage high volume usage are well documented
Of course, "a tad cheaper" than what is currently offered as "unmetered" in the market would be cheap enough that everybody can afford it. So I see little demand for the 5GB only service. Unless they make the 10-, 20-, and 40-gigabyte quotas more expensive than what is currently offered as "unmetered". In which case, I see users taking off for the competition...
Assuming the 40-gigabyte quota is widely accepted, people would still be able to download several movies per month, on top of doing other stuff, without exceeding their quota. I'm assuming a more efficient compression than MPEG-2 here, H.264 for instance will use much less bandwidth.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Don't misunderstand me; I hate the cable people, but I understand where they are coming from. Verizon and other big phone people pay a lot less to be a ISP. The cable guy have to pay by how much bandwidth they use; Verizon does not. But you can look at it a 2nd way. Unlike cable, Verizon is required by law to have a very high uptime on phone. This uptime cost them a lot of money. By having this high uptime on phone, they are more likely to have a high uptime as a ISP. Cable does not have this add cost. In some areas they have up time below 90%. When I stop buying cable, It was going out at less 1 week every mouth. They got better in the last few years, but I am not going back. In summery: Cable should cost more become of Bandwidth cost, but less because of less reliability.
So long as the cable companies also apply the high-traffic fees to the movies downloaded via their video on demand services, I see no problem for paying for the capacity you use. However, if these fees are being used to prevent competitors from having equal access to the cable marketplace, then there is a significant problem here. Then the question becomes, why can't Time Warner and Comcast compete without a favorable bias in the marketplace?
That's retarded. Normal users aren't going to do that, hell, I wouldn't. I'm not going to set up WSUS or download and try and set up some third party software just to update the handful of PCs my family has at home so I can game the bandwidth meter maids. And Windows isn't the only one with updates, nor are OS's the only thing with updates. Games, office suites, utilities, patches, virus updates....there's a whole ton of potential data transfer in the background before you even get into stuff like streaming video, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, emusic, etc. This whole thing is a stupid, stupid idea.
Here in Florida (where I am) we have 4 options:
* Comcast's cable
* AT&T's DSL
* ClearWire
* Wireless via t-mobile, AT&T, Verizon etc
I don't know about everywhere else, but we have 4 options here which is hardly a monopoly. (There is also T1, T3, Comcast business etc service available but I exclude that since it is more business oriented).
Just as the phone system has gone from per minute usage models to flat rate, any attempt to go to per usage will lose market share as the competitors will pounce. DSL is advertised heavily as much cheaper than Cable (but lower speed). If Cable tries that model, the price would have to drop a lot for AT&T to not eat their lunch
They'd still want to if all of the high-bandwidth-users basically paid up and kept their consumption the same.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
So what you're saying is, "I use a TON of this resource, but I hate paying more than people who use less."
I mean yeah, you're paying a lot, and if I were you I'd hate to see my prices go up, but still - I'm a user who doesn't pull a lot of bandwidth. If I'm your neighbor, and there's a choice between:
1)You paying more than me because you use more
and
2)We pay the same
...it's pretty easy to see that in scenario 2, I'm subsidizing your usage.
We've got broadband companies right now selling connections fast enough to stream or download SD video, and we're reaching the stage where HD over IP is looking plausable, but the absurd usage caps mean that it's of absolutely no use to anyone. Brick-and-mortal movie and game stores have absolutely nothing to fear from digital distribution when the average joe's monthly usage cap barely covers a dual-layer DVD. At the rate things are changing (BT's mainstream ADSL package has gone up from about 2GB/month to 5GB/month in about three years) we won't be downloading HD films for a couple of decades.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Whether the unit is 1GB, 10GB, or 100GB, they should offer pricing-per-unit with realistic cost-plus-reasonable-profit for each unit.
There is a cell-phone company that does this with overtime: They charge like $30 or something for a block of several hundred minutes. You use what you pay for, rounded up to the next whole block.
$7.50/GB is simply punitive, meant to discourage going over.
Now, companies do have fixed per-customer costs. This can be taken care of by either having a customer fee or by having a minimum monthly bill. For example, $15 + 10 cents a GB, or 10 cents a GB with a $20 minimum are probably reasonable prices for most people. That jacks up the price of a movie by maybe 13 cents.
At 8Mb/sec, a monthlong leeching session runs 2,592GB, or $259 at 10 cents a GB. Even if the cost were 50 cents a GB, which is on the high side, the full-bore max-usage heavy user would pay close to $1300. Yes, this is prohibitive for the middle-class user but we can't all be rich. In the meantime, a movie would have a "transport fee" of $0.65, less than it costs NetFlix for postage and packaging.
Some of the $259 or $1300 or whatever/month that some rich users are willing to pay would be kept as "retained earnings" and used to improve the infrastructure, benefiting everyone.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Can you imagine the legal NIGHTMARE time warner will have when all these people with open out of the box wireless start getting the bill for all thier neighbors traffic? I pay for my connection, but I've known a lot of people that just leech of someone else, and download anything and everything they can get thier hands on over the 'free' bandwidth.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
I'm going back to Verizon or Cavtel. Screw this.
Thankfully, American consumers are rather stupid. Take your average customer who downloads an average of 50 MB/month. Give them the choice of a 5GB quota for $38, or an unlimited plan for $45. They'll choose the unlimited plan every time.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
i am one of the few lucky ones to have BPL, i purposely moved into the testing region, and its amazing. but one thing i noticed leading up to the install day is that they where having fiber run to my apartment, soooo apparently the power company is not using the power lines to transfer the data around town, and i think thats exactly why they are so slow in their expansion, they just don't want to spend the money to run a new set of fiber around the city
I work for Allegiance Communications in Oklahoma, and we already do this basically. The difference is that we have bandwidth / gig packages without caps, we just charge extra if you go over your limit and most people don't have a problem with that. for example, if you choose our top end package for home use (residential gamer package) you get 5 meg down 1.5 meg up, and usage rate of 50 gigabytes per month. If you go over the 50, you get charged. However most people (even people downloading movies) don't use that up. Those who do are likely hosting servers or doing something else and don't mind if they get charged the extra fee simply because they were told before hand that we do it. Now we are even looking at offering extra usage each month for small fees (an extra 50gigs for $7 more, ect). Usage fees without caps and monitoring can work, it just has to be done ethically. As for the low low bandwith of 1 gig... well, even our basic users occupy that. Anything less than 10gig a month (which is as low as we go) is just ripping off your customers.
Yummie... spoof IAP ids in order to charge others for your net consumption!
... Back to prehistoric age?
Everybody is fighting for an international telephony monthly fee (no more conversation time rates...) in order to make harmless(for your bank account) id spoofing for telephony over IP (via SIP or better)...
Hey! Warner! What's next?
>If BOP would really work, why do we still have human meter readers? Why doesn't the meter transmit its usage back over the same lines it's pulling power?
Very good point.
A lot of electric utilities have recently upgraded electric meters with RFID or radio, so the meter worker can simply drive by the house for a reading. This suggests two things:
a) they know that powerline transfers are not reliable. (Why 'modernize' to radio if you can simply phone home?)
b) Stock pumping. All those 'powerline trials' occurred.. what.. 10 years ago? This lead to stock bumps, mostly to serve the company and the analysts.
When Google takes an interest in data over power, then things get interesting, as they tend to look at technology investments from a technology perspective first.
This technology has gone nowhere, so far.
But back to the topic, I can't get FIOS where I live. The whole zipcode is FIOS, but our condo association dragged their feet on inviting FIOS to do an install. By the time they did contact Verizon, Verizon had already stopped NH installations (and sent all their NH engineers deep into long Mass commutes to punish them for speaking out on the FairPoint sale...)
Oh, for reference zero usage monitoring is key in this. We as ISPs should never care about what you are doing with your bandwidth. We aren't charging you to access your porn, we are charging you a toll to occupy our highway to get to it. Its none of our business what you keep in your packets!
People just need to realize that as an ISP the pipe doesn't magically get bigger, it costs alot of money to get that bandwidth to increase and believe it or not what you pay per month doesn't all go to us. The actual profit margin for an ISP that actually maintains equipment and lines is about 10% of what you pay. So, if you are a customer and you pay $50 a month for internet, only $5 of that is profit. It takes alot of $5 increments to make the millions it takes to upgrade a provider plant.
Your stat is a bit off, the cost per GB is only that low (I would have written $0.10, but OK...) is when you get the data in a multi-homed Tier 1 data center sitting on top of an interstate fiber nexus.
The cost of "edge" bandwidth is much higher as you have local bottlenecks in your Metropolitan Area Network (MAN).
A fairer comparison might be to the cost of industrial T1, E10, and T3 products which bring bandwidth the "last mile" to industrial facilities. That would give you an edge cost somewhere around $1.00 per GB.
If edge bandwidth was as cheap as you say, hosting providers would still host in their own physical facilities, whereas most of them use cages in centralized data centers to take advantage of the much cheaper DC bandwidth.
It might result in lower base prices.
Yeah, I know, this is pretty optimistic, but there are a couple of factors which make me optimistic.
1/ This has the power to mightily piss off some major players. Itunes & Netflix will be directly and negatively impacted. Where Time Warner has a monopoly and use it to the detriment of a competitor (Itunes or Netflix), then you can sure that those two are not going to sit back and say "damn, there goes our business model", especially when Time Warner is delivering their own competing product at subsidised rates. Lobbyists will be called, major pressure will be brought to bear.
2/ This would be a major and detrimental change to peoples contracts, so they would be free to cancel without penalty (they probably won't know it, and the cable companies will try to deny it, but...).
I would be happy with $ per Gb charging, as long as I had real competition with the suppliers. Let the bandwidth hogs pay more than grandma. The idea is not bad, but there needs to be some real changes to stop it from being just another ploy to tighten their grip over digital content provision. The good thing is there are getting some mightily powerful players on the other side of the fence now.
Zapsavings: Simply calculate how much energy efficient bulb
My local power monopoly never promised unlimited juice for a flat monthly rate. The local cable monopoly claimed unlimited access at X transfer rate for a flat monthly fee. You're trying to compare apples and oranges, here.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
hear hear!
effing netzero still has 10 hours/month free dialup.
i've about had it with time-warner...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
OTOH, if they see revenue from every gigabyte you download, then they have an incentive to facilitate your usage, rather than transparently throttling it whenever you use a service with an inconveniently large network footprint. As more people download more content, their infrastructure takes a beating with the unlimited plans they now have trouble providing. Per-gigabyte pricing means they have an incentive to upgrade rather than throttle, because there's money in it for them.
Consolidation of ownership notwithstanding, ISPs built their infrastructure and "unlimited" plans around assumptions of usage that are no longer valid. This would be a problem even in a healthy, competitive market. The push to tiered QoS with bandwidth hogs like iTunes and YouTube being throttled is, at least in part, a response to this. ISPs don't want to expose users to the costs of their usage, so they're trying to blackmail it out of everyone else. From a network neutrality perspective, per-gigabyte pricing is great, because it means Time Warner wins whether I'm downloading from iTunes, YouTube, BitTorrrent, etc. It doesn't matter to them because they can simply bill me according to my usage (or, I'll cut back, or, I'll switch to another ISP and take my heavy usage with me).
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
OK this is a good chance for me to vent about the poor service from Internet, phone and cable providers.
... No DSL ... No DSL ... No DSL
... and a little more and after hell freezes over get to talk to someone.
... that do me no good without Internet. Fios is not yet available in the area and I would not want it if it was. A land line phone works when the power goes out, fios does not ... they say it does ... but it only lasts as long as the battery back up that they claim lasts 6 -8 hrs ... so I go to work ... power goes out .. I get home .. no power no phone no way to complain to get it fixed. If I wanted that I'd just use my vonage box I can take that with me to someplace that does have power / or run the stinking thing of an inverter.
Time line Jan 3 purchase a house.
That day call Comcast to set up cable TV and Internet.
Wonder why the phone is ringing when the previous owner should have had it turned off.
Comcast shows up 1 week later says signal strength inside the house is too low. Checks outside says signal strength at the pole is also too low and we can't get service till it is fixed. He leaves and comcast is never heard from again, 2 weeks later we are sick of waiting and tell them to attempt asexual reproduction.
Dish network comes out to install sat TV, says the main satellite is only at 26 deg elevation and will be blocked by the neighbors trees in the summer.
Why is the phone still ringing?
Call DSL provider, quantum explain that I want DSL and phone. The folks are helpful but they do not offer phone service.
Plug in a phone and answer it when it rings. Discover that the phone line in our house is also connected to the phone line in another house.
Call Cavalier telephone tell them we need phone and DSL. They explain the lines are owned by Verizon and it can take a few days to get set up.
Verizon guy comes out, figures out our phone lines are connected to another house. Disconnects our phone from the line. Now the phone is not cross wired but it not connected to anything either.
No phone
No phone
No phone
Call Cavalier when will I have phone? "It's moving along end of this week or beginning of next week"
Notice cell phone has "no network coverage" in the house when it was working albeit poorly before.
Still no phone
Still no phone
Call Cavalier back and say WTF when will I have phone?
Wait on hold, wait some more
O your account has been placed on "hold" because Verizon says they do not have enough capacity to connect our phone. They tell us that we'll have to wait till a line frees up ie someone 1) dies 2) moves and unless we are willing to get a shotgun and take out a neighbor there is nothing we can do to get phone service.
So No cable TV, no cable Internet, NO satellite TV, no satellite Internet, No Phone, NO dial-up, NO DSL, No cell service... it is Feb 5 on the 18th the analog cell towers go dark so even my old bag phone will not be able to dial 911. I have 2 vonage voice over IP boxes
I live near Baltimore MD an area with over 8 million people, I can't get a basic phone line. My Grandfather lives in a town of less than 800 people out in the middle of nowhere in rural Nebraska they have phone, and Internet and cable TV. He said I need to move to civilization.
It Really stinks having to watch your bandwidth. I don't have the option of buying into a higher plan, I've got the highest plan currently offered. You don't want a metered plan, trust me.
My employer has done some work for a company that makes devices that automatically take the reading, send it by radio (I think) to a device on a nearby telephone pole, and then the readings are sent over the phone lines. No drive-by required for this company's devices, as far as I know.
I'm really bothered by the fact that Time Warner controls entire cities and other companies control other areas. I would prefer to have cable internet (i can't get dsl where I am and I don't want satellite or dial up) So when they come up with a stupid idea like this, I have no viable alternative but to put up with it. It would be better for consumers to have two competing cable companies in cities rather than one. Maybe this is a bad idea but why not make the cable pipelines controlled by tax payers money (like the us road system is) and have the cable companies share it.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Sad to see this go on. 5 Gb a month is a joke. My family's had TW since it first came to our area, and been very happy with them. Our only other choices are At&t DSL, U-verse, or insight cable. If they go through with this change we'll switch in a heart beat. Maybe losing a few thousand customers will be incentive enough to remind them to stop lining their executive's pockets and start investing in increasing the capacity of their network.
If the problem of port throttling becomes widespread, you will see even more applications using port 80 or user-selectable ports by default.
Some ISPs have countered that by deep-packet inspection. That can be countered by masquerading to look like ordinary http: or https: web traffic.
The only thing that is hard to counter is the burstiness/timing profile. "Ordinary" web traffic tends to be between 1 and a few dozen or maybe 100 quick "get" requests followed by between a few seconds and a few minutes of low activity then repeat. On the other hand, background downloads, streaming traffic, and torrents tend to be full-throttle for longer periods of time, which make them easy to spot and degrade.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
hat has much more to do with the less sophisticated law enforcement in those countries
Please stop this kind of faulty thinking. While this sounds plausible, there is not an ounce of truth contained within the statement. Reality suggests some combination of the following:
1. Activity is not illegal or otherwise unenforced. This is a classic developing nation strategy. Consumers in these countries cannot afford developed-nation pricing for the content in question, so they use it as they see fit.
2. IP owners don't particularly care. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft operate under the general idea that today's pirate is tomorrow's customer. They benefit more from piracy than they would otherwise have you believe. That is why retail products like photoshop still ship without hardware drm.
3. There is no sophistication required!!!! This is a petty crime in every country industrialized or otherwise. A DA will not devote much time or effort to the case because it won't get them re-elected. It's pretty much the copyright cartel driving these prosecutions.
4. The crime-fighting budget devoted to copyright infringement is a meaningless compared to other priorities. The vast, vast majority of the "piracy ring busted" news-ish content is PR designed to make developed-nation consumers afraid or to give the perception that "piracy is not welcome in our country" PR.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Indeed.
Most here want neutral ISPs. The only way we're going to get that is if the ISP makes money either way, and their "unlimited" plans aren't the way to do that. They were built around assumptions of usage that are no longer valid with bittorrent, iTunes, YouTube, etc being as big as they are now.
One response is to throttle services that consume too many resources. The other is to bill according to usage and upgrade as necessary. That way, Time Warner has a business case to roll out their upgrades and facilitate higher usage, regardless of what you're doing with it.
A neutral network is metered by the gb.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Its as bad as these colocation services that charge a flat fee plus a few dollars a gig.. Bandwith is stunningly cheap when you buy it in quanity. Even so, lets do a little thought experment. Lets say I have a 56k modem, and I can get 5k/sec. There are ~2592000 seconds in a month, so this means running full bore, I can download ~12G a month on a _MODEM_. The end result is people will start finding alternatives. Aka go to the local wireless cafe, if time warner does this I _WILL_ switch. I've been looking at alternatives since they started throttling upload speeds everytime they raised the download speed. I got better service from them 10 years ago, back when the max download speed was only 2mbit. Back then the upload speed was 1mbit, and my ports wern't being blocked.
It means that they're selling the wrong group of products. If 95% of your customers are throwing away a large portion of what they paid for, and the other 5% are taking more than they paid for, that's a hint that you need to sell a smaller product more cheaply to the 95% and a larger more expensive product to the 5%.
Of course, because this is the real world, what TW is going to try to do is leverage their monopoly to gouge everybody, but there is a central issue here which is that selling only by bandwidth no longer works as well given current internet usage behaviors. Large and frequent file downloads are here to stay. So a market for total data transfer opens up, and ISPs start to charge people for what they're really using, which is bandwidth and total transfer/time period.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Given alternatives this would be a non-story. Unfortunately, we have no real alternatives because of oppressive practices in the cable industry, so this is a huge story. I live in Austin, which is a fairly robust technology city, yet my choices in broadband are what again? Oh yeah, Time Warner. I can drop Time Warner and get Dish Network (their HD content and recorder kills Time Warner's options) but what am I to do for broadband?
You're offering 50 gigabytes. Time Warner is apparently considering offering 5, 10, or 20 gigabytes. Their *high end* plan is stingier than yours.
The definition doesn't need to move, redefining terms is an invitation to confusion. At the very least you would need versioning, which is hard enough in specs, just look at the USB debacle. Just define a new word, which I would argue the marketing folks have already done; "High Speed" internet, which even then really means more like 1 Mbps+ (more than enough for YouTube, etc. btw) Maybe we need even newer words for 5+ Mbps, 10Mbps, 20+ Mbps, and 50+ mbps. Maybe even plan for the future, and define 100+ Mbps and 500+ Mbps (I vote "Plaid" for that one) But then you start ignoring the upload speed (my favorite bit of FIOS, 2Mbps up), and drive away incentive for incremental upgrades. Why go from 5Mbps to 8Mbps, we're still calling it "Ultra speed". But then, now they advertise "real" speeds (if theoretically real), and even now I can't understand why I would pay $10/month more for 15Mbps FIOS versus 5Mbps FIOS (both are faster than the aggregate speed of my ASP employers 3 T-1's
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Great theory except their sister company Warner Bros sells their content on there too.
How good can it be, if it isn't HD?
Pay attention! The last mile IS controlled by the government, which is supposedly "a non-profit public-interest organization". Your local city/county government controls the last mile and issues/sells limited/exclusive "concessions" to providers. Time Warner can't come to your neighborhood unless your local municipal government authorizes it. The fact that your local government sells monopolies to the first highest bidder doesn't mean that Time Warner is originally in control.
It all starts with your local Fat Cat and you elected him or failed to prevent him gaining office through voter apathy.
Apologies for replying to my own comment but there's one other thing I can throw in here.
One Idaho Power engineer told me it's not the actual power lines that are the most valuable for BOP. It's the right of way. Electrical utilities have an incredible above ground, easy access, last mile network with well established, legal right-of-way. In that network, they can lay in whatever they want.
I remember one engineer talking about a little (experimental) robot that wound fiber along the existing power lines. Fiber doesn't interfere with the existing lines and wasn't effected by the huge RFI.
Should I feel bad for the premium newsgroup services I'm not paying extra for? Would it be wrong for Verizon to cap access outside their network while giving users unlimited access to services brought into their internal network?
Man, Time Warner must be living in the glory of the golden age of Internet.
I'm sitting here with more than 100Mb/s of Internet connectivity. 5GB/MO? Heck, that's one DVD ISO (OpenSUSE.) I'll download that in an hour. (Limited by bandwidth of the other end.)
Must suck to be you to be limited to 5GB. And since Microsoft SP2, Office SP up to SP3, and such can eat a huge percentage of that, you just know folks will be bitching to Microsoft about that.
download music faster!
download movies faster!
play games faster!
this was the mantra that cable-tv-turned-isp has been chanting to the public for years!
now they want to change the billing model because some youngblood-hotshot-harvard-kellogg-MBA didn't realize that preaching faster downloads equates to higher bandwidth usage... or they intentionally planned to entice end users to switch to their network with the express intent of pulling a bait-and-switch on the billing model once the general public has swallowed whole, hook-line-sinker. either way it's stupid or underhanded...
here's a comcast press release specifically tauting faster mp3 download speeds
here's an RCN press release claiming speedier download speeds for videos, music, games, etc.
interestingly enough, aol/time-warner/roadrunner have been more discreet regarding claims of faster music and video downloading, perhaps because of their pre-existing media interests.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I had BPL(Current.net) as of a year or so ago here in Cincinnati and it definitely had a long way to go. At first it was amazing for torrenting as I could upload/download at a symmetrical 3-4 megs. I thought for sure they were a strong answer to capped upload cable. Then somebody moved in to our neighbordhood who was actually doing some serious P2P hosting and drove the entire neighborhood's max speeds down to sub 1.5 megs max, even causing packet loss on their switches. After months of free service, back and forth troubleshooting with their network engineers in NY who I got on first name basis with, they finally said there was nothing they could do. They didn't have the power to limit this person's activity and any sort of back side reconfiguration they tried had no effect either. How QoS couldn't be done on their system for an offending user who they had warned multiple times is beyond me, but I also found out that their shared runs are only 6 megs. While they sell tiered speeds(1, 2, and 3 megs), it only took one user to bring down the whole neighborhood of roughly 30-50 users. There was also some very weird issue with lag in games caused by unexplicable packet delay. The technology they were using was so new that not even their top engineers could figure it out, even though they admitted it was an issue. Finally, your modem has to be plugged in close to your main breaker box to get a full 3 megs. In apartment buildings, this is naturally hard to achieve. I can only imagine bad wiring, bad breaker boxes, etc imposes further noise/signal problems.
This is what you get when you allow a monopoly to provide a critical service like Internet, TV, or telephone.
I find it interesting that you identify these services as critical. Last I checked, none of these were necessary for sustaining life or maintaining a livable environment. I'd put water, sewer and heat down as critical services. Maybe you could stretch it to include telephone service if you considered it a lifeline for emergency situations. I can't really imagine a situation where the lack of television service or internet service would be life threatening or make a dwelling uninhabitable.
Not A Sig
They're determined to look like they support different media, but are determined that people will pay those Blu-Ray rates, aren't they...
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
For 90% of the time I don't use much bandwidth. But recently we downloaded and watch a movie in HD off the xbox 360. That single HD movie was 5.2G. I'm sure they have nightmares of thousands of the "other 95%" starting to have these options to suck huge tons of bandwidth. So there is a real problem, in addition to them just being greedy bastards and wanting you to watch their pay-per-view.
It seems that once again, we have a case of a big company with control of a distribution channel and an effective monopoly in a lot of its market areas, who is claiming the lion's share of the sales price of a "work of art". In an earlier story today, we read about the RIAA's latest attempt to give artists even less of the sales price of a CD. The writer's strike comes from the fact that writers mostly get no money at all from even legal network downloads.
It's perhaps not so unusual that an ISP/cable company would see this as an opportunity. Why should they let those recording companies and movie studios get to claim all the profits without sharing them with the artists? An ISP also has a monopoly in most localities, so they should also be able claim monopoly rents from the studios, right?
I wonder if the folks involved in the Congressional "net neutrality" discussion are paying attention? Probably, because they'd see an opportunity for big personal profit ("campaign contributions") from the companies involved. To the detriment of both artists and audience, but they're just a bunch of, uh, customers, y'know.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Imagine if they charged a "fair" per-GB price. The P2P hosting guy would pay 10x or more than the rest of you.
This would give the power company extra revenue they could use to put in more equipment, either to isolate this guy entirely or to divide the neighborhood up so no one part was saturated.
"but I also found out that their shared runs are only 6 megs" - that works only when combined demand over that shared run is 6 megs 95% of the time.
A few years ago, my cable company came out and said they split neighborhoods when demand approached x% of current capacity. While I don't know if that is true or not I do know that while I had them speeds when up every year or two and I never felt congested by my neighbors' behavior.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You would have a valid argument if you actually had to pay to increase the bandwidth capacity out of your own pockets. But, the reality is that most infrastructure improvements are paid for by the taxpayers in the form of MASSIVE tax abatements. I would challenge you to find a single infrastructure project by any ISP, anywhere in the US, that was not subsidized or paid-for outright by tax abatements.
I can see someone with teenagers living in their house using a lot of bits each month for their VOIP service. What happens when you go over the limit, based solely on the amount of VOIP traffic?
Do calls to 911 (US emergency number) count?
Chip H.
As an active user of Second Life, among other high bandwidth demanding applications (ie. Joost) etc. this would really suck.
Infact, i would be forced NOT to use Second Life etc. and forced to change providers, or not use net really at all, ultimately, leaving my workstation useless also.
I use upto 15Gb of bandwidth per day, WITHOUT downloading anything big. At other times, i might be churning backups from my servers, which can be upto 100Gb total, and i SHOULD take all those backups every couple weeks, but do it less often, except for databases. At this time, in 2days and 7hours 35minutes my computer has been on, upstream is 965Mb and downstream 13.97Gb, nevermind how much BW my GF uses.
I'm also assuming they ask something ridiculously high like 1USD per gig.
Hell, viewing a video or two each day on youtube would likely exhaust that 10Gb in a month.
I know in Germany they have/had something similar, without much success. They also tried here (Finland) but they just 'vanished' before even DSL or cable came popular, and was still very few ones luxury. Infact, uncapped, 10Mbps downstream cable was rather a norm if any broadband during the day.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Why do they immediately think Apple iTunes as the target????
The real target are the millions of DirectTV customers who have now received the ability to do on-demand video streaming using their HR20 sat-box and an internet connection. The cable companies can longer claim that satellite customers don't have on-demand programs, and then they have to host directtv's streaming over the cable network to boot! So I'm sure they're very mad about this and looking to stop it.
Apple iTunes isn't even a threat on the radar at this point to the cable company... It may be some day, but they don't put out ads against iTunes, they put up ads against satellite.
I admit I probably download a bit more then the average person, so if their new plan hits my area i'm screwed, right now I'm at 90GB over the last 6 days, so I'm crossing my fingers on this one
Just like the old days where you got x minutes per month. ( CompuServe anyone? GEnie? )
Unlimited is what brought the internet out into the open and changed the face of the earth because of it, this will shut it back down.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You'll never get speeds comparable to cable internet from BB over Power
The reason cable companies are so hot n' heavy to restrict users is not so much the usage at the head end, but the usage on specific nodes.
You can only pack so much data into a piece of coax... in order to sell 8Mbs, 12Mbs, 20Mbs, etc speeds they need to put a lot more infrastructure in place to keep nodes smaller so that people can actually get these speeds.
When you have a user who is saturating their connection on a very regular basis they mess up the loads for that node--as a cable company your choice is either to potentially get pockets of users on the same node who are NOT power users complaining about slow speeds, upgrade infrastructure to put that power user into a smaller node where they can go nuts ($$$), or you can cap the power user and/or offset your infrastructure upgrade costs on them.
It really is very reasonable!
And to the people who say that DSL is not real competition: That's because of the infrastructure required! It COSTS TOO MUCH to provide service at super high speeds, so it just isn't done... in the case of cable they have done an acceptable job of balancing higher speed offers vs. keeping their costs reasonable. Particularly given the suburban sprawl that so many of these providers are dealing with. Next time you see someone from Japan or the Ukraine bragging about how fast and cheap their internet is, find out if they are in the middle of a city or not, because chances are that even ~15-miles outside of a city you won't see speeds like that.
"When you buy water you pay for each gallon. You might use budget billing schemes to smooth out your monthly payment, but over time you pay for what you use."
...and only $40.78 to get rid of it...plus $9.80 to get rid of the free water!
:O
:/
Of course that is perfectly reasonable and the ISP would love to follow suit....
$10.58 for Water meter fee
$3.50 for Water rate stabilization
$9.80 for Stormwater drainage
$6.97 for Sewer use treatment
$2.37 for Sewer use collection
$13.65 for Sewer Treatment
$13.00 for Sewer Rate stabilization
$4.79 for Sewer collect service chg
Oh almost forgot:
$16.50 for WATER USAGE
So it costs $30.58 to get our $16.50 worth of water...
No wonder the ISP would like this price scheme...as soon as they figure out how to bill us for waste bits we are in deep shit
I think if we recycled every drop from last month and used zero it would shave about $20 and change off that so zero useage is $60 (office bill cause it was in front of me)
Actually our internet is the same price as our $16.50 worth of water...
In essence they're penalizing people for using the net. Sure they may charge you more but will they build out a better network, no they won't.
It's a money grab, plain and simple. I note that Cox has been noticeably silent on this issue.
If you have enough machines in one location that monthly MS patching could put you over your bandwidth limit by a substantial amount, perhaps you should look into a WSUS server. One download to the server and clients can pull it locally all day long.
Tada!
Yeah, you should run Debian or Ubuntu like me. There's never any updates to download.
Oops, forgot sarcasm doesn't work on the internet.
Am I still sposed to mod em up? I'm running out of mod poi.......ARGH, THERE THEY GO
Really? I don't understand what you mean.
Assuming everyone is paying proportional to their usage, one heavy user = multiple light users, both in bandwidth and in payment.
How is it that equality = inequality?
I can tell you as one of the management staff that sees where all the money goes that we do not recieve tax abatements. Plant expansion and upgrades actually ends up costing us even more money in increased property taxes. Thus I have an argument once more :)
It isn't $36,000 per month, is it.
So what I'll do is I'll share this bandwidth between the people on my street, 30 houses getting 5 meg. Guaranteed availability of 5Meg.
Now as long as it costs less than about $1200 pcm I can do a cheaper and better plan than my ISP and get free internet (30 people paying $40pcm).
Now an ISP sells at a contention of about 30-50 to 1. That means they break even if it costs $36,000-$48,000 pcm. Anu less than that and they're making money on not providing.
BPL interferences _heavily_ with many commercial, non-commercial and govermental radio services, e.g. military, medical and even plain old AM radio. No other "technology" is know to create such high interference. There has been some limited success using frequency notching and the like, but it seems that everyone agrees that deploying BPL on a large scale is just calling for problems.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication#Potential_for_interference
I had internet service in Austin from both AT&T DSL and Time Warner cable up until about ten minutes ago. I'd been intending to set them up through a multihomed router for fail-over redundancy, but for whatever reason the Time Warner feed was never routing properly. I'd been intending to cancel it for months, since AT&T has been rock solid here (at my previous address in Florida, I had to use redundant feeds quite frequently).
Well, on this ongoing news I called them and canceled the service - when they asked me why, I told them it was because Time Warner was moving over to metering service. When they said, "well, you know that won't be coming to Austin for a long time," I told them that I didn't care and that I didn't want to do business with them for Internet anymore.
Here's hoping more people cancel them.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Just out of curiosity, do you charge fair rates for those who go over their limits? In other words, if you are on a plan that gives 50G per month for $50, and you use an extra 20G, what would the charge be? A fair rate would be significantly under $1 per gig for overage. However, given what I've seen cell phone companies and others do, I wouldn't be surprised to see some companies charge something insane like $10 per gig.
The cable companies need to learn from the recording industry's mistakes. The internet is eventually going to destroy cable TV. We are all using DVRs to convert the old style real time media content into the on demand content that we really want. The internet is already starting to make the whole DVR process unnecessary. When cable TV is dead the cable industry will be left with their broadband internet business unless they screw that up in an attempt to save cable TV. If they loss both can always fall back on copper cable recycling. I hear copper prices are at an all time high.
At the moment we are changing the rate system for overage to consider the costs. However depending on circumstance (in some rural places we service we ourselves are charged per MB over the limit) we have rates as high as $3 per gig (which is at cost, no profit is made from that in any way). Offering broadband to areas that cannot gain even dialup in some cases brings with it limitations on our part as well that we have to pass on to make it worth while (it is in the end a business), but as I stated, we aren't gaining profit from that kind of charge. For other locations we are about to offer a service where people can buy extra bandwidth for a reasonable rate (read: cheaper than buying 2x50gig services) so they can use what they feel they need to. We have been talked about quite a bit in ISP circles for jumping in head first and using a bandwidth/usage based pricing model but at the same time we do not (and do not plan to) offer stupidly low capacities like 20 gig for a top tier package (screwing over anyone who uses netflix, linux, servers, ect in the process).
Is it me or does this represent a step backwards? "old-school" ISPs used to be metered either by time or bandwidth (remember AOL's 'premium' areas?). They moved away from that as the demand grew and market pressure was for greater use.
Market pressure hasn't changed it's trending in the slightest. While a casual internet used might have checked webmail and the weather in the past, that same user is surving youtube for entertainment and printing dozens of 1+MB photos via an online service now. Casual use can VERY easily mean 100's of MB per month (I can do that in one sitting) and has nothing to do with file sharing or so-called 'illegal' activity. Honestly, let TW go this path. Eventually cost-benefit and PR pressure will fix their error.
The internet of the future (tm) isn't focused on metered usage. It's focued on audio and video and total immersion. WoW and it's 7million (or whatever) users now have real-time voice chat. That's no small undertaking. Web-based movie delivery and so on. Now, you want to meter me and charge for data that's fine. But that per-GB charge better include licensing and whatnot for whatever i download then!
This is basically the same thing as sprint "firing" it's worst customers a few months back. Remind me again what that did for their PR?
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Yup, in Finland ADSL prices came down, and quality went up when the local body governing telecommunications ordered to open up the last mile. The companies owning the infrastructure has to rent it for a fair price based on real expenses and a reasonable profit margin. And it really has helped. Within the first year adsl connection speeds where raised three times (so your 1Mb connection became 2Mb and then 8Mb) while the price remained the same. This happened in any location where there was enough inhabitants for it to be worth it to install a dslam (so some of the most remote areas still don't have enough competition).
That sounds fair and honest, which is what most people really want. Don't take advantage of people who go over an arbitrary limit by nailing them with huge fees (e.g. cell phone companies.) Don't take advantage of the fact that you're providing internet access by trying to control how they use it, and trying to force other services down their throats (most cable internet providers.) Kudos to you for playing fair, I hope the market rewards you for it!
If there is anything that will kill internet business growth, it is capped connections, because consumers will spend more time worrying about their costs than doing business over the net. I can only shake my head and laugh, because such rapacious greed will surely hurt TW itself when customer growth slows. Oh well, fuck the internet, at least it's a good excuse to get outside and get a life.
Lemme ask this question. How many markets are open, legally, to competition, and how many still laber under the socialist fraud that grants a legal monopoly under the argument "this town ain't big enough for more than one provider"?
.sig.
I humbly await my downmod, but before modding me down, read my
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
i'm moving ... or changing providers ... or making my own ISP ... er something
seriously, if you do torrents - even legal ones people, and you subscribe to the idea of seeding to help the network, and you're on a network that doesn't throttle your traffic, you can go over a terabyte in a month pretty easily.
"Given the astronomically high latencies of satellite, not to mention the *severely* limited upstream"
Straight to the hyperbole, that itself speaks to the strength of your argument.
"Uh, no, it does deserve an answer"
No, it doesn't, it's really a very dumb attempt to do what you did, rant about the shortcomings of satellite while completely ignoring the large amount of people who irrefutably prove my point.
"please, tell us, why is satellite even in the same league as terrestrial broadband?"
As soon as you tell me why you think "viable alternative" and "in the same league" are synonyms.
Can you respond without the obvious overstatement, hyperbole, and straw men? If not, then don't bother.
KiahZero is claiming the largest expense of providing internet service is not in operating cost (pushing bits down the tubes), but in the capital costs and plant depreciation of rolling the tubes down each street and to your door.
If the biggest expense is operating costs, Mr. Ionly Checkemail is subsidizing the cost of providing Mr. Lawyer Heavyuser so much data when they pay the same amount. But if the biggest expense is in infrastructure, Mr. Heavyuser is subsidizing the cost of rolling wire to Mr. Checkemail's door when Mr. Heavyuser has to pay more for his high usage.
You could argue that the largest cost is depreciation due to obsolescence of the low bandwidth tubes as Mr. Heavyuser increases his usage and the cable company tries to keep up. That allocates more expense back to Mr. Heavyuser. Or you could challenge KiahZero's assumption that capital costs are higher than the operating costs.
If Time Warner was smart, they'd offer similar packages. Rogers doesn't enforce bandwidth caps (even though they could). I have the Express package and I often go above the 60GB/month limit. Not once in 8 years has Rogers ever sent me a complaint for going over the limit.
I feel that I should point out that once the rhetoric of these guys owning content vs. iTunes and the other arguments die down, this is really simple capitalism.
There's a store called the iTunes Music Store, and it's become popular. Somebody has finally realized that they can raise the toll to get there because they own many of the roads and bridges to get there. It's not about traffic (number of people) or weight on the road (increased bandwidth use).
We want X like never before, so we're going to buy X, but we have to go through Y. Y is going to raise their prices to cash in on X's success - because they finally figured out that they can. It's called simple capitalism.
This practice will increase so long as market demand supports it. Given the cost of HDTVs, BD, satellite feeds - we will evidently support a lot.
My dear friends - we are screwed.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
they're going to find out just how little we really need what they have to offer. Broadband is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I don't believe it's as entrenched in our society as they seem to think it is, nor are they as important to us as they think they are. Furthermore, obnoxiously anti-competitive efforts designed to kill off the major reason millions of us have broadband in the first place is just stupid. So, fine. They win. If I need to use the Web for anything I'll do it after hours at work. They can shove it.
It is possible to have a life without Time-Warner or Comcast in it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Over here I pay for US $60 for a 8 megabit cable connection (600k upstream). I admit I don't always get that speed on foreign servers, but for most of Brazilian content I do.
The speed is good for 60G (upstream counts too). If you do go over it, usually at around 80G they will send an e-mail and also call you asking if you want additional gigs for some price. If you don't, they cap your speed at 200k each way until the end of your billing cycle.
One way to get around the cap once it is in place (shhh, don't tell anyone!) is to simply use USB to connect to the cable modem, instead of ethernet (or vice-versa). They cap the MAC address of the modem (which offers 3: one USB, one Ethernet, and the other for VOIP. VOIP of course is never capped).
I used to bitch about it. But reading what you guys pay in the US and Australia, it doesn't sound pretty bad after all.
Another option would be to get DSL. The 8M option costs about twice is that, but it has no content limit whatsoever.
Upstream speed is 128k though...
I should also point out the other obvious thing while I'm at it.....
An attempt to made to find the excuse that the market accepts - instead of the truth (screwed) - for this behavior. This attempt is called marketing.
When the excuse is successful, it's called sales.
I don't know about you, but knowing that I'm screwed really helps me to see clearly.
I predict that these guys have opened the floodgates. There will be no price alternative. Switch to DSL and the DSL will do the same thing - why should they leave money on the table?
Simple capitalism.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
As has been stated, tiered pricing has been in australia since pretty much the dawn of time. What i hate about it is two fold.
First, the internet (as far as i am concerned) is about putting in and taking out, you make it hard for users to put in, theres less to take out. (read that however you like, im not talking about piracy here).
Second, it leads the way to what our local IT idiots like to call "freezone". For example, bigpond have bigpondmovies and so forth and its in the "freezone" (unmetered) and itunes is not. So you either pay a rediculously high bandwidth fee for using itunes or a moderately high fee for using bigpond movies. Which are u going to do? Personally, i dont understand how they get away with such behaviour, but they do. On the plus side of that there is always the argument about "we need to provide as many services as possible in our freezone" so you get download servers, gaming servers and so forth (my isp has an up-to-date mirror of fedora, ubuntu and many others so ROCK ON - its dam fast!). The problem with that (imho) is that while local gaming servers and stuff are great, i'd so much rather have the ability to shoot at people in battlefield (or some such) in another country because hey, thats what the internet is all about.
Its a pity this is what the internet has come to though, big companies not being able to support bandwidth due to sheer incompetence (if you've ever worked in IT in AU at Telstra, you know what i mean). If Telstra were a plausible IT company they could provide 100 times the bandwidth at 1/100 the (current) price, anyone in the world could do it better than telstra do.
something important seems to be missing from my comment ... like the body or the subject!
Maybe they shouldn't be paying $50 per month, but I think the real value of theirs should be lower and yours higher. Let's say it's $50 per month average, which is what they are charging now. Let's ignore the fact that there are static costs to hooking a customer up and maintaining their account, connection, email and customer service. Let's take 20 people, one of which is using 50% of the bandwidth and the other 19 are using the other 50%. They are paying $1,000 total, so the 1 top user would pay $500 per month and the other 19 would be charged $26.32 per month. Now let's say only 50% of their costs are for bandwidth. Now the 1 high-bandwidth user is paying $275 per month and the other 19 are paying $38.16. That seems reasonable.
As long as there is competition in the marketplace I don't see an issue. I'm much happier with my 5 megabit DSL than I ever was with cable. After I replaced my crappy Actiontec DSL modem with a Cisco my connection has been rock-solid and I always get full bandwidth. If they go ahead with this pricing, can you switch to a different service provider? If enough people do that then they will get the message. If 95% of the people aren't affected and don't care then maybe you were getting a much better deal than you should have been.
I would just like to say, as has been said may times in these comments already, we in Australia already have to put up with this. So, as the subject says, quit your bitching. I pay $80 a month for a 1.5 Mb/s connection with a download cap of 20 GB, where I live (i.e. anywhere outside of a capitol city) that's the best value you can get. Until every American is forced to pay through the nose for technology that's at least six years old, I don't want to know about any complaints. Whatever crap you think you're being force fed in the US, just spare a moment for a thought that it's three times as bad here.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Electrons wear out?
Fiber bandwidth approaches infinity. Fiber does not oxidize or otherwise decay.
Replacing routers and terminal equipment is an ongoing cost. Municipal WiFi will further lower costs.
Consider the cell telephone model - costs decreased as penetration increased. Of course, there is competition....
There are very high usage cell accounts - and I have one of those as well. But, once again - the effects of competition play out in favor of the consumer and the efficient business. Sloppy business relies upon monopoly or cartel strictures to remain profitable.
Consider the OIL industry: Record Profits at a time of Record Well-Head Barrel prices. That CAN'T HAPPEN in a free market! But, it has. Because the Oil Industry operates as a cartel within the US borders.
The costs of Internet access decrease as infrastructure increases. My first ISDN line cost me $300.00 a month and a T-1 was $1,500/mo. I have seen my bandwidth increase and my costs decrease as the industry matures - but, the TW folks want to reap profits that they can only command through monopolistic business practices.
REGULATION!!!
Of course, Time Warner recently announced a deal with HBO to offer HBO TV shows online for download:
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSN1833864220080121
I guess I'm going to need a high tier plan to use the "services" offered? Someone please tell the left hand what the right hand is doing...
"Yeah, you should run Debian or Ubuntu like me."
:P
Those updates are available for download and offline install too, no WGA required!
If I were on dialup I'd do it that way, ditto bandwidth-strangled connection of any other sort.
If you or I get screwed by our ISP, we either switch, fight, or adapt. The Linux folks don't work against those who may choose or be coerced to adapt. I'm not defending the screwing, just pointing out options.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Love it?
You got to be kidding me.
Here in aus, every provider has pricing teirs like that, and its terrible. Ask any semi-literate australian internet user and they will be happy to tell you how much they DESPISE tiered pricing brackets, and especially ones that charge extra when you go over instead of capping you.
Jokes on america if you go down that road.
I'm an aussie and have been stuck with crappy, low limit ($50 for 20G/month (@1.5Mbit/s) is about the best I've had) plans even since moving off dialup 5 years ago. Welcome to the technological stone age, USA :)
:P
Although to be honest, things are looking up with one provider currently offering a 150G/month plan (40G on peak, 110G off) for $70 a month at adsl2+ speeds that I'm eyeing off right now - and with government officials and industry bodies (PIPE) urging ISPs to up their quotas, it might not be too long before we've traded places with you guys as far as broadband value goes.
Anyone interested in having their sites hosted over here?
I let 'Einstein@Home' run half the night. How much b/w does this chew when a task is complete? If folks THINK it may cost, they'll pull the plug on 'Folding' and many other worthy projects. ...Lorenzo
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
I don't care if you bent over and got your friends to help them rheam you in australia, that doesn't mean their anticompetitive rapage is at all acceptable.
If they try this on me i'm going to move so swiftly to dsl they'll vomit from the dizziness.
So no, i shouldn't quit my bitching, you should start yours instead of swatting the l00b out of their hands and screaming YES, HURT ME MORE BABY!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They are now playing with DNS lookups this week with their own sitefinder. I'm expecting port forwarding, blocking, proxying, and other annoying stuff soon.
Because heavy users increase the "usage density" of an area, thereby making it worthwhile to run wire there, whereas if it was all light users in the area, it wouldn't be worthwhile? (Just trying to understand).
I still don't get it. Even if this is the case, the ISP doesn't know in advance where heavy users will be located, beyond generalizations like "this is a business district, so they'll use VOIP," right? So it's not like the heavy users are there, convincing the ISP to bring service to the area, and the light users benefit, right?
I mean, by the time they know who is a heavy or light user, the infrastructure cost is ALREADY sunk, and at that point, a person who uses a gig a day is equal to four of his neighbors who use 250 MB each in terms of paying back that sunk cost (assuming a per-MB charge, which is what I've been arguing for).
Right?
As you rightly point out, cable companies have little information about specific customer's usage patterns before they start service. This is about expensing sunk costs after service decisions are made, to get an accurate idea of your costs and profit on each customer.
Imagine a senario where it costs $500 to provision access to a customer, and once you have committed that infrastructure the cost difference to service a high vs low usage customer is $1. Obviously this is an extreme example. It wouldn't make sense to allocate proportionally more of your cost to the heavy user (unless you are considering future cost expensing for network upgrades). Given flat rate pricing, it artificially makes it look like you are making money on the light user and losing money on the heavy user. You are really making almost the same amount of money on each customer. You'd want to allocate your expenses on a per customer basis.
Now imagine the alternate where it costs you $50 to provision access to a customer, and the cost difference of servicing a high vs low usage customer is $40. In this case, infrastructure costs are almost irrelevant compared to the ongoing extra cost of providing more service to high usage customers. You'd want to allocate costs based on usage, instead of on a per customer basis.
Once you have decided where your costs lie, you can talk about the best way to price your service. I was just pointing out that allocating costs solely on usage and not considering where those costs come from is a poor business decision.
deer verwizon
i gots you a crismus presunt.
it is all of my kustoomers.
love,
time warner
If you have an argument, then provide me with a project location, date, and mission, and I will give you a list of the tax abatements you received to go towards paying for it.
Zeros and ones switching back and forth. Does it speed up when you use it more does it slow down ? No. I am paying for real time band width 24/7 I am using up that when I am sleeping. Net neutrality is more important than ever after this next alarming incursion. The government should tell time warner that if they don't like it to get out of the business. Please people make this farce go away!
So it's 1990 all over again. I'm gonna have to move to Fiji.
Verizon FIOS.