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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."
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
>> '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.
We have had tiered pricing like this for a many years in Australia.
And its not about iTunes downloads.
My ISP (iinet.net.au) charges me $XX dollars for XX GB of usage per month on a 24Mbps ADSL2 connection. This is very common in Australia. My XX's are $49 for 10GB of usage but other higher and lower plans are available. After that I am "shaped" to a 64kbs connection.
Sounds bad right? But...
If I get me email off their POP server that doesnt count towards usage.
And they have some kind of agreement with Apple (mirror maybe?) that itunes downloads dont count. (NOTE: This partnership with Apple is highly visible and advertised on their website)
They also have a mirror for just about every linux distro (they are an official Ubuntu mirror) and for almost all game demos and patches. Not only does this not count towards my usage, but it means I can get these at the maximum speed of my connection as the download is only one short hop away (think linux iso in 3 to 4 minutes).
About the only thing that really counts towards your usage is web browsing - which even in a month of heavy use doesnt come close to the limit at about 2 to 3 GB - and BitTorrent/P2P which I have to admit I do use sometimes.
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.
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
Listening to the web radio cuts into it.
Automatic Updating software (Windows/AV and all others) cuts into it.
Skype cuts into it.
Playing games cuts into it.
Your 2-3gb is gone very quickly without ever opening a webpage.
liqbase
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.
Podcasts? Youtube? Even if you don't use BitTorrent etc., it's easy to go over 10 GB/month.
I mean, seriously, that's *2 DVDs*. Not exactly a lot of data, is it? At your connection speed, it'd take you less than an hour to transfer (download) that amount of data.
Of course, if your ISP is upfront about this and doesn't claim to be selling you anything they're not (such as an "unlimited plan", a "flatrate" or so), then there's nothing inherently wrong with it; after all, if you don't like it, you can switch to another ISP. If none offer better deals, that's a failure of the marketplace, obviously, but it's still not necessarily unethical behaviour, even if is unfortunate for you.
But that doesn't mean you have to be happy with it; I know I wouldn't be, and any ISP who tries to squeeze the most money out of me and give me the shittiest service possible that they can still (barely) get away with would do well to remember that this does not exactly breed customer loyalty.
There are some business I *like* to deal with; with others, I really despise having to. I still will do so if all corporations in a certain market are like that, but as soon as a better deal comes along, I'll throw them out like yesterday's chicken necks. Any company that thinks maximising short-term profit or shareholder value at the expense of long-term development should keep in mind that they're playing with fire.
You're assuming that these tiered prices are actually neccessary because of a high load on the network. I'd speculate that TW's network is fine and they're just seeing a nice opportunity to earn money. Note that this could be different in AU because of the rather expensive and long submarine cables.
Fleur de Sel
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.
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 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!
WOW.
An ISP has partnered with various content providers to offer specialized service: Network Neutrality nightmare #1 is here! To everybody who said all this network neutrality stuff was theoretical and we should wait until it happens - here's your example. Now, do we have to wait until this happens in the U.S. before we get some neutrality legislation?
I know that the parent poster was using this example to be a good thing, but it isn't. It is now cheaper for him to buy stuff from iTunes instead of Amazon. It's cheaper to play games from the companies they've partnered with. I'm sure that non-commercial games with large downloads aren't getting these special benefits. Nor small Linux distros. This sounds like a great way for an ISP to slip non-neutral policies into place: 1. Create some sort of cap that applies to everyone. 2. Make exceptions to the cap. Now, instead of it looking like they are penalizing Amazon's music download service, they can say they are doing something helpful to the iTunes users. Same thing, different spin.
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.
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 downloaded the entire first season of Lost from iTunes at one point. That single download was (IIRC) over 9GB. I have rented several movies from iTunes in the past few weeks, each one around 1.5GB in size. I have taken an active interest in history and archeology as of late and have downloaded as many as 5 History Channel shows in a single weekend, each between 450MB and 1.5GB in size. (The History Channel has some special feature shows which are basically movies.)
I'd easily trample 5GB for my entertainment before you even START looking at my bandwidth usage for getting Solaris 10 & OpenSolaris downloads; evaluating the latest Linux version; playing video games online; downloading the latest OO.org, Netbeans, Seamonkey, Firefox, Opera, Safari, iTunes, GIMP, and other software that I need to keep up to date on a regular basis. Oh, and then there are free videos like Star Wreck, YouTube, Starship Exeter, New Voyages, Hidden Frontier, Java Gaming Vidcast, watching the lastest Macworld Expo, the JavaOne presentations, the Sun announcements, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Oh! And let's not forget about my day-to-day tasks of obtaining libraries, SDKs, documentation, and other tools I need for my work and hobby. (HTML & PDF documentation can easily exceed hundreds of megs for many projects. Some exceed several GB. Don't even ask me about the time I tried to get a copy of MonoDocs by spidering the MonoDoc website.)
As if that isn't enough, taking my game console online to play web games, watch videos, and otherwise interact over the web with the console easily chews through a significant chunk of bandwidth. A 3-10 MB Flash Game or a 20MB video clip might not seem like much, but it starts to add up after a while.
Am I a power user? Sure. And I'm more than willing to pay for quality service that provides me what I need to use my connection to its fullest potential. But don't think for a moment that using your connection implies illegal activity. There's more than enough data churning around the 'net before you even touch the illegal stuff. And when I'm paying upwards of $50/mo for broadband, you had better bet that I expect to be able to transfer as much as a hundred GB a month. As someone already mentioned, bandwidth is more than cheap enough to make that much transfer cost-effective.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I could see what these guys at TW are thinking.
"If we implement this cap, the 5% of our user base will pick up and use another provider thus solving our infrastructure problems."
There just going to ward off the heavy users, and your typically dumb home user will continue to pay for their service. They are probably thinking that no one else will care but the heavy users, thus eliminating their infrastructure problem.
Sad thing is...it will probably work to.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
In certain areas in Serbia you can get Wifi this way. You buy an amount of data (the minimum is 100MB, which costs about 1.5US$), 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.
Ugh, that is wrong on so many levels. A partnership with iTunes? What if I don't want to get my music from iTunes? What if I want to download from emusic or Amazon? POP email for free? What if my primary email is via my own host, or gmail? Mirrors are great and all, but they don't have everything. What if I'm a YouTube freak and want to watch that all day? Or something like Joost? Why the f- should the ISP be telling me what I can or cannot do with my connection? And depending on the ISP for content?!? Insane!
This whole idea of bandwidth metering or tiered pricing is bad, bad, BAD. We're sitting on the edge of a revolution with streaming video and other multimedia, and it's getting neutered before it even takes off because the telecom companies won't see the light that they need to build the infrastructure to handle it.
No worries, though....*someone* will come along with the infrastructure (Google and their dark fiber?), and win ALL of the consumers.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 ----
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.
Dude, this isn't net neutrality. It's cheap for an Australian ISP to have their users download from iTunes because iTunes content is distributed using Akamai, a caching CDN. Bandwidth inside Australia is plentiful and cheap. Bandwidth out of Australia is extremely expensive. Because they're caching the content inside Australia the ISP only has to pay for each separate file once. EG when they sell Lost, the first user that downloads it hits the trans-pacific links and from then on it stays within Australia.
If Amazon wanted to come to the same arrangement, I'm sure that'd be OK with those ISPs. It's basic HTTP caching. I suspect they could, in theory, not charge for any content which hits the ISP HTTP caches and it'd mean that everyone competes on a level playing field (if the caches are large enough), but that'd be a complete nightmare to track and explain to users. So it's sold as "iTunes is free, other stuff isn't" because that's easy for the punters to understand.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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).
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