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Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use
As rumored a couple of months back, Time Warner is starting a trial of metered Internet access. "On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte... [T]iers will range from $29.95 a month for... 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for... 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap."
Many many ISPs in many many countries operate this way. It's not as nice as "flat rate" in some folks eyes, but at least you get what you pay for (assuming no BT throttling, etc shenanigans).
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
didn't those subscribers sign up for unlimited usage?
someone's getting sued.
Someone has to challenge the legality of the "terms subject to change without notice" clause. This essentially is not a contract if its terms can change.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Let's have some honesty here. If we're going to have limits then let them be clear and open ones, where customers can make decisions about which limits they want, and how much they're prepared to pay for them.
Far better this approach than one which says "Eat what you like, so long as you're reasonable."
My Journal
Well, thankfully (for now) FIOS is unmetered and most certainly will be hyped by Verizon. The cable companies may rake in money for a year or two, but their greed will get the best of them and they won't know when to stop. By that time, Verizon's FIOS infrastructure will be pretty much complete in most markets and everyone will be switching.
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual competition they will lose out.
I know damn well that if Comcast starts capping my usage with a "meter" like this, particularly this low, I'll move to a lower end DSL line without a problem. Sure I'd take a speed hit, but I can live. So it takes me 45-60 minutes to DL a TV episode instead of 15 minutes.
The very reason that companies like Google have been told that they are "freeloaders" by the telecoms and ISPs is because the access providers wouldn't point their fingers at their own policies and customers. Unlimited broadband is ridiculous at this stage of the game. There simply is not enough infrastructure to allow everyone to consume whatever they want, whenever they want, without making them pay for it.
The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom because it gives us a greater argument for demanding a hands-off approach to regulating protocols. If you pay for the bandwidth itself, rather than just a simple monthly access fee, it's easier to argue that it's your bandwidth now and the ISP needs to piss off if they think they'll tell you how to use it, the law notwithstanding.
Looks fine to me. I don't know what prices are like in the USA but that $55 (=35â) for 15 megabits is better than you can get in most places of Finland (I know I pay more for 8 megs) and I don't, on average, use much more than that cap... Well, I guess that sometimes... If you download more than 10ish dvd quality movies (4 gigs) per month, you get 4 dollars more to price of each exceeding the 10 but still, I think that for quite a majority that's pretty good deal.
;)
Hmm, after a post like this I propably got to add a disclaimer that I am not assosciated with the company
This is much better than the current large telco pactice of throwing people off the network or throttling them. Make people pay for the capacity they use and let economics sort it out.
As a matter of fact most small ISPs around EU have been running this as a standard practice for ages with a considerable degree of success The approach is either a tiered system like this or a system where if you exceed your monthly quota your traffic gets the lowest possible priority on the network. There are also various variations on this using daily peak periods and so on. In any case, while introducing them at first has always caused a few grumbles on the overall, the users like them. As a result the network is not hogged by 5% who pay the same as the remaining 95% while using 99% of the capacity.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I could have swore we already fought this battle. As I recall, my first internet provider in 92 had caps and limits and due to popular demand eventually even the mighty AOL dropped them. Do the people that run these large corporations not understand Internet history??
I think this is a terrible thing for the consumer. The internet is now a crucial resource for video content. Someone who is heavy into video podcasts or steaming live audio or video would potentially have a really hefty "data" bill. Bandwidth could be dirty cheap as it is and now the ISP's seem to be becoming even greedier. At least (for now) most people have several ISP's to choose from. Maybe is TWC looses some customers over this they'll realize its a bad idea.
I use the web for browsing and VoIP. Rarely I need to download some source code, or distro, or security update for OS. I always pay the lowest ADSL subscription (unlimited). By under-utilizing my net connection, does it mean that I sponsor the bandwidth of others who do..?
http://revj.sourceforge.net
Providers of pay-per-GB-transferred internet exists since forever, at least here in Europe and especially for mobile access. It was never popular among users and never will be, because people don't like to think about amount of data transferred all the time. Plus, there are programs like Skype and Windows malware that transfer data all the time when computer is on. However, 40GB cap sounds much more reasonable then anything I saw here ...
839*929
Having capped internet access in any developped country in 2008 is a shame.
Time-Warner Sued By A Bazillion Customers Over Bandwidth Charges
.....seriously, I don't think TWC would be stupid enough to deliberately install spyware on its subscribers' computers, but this will fail as soon as hundreds of thousands of clueless Windows users running zombie botnet boxes start cancelling their service en masse "because they jacked up the price". This is not the way to either fix broadband usage policy nor to stop botnets.
$slashdot_user writes: "Time-Warner today was served with a class-action lawsuit from nearly every single subscriber to its metered internet service, launched in June. The suit claims that Time-Warner willingly and complicitly installed spyware onto its subscribers' computers to run up bandwidth charges. The program, which affected primarily Windows-based computers, repeatedly downloaded and uploaded a 1.5 MB file of random, uncompressable data up to a thousand times per hour each way, causing subscribers' caps of 5 GB to be reached within hours. Further GB of bandwidth was charged at $1 each, with some subscribers receiving 'overage' bills stretching upwards of $700. Representatives for Time-Warner were unavailable for comment."
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
how much is their unlimited plan?
b/c its like 49.99 or 54.99 (+/-) for unlimited 5mb through-put on charter and comcast
if the ISP companies want to role out metered bandwidth, and make it attractive then they are going to have to make it cheaper.
i switched from 3mb cable $54.99 to 1.5mb naked DSL for $42.00, when i called the cable company that i was dropping service (after they charged me $54.99 for a month (b/c my one year deal had lapsed)) they said they could give me 5mb for $29.99 for 6 months. i said they should have done that to KEEP ME AS A CUSTOMER before they charged me regular price rather than caring about me as a customer.
DSL has tiered service (768 / 1.5 / 3.0 [some places 6.0]) options, but there arent caps. and their prices (and latency) is much better than cables' massive speed. (and prices)
because one problem I have is the trend towards FLV ads. If I am getting metered internet I want any ad server filtered out from the charge or I should have the option of having it filterd out at the ISP.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What exactly is the technical network congestion that the cable companies are looking at? The article implies DSL doesn't face the same problem so it sounds like it's last mile congestion.
If that was the case though I would think they'd gain far more by seeking to give incentives for heavy users to download during off hours or some such.
I think this is one of the first plans where they've mentioned being able to tier your usage. I personally would have no problem if they set up the system like they do cell phones, you pay x amount for y minutes/GB, with overages being relatively expensive. If they could also add in something similar to cell phones where if you "call in plan" it doesn't count against your total, where the in plan refers to getting the data from a source close enough to you that it is less costly for the ISP, we would see massive improvements in the efficiency of P2P programs. At least with that everybody would be happier, consumers get the same data and ISPs use less bandwidth.
Don't you hate pants?
I would not pay that much for such low speeds. I have never been throttled by ISP yet, although I use BitTorrent often and for long periods at once. Maybe if I lived in a country where ISPs were that bad to customers, I would think of paying premium for those few that do not interfere in my net traffic.
:)
PS. Captcha was "throttlingsuxx0rz"
$1 per gigabyte sounds pretty good, though the initial cap is a little low.
My ISP has had a 20gb cap (which they never enforced... thank god) since 2004 but if you go over it they will charge you â10 per GB.
The invisible hand will build FIOS to the McMansions in the wastelands and eliminate all bandwidth caps! Tax breaks will allow consumers to choose between all the free market competition out there, just like in my area where I can choose between exactly *one* high speed provider. At least that's better than a government monopoly where I would only have ONE internet provider!
My ISP (Newfoundland, Canada) Rogers Cable just started metering this month too. I now pay $55.95CDN for 95GB of transfer (up and down) per month.
Shh.
I guess we got lucky with the Internet in a way. It was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists and engineers in a peer-reviewed academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal.
What Time-Warner is doing probably has less to do with consumption and more to do with figuring out a way to nickel and dime you for every trivial service they can think of. First it'll be quotas, then they'll be a BitTorrent surcharge, then there'll be a 'speed-up' charge for port X. Before you know it your ISP bill will look like your phone bill.
With those low caps it can be nothing else. Make the internet so expensive that no-one can complete with your multimedia sales (cable, dvd, music).
With the added 'benefit' of them being able to effectively gouge movie downloaders.
So does anybody know of good tools to measure the total upload/download usage on the three platforms (Mac/PC/Linux)?
There is only two providers here, AT&T and Cox. Everybody knows that AT&T is already disrupting Bit Torrents and metering is coming next. I would like to get an idea on my usage. My guess is about around 300k a day on podcasts and the web but it is only a guess.
Any tools you know of would help me get a handle on it, thanks.
Seems reasonable to me. Better than 40 cents/minute overage on your cell phone.
Of course, there needs to be an easy way to check your usage at all times. It amazed me how awkward it was to see my cell phone usage in the first few years I had one.
Cancel your service immediately. Please. Its the only way to let them know that you don't accept their new terms. Stop the experiment in Beaumont.
I wonder what happens about so called "internet noise", that continuous flow of traffic (typically bots trying to hack your devices) that yanks up your total traffic throughput although you're not doing anything particular.
Or, for that reason, what about all those pesky updating programs (adobe, java, apple, windows update...)?
I think the best way would be some sort of "best effort" approach. If you need to download something big, great, you'll get all the bandwidth you need... for a short time, though.
If your hooking up to bittorrent (et al.), then your bandwidth will be throttled downwards, depending on what you pay.
the ISPs in the UK have been doing this for years, although some still have an ambiguous 'fair use policy' like virgin that'll bring your connection to its knees during peak hours if you're doing something like, say, using the internet.
all the ISPs market their service with all these multimedia capabilities. i use these capabilities, and my bandwidth doesnt go below 140GB a month. what the hell am i meant to do on a 5GB limit?
I have mixed feelings about this one. I can see how a lot of people would complain about being put onto a metered service. However, I think that 15 MBps and a 40 GB monthly cap for $55 is a good deal. Not to mention, going over the cap is only $1 per GB, which I consider to be a good deal. I mean, think about how much they cell companies charge for going over your monthly minutes...
There are a few gotcha's though. First, if its a metered network, I would want a solid 15 MBps at all times while I was within the cap. Not any of this "peak" business. Also, a lot of people (most of which would not be reading slashdot) might run into problems with apps consuming network resources that they dont know about (Anti-Virus, Application Updates, Spyware, etc.).
Personally, if they could guarantee a constant connection speed at whatever it is that they advertise, I would go for it.
My ISP (Rogers) did. Like any good economically rational consumer, I used it to grab while the grabbing was good. Last month I downloaded "Video Store 1.0 (beta)" and the bill they sent indicated I'd have been charged $1,000 in overages.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Seriously? Did I do my math correctly? 40GB per month? 15MB/sec? It would take under an hour to go over the monthly allowance? That's nuts. This would be like getting a cellphone plan that only has 40minutes of plan-minutes per month, with no nights and weekends or in-network calling. Who would go for that? I guess there is a subtle difference in that a computer doesn't NEED to saturate its pipe for the entire time but still.
I'd go with DSL and to heck with the peak throughput.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
hell i use 40 gig in less than a day.
time to start looking for another ISP
paying more, getting less, that one way we're being held hostage. you may continue to pretend that all is well. the lights are coming up all over now. see you on the other side of it? conspiracy theorists are being vindicated. some might choose a tin umbrella to go with their hats. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be yOUR guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. there are still some choices. if they do not suit you, consider the likely results of continuing to follow the corepirate nazi hypenosys story LIEn, whereas anything of relevance is replaced almost instantly with pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking propaganda or 'celebrity' trivia 'foam'. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
http://news.google.com/?ncl=1216734813&hl=en&topic=n
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?hp
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/02/nasa.global.warming.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/02/honore.preparedness/index.html
is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in. for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it? we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=weather+manipulation&btnG=Search
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster. meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html
the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with. is it time to get real yet? please consider carefully ALL of yOUR other 'options'. the creators will prevail. as it has always been.
corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7
as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption. fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way. the little ones/innocents must/will be protected. after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit? for each of the creators' innocents harmed in any way, there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available. 'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet, & by your behaviors. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable. some of US should consider ourselves somewhat fortunate to be among those schedu
I think you should put a more realistic figure on the real cost of Internet traffic. Down in Australia, Optus has offered a competitive rate of $150/GB. This brought the price down from Telstra who were charging in excess of $300/GB.
> wouldn't it be worth setting up an internal mirror / patch distribution
> server so you only need to pull the data down your internet pipe once?
To mirror the entire Ubuntu update repository would probably be pretty wasteful unless his office is quite extraordinary. And just mirroring the files needed by one computer will not necessarily be OK for all the other ones, unless he's very careful to install packages only on an office-wide basis. I think a better solution for him would be to use a proxy (like Squid) to cache the update files.
I will have to start stealing bandwidth from my neighbor if this practice comes my way. /who doesn't secure their network?
Even Tmobile's Blackberry plan is more competitive than this Time-Warner piece of crap that they are putting out there.
Tmobiles = 30$/month unlimited edege.
In the meantime, why did some random town in Texas get chosen to test this?
Why didn't they try somewhere that there are enough people who will voice their opinions that the idea is garbage and just a money extraction?
I'm paying $90/month for a dedicated server, 24/7 amazing tech support and 1.2TB bandwidth per month. How is $60/month for no dedicated server, crappy tech support and 40GB/month (0.04TB) any where near a reasonable offer?
So you are chugging along moving a large file when "oops" that last packet in the file somehow get's lost. Now geeks here would be using a recoverable transmission tool, but grandma will just have to re-get that tar ball of the grandkids pictures.
Drop a few packets here and there when you need to increase the billable bandwidth!
Is your TV metered? No? That's why. You don't get charged if you exceed your "TV allowance" as there is no "TV allowance".
I think GP's question is perfectly legitimate.
I've got no problem with heavy users paying more, light users paying less. But $1/gigabyte is so far in excess of the "going rate" for bandwidth that it's not even funny.
For instance, my current web hosting provider offers me 5 TERAbytes of transfer for six bucks a month. Now, it's possible they'd try to change the terms of the deal if I actually approached that level of usage, but still, it shows the cable company in TFA is charging more by roughly a factor of 1000.
I'm guessing that Dreamhost probably serves up roughly as many bytes as a cable company does in a large town or small city. Now, I totally agree that providing internet access to a bunch of houses spread out over square miles is going to cost more than providing it to a couple rows of rackmounted servers. But that's a *fixed* cost to provide access, regardless of bandwidth usage.
I'm okay with charging more for using more, but this is so out of proportion it's simply highway robbery.
30 days 5 gigs aprox 171 megs a day
24 hours aprox 7.1 megs a hour
60 mins a hour aprox 121.1 kB per minute
60 secs a min aprox 2.0 bytes per second
8 bits = byte aprox 0.25 kilobits per second
this is a fair deal???
Dial Up is better.....
Using Time Warner's service for less than 13 minutes each day of a month, pulling/pushing 15 Mb/s of data you'll use up the quota.
Maybe they'll also start charging for accessing servers in Europe. Seriously though, why do we just now get the option of unlimited cellular time and now TW wants to charge per GB? Will I get to buy a block of "Whenever bytes"? Free nights and weekends maybe?
I guess under this plan when a program decides to secretly phone home I can sue the company for using my bandwidth. I guess if this catches on I'll have extra reason to get re-acquainted Lynx. Stretch your monthly allotment by going text-mode!
I talked to a TimeWarner rep when I lived in San Antonio last summer and he told me that they've had the infrastructure for 15mbps connections in place for a year or two, but cap the speeds between 5-10 on purpose. The "purpose", I see now, is that they want to try and milk every penny out of us for something that wouldn't cost them any more to deliver. I imagine it actually costs them money to cap our bandwidth anyway, so this is pretty dumb...especially now that I live in a market with another major provider (AT&T) for competition.
The same situation has been present in Belgium ever since cable and *DSL made the market. There is simply no choice to get an ISP that doesn't limit your monthly bandwidth usage.
... Me I've never had my internet go down, and when I do play a game I tend to get a ping between 20-25 so it's all about what's important to you I guess.
...
Recently however, a new company surfaced offering low prices (30 euros / month) for a 100 Gb / month limit and a normal price (50 euros / month) for an unlimited connection. This new ISP is limited to a very small region in Belgium though, the services they offer outside their home city is similar to the other ISP's (more max download/upload, less speed).
There is however no throttling, an almost 100% uptime (varying on location of course, but if you live anywhere near a city you can expect uptime of 100%
Most ISP's offer a nighttime discount too. Everything you download/upload between midnight and 10 AM only goes half towards the download limit.
Also, the default option if you cross your limit is not to make you pay extra per Gb, but to put you on "smallband" which is (if I remember correctly) 64Kbit Up/Down. In other words: hell compared to the 20Mbit / 2Mbit (Down/Up) we usually get. You can change that default option to paying extra for Gbs of course
Also I'd like to point out that Belgium is the only country in Europe where there is no viable option to choose for an ISP without transfer limit.
Life is great! (as told by Lady Susan)
This plan is absurd!
$30 / month for DSL speeds and a bandwidth cap of 5 GBs.
Are they trying to sell internet service to people that are living in 1998? I was there when AOL tried to do that in 1996.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Oh, misery. Been there, done that, got the phone bill. Let's hope this trial balloon blows up like the Hindenburg before anyone else gets any ideas.
I remember the bad old days of Compu$erve Information $ervices when the clock was ticking at, if I recall correctly, $6.00 an hour... and much more than that if you entered some of their "premium" services.
Plus, if you lived in Roysburg, Winnemac, their list of dialup telephone numbers might helpfully list one under "Roysburg" while not bothering to mention that the actual physical location of their modem was in the city of Zenith, fifteen miles and a local toll call away. So you were also racking up a hefty phone bill at the same time.
People may hate AOL now, but when they came charging in with a flat monthly rate they looked like knights in shining armor.
And at least with CI$ the clock was ticking at a steady rate. With the Time Warner plan, in a million households little Genevieve will run across some funny and age-appropriate penguin cartoon website and watch it for weeks, and neither her nor her folks will have any idea it cost them $82.19 until the bill comes in at the end of the month.
The funny thing is that the trend is toward flat pricing everywhere else. It seems odd to read that the genius at Time Warner are moving away from flat-rate pricing at exactly the same time as the cell phone companies are moving toward it?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I did a little math:
:P Actually, networks don't run at full capacity 100% of the time and accounting/billing would become more expensive, so 1600% is an obvious exaggeration.
/.ers have a better idea than Time-Warner and other ISP's as to how they should charge to pay the cost of Net Neutrality.
1 megabit-month = 3600 sec per hr * 24 hrs * 30 days / 8 bits per byte = 324 gigabytes
I pay $20 per megabit-month on an OC-3., so that is a 1600% markup! Well, if the drug companies can do it, why not ISP's
Senate Bill 215 (Obama is a sponser) would prevent ISP's from interfering with content upload or download except in times of network congestion. This could lead to a 50% reduction in revenues since ISP's charge for uploading content such as webpages. The bill will also force them to buy ever increasing amounts of bandwidth at the same time, raising their expenses at the same time their revenue is decreasing. The bill will likely pass if it emerges from commitee. So IMHO, Time-Warner and other ISP's are testing the most likely economic model left to them should SB 215 pass.
If someone were to break this off as a separate topic, it would be interesting to see if
Almost everyone I know with a net connection is involved in some sort of P2P based piracy. This is hardly what I would call "legitimate" traffic. ISPs are reacting this way BECAUSE there is so much traffic.
... that's 603 TiB/day, or 18,104TiB per month. Who's going to pay for that? Will you accept $250/mo or more in ISP fees?
I agree that they should be public and open about their limits they impose, but let's not pretend that they're inherently stepping on any sort of legit traffic.
I'm kinda of the camp of thought where I think the ISPs should not block ports or any other sort of connectivity. I'm paying for an IPv4/v6 transport and I expect the protocol to be respected. I don't expect them to host 100s of GB of traffic I generate while paying a "residential" rate. There are too many subscribers to make that effectively and cheaply possible. That's just the nature of networking.
There are around 6-7 million families in Canada. Suppose they all want 10Mbps 24/7. That's 7.152GiB/sec for all of Canada. Multiply that by a day
The irony is people go on about how the net is supposed to be about openness and sharing and what not, then they horde as much bandwidth as they can for themselves. Yes you pay for a net connection, but you're also sharing it with OTHER people.
Just like you pay taxes and other costs to drive a car, but you still have to share the road. Same fucking idea.
Kind of like taking a dump while standing on your head. Some people deserve exactly what they ask to receive.
It may not be that they want to combat piracy, but I can certainly see it getting worse. How so? Think about it. At $1/GB, pretty much any retail game could be pirated for like $5. That's still better than the $50 that the software companies want for them. Movie piracy? That's, like, 2 for $1. People will figure they'll pirate MORE since they're paying extra for the bandwidth. And we all know you can't COMPLETELY stop piracy, no matter how much "BT throttling" you do.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
This is so dumb, if they tried to make me pay for my bandwidth per month I would mooch off more unsecured wireless networks than I do now.
I'm really surprised someone hasn't posted this already, but use Firefox and the NoScript plugin.
It blocks all ad content from being downloaded, I use it to speed up my horribly slow internet connection.
I have to choose between lots of bandwidth and lots of volume at a high price, or low volume at low bandwidth for a low price?
I only use my home connection on nights and weekends, I don't seed torrents. I don't need a lot of capacity, I just want it to be fast when I do use it. That goes out the window, apparently.
Are they offering a way for users to actually monitor their usage so they don't have to guess?
I guess it's all moot anyway - I'm getting 500Kbps down and paying for 10Mbps already.
There really needs to be a big movement towards filtering out advertisements from a feed. Because if you are paying for the ads they make up over 90% of most blog type pages where you want the text.
I am sure that if everyone used a hosts or other ad-block process the advertisers would start paying the networks to open up the bandwidth.
I can't help but comment on how much of a frigging nice change it is to actually read an article that doesn't consist of a 5-sentence blog, or something on a shovel-ware tech site (Information Week, Computerword, CNET, etc) that offers over-filled, over-designed, and over-sized pages, but similarly little content.
This is, I believe, is the first Slashdot article from AP. Dunno if Google's deal with AP is making either of them money, but I do know I'm not alone when saying that Google's clean and minimalist approach to things is both welcome and appreciated.
Well.. if they are going to meter usage, they need to have a real-time meter, that you can watch and see how much you've used, and how much is left. The downside is, people that know just enough to get on the net, but don't know what they are doing. So when the home network is hijacked but others, and they have to pay 30 bucks more due to that what will they do? Who's looking out for the "kids" on the net. And by kids I mean most adults that are kids to the internet.
As to the cost of the infrastructure. Telcoms and Cable providers alike have had plenty of time and profits to start investing in their own infrastructure. It needs to be brought up to par with Japan.
This is a clear attempt to apply the cell phone industry's business model to internet access. I think the traffic limits and outrageous overuse fees couldn't make my point more clearly. When you establish those limits, you profit both ways--when the customer limits their use to avoid exceeding the limit you can deliver less than what the customer paid for, and when they exceed you can rape them. Expect to see your monthly service become a 12 month or longer contract with early termination fees if they realize their ambitions.
The whole point of broadband is to give everyone access to content on the internet quickly and cheaply. If you strictly meter the service, you basically eliminate the purpose of broadband in the first place.
Multimedia distributers such as Youtube, Netflix and iTunes and media rich social networking sites like LJ and Facebook are the reasons why demand for Broadband service is so strong to begin with. Tell people they can only use these services a little bit before being charged out the wazoo, and you've killed the whole point of the internet.
This might hurt the technophile and the hardcore online junky, but for Ma & Pa who only check their email once a week and occasionally watch videos of their grandkids learning to walk, PeoplePC is only $9.99 a month.
thats quite expensive in the uk for £40 a month (aprox $80) you can get unlimited (with no BT throttle) upto 24Mb/s (although my freinds who have it can only connect at about 12Mb/s due to line quality, but the upload is about 1Mb/s which is alot better than ADSL1.
5GB @ 768Kb works out to 14 hours to consume if you saturate your link to the maximum, if my math is correct.
That seems ridiculous, no?
Let me see if I got this right. 1) Cable companies used existing infrastructure to offer cable internet service. 2) Cable companies offered unlimited bandwidth because the internet didn't have all that much on it worth downloading. 3) The internet accumulated material worth downloading. 4) Cable internet became the best option for an internet connection because it was fast and had unlimited bandwidth. 5) Cable companies did little to improve their infrastructure, despite getting subsidies from the Federal government. 6) Cable companies sold more subscriptions to their service than they were able to provide stable, uninterrupted service for. 7) Cable company whines incessantly while throttling people's connections, effectively making moot the reason why people chose cable internet in the first place. 8) Verizon FiOS spends billions to build an entirely new infrastructure that can easily provide unlimited monthly bandwidth to customers. 9) Cable company implements plan to charge heavy users more, effectively pushing them towards Verizon FiOS if it's in the area yet. Maybe it's just me, but I view this as a win-win. A lot of customers will have a very good reason to seek out a fiber optic connection while simultaneously easing the load on the cable companies. The connection for the existing cable company subscribers improves as all the heavy bandwidth users switch to fiber optic and all the heavy bandwidth users get a much faster connection with a bigger bandwidth pipe. I actually wonder if it wouldn't be more profitable for the cable companies to actually push certain customers towards a fiber optic provider. There's no reason why fiber and cable can't coexist. DSL and cable have been for years now. Each will occupy its own niche within the market. Plus, by having the downloaders migrate to the provider best able to provide for their needs, the network usage would be a lot more predictable for the companies, making it easier for them to manage and provide a quality connection for a reasonable price. Or, more likely, the cable companies are going to kick and scream and fight like hell to keep a failing business model.
Dial up rocks. At only $40/month for a land line and $15/month for an ISP on that line I can download all the goodness I want at 36 kbs, just like I did 15 years ago.
DSL, you ask? Not available and owned by a company known for FU practices.
See the choices most people have? Don't you wish something other than GWB had happened over the last eight years?
It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
As high-speed internet connections are used for purposes other than web-browsing and email, metered access will be a disaster.
At my house, I have an Analog Terminal Adapter (telephone), multiple satellite boxes, apple TVs, game consoles, video cameras, alarm system, and HVAC thermostat all plugged into my network. Many of these devices "call home" for one reason or another, and I have little, to zero control over that process.
Metered access will either prevent me from using these devices to their full potential, or cause me to spend a lot of money to keep them working.
Metered access, especially at these rates, is nothing more than an attempt to keep demand artificially low. Once the infrastructure guys "reduce demand" the financial pressures of network upgrades go away, and the shareholders become happy.
If metered network access succeeds, it will only be due the monopoly status of the provider, not because the market wants it.
-ted
I wonder if they'd to "rollover" bandwidth?
Afterall, if they want to get snobbish about counting, it should work both ways. If I'm paying for 40GB and I only use 15GB one month, I still want my other 25GB rolled into a reservoir that I can use the next month.
Truthfully though, this is a stupid idea. Part of the beauty of the Internet is flat rate. If one starts having a limited pool (which is totally an artificial limitation), then everything starts becoming an "is it worth it to download" scenario. Should I give this new Ubuntu Linux distro a try? I dunno. That's almost a gig of my quota and Slackware works fine. Should I use Gentoo? I dunno source code downloads are going to be larger than binaries. Should I even bother patching my Windows machine. I dunno that's 500MB of quota and it'll probably be fine if I install a firewall. Should I run TOR? No I don't know how much traffic would be routed through my machine.
Essentially this throws in giant anvil in front of the train that was the Internet. Instead of it becoming more ubiquitous, and more seamlessly integrated into our lives as a way for everything to talk to everything else, it's further segregating the internet into something that you "visit" and limit your usage of, rather than something that you simply participate in.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And yet you've completely failed to demonstrate how.
Nothing you posted there addresses the fact that at some point, with metered downloads, you will be downloading ads that count against your cap WHETHER YOU WANT TO OR NOT. Your TV comparison fails at all levels.
Because the two have fuck-all to do with each other? And the entire point has fuck-all to do with metered downloads? You would have a point if I were charge more when I watched more TV, but since I'm not, and no one else is either, you don't.
Does anyone know of a good program to use that will tell you how much bandwidth you are using in a month?
Go home, nobody loves you. .
- The Blog
I will be putting three Roku devices around my home to stream movies. When they go to HD, this will be three devices able to stream HD movies. We're talking 4GB a movie. Get a few people in the home watching these and we could hit a 40GB "cap" in a week on vacation, if not sooner.
Microsoft is selling HD movies from Warner Brothers. With these new caps in place, Warner Brothers will probably not be able to see HD movies over the internet. Isn't this against their interests right now?
If they want to cap internet usage, they need to realistically do it. In todays world, nearly everything is going streaming for audio and video. 40GB is simply nothing. They should offer a terrabyte per month at the very minimum.
It's a sham.
Thank u, thank u very much
I know it sounds good as a way to shaft people, but horrible business sense...why do people honestly not use good business sense in the face of reality? This has to be the most shortsighted idea I've ever seen out of TWC.
How many new subscribers are there in an obscure Texas town, 5-10 and/or whatever market numbers they magically create via using family employees?
I think market response will be strong enough to tell TWC to go fly a kite, hopefully forever.
You assume that bandwidth caps/traffic shaping and capacity use fees are mutually exclusive. I'm cynical enough to suspect that Bittorrent will still be throttled and that latencies will still suck for gaming apps and possibly even VoIP will be throttled down the road. Ma Bell and the rest are in bed with Hollywood and the recording industry. I also bet that upload will still be a tiny fraction of download bandwidth. (Man I hate that one. As an academic I store gobs of research at home that I want to access from my laptop, whether it's in my office or in a coffeeshop.)
This was the door-to-door guys that came around last summer? These are salesman. They know what they know from the brochures they carry. I was in the garage when he came around and I swear, he would not leave, and it was obvious I was very busy wiring cat5 and the guy just would not leave. I am a nice guy, but this was just ridiculous. TWC runs an add here saying they have FIBER. What a crock!
I don't care how nice a face you put on it, this is nothing more than a local monopoly creating artificial scarcity, for the purpose of raising prices. If that locality had some competition in the internet business, some OTHER place would be getting this "test".
On the one hand, this may reduce the amount of spam coming from bots on Time Warner's network, since people may be more concerned about securing their computers if they get billed for the bandwidth for the spam they are sending. On the other hand, getting billed for the bandwidth to receive spam sucks since the receiver has no control over it.
Great point, succinctly expressed. I totally agree. This is related to a point I was going to make: It annoys me that one cannot resell bandwidth. The notion that one person having 3 people in the house can grab bandwidth for all of those people at one price, but three people living separately have to buy 3 separate services seems unfair. In practice, it means that lots of people cheat and get away with it, while the people who don't cheat are charged a premium (or, more specifically: several premiums) for operating to the letter of the rule. For quite a while, I've been pushing the need for Universal Business Access, and have only just recently written it up, but it relates to that.
Email has a similar kind of issue, where not paying is more expensive than paying, since we all pay for spam due to email being free, and the cost of that spam is certainly way higher than the cost that email itself would be--except to the spammers.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The only way I will accept "metered" internet access is if, when I reach my limit, the service stops working and requires consent authorization from me before allowing me to continue to run up charges.
If I have no good way to determine "how many minutes" I've used up of my internet I'll quit using it. I can't stand watching the meter - it's way to stressful a way to use an entertainment device, which is what home internet access is for me.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
5gig / 30days = 166mb / day = 6.94mb / hour = 115k / min
Wonder how much bandwith WoW uses... or spybot... or AvG... or any of the other thousands of perfectly reasonable programs that were created in a world where they didn't need to monitor their own traffic. Programs who's only worry was to do their job, rather then doing it without using any of the users costly bandwith.
I will cheer the creater of programs who's jobs will be to find places to waste bandwith constantly... draining 20k a minute here... 10k a minute there... slowly and constantly. Not from the users computer, but from an outside website (incomming trafic is monitored as a part of that total)
And what of the massive video ads? How much bandwith does the average flash page take? Surfing news sites even, with their flash video adds, and multi-banner crap that they think is so cute now.. what of that?
Although, in the end, they'll do what they want, we'll bend over and take it, and start being charged by the keystroke to bitch about their service. The internet will regress to being less about pretty, smooth, and modern, and more toward bland, focused, nonsense. We'll do less random surfing, and there will be less random content... the internet will lose that spark of madness that keeps it free.
It's a shame too, I was really thinking mankind might have had something with that while internet thing... cause and effect.
I have Cox cable and I don't need the 6 down/2 up speed. I don't surf porn, I don't use Limewire. I read email, I check Slashdot and Fark, and read news. At the same time, I don't want to suffer with 640kbps DSL. Why can't I buy a 2mbps/512mbps package for $20 a month?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If implemented, metered net access in combination with open APs could give some people surprisingly large bandwidth bills... and thus incentive to turn the crypto on. On the other hand, if you're looking to download something large, it makes jumping on your neighbor's wifi (encrypted or not) that much more attractive...
Tin foil territory here, but is it a coincidence that soon after we learn that the big ISPs have rooms dedicated to government monitoring of all internet traffic we are pushed toward bandwidth caps?
(1) Tell them we are monitoring everything
(2) Throttle them all so we can actually handle the data
(3) "Save Dick and Jane User from Osama!", while getting kickbacks from the ISPs
(4) But really just move the world closer to a NWO, while profiting every step of the way and gathering enough data on everyone that they can put away anyone who threatens their plan
I come here for the love
Are they offering compensation for:
-Lost packets
-Resent packets
-Undeliverable packets
-Control packets (cable modem to head-end)
-Unrequested Inbound packets
-Broken downloads/incomplete file transfers
-Spam and other Junk mail
-Ad banner transfers
-Web page redirects
So all we need to do is get the Storm botnet pissed off at the Time-Warner IP range, and we can drive them out of business when their customers all receive a $5,000 internet bill next month.
I have a feeling that this will see court action in the near future. If they are going to charge for inbound packets, they will HAVE to prevent any and all unsolicted traffic, and compensation of any packet delivery issues within their network.
Grab yer ankels, boys!
Finally - they are actually telling us exactly what product they are selling and letting us decide! That is a very good thing. It puts the power of the purse firmly in the hands of the consumer. (assuming, of course, that they do not have other hidden restrictions, like protocol throttling - which is admittedly a big assumption)
Most ISPs already have these limits in one way or another. Be it protocol throttling or canceling your account for excessive use, these limits exist. But most ISPs flat out lie to the consumer and say it is "unlimited". Selling a pig in a poke to the customer is not good for the customer. It is a violation of the most fundamental requirement of efficient capitalism; perfect information. We have that problem in all kinds of markets, and it is a load of crap.
I will always prefer products which clearly disclose their strengths and weaknesses and allow me to be the decider. I want the power of the purse. I want to vote with my dollars. But when you're being sold a lie, you can't make that decision fairly. This is a very good thing.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
No doubt this is a download rate they quote, my download bandwidth with videotron in Montreal is 3-4 Mbit/s but I'm lucky if I can get 100 KB/s upload, which REALLY pisses me off, but the only alternatives are DSL and I hates me that Bell DSL.
And videotron does charge when you go above your monthly cap, and yes I ageee that it is entirely reasonable that they do so.
Bell was stupid to claim unlimited service, and then throttle when people took advantage of it. And now they have to audacity to say that they have to do it so that it doesn't affect their other customers, which is true and fine, but Bell *used* to claim that their service was better than cable because your neighbours activities wouldnt' affect your service, which was obviously bullshit then, and is now out in the open as bullshit. I hate Bell.
Salut,
Jacques
And the bulk of the comments here *support* it?!? Just because "the rest of the world is doing it" doesn't make it right, and doesn't make it OK that the companies have long oversold "unlimited" Internet access, are getting burned by it, but refuse to invest any more into new infrastructure to compete.
This is nothing short of a Bad Thing. Bandwidth use is not going away...if anything it is going to increase. Those "average" users that only browse and do email today, that everyone wants to be subsidized by the "heavy" users doing their bittorrent and porn and linux distros? Those average users are going to start downloading HD movies from iTunes and Xbox 360 and PS3. They're going to be playing online multiplayer games and wanting to videochat in HD.
How is innovation supposed to happen if you start creating tiered access points? Do you honestly think higher tiered prices are going to go back into building infrastructure that is better able to handle the load? This is merely a ploy to penalize those using their available resources that they pay for. And as time goes on, EVERYONE will be needing those resources, and they'll be back in the same boat, except everyone will be paying that much more.
The answer is to invest in more and better infrastructure, not try to limit your existing users to try and get them to not use your product!
In the "good old days" (which weren't all that, truthfully) we paid by the hour for AOL, Compuserve, and Delphi. Then flat rates per month came along! And God saw that it was good.
This metering is a step backward. I certainly wouldn't stay with an ISP that used these rules, and I hope others will also dump stupid ISP's.
Next they'll want to charge you based on the actual size of the files in that zip file you downloaded instead of the size of the zip file. Where does it end?
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
I'm surprised that major content providers (Apple (iTunes), Google (so many), etc.) haven't stood up and raised a fuss. Sure, individual customers complaining is all well and good, but when "providers" are limiting other companies' abilities to conduct business, I'd think they'd step up and cry foul. I mean, if most of America is suddenly under the clamp of pretty hefty bandwidth restrictions, their ability to buy songs, browse movies, and _view advertising_ is dramatically limited.
Yeah. I know. I could have simplified that as "what a moronic move which is only going to stifle innovation in an era where we need more, not less advancement in ideas and technology..."
We've got basically the same packages with Sympatico DSL. To me its not os much that metered access thats the problem, its that the base amount is too low, and the charges are too high. Something on the order of 100gb seems a far more reasonable base bandwidth in this day and age, and a $1 a gig is just crazy.
Let's see some decent packages, and more importantly decent pricing and I'll believe that metered access is somthing other than a simple cash grab.
Great news! Now, Warner Brothers movies no longer count against your bandwidth cap!
Just more great service brought to you by Time Warner Cable!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I would imagine charging by usage is one way of regaining some of the TV/Movie market they will be losing over the next couple of years. No one is going to spend money on pay-per-views with Comcast Cable they will simple start downloading them from the Net. And since they aren't as dumb as we think they figure well take a cut. HD Movie = a gig or two and now all my bandwidth is gone.
I pay for two terabytes a month on my webhosting and it's less than 40 bucks, and they're charging that for a handful of gigs?
Metering is one thing, but that is a fricking joke.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I've read a few comments now telling me just how crappy US providers are and how those monopoly companies rip you off, and how much better it is over in Europe. Allow me to tell you a little story. Maybe it will correct your view, and maybe even ease your pain.
I'm in Europe. In the capital of a country priding itself of being rather well industrialized. I'm not sitting in some backwater countryside "be glad you have power" area, I'm sitting in the middle of said capital.
In general, I have the choice between our former telco monopolist and the cable company. Yes, there are a few other internet providers, but in general they're reseller for the telco service since, well, laying your own lines is anything but trivial here.
In short, my current "service" (I don't really like using that term, but lacking a better one...) offers me 4mbit down, 256k up and 10Gig traffic a month. Including their insane overhead (which makes up about 10-20% of the traffic, leaving me with about 8-9 Gig to use. Under a policy they call "fair use", which is never really explained, but if you use too much for a month or two, they just cut off your service and keep you in the dark for a week or two so you "learn your lesson", while you get petty excuses from their customer service reps.
Since I know such a rep, I know it's not just my gut feeling but that's actually how it is done.
IF it works, that is. Currently, I'd estimate an uptime of about 98%. You're not allowed to provide services (i.e. run servers), the key ports (i.e. 21, 22, 80, and quite a few more below 1024) are blocked and it's an open secret that they do try to shape your traffic, up to the point where they make it near impossible to use high bandwidth services like YouTube during prime time (i.e. 1800-2400) and you should not try to run any P2P services on their standard ports, it won't work too well.
I pay roughly 80 bucks a month for this service.
Oh right, the alternative. Our ex-monopoly telco. It would be cheaper, only about 60 bucks, but I'd have to do with 1mbit down/256k up with a hard limit of 5Gig and some insane price (about 40 bucks or something like this) for every extra Gig I use. But with less stability and longer latency, i.e. not really useful when you try to play games online or want to download something that takes more than 10 seconds to finish (chances are good that your download dies before it's done).
Still anyone here who wants to trade?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Anyone who orders more than basic cable is going to get a $1 charge per the number of channels over 200. I mean, I don't get HBO or extra sports or international programming... so why should my bandwidth suffer just because that guy wants get more channels? They are using 10x more bandwidth than me and my basic cable package! Furthermore, people who leave their TV on should also be penalized. Now that you have cable, if you watch more than 100 hours of cable a month, you'll get a charge of $1 per extra hour of cable that you watch. Quit hogging all the bandwidth!
I think (and correct me if I'm wrong - though I'm sure the invitation is not necessary) that this is just the fundamental difference between cable and DSL finally rearing its head.
When DSL was king and cable started to take over, the big win for cable was the maximum bandwidth. DSL to a typical home (ie: not close to the central office) tops out somewhere around 1 megabit. Cable uses a shared local loop - so maximum bandwidth is enormous, far exceeding DSL. The only problem with cable is saturation resulting from many customers attempting to get that peak bandwidth. Cable has been touting their peak bandwidth as what you are buying, and has been claiming unlimited. DSL can provide unlimited at their peak bandwidth, cable cannot. (DSL may also have unstated or explicit rate caps, but that is not a technical limitation of the local loop).
Cable has been fundamentally lying to the customer since the very first days that they began to compete with DSL. And now that the average joe is actually using a significant portion of the promised bandwidth, the local loop is becoming saturated. You've all probably experienced this - get home from work, hit YouTube, and the performance is degraded compared to late at night.
All of which implies a very simple economic dynamic is at work; cable providers have been selling a falsely advertised product, and now are facing the fact that they cannot provide what they've sold. They're trying BT throttling, and want to start throttling YouTube, but know they can't fight that gorilla. So they are being forced to tell the truth about their product.
There's no mystery here, and the new solution is not screwing you - the old lies are simply coming home to roost.
So the question is not whether you should get unlimited 5 megabit for $50 per month. You can't have that with cable if everyone wants it. The cake is a lie. This new approach by TW is neither more nor less than them telling you what you really had all along. The only difference is you're no longer able to use the bandwidth your neighbor didn't know how to use five years ago.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I dumped Twat Wanker for AT&T U-verse a year ago.
No more connectivity problems. No more retarded tech support people.
Of course, I've only had to call AT&T tech support twice, because I never had a single service outage with AT&T (except for the one time when a power surge fried my RG, but that wasn't a problem with the connection), but when I've needed to call them, they actually know what they're doing. I think back to the days when TWC had weekly service outages and I had to constantly deal with retarded tech support people, and I don't know how I didn't go insane.
I'd recommend that anyone still using TWC dump them for AT&T U-verse...TWC just isn't worth what you're paying them.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
"[T]iers will range from $29.95 a month for... 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for... 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap."
Assuming 2^10 = kilo, etc:
5GB/(768kb/s) = 5*8*2^20 kb/(768kb/s) = 54,613s = 910min = 15.2hr
40GB/(15Mb/s) = 40*8*2^10 Mb/(15Mb/s) = 327,680s = 5461min = 91hrs
Assuming 30*24 = 720 hours/month, the first tier allows 2.1% utilization, and the second tier 12.6%
(All times assume usage at full speed)
This is kinda insane from where I stand. My local cable offers 10Gbps and 95GB for 55CAD. So, for the same price, you end up with a bigger pipe and a smaller pool.
I bet they're banking on people going over their limit.
(My record was 120GB over the limit on a 5Gbps connection, at $5/GB).
Time for the math!
For this, I am using lowercase "b" to represent "bits" and uppercase "B" to represent "Bytes." There are 8 bits to a byte, 1024KB to 1MB, and 1024MB to 1GB
Plan 1:
$29.95/mo at 768kb/s and 5GB monthly cap.
For Plan 1:
768kb/s = 96kB/s
96kB/s = 0.09375MB/s
0.09375MB/s = 0.000091552734375 GB/s
5GB / (0.000091552734375 GB/s)=
54613.33(repeating) seconds. =
910.22(repeating) minutes =
15.1703703(repeating) hours.
On plan 1, you have 15.1 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential, before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 3 hours, 2 minutes.)
Plan 2:
$54.90/mo at 15Mb/s and 40GB monthly cap.
15Mb/s = 1.875MB/s
1.874MB/s = 0.0018310546875 GB/s
40GB / (0.0018310546875 GB/s) =
21845.33(repeating) seconds
364.088(repeating) minutes
6.06814814 (repeating) hours.
On plan 2, you have 6.07 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 9 minutes, 6 seconds.)
I do not think this plan would be suitable for my Internet needs.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
You could hit that very easily just with WOW or EQ updates. Even single picture attachments can run 5mb these days.
That service would be worth about $10 a month to me.
This idea is about as dumb as my companies limit of 100mb for email (as compared to 5gb to unlimited for each of all my free email accounts.) Someone sends me just about anything and I get a notice that my mailbox quota is exceeded.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom"
It would be if high speed internet wasn't a monopoly or at best a duopoly. Right now, it's simply an excuse to raise prices at a time when the cable companies/telcos are raking in record profits.
And perversely, if it is metered and considered a limited resource, it gives the government the power to step in and control content. How do you think the FCC (which was only supposed to be in charge of frequency allocation) was made into a de facto censor for radio and TV? It was the limited resource argument.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Back in the dial-up days I didn't use the internet much due to telephone costs. I was always looking at the clock and trying to get things done quickly. It wasn't a great experience. Now with Virgin Media's aggressive throttling policy, it kind of feels like I'm back on Dial-up again. I've had to install DU Meter to keep tabs on my downloads and it's amazing how much ordinary browsing generates these days, especially if you like Youtube. It doesn't take much for me to hit their daily download limit and be slammed back down to 1mbps. Just downloading one TV Show from ITunes can do it. Perhaps if they didn't spend so much money on Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson advertising it, they could actually afford to upgrade their equipment and deliver a service in tune with modern Internet usage.
From TFA: "Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services."
Nope. Substitute 'and' for 'or'. All of Time-Warner's new Beaumont bundles include their crappy VOIP phone service.
Thus to avoid paying for the phone service, you must pay a la carte prices for cable-TV and/or internet service.
I almost want them to do this where I live; it would give me an excuse to kick the crappy Time Warner Cable TV service to the curb and get something that has more than 10 HD channels.
I already changed my DNS servers from Time Warner's, I prefer getting an NXDOMAIN response as opposed to a page full of ads. This is really a company I don't want to be a customer of anymore.
starts at the very beginning.
The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is a scarce good (in an economic sense; we have quite a lot of it actually, but not enough to serve everyone at high usage).
Actually, most people have no effing clue what bandwidth really is. You prove how clueless you are by calling it a "scare good."
So how de we ensure that bandwidth can be apportioned fairly across users?
Bandwidth is not a commodity as such. Unlike most commodities, it cannot be stored for future use. It is entirely a function of the momentary capability of the attached routing system. It's much like telephone systems in that regard; there are only a certain amount of circuits ("lines") that a particular neighborhood or area can have active at a given time.
We can make sure that people pay for the bandwidth they use, by metered sale or by tiered pricing.
And here is where it gets stupid. If you sell someone "X GB/month", then people will STILL get fucked over when they try to use the "bandwidth" (actually, absurd data capacity) they bought during a time when others are doing the same. Tiered plans are in place NOW for most providers, and the companies are lying to us about what they sold anyways - the "up to X kbits/second" tier usually isn't even doing as well as the next tier below.
And this says nothing of the off-period times when most sane people are at work or asleep. You're charging people the same price for the "scarce" times (similar to the daytime cell rates) as for the rates when the routers are just sitting more or less idle.
This is where the crackheads in corporate accounting offices and management start drooling - they can set up a complicated pricing scheme that the normal consumer barely understands, and get away with tagging in all sorts of hidden fees. I for one think the companies should be held responsible for upgrading their network and fulfilling the service they contracted for rather than trying to wiggle out of it after they overbooked.
Ignoring the fact that mb is millibits, 3300MB is 3.3 *GIGAbytes*, not 3.3 Terabytes.
Similarly, 33000MB is 33 Gigabytes.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Of course once they slowly implement caps on bandwidth, then they'll exclude their own services to push out the competition. Oh, you use our pay services (VoIP, IP TV, IP PVR, etc), that doesn't count against your bandwidth.
so, that's $30 for 2KB/s and $55 for 15KB/s
TV online, downloading (legally) movies instead of renting them, adobe/microsoft/google applications online, etc...
The current trend is to move EVERYTHING online. My current employer and three companies I have recently interviewed with are expressing great intention of taking their current monolithic, archaic desktop applications and scrapping the idea of porting them to a new desktop language. What are they doing with it you ask? Make a web suite of applications, of course!
The average consumer is going to start using more bandwidth, period. If I was in that town and it was applied to existing customers I'd quit and enjoy the slower speeds of DSL... with unlimited bandwidth. Lets face it, streaming movies/shows works fine on DSL. The initial load time may be a few minutes longer but seriously, can't you wait that long? And if you're using torrents you rarely if ever get speeds greater than a DSL line anyway. Downloading files takes 10 minutes longer? Or hours longer if you're pirating crap? WHO CARES! Go do something while it downloads.
No competition is the breeding ground for terror invoking corporate practices. I'm really hoping we end up with an administration that gives a hoot about technology and where our country is going with it. I certainly don't see it happening with McCain or Hillary, and there's at least some Hope(tm) that Obama is aware of technology enough that it will happen. This issue is important enough to me that I will vote Obama just for it.
In summary, may a tornado destroy all files/e-mails and somehow all thoughts going through their minds regarding capped bandwidth.
This was a joke.
Please don't mod as informative.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I will NEVER get Comcast, Cox is soooooo much better. My bro works there and he says that it's not uncommon for folks to use over 20 GB a month in downloads and get this - they don't cut them off or charge them more. Some are using over 80 GB a month according to their 'Top Talkers' reports. I know I can kill 10 GB in a night easily ;).
With the 5GB cap, Windows Update alone could use up the quota if you own enough Microsoft software.
Let me rephrase that for you:
There, I think that about does it.
So long as the consumer base is a bunch of uneducated and apathetic maroons, the execs will happily econo-rape them into poverty at any opportunity. I'm not the least bit surprised that tiered pricing and caps are coming back -- corporate behaviour is actually a bit like how the 17-year locust evolved, to where the cycles are just long enough for folks to forget about them before they come back.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
What the hell is wrong with you people? How can anyone be FOR this? This is outrageous and not right. I don't give a damn if it's 1 dollar per gigabyte, for some of us that adds up, and I'm not for this whole "oh well 5% can just deal with it" Seriously what the hell is all of you peoples deal? I'm sorry I forgot the ones WHO CAN AFFORD IT. But what about us normal people who already have little to no income and can barely afford anything as it is? What a bunch of money grubbing pieces of garbage!
Yer honor, the RIAA must be mistaken because I paid for this film that I downloaded. See, right here is the bill from my ISP. I was just giving away my own property to my friend because I didn't like the film.
[quote]Competition is so 20th century. In the Bush era, we've learned that the purpose of government is to give corporations whatever they want.[/quote]
Actually, if you think about it more closely, Bush actually has given everyone what they wanted, well just about anyways. He hasn't vetoed a thing yet (that I can recall).
Just put it in front of him, and he'll agree to it.
Now where is my Congress Critter, I need to get an earmark or two sent my way.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Comcast etc. already have location monopolies on customers for the most part. You don't have two cable companies competing for the same area usually. Granted there is DSL though. So basically they are given an area of customers that may not have any other choice.
They then charge them whatever they want; the same exact service can vary widely from city to city (mostly based on whether or not there is any competition).
They then receive kickbacks from the government to pay for infrastructure improvements.
I hear no complaints about telcom companies losing money on the current model. Yet there are inroads made frequently that restrict, cap or otherwise hinder the flow of information with no kickback to the customer. I hear that a small percentage ruins it for the rest of us, those few who manage to serve hundreds of gigabytes of data apparently cause a lot of problems for telcoms. So technically the load should be reduced and the "threat" should be removed. Shouldn't the prices go down as a result?
Even cell phone providers, which operate in a similar fashion, usually let stuff "roll over".
I have no problem paying for a service and I have no problem with a company making money off their services. However, I don't see any good intentions in any of this. All I see is a board room filled with people asking themselves how much more they can get out of the consumer without giving anything back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry In common law, a hue and cry (Latin, hutesium et clamor, "a horn and shouting") was a process by which bystanders were summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who had been witnessed in the act of committing a crime. ------------ On the OT, it makes sense to charge for BW used. That's how the ISPs typically have to pay for it. The unlimited model only works when overall usage is low. Personally, I am a frequent but not high-bandwidth user, and would prefer to pay a rate that reflects my actual usage instead of subsidizing all the torrent uploaders. It seems to me that simply charging for BW utilization would solve the file-sharing problem overnight.
If Amazon can make money charging (at most) $0.17/GB for transfer over redundant links to highly available storage, I have no idea why an ISP would need to charge almost 10 times that amount for best effort packet forwarding. Oh, that's right, they're mostly all greedy monopolies.
I'm sure that the trend will go towards Unlimited Bandwidth at a higher cost versus lower cost for metered usage, to promote its spread among grandmas and people who might watch an occasional youtube video, but I download (As others have said) Linux Torrents, watch streaming video on Hulu.com, Youtube, Albums, computer game mods and so forth, and these ALL take up a lot of space. Not to mention I play City of Heroes and that generates a lot of bandwidth (As it is an MMO like WoW ) in and by itself. So yeah, if given the choice between lower cost with metered usage or higher cost and unlimited bandwidth, the unlimited bandwidth is a no brainer for me.
"May the flees of a thousand camels infest your genitals and may your arms be too short to scratch."
Yeah.... short story is it's not metered service. It's just like those horrendous cell phone plans. We want T-Mobile style pay-as-you-go. (If your plan costs you on average more than 10 cents a minute then switch.)
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
They switch to metered use, I switch to another service provider. I'll pull my phone, my cable, and and my internet. They won't get one more dollar from me under those conditions.
It should be metered like snail mail and the phone service: the sender pays. So the advertisers should be paying for the bits they send you and you should be paying for the bits in the GET request.
By the same token, you should probably throttle your home server and personal blog page to match your means.
>> First off, they should have considered that before they sold it to us, not my problem they can't provide what they said they would.
Actually, it is your problem if you bought it and they can't provide it.
Thank you.
I'd be more than happy to pay for my bandwidth usage, so long as my download speeds even REMOTELY approached the advertised ones.
Does this metering cover all traffic? If I was to send 5 gigs of UDP packet traffic, where the client may not even be listening on a port, does it count against them?
...in Norway, the customers fled instantly when an ISP turned to a simular model. The said ISP was Telenor, earlier state controlled Televerket. I don't remember numbers (gb/month), but it was pretty small.
The funny thing about it was when one of the managers saw the result (peramently loosing a good wad of customers to competitors) of this "experiment" he went sour and bitter, claiming that this restrivtive model would have been "the best solution for most people involved" (or something like that), and blaimed the failure on other ISPs, wich wasn't willing to adapt from unresticted bandwitdh use.
The same company have on several occations demanded some sort of "Internet tax". Ie, that some money should go directly to the content providers, just because they provide "free" content. Ofcourse, Telenor is also a content provider. I don't remember where they suggested the money should come from, but I'm sure it was as crazy as the suggestion itself.
On another note, we had a company (Cybercity if I remember correctly. I think it was Danish) offering free dialup use, with a static monthly rate. That is, they had a dialup number that was free to call. This was before DSL arrived for most people, and their service was heavily used. So much, in fact, the had to put in a few restriction, and then instantly lost most customers.
I live in Beaumont, and I'm a RR customer.
Every time we're told that increased costs go to "infrastructure," we get the same crappy 6Mbps download speeds, downtime every Sunday night, no-show service calls, and human-unfriendly telephone support.
As a former owner of a dialup ISP, I completely understand the "5%" rule.
However, a 15-40GB limit is clearly not intended to curtail those users.
The "problem" users are up in the 200GB/mo region, not a measly 3-7 DVD ISOs.
This is nothing short of a preemptive attack against companies like NetFlix, Apple, Packet8, Vonage, etc. who offer DVD/HD downloads, VOIP, videoconferencing, and other services that compete with the incumbent's own services.
Note that the new bandwidth cap does NOT include the VOD or VOIP services you buy from TWC.
Again, I'm ok with fair and non-putative metering. I pay a larger water bill because my swimming pool has a leak. I pay a larger electric bill because I have an old house and I like it cool.
But my water company simply charges me based on usage. There are no caps and no punitive pricing brackets. And they aren't trying to sell me pool maintenance services that come with "free" pool re-fills.
This is nothing more than trying to do broadband on the cheap, instead of lighting up all that fiber that was pulled during the dot.com boom.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Economist http://www.economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10534573
Quote
Ugh. Glad I signed up years ago.
I use them for Internet only. Dish eats their lunch on television quality (including the local channels), and when I had VoIP, I used Packet8.
Back when all we had was CompuServe and GENIE.
Unrestricted access is what makes the internet useufl and why it is what is today.. If they to back to pay per use, it will die off as a commercial entity and bankrupt places like Amazon.
And how do they address spam, popups and DoS issues?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If people pay for usage, then leaching off your neighbor becomes theft. I think that is part of their goal. Getting extra money for bandwidth is just icing on the cake.
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
I can just see it now... poor unsuspecting windows user with an idle-bandwidth-consuming rootkit installed on their computer, gets charged $10k for a month of internet usage and sues ISP. ISPs won't care until this is the case w/ > 20% of their customers, and it leads to major class action lawsuits.
There are so many problems with this form of service delivery for the consumer, that far outweigh the benefits for the provider. Unfortunately, competition is limited (in most areas throughout the US) and consumers are really at the mercy of these corporations and their greedy business practices. If DSL and Cable Providers gang-up and gauge prices like this, then really, depending on where you live, you may have no choice.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
For starters. No more Itunes, netflix, casual shopping...
I would be canceling my service if i got that sort of garbage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I prefer metered unthrottled Internet to unmetered throttled Internet. And it will have to be one or the other.
All they have to do is plaster local market with "We're REALLY unlimited" and "Cable sells you 6 hours of internet + more charges" or "Have you checked your internet usage meter?"
With that all new subscribers will pretty much be scared away from cable.
Because the last thing a newbie wants to do is do something wrong on the computer and get "a bill for $100 bucks extra". And it's true. Leave your TV Viewing app on, and you're screwed.
p.s. TW is already claiming that "limits are easy to change", of course with them limits will only be going down. For economical reasons...
Hyperom.com
And i suppose they will give you constant feedback of how much you are using so you don't manage to get hit with a big bill at the end of the month because you got vacation pictures from Aunt Millie in the mail?
No, of course not, as they want to screw the customer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They sell both internet access and cable television. Once their subscribers are given a fat enough pipe, they can dump Time Warner cable and start paying someone else for TV.
Its not quite there yet, but everyone can see the writing on the wall.
This should really work well with Microsoft's .NET "Software as a Service" vision.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
Sometimes down to twelve, sometimes over twenty but generally about seventeen gigs a day.
I know because I use a Linux box as my router and leave it running iptraf in a terminal.
If I was put on this plan it would basically be like losing access to the net. Luckily, I'm not in the States. But I have to comment on those people who are claiming the problem is a lack of competition. You are high on crack if you think this is a problem caused by excessive restraints on business competition. This is a problem of a lack of regulation in the public interest.
It was destined to happen. Once the masses were hooked on the net, and it became a part of their daily lives... its the perfect time for broadband providers to charge whatever they want and you have no other option but to pay.
a 100Kbps masked DDoS for a approx. 14.6 hours straight would take up 5GiB of bandwidth.
Its a small amount of bandwidth that most people wouldn't even notice the attack. After 14ish hours, BAM, internet shuts off, or they are raking in additional charges from their ISP.
I'm currently using TimeWarner in San Diego, CA. I'll be canceling my internet service with them and letting them know that this move in Beaumont is the reason for my leaving. SpeakEasy it is!
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The rage boils... I literally glowered at this article for a few seconds.
Proof that Time Warner has laid off anyone who remembers the early days of AOL, or the lessons learned...
2009: Time Warner announces unlimited Internet; busy signals ensue
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if they do that here then i will cancel my service and pick up something else. i have no idea how much bandwidth i use, but i shouldn't have to be concerned with it. i don't do bit torrent, but i do play online games. i don't know how much data that uses, and i shouldn't have to care.
$55/40GB = $1.375/GB. The overage rate is $1/GB, according to the summary. This means you get a better deal for exceeding your cap.
Not a sentence!
If you really truly believe that there should be no limits on traffic when you sign up with an ISP, stop whinging about it on Slashdot.
Take action! Set up your own ISP, and offer unmetered, unshaped, uncensored access to all!
Be sure to make a big noise about it on Slashdot so we can watch the circus.
Is the amount of data continuously using a 5mbps line for 30 days would generate (ok ok, I used 1000 rather than 1024 as the base because I'm lazy, sue me ). So I guess it is ok if they meter access as long as it doesn't cost more per megabyte than the equivalent cost of a 5mbps line operating constantly for 30 days. Somehow I expect their rates to be just a tiny bit higher.
Limits on downloads are very common.
My ISP, Woosh, caps it at about 5 Gigs per month on our plan. After you go over, no extra charge, but your speeds do go down to dialup level.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
That's quite comparable to broadband (edge is more akin to dialup, IMO) and its available right here in Beaumont! Seriously, TWC is shooting themselves in both feet with this metering crap.
I hope this fails in TX. I'm in WV and a current customer of TW. Their service is great. Their tech support is clueless but not from an intellgence standpoint but from not being informed from the powers that be. I can use nearly a gigabyte of transfer a day just by running eMule idle (idle meaning I have no downloads to my PC, only the lowest transfer possible for uploads). I don't want to have to pay out the wazoo for my service. The last 4 months I've had 135GB, 280GB, 148GB and 104GB transfers from February to May. I can download a gigabyte of data just downloading newsgroup headers from a 5 day period (since TW outsourced their news service 18 months ago which provides a 2-3 month retention). Will internal traffic count against this cap? Am I going to have to wait for the equivalent of T-Mobile's Mobile-to-Mobile crap so I can transfer stuff for "free" to another TW customer if internal traffic ends up counting against this? As someone else mentioned, I want all my ads filtered out to reduce my transfer. I bet they won't be providing that service.
15 Mbps transfer is great however assuming a constant rate (and my math is right) I can download 40GB in 6 hours. Obviously that would be rare unless I find a bunch of stuff on the newsgroups to download or want to watch a bunch of streaming video from somewhere. I'd like to know why they plan to raise the bandwidth but yet drastically drop the monthly transfer cap compared to what I list above (and I've never had any complaints from them). 40GB is just too low. With dial-up basically dead I think the 768kbps/5GB tier should be priced at $14.95, a 15Mbps/50GB tier priced at $29.95 and a 15Mbps/150GB tier priced at $59.95 with a per gigabyte charge of $0.25. $1 for a gigabyte is just racketeering. I'll be contacting my local office to let them know I'll have to switch to something else (only option would be Verizon DSL or satellite for my area though) if this goes nationwide.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Eat all you want within reason IS the best way. All others paths are usually led by an industry shill with a buck in his pocket and an industry spiel in his bought and paid for mouth. Once a monopoly like a local cable outfit gets a taste of success in foisting 'metering' on a previousely perceived non-gullible public, a line is drawn and the business environment is forever changed. And not for the better! There is no going back unless extreme force is used. Such force was used on the old AT&T to break it's national monopoly in telephone service and its panoply of mendacious rules. I grew up in a household of 'limited' phone service. In it all phone calls counted and often measured as well if conversations lasted more than a few minutes. If a household with this service made over ten or so calls in a month, a per call surcharge of ten cents a call was added. Time charges were leveled as well. I was twelve years old when we moved out of Lakewood, Ohio where the lovely 'Bell System' and its mandated 'Western Electric' phones held the population in unwilling and often ignorant of any alternative thrall. 'Ma Bell was a mean mutha' was an operating slogan of an entire generation that saw the Bell 'system' dragged through court after court by successive democratic governments that considered the interests of the people over the interests of monopoly capitalists without souls that held soul-less power over millions of victimized subscribers. These capitalists never lack for idiotic lackeys willing without thinking to be fools and prostitutes for them. I am forever thankful that the old AT&T monopoly was broken up; but I fear that the monster, like a Borg Cube from the 'Star Trek' series, is rising again to darken the communications of the world yet again. The new AT&T is just as predatory as the old one, and the Time Warner people better take heed, for their game is not new, and the new Borg may one day seek to 'assimilate' THEM as well. The old monopoly made you use their phones, and no extensions or extra connections were allowed. They knew when new connections were made, as all connections had an electrical load called in telco terms, a 'beta'. On this same note, when the new monopoly AT&T takes over the whole nation again, subscribers will also only have one source for the internet. AT&T! They will also have to own only one brand of computer, theirs! And you can bet that it will not run linux. No, I resent having my freedom sold cheaply down the river by fools and shills and prostitutes, and will not be silent when this precious hard won freedom is under attack.
Er... um... "skynet"?
really?
Its worse in Aus than the previous poster mentioned.
You know how you are getting charged $1 per gigabyte? In aus it is not uncommon for charges to be ~$150 per gigabyte (aus dollar is almost at parity with USD at the moment).
Back in the 90's I used to be on a ~10 megabit cable connection with a 100 *mega*byte cap. (with 18 cents per meg - 180 dollars per gig - usage charges.)
Perhaps they should just do shaping after specified quotas like lots of the actually affordable ISPs in AU. (40 gig then shaped bandwidth etc.)
Metering data is the norm for pricing in New Zealand. But throughput is excellent (My ISP is ORCON) and they don't seem to do much shaping....With metering, you do tend to get what you pay for....and that's pretty good almost all of the time. They have an incentive to keep the network fast and inviting. if you go over your cap, you pay $10 for each additional 5GB...If that gets too expensive, I could pay more as a base price to get a higher cap if I consistently exceed the level I'm paying for. On my DSL my download speed is just under 4mbps and my upload speed is about 890kbps. That's about as good as it gets in New Zealand. A small number of people are getting 24mbps as it rolls out....but I've heard it isn't very reliable and you can't go far on that 24mbps.....It runs out not far from your house....
Only boring people are ever bored.
FOADIAF
AT&T, if you manage to get U-Verse into my neighborhood in the near future, and do it RIGHT (i.e., unmetered, unfettered, gimme-all-the-freakin'-bandwidth-I-want), you will nail me down solid as a customer... throw in the availability of the HTC Touch Pro as my new cell phone, and I may just kneel down and orally pleasure an AT&T exec (only if she's young, blond, & genetically female)
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
I use a gigabit router. Tomato's no help.
get 'em hooked then squeeze 'em dry - hehehehe
god bless capitalism! god bless texas!
In Australia only Telstra (Bigpond) & Optus offer fibre optic cable broadband and both count uploads/downloads in their contracts. .. BIG-TIME!! ... only count downloads in your allocated useage.
It is a ripoff
Every other ISP offers ADSL +2 at broadband speeds, BUT
Many customers have found out too late (with Telstra & Optus) that they are being ripped-off by the download/upload part of their contract.
While management of useage is becoming an issue with ISPs', don't allow yourselves to be forced into the situation where this upload/download becomes an industry standard.
Unless it's already too late for you, vote with your feet & sign-up with any other ISP who doesn't included uploads in your useage.