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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."
No it isn't (yet). You obviously didn't read the short article as it states this trial is only running with new subscribers and not existing ones.
In Australia the plans are usually for bandwidth/month, so you pay according to line speed, GB/month etc, but it's fairly uncommon (except for wireless broadband) to be charged for excess usage (they just drop the speed to something painful like 64kbps).
Many of the ISP's have unmetered content, such as local mirrors for major linux distro's, file repositories and some entertainment related stuff. So, for example, all the Ubuntu updates for our computers are not metered - in some circumstances that's VERY useful (eg: an office with 10 computers).
But Australia's internet is a horrible state of affairs generally - just putting in our experience here FWIW.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Some Australian ISP's used to let users elect to have either the painful throttling you describe, or to be charged extra for excess usage. These days most (all?) just do the throttling - most likely to try to get users to upgrade to more expensive plans. I'm currently on 64k thanks to exceeding my allowance for the month, and 'painful' barely describes it. I'd happily pay $10 extra for another few more GB this month, but certainly don't want to lock myself into a higher plan, as most months I won't be using as much.
Also - if you've got 10 machines running the same OS, 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?
> 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 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.
All the equipment is consolidated in a server farm where ever your hosting company is, so they buy bulk bandwidth and resell it to you cheaply. With residential services customers are spread out and require last mile infrastructure.
If you install AptZeroConf on every machine, then you won't have to any work at all -- it's all handled transparently.
Put identity in the browser.