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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.
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."
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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.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
hell i use 40 gig in less than a day.
time to start looking for another ISP
I'm paying $90/month for a dedicated server, 24/7 amazing tech support and 1.2TB bandwidth per month. How is $60/month for no dedicated server, crappy tech support and 40GB/month (0.04TB) any where near a reasonable offer?
So you are chugging along moving a large file when "oops" that last packet in the file somehow get's lost. Now geeks here would be using a recoverable transmission tool, but grandma will just have to re-get that tar ball of the grandkids pictures.
Drop a few packets here and there when you need to increase the billable bandwidth!
Oh, misery. Been there, done that, got the phone bill. Let's hope this trial balloon blows up like the Hindenburg before anyone else gets any ideas.
I remember the bad old days of Compu$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!
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 $9.99 a month.
It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
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
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".
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
And who decides if the network is congested?
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.
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.
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 ----
This should really work well with Microsoft's .NET "Software as a Service" vision.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com