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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."
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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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
Not necessarily. It's not easier to argue that it's your bandwidth, because it's not. It's still their bandwidth, and they will still want to QoS it however they please.
Metering the bandwidth has little to do with them wanting to finance new infrastructure and a whole lot more to do with new ways to extract more revenue from their existing customer base. I mean, once you lock someone into a $150/month package deal of internet service, you can only do so much more to get money from them.
So this is how they're going to do it. Beyond this, they will still look at providing "premium" service rates for quality of service assurances.
Not to mention they will still QoS competitive products down. This will stifle innovation, as companies such as Netflix, who want to start online delivery, will now not be able to be as successful. Your freedom of choice to choose who you get content from is now limited to precisely your cable company because guess what? They aren't going to be metering your cable TV as part of the internet service.
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.
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.
...assuming no BT throttling, etc shenanigans.
That's a bold assumption to make...
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?
Which cable company do you work for?
ISPs and telecoms are greedy bastards calling Google and the like 'Freeloaders' for absolutely no reason. They pay for bandwidth the exact same way everyone else does. Time Warner and the like have practically 0% of their cost of business in the infrastructure once its built. You're on slashdot, we've discussed this on god knows how many occasions and anyone with the technical knowledge of building such an infrastructure and providing the bandwidth they provide for the price the provide knows how ridiculous their profit is. Don't try to pull this bullshit and expect not to be called on it.
Metered bandwidth is retarded. The lines are there, they dont' cost any more when they get used versus when they don't. The charge is artificial. They have oversold their external links and aren't upgrading. Have you paid attention to their quarterly reports and notice the ridiculous amount of profit they turn or are you just oblivious to that part of the equation?
There is no such thing as freeloading when buying bandwidth, so just cut that crap out. We all pay for our portion of the bandwidth we use, thats the way it works in shared networks. I pay my upstream for service, they are either a NAP or they pay their upstream and for their interconnects to others. Explain how its somehow different for the telecos than it is for google?
> There simply is not enough infrastructure to allow everyone to consume whatever they want, whenever they want, without making them pay for it.
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.
Second, telephone service in land lines has been unmetered for local service for decades. Cell phones don't charge extra for long distance any more, any metered charge is an artificial charge added because people are willing to pay it, not because it costs them 'extra'. Carriers typically have recipical agreements so its not like they charge each other for long distance anyway. Backbone providers do this as well.
Third, I've had plenty of bandwidth on my cable modem for the last 8 years. Unmetered. That is freedom. Charging extra and having limits is not freedom. I'm amazed that you even considered making such statement. Do you also believe warrentless wiretaps and being held without reason as a terrorism suspect is freedom? So now that they need to perform upgrades to compete with FiOS and the like, now they don't have enough bandwidth? Why is it that Time Warner has just bumped up residential service from 5mb/s to 7mb/s for standard service, and 7 to 10 for their 'turbo' customers, but they can't keep up with those people who use it without limiting them? Do you not see the wool being pulled over your eyes?
Perhaps they should fix their 'overloaded' backbone rather than sell more bandwidth that they claim they don't have and it costs too much to build out.
Perhaps they should implement fair queuing across the board rather than pick on specific protocols to control. If I'm using 10mb/s of my 10mb/s 'always on, unlimited' bandwidth, and someone else wants 10mb/s on theirs, and they can't provide it or figure out how to fairly share the bandwidth, they shouldnt' be in business. I was doing that at the ISP I worked at in 1996, without considering anything above layer 2, was there implosion in technology that suddenly caused this ability to be lost? I'm pretty sure that if they can provide machines capable of doing deep packet inspection, they can probably come up with a box or two that is capable of doing fair queuing at layer 2, don't you think? They can also probably spend a little bit of cash on network infrastructure.
I ask you again, which cable company do you work for?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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!
Bear in mind that the USA is run by and for big business, not the 'consumers'. Politicians rely on "campaign contributions" to fund their business-class lifestyles, and when they've blown through that money, there are plenty of "lobbyists" ready to pay for access to them. The mind blowing costs of running a political campaign practically assures that most victorious politicians are corrupt.
While the breaking up of the old AT&T was a pretense that a telco monopoly wouldn't be tolerated, it just resulted in regional monopolies instead, and the eventual result was that the "Baby Bells" just re-merged into three companies that now form an effective cartel.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
They can and SHOULD charge you for zombie traffic. Matter of fact, they should charge you double for it once they notify you of said traffic coming from your setup.
Actually, a better solution would be to redirect all your web requests to a 'this is how to fix it' page until the traffic isn't coming from your setup any more. I'm sure someone is about to complain about how their grandma can't understand what that means and she just wants to see pictures of her grandkids.. cry me a river. Zombified systems are a threat to everyone on the network.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.