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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."
My Journal
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??
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.
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?