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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."
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/
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.
Actually, the reason there will BT throttling and other restrictions on using the PC as a media device is because almost NO ONE in America knows it. Try discussing these issues with anyone who's not a regular on /. and watch the glassy stares they give back to you.
If everyone in America knew what was happening there would be a hue and a cry to do something about it, just like with health care or gas prices.
Seen from the country I live in, all this is just unbelieveable.
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We have ADSL lines with speed up to 28Mb DL (remove ATM overhead) for prices starting at 18â per month.
No cap, no bullshit, nothing.
Usually for a higher price (starting at 29â), you get unlimited phone calls to many countries (japan, us, europe, etc...) and video over IP (TV, video on demand, other funky services)
All this without even talking about fiber which is being deployed, and cable.
I cannot understand how the country where the internet was born is going this way
Looks like there is either no competition, or no incentive to upgrade the network.
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.
Slashdot really needs a +1 Scary, because I laughed at first, then thought you were serious and realized that Comcast might actually do some sort of shit like this.
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.
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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)
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
Looks like there is either no competition, or no incentive to upgrade the network. Competition is so 20th century. In the Bush era, we've learned that the purpose of government is to give corporations whatever they want.
This has boosted us to the dizzying heights of... 16th in broadband penetration in the industrialized world.
And falling.
Back in the 90s, the telecom companies swore up and down if we just deregulated them and gave them all kinds of tax incentives, they'd wire the country like crazy. Actually promised us--get this--45 meg symmetric, not just download, to 80% of US households by (wait for it)...
2006
Of course, the deal was meant to be enforced by the FCC which under Bush said, "Whatever you want, we're taking a nap."
So we end up with situations like the one I'm in. I live in a small town outside the capitol of Texas where folks fleeing the city have been moving for some years so they could have an actual tree in their yard but it's not too long a commute into the city.
Fastest growing county in the entire state. Tons of people from the city with jobs and money. What's AT&T (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) done about DSL?
Nothing. Flat out nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a single upgrade to the CO in years, no build out, nothing.
It doesn't even make good business sense. But, there it is.
They do, however, spend tons on advertising. My landline is with them so every couple of months, I get marketed at about DSL. It's great! It's wonderful! It's fast! Get it! Get it now!
I always say, "Sure! Sign me up!"
The marketeer happily tippy taps his keyboard then slows down and finally says, "Um... you can't get DSL."
"No, really? Gee, maybe you ought to freaking think about building out in the, you know, fastest growing county in the entire blasted state BEFORE you call me again."
(slam phone)
Yeah, it's petty. But it makes me feel better.
My WinXP (kept for gaming only, Linux for everything else) got infected with a spambot (hazards of having children), and I came home one day to find my service shut off. Several hours of calling around to various departments later they informed me that I would have to get my computer "professionally cleaned" before they would reconnect me. Like the "professionals" wouldn't do exactly the same things I did to fix the problem. A bit of social engineering, and accusing them of scanning my system without permission (they didn't, they were monitoring the quantity of outgoing emails) and I convinced them to turn it back on.
That being said, the US is horribly backwards in telcom because they corps know the average citizen has no idea how much they are being screwed. Paying for cell minutes and long distance, when it costs the company no more to route my call across the country than it does to the house next door? And now extra for bandwidth, when only 5% of their customers are using anywhere near the max? [quote from the radio on the way to work this morning]
If Time-Warner tries to implement this in my area, I'm finding another provider. I really don't feel like explaining to my son that he can't play Xbox Live because we "went over our minutes".
It's time Americans woke up and insisted that we stop being ripped off. Flat rates for phone service, flat rates for internet, and at reasonable prices. Either that, or stop claiming we are "more technologically advanced" than the rest of the world, because nonsense like this is proving on a daily basis that we are being left behind.
All the US has is monopoly areas. That's because our fucked-up government handed out monopolies on phone service way back when, and "deregulation" doesn't help anything but picking who bills your phone service: all they do is "lease" your particular line from the company that owns it.
For example:
#1 - In my old apartment, I could only get DSL. DSL was only available through SBC. I could get phone service from any one of 5 phone providers, but SBC was the only one that could provide DSL, because SBC owned the lines and the DSL routers - and if I went with phone from one of the other phone companies, then I couldn't get DSL because SBC required an "active phone account" before providing the DSL service.
#2 - Where I live now, we can't get DSL (no router close enough). We can only get cable from Comcrap, because they have a monopoly on cable TV service in the area. When I called Verizon about FiOS, I was told - surprise surprise - that FiOS will ONLY ever be available in places where Verizon owns the phone line infrastructure. So, my options are now either (a) Comcrap cable modem or (b) shitty satellite service with >2000ms pings.
The kicker? I asked my elected representative why this is allowed, and they said that there is "national competition" between the phone companies... meanwhile, the gov't sits back and allows monopoly abuse by the data providers all over the fucking place.
In the big metropolitan area I live in, we get radio ads trying to get people to "switch" between cable modem and DSL all the time. Yet looking over the map, less than 10% of the people even exist in an area where DSL and cable modem services overlap. It's all a big fraud.
You severely underestimate large corporations ability to talk (and bill) out of both sides of their mouthpieces. When you have the people who write laws in your pocket, you get to make the laws.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
My parents' ISP has a monthly cap (60GB, or 30GB, or something like that). On the ISP's page there's a usage graph. It says things like "your predicted usage for this month is 8GB".
It's less easy to see who or what is using the bandwidth though.
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.
I attended a presentation once where one of the admins (Bob Beck) at UAlberta showed off his pf-based system to yank DHCP leases from machines that met their criteria for zombie traffic (typically a sudden blast of SMTP traffic). Actually, I think it was a little more complicated than that, but the end result is that desktops are redirected to a "You are zombied, contact the IT department" webpage. Pretty cool.