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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.
didn't those subscribers sign up for unlimited usage?
someone's getting sued.
Someone has to challenge the legality of the "terms subject to change without notice" clause. This essentially is not a contract if its terms can change.
They're using their grammar skills there.
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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Well, thankfully (for now) FIOS is unmetered and most certainly will be hyped by Verizon. The cable companies may rake in money for a year or two, but their greed will get the best of them and they won't know when to stop. By that time, Verizon's FIOS infrastructure will be pretty much complete in most markets and everyone will be switching.
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual competition they will lose out.
I know damn well that if Comcast starts capping my usage with a "meter" like this, particularly this low, I'll move to a lower end DSL line without a problem. Sure I'd take a speed hit, but I can live. So it takes me 45-60 minutes to DL a TV episode instead of 15 minutes.
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.
Looks fine to me. I don't know what prices are like in the USA but that $55 (=35â) for 15 megabits is better than you can get in most places of Finland (I know I pay more for 8 megs) and I don't, on average, use much more than that cap... Well, I guess that sometimes... If you download more than 10ish dvd quality movies (4 gigs) per month, you get 4 dollars more to price of each exceeding the 10 but still, I think that for quite a majority that's pretty good deal.
;)
Hmm, after a post like this I propably got to add a disclaimer that I am not assosciated with the company
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/
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??
I use the web for browsing and VoIP. Rarely I need to download some source code, or distro, or security update for OS. I always pay the lowest ADSL subscription (unlimited). By under-utilizing my net connection, does it mean that I sponsor the bandwidth of others who do..?
http://revj.sourceforge.net
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.
Time-Warner Sued By A Bazillion Customers Over Bandwidth Charges
.....seriously, I don't think TWC would be stupid enough to deliberately install spyware on its subscribers' computers, but this will fail as soon as hundreds of thousands of clueless Windows users running zombie botnet boxes start cancelling their service en masse "because they jacked up the price". This is not the way to either fix broadband usage policy nor to stop botnets.
$slashdot_user writes: "Time-Warner today was served with a class-action lawsuit from nearly every single subscriber to its metered internet service, launched in June. The suit claims that Time-Warner willingly and complicitly installed spyware onto its subscribers' computers to run up bandwidth charges. The program, which affected primarily Windows-based computers, repeatedly downloaded and uploaded a 1.5 MB file of random, uncompressable data up to a thousand times per hour each way, causing subscribers' caps of 5 GB to be reached within hours. Further GB of bandwidth was charged at $1 each, with some subscribers receiving 'overage' bills stretching upwards of $700. Representatives for Time-Warner were unavailable for comment."
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
how much is their unlimited plan?
b/c its like 49.99 or 54.99 (+/-) for unlimited 5mb through-put on charter and comcast
if the ISP companies want to role out metered bandwidth, and make it attractive then they are going to have to make it cheaper.
i switched from 3mb cable $54.99 to 1.5mb naked DSL for $42.00, when i called the cable company that i was dropping service (after they charged me $54.99 for a month (b/c my one year deal had lapsed)) they said they could give me 5mb for $29.99 for 6 months. i said they should have done that to KEEP ME AS A CUSTOMER before they charged me regular price rather than caring about me as a customer.
DSL has tiered service (768 / 1.5 / 3.0 [some places 6.0]) options, but there arent caps. and their prices (and latency) is much better than cables' massive speed. (and prices)
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.
What exactly is the technical network congestion that the cable companies are looking at? The article implies DSL doesn't face the same problem so it sounds like it's last mile congestion.
If that was the case though I would think they'd gain far more by seeking to give incentives for heavy users to download during off hours or some such.
I think this is one of the first plans where they've mentioned being able to tier your usage. I personally would have no problem if they set up the system like they do cell phones, you pay x amount for y minutes/GB, with overages being relatively expensive. If they could also add in something similar to cell phones where if you "call in plan" it doesn't count against your total, where the in plan refers to getting the data from a source close enough to you that it is less costly for the ISP, we would see massive improvements in the efficiency of P2P programs. At least with that everybody would be happier, consumers get the same data and ISPs use less bandwidth.
Don't you hate pants?
My ISP (Newfoundland, Canada) Rogers Cable just started metering this month too. I now pay $55.95CDN for 95GB of transfer (up and down) per month.
Shh.
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.
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.
So does anybody know of good tools to measure the total upload/download usage on the three platforms (Mac/PC/Linux)?
There is only two providers here, AT&T and Cox. Everybody knows that AT&T is already disrupting Bit Torrents and metering is coming next. I would like to get an idea on my usage. My guess is about around 300k a day on podcasts and the web but it is only a guess.
Any tools you know of would help me get a handle on it, thanks.
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.
I wonder what happens about so called "internet noise", that continuous flow of traffic (typically bots trying to hack your devices) that yanks up your total traffic throughput although you're not doing anything particular.
Or, for that reason, what about all those pesky updating programs (adobe, java, apple, windows update...)?
I think the best way would be some sort of "best effort" approach. If you need to download something big, great, you'll get all the bandwidth you need... for a short time, though.
If your hooking up to bittorrent (et al.), then your bandwidth will be throttled downwards, depending on what you pay.
the ISPs in the UK have been doing this for years, although some still have an ambiguous 'fair use policy' like virgin that'll bring your connection to its knees during peak hours if you're doing something like, say, using the internet.
all the ISPs market their service with all these multimedia capabilities. i use these capabilities, and my bandwidth doesnt go below 140GB a month. what the hell am i meant to do on a 5GB limit?
My ISP (Rogers) did. Like any good economically rational consumer, I used it to grab while the grabbing was good. Last month I downloaded "Video Store 1.0 (beta)" and the bill they sent indicated I'd have been charged $1,000 in overages.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Seriously? Did I do my math correctly? 40GB per month? 15MB/sec? It would take under an hour to go over the monthly allowance? That's nuts. This would be like getting a cellphone plan that only has 40minutes of plan-minutes per month, with no nights and weekends or in-network calling. Who would go for that? I guess there is a subtle difference in that a computer doesn't NEED to saturate its pipe for the entire time but still.
I'd go with DSL and to heck with the peak throughput.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
hell i use 40 gig in less than a day.
time to start looking for another ISP
> wouldn't it be worth setting up an internal mirror / patch distribution
> server so you only need to pull the data down your internet pipe once?
To mirror the entire Ubuntu update repository would probably be pretty wasteful unless his office is quite extraordinary. And just mirroring the files needed by one computer will not necessarily be OK for all the other ones, unless he's very careful to install packages only on an office-wide basis. I think a better solution for him would be to use a proxy (like Squid) to cache the update files.
Even Tmobile's Blackberry plan is more competitive than this Time-Warner piece of crap that they are putting out there.
Tmobiles = 30$/month unlimited edege.
In the meantime, why did some random town in Texas get chosen to test this?
Why didn't they try somewhere that there are enough people who will voice their opinions that the idea is garbage and just a money extraction?
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?
Is your TV metered? No? That's why. You don't get charged if you exceed your "TV allowance" as there is no "TV allowance".
I think GP's question is perfectly legitimate.
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.
30 days 5 gigs aprox 171 megs a day
24 hours aprox 7.1 megs a hour
60 mins a hour aprox 121.1 kB per minute
60 secs a min aprox 2.0 bytes per second
8 bits = byte aprox 0.25 kilobits per second
this is a fair deal???
Dial Up is better.....
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.
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.
...
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)
This plan is absurd!
$30 / month for DSL speeds and a bandwidth cap of 5 GBs.
Are they trying to sell internet service to people that are living in 1998? I was there when AOL tried to do that in 1996.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Oh, misery. Been there, done that, got the phone bill. Let's hope this trial balloon blows up like the Hindenburg before anyone else gets any ideas.
I remember the bad old days of Compu$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!
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
It may not be that they want to combat piracy, but I can certainly see it getting worse. How so? Think about it. At $1/GB, pretty much any retail game could be pirated for like $5. That's still better than the $50 that the software companies want for them. Movie piracy? That's, like, 2 for $1. People will figure they'll pirate MORE since they're paying extra for the bandwidth. And we all know you can't COMPLETELY stop piracy, no matter how much "BT throttling" you do.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
This is so dumb, if they tried to make me pay for my bandwidth per month I would mooch off more unsecured wireless networks than I do now.
I'm really surprised someone hasn't posted this already, but use Firefox and the NoScript plugin.
It blocks all ad content from being downloaded, I use it to speed up my horribly slow internet connection.
I have to choose between lots of bandwidth and lots of volume at a high price, or low volume at low bandwidth for a low price?
I only use my home connection on nights and weekends, I don't seed torrents. I don't need a lot of capacity, I just want it to be fast when I do use it. That goes out the window, apparently.
Are they offering a way for users to actually monitor their usage so they don't have to guess?
I guess it's all moot anyway - I'm getting 500Kbps down and paying for 10Mbps already.
I can't help but comment on how much of a frigging nice change it is to actually read an article that doesn't consist of a 5-sentence blog, or something on a shovel-ware tech site (Information Week, Computerword, CNET, etc) that offers over-filled, over-designed, and over-sized pages, but similarly little content.
This is, I believe, is the first Slashdot article from AP. Dunno if Google's deal with AP is making either of them money, but I do know I'm not alone when saying that Google's clean and minimalist approach to things is both welcome and appreciated.
This is a clear attempt to apply the cell phone industry's business model to internet access. I think the traffic limits and outrageous overuse fees couldn't make my point more clearly. When you establish those limits, you profit both ways--when the customer limits their use to avoid exceeding the limit you can deliver less than what the customer paid for, and when they exceed you can rape them. Expect to see your monthly service become a 12 month or longer contract with early termination fees if they realize their ambitions.
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.
thats quite expensive in the uk for £40 a month (aprox $80) you can get unlimited (with no BT throttle) upto 24Mb/s (although my freinds who have it can only connect at about 12Mb/s due to line quality, but the upload is about 1Mb/s which is alot better than ADSL1.
With a proper, modern cable plant, DSL isn't shitty at all.
I get 6Mbps down and 512kbps up. My line is capable of 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up, but Bellsouth/AT&T simply won't sell it to me; it's not a technical limitation.
With a well-designed cable plant, DSL can be just as good as cable. The problem is cheap telcos who don't want to update their 100 year old plant, and thus can't squeeze more than maybe a megabit out of the ancient wires.
Let me see if I got this right. 1) Cable companies used existing infrastructure to offer cable internet service. 2) Cable companies offered unlimited bandwidth because the internet didn't have all that much on it worth downloading. 3) The internet accumulated material worth downloading. 4) Cable internet became the best option for an internet connection because it was fast and had unlimited bandwidth. 5) Cable companies did little to improve their infrastructure, despite getting subsidies from the Federal government. 6) Cable companies sold more subscriptions to their service than they were able to provide stable, uninterrupted service for. 7) Cable company whines incessantly while throttling people's connections, effectively making moot the reason why people chose cable internet in the first place. 8) Verizon FiOS spends billions to build an entirely new infrastructure that can easily provide unlimited monthly bandwidth to customers. 9) Cable company implements plan to charge heavy users more, effectively pushing them towards Verizon FiOS if it's in the area yet. Maybe it's just me, but I view this as a win-win. A lot of customers will have a very good reason to seek out a fiber optic connection while simultaneously easing the load on the cable companies. The connection for the existing cable company subscribers improves as all the heavy bandwidth users switch to fiber optic and all the heavy bandwidth users get a much faster connection with a bigger bandwidth pipe. I actually wonder if it wouldn't be more profitable for the cable companies to actually push certain customers towards a fiber optic provider. There's no reason why fiber and cable can't coexist. DSL and cable have been for years now. Each will occupy its own niche within the market. Plus, by having the downloaders migrate to the provider best able to provide for their needs, the network usage would be a lot more predictable for the companies, making it easier for them to manage and provide a quality connection for a reasonable price. Or, more likely, the cable companies are going to kick and scream and fight like hell to keep a failing business model.
Dial up rocks. At only $40/month for a land line and $15/month for an ISP on that line I can download all the goodness I want at 36 kbs, just like I did 15 years ago.
DSL, you ask? Not available and owned by a company known for FU practices.
See the choices most people have? Don't you wish something other than GWB had happened over the last eight years?
It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
7.152BiB/s isn't that much actualy, thanks for provinding an excelent argument for the undercapacity of canadas current network!
As high-speed internet connections are used for purposes other than web-browsing and email, metered access will be a disaster.
At my house, I have an Analog Terminal Adapter (telephone), multiple satellite boxes, apple TVs, game consoles, video cameras, alarm system, and HVAC thermostat all plugged into my network. Many of these devices "call home" for one reason or another, and I have little, to zero control over that process.
Metered access will either prevent me from using these devices to their full potential, or cause me to spend a lot of money to keep them working.
Metered access, especially at these rates, is nothing more than an attempt to keep demand artificially low. Once the infrastructure guys "reduce demand" the financial pressures of network upgrades go away, and the shareholders become happy.
If metered network access succeeds, it will only be due the monopoly status of the provider, not because the market wants it.
-ted
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
And yet you've completely failed to demonstrate how.
Nothing you posted there addresses the fact that at some point, with metered downloads, you will be downloading ads that count against your cap WHETHER YOU WANT TO OR NOT. Your TV comparison fails at all levels.
Because the two have fuck-all to do with each other? And the entire point has fuck-all to do with metered downloads? You would have a point if I were charge more when I watched more TV, but since I'm not, and no one else is either, you don't.
Does anyone know of a good program to use that will tell you how much bandwidth you are using in a month?
Go home, nobody loves you. .
- The Blog
I will be putting three Roku devices around my home to stream movies. When they go to HD, this will be three devices able to stream HD movies. We're talking 4GB a movie. Get a few people in the home watching these and we could hit a 40GB "cap" in a week on vacation, if not sooner.
Microsoft is selling HD movies from Warner Brothers. With these new caps in place, Warner Brothers will probably not be able to see HD movies over the internet. Isn't this against their interests right now?
If they want to cap internet usage, they need to realistically do it. In todays world, nearly everything is going streaming for audio and video. 40GB is simply nothing. They should offer a terrabyte per month at the very minimum.
I know it sounds good as a way to shaft people, but horrible business sense...why do people honestly not use good business sense in the face of reality? This has to be the most shortsighted idea I've ever seen out of TWC.
How many new subscribers are there in an obscure Texas town, 5-10 and/or whatever market numbers they magically create via using family employees?
I think market response will be strong enough to tell TWC to go fly a kite, hopefully forever.
You assume that bandwidth caps/traffic shaping and capacity use fees are mutually exclusive. I'm cynical enough to suspect that Bittorrent will still be throttled and that latencies will still suck for gaming apps and possibly even VoIP will be throttled down the road. Ma Bell and the rest are in bed with Hollywood and the recording industry. I also bet that upload will still be a tiny fraction of download bandwidth. (Man I hate that one. As an academic I store gobs of research at home that I want to access from my laptop, whether it's in my office or in a coffeeshop.)
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".
On the one hand, this may reduce the amount of spam coming from bots on Time Warner's network, since people may be more concerned about securing their computers if they get billed for the bandwidth for the spam they are sending. On the other hand, getting billed for the bandwidth to receive spam sucks since the receiver has no control over it.
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
Yeah, I have the same problem with Qwest. I have their 3Mbps VDSL service (at an outrageous $41.99/month), which is the fastest connection they will sell me. VDSL is basically FTTN and should be capable of speeds up to 100Mbps, but Qwest is using most of that bandwidth for their crappy TV service (which no one I know in the area uses). Why, why, why won't they use some of that bandwidth to provide decent internet service ala Verizon's FIOS? The infrastructure is already there.
The only way I will accept "metered" internet access is if, when I reach my limit, the service stops working and requires consent authorization from me before allowing me to continue to run up charges.
If I have no good way to determine "how many minutes" I've used up of my internet I'll quit using it. I can't stand watching the meter - it's way to stressful a way to use an entertainment device, which is what home internet access is for me.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Tin foil territory here, but is it a coincidence that soon after we learn that the big ISPs have rooms dedicated to government monitoring of all internet traffic we are pushed toward bandwidth caps?
(1) Tell them we are monitoring everything
(2) Throttle them all so we can actually handle the data
(3) "Save Dick and Jane User from Osama!", while getting kickbacks from the ISPs
(4) But really just move the world closer to a NWO, while profiting every step of the way and gathering enough data on everyone that they can put away anyone who threatens their plan
I come here for the love
Finally - they are actually telling us exactly what product they are selling and letting us decide! That is a very good thing. It puts the power of the purse firmly in the hands of the consumer. (assuming, of course, that they do not have other hidden restrictions, like protocol throttling - which is admittedly a big assumption)
Most ISPs already have these limits in one way or another. Be it protocol throttling or canceling your account for excessive use, these limits exist. But most ISPs flat out lie to the consumer and say it is "unlimited". Selling a pig in a poke to the customer is not good for the customer. It is a violation of the most fundamental requirement of efficient capitalism; perfect information. We have that problem in all kinds of markets, and it is a load of crap.
I will always prefer products which clearly disclose their strengths and weaknesses and allow me to be the decider. I want the power of the purse. I want to vote with my dollars. But when you're being sold a lie, you can't make that decision fairly. This is a very good thing.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Yet I get on average 9mbps down and 512kbps up, with spikes up to 10mbps and once - just once - I saw 12mbps on cable. I really don't mind, but for things like streaming near-dvd quality (like netflix)? I don't think 3-6mbps would cut it. Unless you have data that I can't find right now asserting otherwise..
Or back to dial-up (3 KB/sec at most for me with compressed files). I have no other affordable broadband options in my area. DSL is too far (20K ft. from CO). Forget satellite Internet services. No local WISP services. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And the bulk of the comments here *support* it?!? Just because "the rest of the world is doing it" doesn't make it right, and doesn't make it OK that the companies have long oversold "unlimited" Internet access, are getting burned by it, but refuse to invest any more into new infrastructure to compete.
This is nothing short of a Bad Thing. Bandwidth use is not going away...if anything it is going to increase. Those "average" users that only browse and do email today, that everyone wants to be subsidized by the "heavy" users doing their bittorrent and porn and linux distros? Those average users are going to start downloading HD movies from iTunes and Xbox 360 and PS3. They're going to be playing online multiplayer games and wanting to videochat in HD.
How is innovation supposed to happen if you start creating tiered access points? Do you honestly think higher tiered prices are going to go back into building infrastructure that is better able to handle the load? This is merely a ploy to penalize those using their available resources that they pay for. And as time goes on, EVERYONE will be needing those resources, and they'll be back in the same boat, except everyone will be paying that much more.
The answer is to invest in more and better infrastructure, not try to limit your existing users to try and get them to not use your product!
In the "good old days" (which weren't all that, truthfully) we paid by the hour for AOL, Compuserve, and Delphi. Then flat rates per month came along! And God saw that it was good.
This metering is a step backward. I certainly wouldn't stay with an ISP that used these rules, and I hope others will also dump stupid ISP's.
Next they'll want to charge you based on the actual size of the files in that zip file you downloaded instead of the size of the zip file. Where does it end?
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
I'm surprised that major content providers (Apple (iTunes), Google (so many), etc.) haven't stood up and raised a fuss. Sure, individual customers complaining is all well and good, but when "providers" are limiting other companies' abilities to conduct business, I'd think they'd step up and cry foul. I mean, if most of America is suddenly under the clamp of pretty hefty bandwidth restrictions, their ability to buy songs, browse movies, and _view advertising_ is dramatically limited.
Yeah. I know. I could have simplified that as "what a moronic move which is only going to stifle innovation in an era where we need more, not less advancement in ideas and technology..."
Great news! Now, Warner Brothers movies no longer count against your bandwidth cap!
Just more great service brought to you by Time Warner Cable!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I would imagine charging by usage is one way of regaining some of the TV/Movie market they will be losing over the next couple of years. No one is going to spend money on pay-per-views with Comcast Cable they will simple start downloading them from the Net. And since they aren't as dumb as we think they figure well take a cut. HD Movie = a gig or two and now all my bandwidth is gone.
I pay for two terabytes a month on my webhosting and it's less than 40 bucks, and they're charging that for a handful of gigs?
Metering is one thing, but that is a fricking joke.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I've read a few comments now telling me just how crappy US providers are and how those monopoly companies rip you off, and how much better it is over in Europe. Allow me to tell you a little story. Maybe it will correct your view, and maybe even ease your pain.
I'm in Europe. In the capital of a country priding itself of being rather well industrialized. I'm not sitting in some backwater countryside "be glad you have power" area, I'm sitting in the middle of said capital.
In general, I have the choice between our former telco monopolist and the cable company. Yes, there are a few other internet providers, but in general they're reseller for the telco service since, well, laying your own lines is anything but trivial here.
In short, my current "service" (I don't really like using that term, but lacking a better one...) offers me 4mbit down, 256k up and 10Gig traffic a month. Including their insane overhead (which makes up about 10-20% of the traffic, leaving me with about 8-9 Gig to use. Under a policy they call "fair use", which is never really explained, but if you use too much for a month or two, they just cut off your service and keep you in the dark for a week or two so you "learn your lesson", while you get petty excuses from their customer service reps.
Since I know such a rep, I know it's not just my gut feeling but that's actually how it is done.
IF it works, that is. Currently, I'd estimate an uptime of about 98%. You're not allowed to provide services (i.e. run servers), the key ports (i.e. 21, 22, 80, and quite a few more below 1024) are blocked and it's an open secret that they do try to shape your traffic, up to the point where they make it near impossible to use high bandwidth services like YouTube during prime time (i.e. 1800-2400) and you should not try to run any P2P services on their standard ports, it won't work too well.
I pay roughly 80 bucks a month for this service.
Oh right, the alternative. Our ex-monopoly telco. It would be cheaper, only about 60 bucks, but I'd have to do with 1mbit down/256k up with a hard limit of 5Gig and some insane price (about 40 bucks or something like this) for every extra Gig I use. But with less stability and longer latency, i.e. not really useful when you try to play games online or want to download something that takes more than 10 seconds to finish (chances are good that your download dies before it's done).
Still anyone here who wants to trade?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think (and correct me if I'm wrong - though I'm sure the invitation is not necessary) that this is just the fundamental difference between cable and DSL finally rearing its head.
When DSL was king and cable started to take over, the big win for cable was the maximum bandwidth. DSL to a typical home (ie: not close to the central office) tops out somewhere around 1 megabit. Cable uses a shared local loop - so maximum bandwidth is enormous, far exceeding DSL. The only problem with cable is saturation resulting from many customers attempting to get that peak bandwidth. Cable has been touting their peak bandwidth as what you are buying, and has been claiming unlimited. DSL can provide unlimited at their peak bandwidth, cable cannot. (DSL may also have unstated or explicit rate caps, but that is not a technical limitation of the local loop).
Cable has been fundamentally lying to the customer since the very first days that they began to compete with DSL. And now that the average joe is actually using a significant portion of the promised bandwidth, the local loop is becoming saturated. You've all probably experienced this - get home from work, hit YouTube, and the performance is degraded compared to late at night.
All of which implies a very simple economic dynamic is at work; cable providers have been selling a falsely advertised product, and now are facing the fact that they cannot provide what they've sold. They're trying BT throttling, and want to start throttling YouTube, but know they can't fight that gorilla. So they are being forced to tell the truth about their product.
There's no mystery here, and the new solution is not screwing you - the old lies are simply coming home to roost.
So the question is not whether you should get unlimited 5 megabit for $50 per month. You can't have that with cable if everyone wants it. The cake is a lie. This new approach by TW is neither more nor less than them telling you what you really had all along. The only difference is you're no longer able to use the bandwidth your neighbor didn't know how to use five years ago.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I dumped Twat Wanker for AT&T U-verse a year ago.
No more connectivity problems. No more retarded tech support people.
Of course, I've only had to call AT&T tech support twice, because I never had a single service outage with AT&T (except for the one time when a power surge fried my RG, but that wasn't a problem with the connection), but when I've needed to call them, they actually know what they're doing. I think back to the days when TWC had weekly service outages and I had to constantly deal with retarded tech support people, and I don't know how I didn't go insane.
I'd recommend that anyone still using TWC dump them for AT&T U-verse...TWC just isn't worth what you're paying them.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
"[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."
Assuming 2^10 = kilo, etc:
5GB/(768kb/s) = 5*8*2^20 kb/(768kb/s) = 54,613s = 910min = 15.2hr
40GB/(15Mb/s) = 40*8*2^10 Mb/(15Mb/s) = 327,680s = 5461min = 91hrs
Assuming 30*24 = 720 hours/month, the first tier allows 2.1% utilization, and the second tier 12.6%
(All times assume usage at full speed)
Time for the math!
For this, I am using lowercase "b" to represent "bits" and uppercase "B" to represent "Bytes." There are 8 bits to a byte, 1024KB to 1MB, and 1024MB to 1GB
Plan 1:
$29.95/mo at 768kb/s and 5GB monthly cap.
For Plan 1:
768kb/s = 96kB/s
96kB/s = 0.09375MB/s
0.09375MB/s = 0.000091552734375 GB/s
5GB / (0.000091552734375 GB/s)=
54613.33(repeating) seconds. =
910.22(repeating) minutes =
15.1703703(repeating) hours.
On plan 1, you have 15.1 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential, before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 3 hours, 2 minutes.)
Plan 2:
$54.90/mo at 15Mb/s and 40GB monthly cap.
15Mb/s = 1.875MB/s
1.874MB/s = 0.0018310546875 GB/s
40GB / (0.0018310546875 GB/s) =
21845.33(repeating) seconds
364.088(repeating) minutes
6.06814814 (repeating) hours.
On plan 2, you have 6.07 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 9 minutes, 6 seconds.)
I do not think this plan would be suitable for my Internet needs.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Ha-ha. My DSL connection actually has 50% more upstream bandwidth than your cable connection. (Admittedly, I mainly use it for gaming rather than streaming video, so this and consistent low latency may be more important to me than it is to you.) Incidentally, if you think Netflix streaming is near-DVD quality, or that it takes anywhere near 3-6 Mbps to deliver, let alone 9+, I have a bridge in Manhattan I'd like to sell you... Actual Netflix bitrates range from 0.5 to 2.2 Mbps, depending on the negotiated stream quality. You don't really think they're going to alienate the majority of their (US-only) marketplace, which certainly isn't paying for a 6+ Mbps connection, do you? There's some talk of providing HD streams at 3+ Mbps, but right now it's just that, talk. (Even then, it's going to be pretty sucky HD; Blu-ray provides up to 36 Mbps of H.264, and ATSC 19.4 Mbps of MPEG-2.) If you have a Netflix subscription, go ahead and watch it sometime, and check your bandwidth meter. (You can do this using iftop under Linux, or the Task Manager in Windows.) It's not going to get anywhere near pegging your available downstream bandwidth.
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.
"The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom"
It would be if high speed internet wasn't a monopoly or at best a duopoly. Right now, it's simply an excuse to raise prices at a time when the cable companies/telcos are raking in record profits.
And perversely, if it is metered and considered a limited resource, it gives the government the power to step in and control content. How do you think the FCC (which was only supposed to be in charge of frequency allocation) was made into a de facto censor for radio and TV? It was the limited resource argument.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Back in the dial-up days I didn't use the internet much due to telephone costs. I was always looking at the clock and trying to get things done quickly. It wasn't a great experience. Now with Virgin Media's aggressive throttling policy, it kind of feels like I'm back on Dial-up again. I've had to install DU Meter to keep tabs on my downloads and it's amazing how much ordinary browsing generates these days, especially if you like Youtube. It doesn't take much for me to hit their daily download limit and be slammed back down to 1mbps. Just downloading one TV Show from ITunes can do it. Perhaps if they didn't spend so much money on Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson advertising it, they could actually afford to upgrade their equipment and deliver a service in tune with modern Internet usage.
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.
Ignoring the fact that mb is millibits, 3300MB is 3.3 *GIGAbytes*, not 3.3 Terabytes.
Similarly, 33000MB is 33 Gigabytes.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Of course once they slowly implement caps on bandwidth, then they'll exclude their own services to push out the competition. Oh, you use our pay services (VoIP, IP TV, IP PVR, etc), that doesn't count against your bandwidth.
so, that's $30 for 2KB/s and $55 for 15KB/s
This was a joke.
Please don't mod as informative.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
WTF, why is this a troll? Its a true statement.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With the 5GB cap, Windows Update alone could use up the quota if you own enough Microsoft software.
Let me rephrase that for you:
There, I think that about does it.
So long as the consumer base is a bunch of uneducated and apathetic maroons, the execs will happily econo-rape them into poverty at any opportunity. I'm not the least bit surprised that tiered pricing and caps are coming back -- corporate behaviour is actually a bit like how the 17-year locust evolved, to where the cycles are just long enough for folks to forget about them before they come back.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I didn't meet "that guy". The guy I spoke with was actually not "at work" when we were talking about HD and cable. He was also not a salesman. He also gave me some insight that they were already delivering the 15mbps in Houston, but not yet in San Antonio and Austin, because those two markets have two or three providers each, so they wanted to sweeten the deal to entice people to choose TWC over AT&T (and some other carrier) when the competition really started getting fierce.
[quote]Competition is so 20th century. In the Bush era, we've learned that the purpose of government is to give corporations whatever they want.[/quote]
Actually, if you think about it more closely, Bush actually has given everyone what they wanted, well just about anyways. He hasn't vetoed a thing yet (that I can recall).
Just put it in front of him, and he'll agree to it.
Now where is my Congress Critter, I need to get an earmark or two sent my way.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Comcast etc. already have location monopolies on customers for the most part. You don't have two cable companies competing for the same area usually. Granted there is DSL though. So basically they are given an area of customers that may not have any other choice.
They then charge them whatever they want; the same exact service can vary widely from city to city (mostly based on whether or not there is any competition).
They then receive kickbacks from the government to pay for infrastructure improvements.
I hear no complaints about telcom companies losing money on the current model. Yet there are inroads made frequently that restrict, cap or otherwise hinder the flow of information with no kickback to the customer. I hear that a small percentage ruins it for the rest of us, those few who manage to serve hundreds of gigabytes of data apparently cause a lot of problems for telcoms. So technically the load should be reduced and the "threat" should be removed. Shouldn't the prices go down as a result?
Even cell phone providers, which operate in a similar fashion, usually let stuff "roll over".
I have no problem paying for a service and I have no problem with a company making money off their services. However, I don't see any good intentions in any of this. All I see is a board room filled with people asking themselves how much more they can get out of the consumer without giving anything back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry In common law, a hue and cry (Latin, hutesium et clamor, "a horn and shouting") was a process by which bystanders were summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who had been witnessed in the act of committing a crime. ------------ On the OT, it makes sense to charge for BW used. That's how the ISPs typically have to pay for it. The unlimited model only works when overall usage is low. Personally, I am a frequent but not high-bandwidth user, and would prefer to pay a rate that reflects my actual usage instead of subsidizing all the torrent uploaders. It seems to me that simply charging for BW utilization would solve the file-sharing problem overnight.
If Amazon can make money charging (at most) $0.17/GB for transfer over redundant links to highly available storage, I have no idea why an ISP would need to charge almost 10 times that amount for best effort packet forwarding. Oh, that's right, they're mostly all greedy monopolies.
I'm sure that the trend will go towards Unlimited Bandwidth at a higher cost versus lower cost for metered usage, to promote its spread among grandmas and people who might watch an occasional youtube video, but I download (As others have said) Linux Torrents, watch streaming video on Hulu.com, Youtube, Albums, computer game mods and so forth, and these ALL take up a lot of space. Not to mention I play City of Heroes and that generates a lot of bandwidth (As it is an MMO like WoW ) in and by itself. So yeah, if given the choice between lower cost with metered usage or higher cost and unlimited bandwidth, the unlimited bandwidth is a no brainer for me.
Not really.
Even in the DC area, one of the most prosperous areas in the nation, there are only two broadband suppliers: Verizon for DSL and Comcast for cable. If you're lucky, Verizon will offer FIOS as well. Either way, they both have pathetic customer service and don't care.
It is an effective monopoly since the competition is so poor.
"May the flees of a thousand camels infest your genitals and may your arms be too short to scratch."
Yeah.... short story is it's not metered service. It's just like those horrendous cell phone plans. We want T-Mobile style pay-as-you-go. (If your plan costs you on average more than 10 cents a minute then switch.)
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Well, with proper modern tachyon PTP links, UniverseNet isn't shitty either.
Problem is, I can't get that (anyone have a spare hyper-klein bottle lying around?) OR a decent DSL link. For many people DSL is not really a viable option. DSL doesn't have to be shitty, agreed. But for many people, it is - it doesn't have to be but that's not the reality on the ground.
They switch to metered use, I switch to another service provider. I'll pull my phone, my cable, and and my internet. They won't get one more dollar from me under those conditions.
>> 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.
Actually, it is your problem if you bought it and they can't provide it.
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.
This is nothing more than trying to do broadband on the cheap, instead of lighting up all that fiber that was pulled during the dot.com boom.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Economist http://www.economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10534573
Quote
Ugh. Glad I signed up years ago.
I use them for Internet only. Dish eats their lunch on television quality (including the local channels), and when I had VoIP, I used Packet8.
Back when all we had was CompuServe and GENIE.
Unrestricted access is what makes the internet useufl and why it is what is today.. If they to back to pay per use, it will die off as a commercial entity and bankrupt places like Amazon.
And how do they address spam, popups and DoS issues?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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 ----
I prefer metered unthrottled Internet to unmetered throttled Internet. And it will have to be one or the other.
All they have to do is plaster local market with "We're REALLY unlimited" and "Cable sells you 6 hours of internet + more charges" or "Have you checked your internet usage meter?"
With that all new subscribers will pretty much be scared away from cable.
Because the last thing a newbie wants to do is do something wrong on the computer and get "a bill for $100 bucks extra". And it's true. Leave your TV Viewing app on, and you're screwed.
p.s. TW is already claiming that "limits are easy to change", of course with them limits will only be going down. For economical reasons...
Hyperom.com
And i suppose they will give you constant feedback of how much you are using so you don't manage to get hit with a big bill at the end of the month because you got vacation pictures from Aunt Millie in the mail?
No, of course not, as they want to screw the customer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They sell both internet access and cable television. Once their subscribers are given a fat enough pipe, they can dump Time Warner cable and start paying someone else for TV.
Its not quite there yet, but everyone can see the writing on the wall.
This should really work well with Microsoft's .NET "Software as a Service" vision.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
It was destined to happen. Once the masses were hooked on the net, and it became a part of their daily lives... its the perfect time for broadband providers to charge whatever they want and you have no other option but to pay.
a 100Kbps masked DDoS for a approx. 14.6 hours straight would take up 5GiB of bandwidth.
Its a small amount of bandwidth that most people wouldn't even notice the attack. After 14ish hours, BAM, internet shuts off, or they are raking in additional charges from their ISP.
I'm currently using TimeWarner in San Diego, CA. I'll be canceling my internet service with them and letting them know that this move in Beaumont is the reason for my leaving. SpeakEasy it is!
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
This is exactly how it is. Luckily I was able to get Cablevision's optonline very early in its deploy. It was fantastic before everyone jumped onto the internet. It eventually hit a saturation point and you could tell. Cablevision suddenly had secret caps, and everyones upload bandwidth went from 750KB a sec, to 110KB a sec. Constant secret throttling issues with a lot of users who complained endlessly on dslreports.com
The problem was cablevision's network, they over sold it and their quality of service went to shit. Luckily... FIOS came along and now i've dumped cablevision all together. I have Fios TV and Fios internet. 30mb down, 5mb up. Its fantastic, although lately i've seen some decline in dns responsiveness... but the bandwidth has remained solid.
Competition is great, when its there... but usually its just between 3 companies as you said. Its the local cable(usually the fastest) dsl/isdn... or if you're lucky... Verizon Fios.
Its not a total monopoly out there, its just a squeeze play. Fios was luckily the way out of the cablevision sqeeze!
My father has no option for broadband where he is. Comcast refuses to build up the road 2 blocks. There is no dsl. His only option is wireless data over cell phone MAYBE.. depends on his reception.
The rage boils... I literally glowered at this article for a few seconds.
Of course they want to milk every penny. Last mile infrastructure is frickin' expensive. Look at Grande -- they had to stop their massive expansion because the capital cost was killing them. The other thing is that reducing your speed reduces their bandwidth costs because you'll be less likely to download as much. They want to stave off having to pay for more upstream bandwidth as long as possible.
Cheers,
-l
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I actually have a 24mbit/1248kbit ADSL connection (I live in Europe), which works great. The problem is not with the technology, it's with the infrastructure. To deliver a quality DSL connection, the infrastructure needs to be in a perfect shape.
Proof that Time Warner has laid off anyone who remembers the early days of AOL, or the lessons learned...
2009: Time Warner announces unlimited Internet; busy signals ensue
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Meta-fail!
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
$55/40GB = $1.375/GB. The overage rate is $1/GB, according to the summary. This means you get a better deal for exceeding your cap.
Not a sentence!
If you really truly believe that there should be no limits on traffic when you sign up with an ISP, stop whinging about it on Slashdot.
Take action! Set up your own ISP, and offer unmetered, unshaped, uncensored access to all!
Be sure to make a big noise about it on Slashdot so we can watch the circus.
It was my understanding that they are already paying for the 15mbps anyway, and actually have to put things into place to cap us at 10.
Is the amount of data continuously using a 5mbps line for 30 days would generate (ok ok, I used 1000 rather than 1024 as the base because I'm lazy, sue me ). So I guess it is ok if they meter access as long as it doesn't cost more per megabyte than the equivalent cost of a 5mbps line operating constantly for 30 days. Somehow I expect their rates to be just a tiny bit higher.
Limits on downloads are very common.
My ISP, Woosh, caps it at about 5 Gigs per month on our plan. After you go over, no extra charge, but your speeds do go down to dialup level.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
That's quite comparable to broadband (edge is more akin to dialup, IMO) and its available right here in Beaumont! Seriously, TWC is shooting themselves in both feet with this metering crap.
I hope this fails in TX. I'm in WV and a current customer of TW. Their service is great. Their tech support is clueless but not from an intellgence standpoint but from not being informed from the powers that be. I can use nearly a gigabyte of transfer a day just by running eMule idle (idle meaning I have no downloads to my PC, only the lowest transfer possible for uploads). I don't want to have to pay out the wazoo for my service. The last 4 months I've had 135GB, 280GB, 148GB and 104GB transfers from February to May. I can download a gigabyte of data just downloading newsgroup headers from a 5 day period (since TW outsourced their news service 18 months ago which provides a 2-3 month retention). Will internal traffic count against this cap? Am I going to have to wait for the equivalent of T-Mobile's Mobile-to-Mobile crap so I can transfer stuff for "free" to another TW customer if internal traffic ends up counting against this? As someone else mentioned, I want all my ads filtered out to reduce my transfer. I bet they won't be providing that service.
15 Mbps transfer is great however assuming a constant rate (and my math is right) I can download 40GB in 6 hours. Obviously that would be rare unless I find a bunch of stuff on the newsgroups to download or want to watch a bunch of streaming video from somewhere. I'd like to know why they plan to raise the bandwidth but yet drastically drop the monthly transfer cap compared to what I list above (and I've never had any complaints from them). 40GB is just too low. With dial-up basically dead I think the 768kbps/5GB tier should be priced at $14.95, a 15Mbps/50GB tier priced at $29.95 and a 15Mbps/150GB tier priced at $59.95 with a per gigabyte charge of $0.25. $1 for a gigabyte is just racketeering. I'll be contacting my local office to let them know I'll have to switch to something else (only option would be Verizon DSL or satellite for my area though) if this goes nationwide.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Er... um... "skynet"?
really?
Metering data is the norm for pricing in New Zealand. But throughput is excellent (My ISP is ORCON) and they don't seem to do much shaping....With metering, you do tend to get what you pay for....and that's pretty good almost all of the time. They have an incentive to keep the network fast and inviting. if you go over your cap, you pay $10 for each additional 5GB...If that gets too expensive, I could pay more as a base price to get a higher cap if I consistently exceed the level I'm paying for. On my DSL my download speed is just under 4mbps and my upload speed is about 890kbps. That's about as good as it gets in New Zealand. A small number of people are getting 24mbps as it rolls out....but I've heard it isn't very reliable and you can't go far on that 24mbps.....It runs out not far from your house....
Only boring people are ever bored.
FOADIAF
AT&T, if you manage to get U-Verse into my neighborhood in the near future, and do it RIGHT (i.e., unmetered, unfettered, gimme-all-the-freakin'-bandwidth-I-want), you will nail me down solid as a customer... throw in the availability of the HTC Touch Pro as my new cell phone, and I may just kneel down and orally pleasure an AT&T exec (only if she's young, blond, & genetically female)
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
I use a gigabit router. Tomato's no help.