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Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use
As rumored a couple of months back, Time Warner is starting a trial of metered Internet access. "On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte... [T]iers will range from $29.95 a month for... 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for... 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap."
Many many ISPs in many many countries operate this way. It's not as nice as "flat rate" in some folks eyes, but at least you get what you pay for (assuming no BT throttling, etc shenanigans).
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Let's have some honesty here. If we're going to have limits then let them be clear and open ones, where customers can make decisions about which limits they want, and how much they're prepared to pay for them.
Far better this approach than one which says "Eat what you like, so long as you're reasonable."
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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.
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
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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??
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
No it isn't (yet). You obviously didn't read the short article as it states this trial is only running with new subscribers and not existing ones.
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.
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...
As far as being sued goes - If I were an ISP, I would think this makes sense. It's easier to defend limits that are the same for everyone, vs. arbitrarily notifying subscribers who happen to piss off a network admin for interfering with their bittorrent download.
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 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.
Cancel your service immediately. Please. Its the only way to let them know that you don't accept their new terms. Stop the experiment in Beaumont.
hell i use 40 gig in less than a day.
time to start looking for another ISP
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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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!
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
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 $9.99 a month.
It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
I wonder if they'd to "rollover" bandwidth?
Afterall, if they want to get snobbish about counting, it should work both ways. If I'm paying for 40GB and I only use 15GB one month, I still want my other 25GB rolled into a reservoir that I can use the next month.
Truthfully though, this is a stupid idea. Part of the beauty of the Internet is flat rate. If one starts having a limited pool (which is totally an artificial limitation), then everything starts becoming an "is it worth it to download" scenario. Should I give this new Ubuntu Linux distro a try? I dunno. That's almost a gig of my quota and Slackware works fine. Should I use Gentoo? I dunno source code downloads are going to be larger than binaries. Should I even bother patching my Windows machine. I dunno that's 500MB of quota and it'll probably be fine if I install a firewall. Should I run TOR? No I don't know how much traffic would be routed through my machine.
Essentially this throws in giant anvil in front of the train that was the Internet. Instead of it becoming more ubiquitous, and more seamlessly integrated into our lives as a way for everything to talk to everything else, it's further segregating the internet into something that you "visit" and limit your usage of, rather than something that you simply participate in.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I don't care how nice a face you put on it, this is nothing more than a local monopoly creating artificial scarcity, for the purpose of raising prices. If that locality had some competition in the internet business, some OTHER place would be getting this "test".
Great point, succinctly expressed. I totally agree. This is related to a point I was going to make: It annoys me that one cannot resell bandwidth. The notion that one person having 3 people in the house can grab bandwidth for all of those people at one price, but three people living separately have to buy 3 separate services seems unfair. In practice, it means that lots of people cheat and get away with it, while the people who don't cheat are charged a premium (or, more specifically: several premiums) for operating to the letter of the rule. For quite a while, I've been pushing the need for Universal Business Access, and have only just recently written it up, but it relates to that.
Email has a similar kind of issue, where not paying is more expensive than paying, since we all pay for spam due to email being free, and the cost of that spam is certainly way higher than the cost that email itself would be--except to the spammers.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
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. You mean, "there is no TV allowance...yet".
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
The very reason that companies like Google have been told that they are "freeloaders" by the telecoms and ISPs is because... 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.
If the above quote is true, it apparently isn't ridiculous for the rest of the world, only here in the US is the infrastructure so ridiculously incapable to give everyone what they want (no competition or upgrade incentives - US ISP's are probably in collusion).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live in Beaumont, and I'm a RR customer.
Every time we're told that increased costs go to "infrastructure," we get the same crappy 6Mbps download speeds, downtime every Sunday night, no-show service calls, and human-unfriendly telephone support.
As a former owner of a dialup ISP, I completely understand the "5%" rule.
However, a 15-40GB limit is clearly not intended to curtail those users.
The "problem" users are up in the 200GB/mo region, not a measly 3-7 DVD ISOs.
This is nothing short of a preemptive attack against companies like NetFlix, Apple, Packet8, Vonage, etc. who offer DVD/HD downloads, VOIP, videoconferencing, and other services that compete with the incumbent's own services.
Note that the new bandwidth cap does NOT include the VOD or VOIP services you buy from TWC.
Again, I'm ok with fair and non-putative metering. I pay a larger water bill because my swimming pool has a leak. I pay a larger electric bill because I have an old house and I like it cool.
But my water company simply charges me based on usage. There are no caps and no punitive pricing brackets. And they aren't trying to sell me pool maintenance services that come with "free" pool re-fills.
If people pay for usage, then leaching off your neighbor becomes theft. I think that is part of their goal. Getting extra money for bandwidth is just icing on the cake.
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
I can just see it now... poor unsuspecting windows user with an idle-bandwidth-consuming rootkit installed on their computer, gets charged $10k for a month of internet usage and sues ISP. ISPs won't care until this is the case w/ > 20% of their customers, and it leads to major class action lawsuits.
There are so many problems with this form of service delivery for the consumer, that far outweigh the benefits for the provider. Unfortunately, competition is limited (in most areas throughout the US) and consumers are really at the mercy of these corporations and their greedy business practices. If DSL and Cable Providers gang-up and gauge prices like this, then really, depending on where you live, you may have no choice.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
For starters. No more Itunes, netflix, casual shopping...
I would be canceling my service if i got that sort of garbage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This should really work well with Microsoft's .NET "Software as a Service" vision.
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