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Charter Cable Capping Usage Nationwide This Month
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from DSL Reports, with possible bad news for Charter customers who live outside the test areas for the bandwidth caps the company's been playing with: "Yesterday we cited an anonymous insider at Charter who informed us that the company would very soon be implementing new caps. Today, Charter's Eric Ketzer confirmed the plans, and informed us that Charter's new, $140 60Mbps tier will not have any limitations. Speeds of 15Mbps or slower will have a 100GB monthly cap, while 15-25Mbps speeds will have a 250GB monthly cap. 'In order to continue providing the best possible experience for our Internet customers, later this month we will be updating our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to establish monthly residential bandwidth consumption thresholds,' Ketzer confirms. 'More than 99% of our customers will not be affected by our updated policy, as they consume far less bandwidth than the threshold allows,' he says." But if they're lucky, customers will be able to hit that cap quickly.
Netflix (and every other source that provides competition to Charter or Comcast or whomever). If not for Netflix and Hulu, my usage would be minimal. I do not have cable or satellite TV (or OTA for that matter). I pay charter for Internet only service, and I pay a premium because I only want Internet. Now I am going to pay another premium to actually make full use of that Internet. Perhaps Charter will start capping ports as well. "Ports 1 - 80 are free. With our Super Ports Family Pack, you get 81 - 443 for an additional $50 per month."
I wonder what effect those millions of bot-infected Windows XP clients are going to have on this situation. The Charter customers who have these infected PCs already don't know what's going on with their computer let alone how much bandwidth they use. They are going to be very angry when the service gets disconnected for bandwidth they haven't personally consumed or when their $50 broadband bill jumps to $150.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Something tells me that if I tether my cell phone to my laptop and let it run continuously for a month, that a rep from my cell phone company will call to tell me that the "Unlimited Data Plan" is not really Unlimited when put to the test. I'm sure the same goes if I were to place a call and leave it up like some kind of intercom.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just a feeling that cell phone technology is somewhat self limiting in the "unlimited" space. People just aren't in too many situations where it will happen.
Of course, that data scenario probably does happen on occasion with road warriors.
But you're paying for water usage and electric usage for a finite resource, not the means of transmission. All Charter or any other ISP is providing me is a means to access a resource. I'm paying my water company for the water I use, not the pipes that it comes in on. If I wanted, I could contract with Koolaid to put a reservoir on my land where my water comes in, and I would pay them to provide Koolaid instead of water. Would I keep paying the water company?
Bandwidth caps are stupid stupid stupid, as are the retarded attempts to defend them. This is a situation where the ISPs *don't* want to build new infrastructure and lower their margins, so they are attempting to socially engineer lower bandwidth consumption. If you're running out of space on your pipes, build bigger and more pipes. Don't try and coerce people to use *less* of your service.
WTF would Charter do if all of a sudden every single subscriber signed up for the 60Meg tier and maxed out their bandwidth 24/7. They'd be back in the same fucking boat they're in now.
I was actually just thinking about this the other day. (as it happens to me now)
If you think about it, its kind of messed up. For example, the caps are based on a fictional date, that of your billing. Which in these instances, is monthly. While this may make sense for, "billing" it may not make sense, and have ramifications beyond for caps.
So for example I closely self monitor my cap. Which means at the beginning of the month I download like a whore. However nearing the end of the month, I might download a lot less, being aware that I am running out of cap. At the end of the month I might not download at all, because I have no cap space left at all.
What does this mean? Huge bandwidth demand all front loaded on any given month. Multiply that by many many users, and well you get the idea. Also odds are if you are not using your cap you are likely not using it much the whole month, pretty much constant with perhaps a random spike.
Now how about this as a business model. If ISP's wish to place caps, to me that says you are entitled to ALL of that bandwidth, as this is specifically what they are selling you. A given rate of speed for a given quantity. So what if you put in place a behind scenes an unobtrusive way to sell your unused bandwidth? Much like the stock market the price would go up and down with demand. Also you would make your cut of money by simply taking a small percentage off each sale, which when multiplied many many times over would equal Profit! I don't know how you would do it, or if it is technically feasible, or even legal, else I would do it right now and make my first million that way. Anyway an interesting idea eh?
It would also be the demise of "caps" as we know it. People might have a "soft" cap imposed by their ISP, however if they run out would be able to "buy" cap space from someone else if they so desire. Thus power users get what they pay for, and internet gets cheaper for those moderate or light users!
Then ISPs need to sell bits delivered and sent, not "access". If I knew exactly how much it would cost to send and how much to receive data, be given a metering tool, and have my cost structure built accordingly, then I'd be ok with it. But right now I pay for "access", period. I want the access that I pay for or I want ISPs to be honest and sell a metered service with metered, flexible pricing. I pay about $4 a month in the summer for gas, just to have the pipes hooked up. My bill goes way up in the winter when I use the gas. If the ISPs are all concerned about usage, then meter me so that I can pay $1 to keep the "lights" on when I work all month and don't use any access at home, and charge me per bit for the months when it's slow and I'm sitting around at home downloading movies from iTunes. Right now ISPs want the best of both worlds... for themselves.
Of course people today are used to using unlimited service, even me. But there is always a limit, as no resource is infinite. The question usually is do we have to enforce that limit explicitly, or will the market tend to enforce it. For instance, in garbage collection I grew up with unlimited garbage collection. There were practical limits on what could be collected, and I suppose that sometime garbage would not be collected, and i would not call that fraud, but for the most part it worked rather well. But eventually people got lazy, greedy, and wasteful, and a formal limit had to be set. For most of us the limit was not a problem, and we were happy that the parasites who leeched off our taxes were contained.
I think that is what is going on here. I do not think that what amounts to a 142 MB limit per hour of every day is anything that most people would consider a limit. I do not think most services actually effectively feed more than 2 or 3 MB per minute, and least not every minute of day all year. I think that most people would be happy to know that cost are being contained so they are not forced to forced for some other persons p0rm habit. I think it would be more fraudulent to raise rates just to insure other people can run a cheap P2p service, not matter how noble such a service might be.
I also understand that many would say this is just anticompetitive behavior to prevent streaming TV and movies which are becoming more popular. To this I would say, how much tv do you watch? If you are talkiing about downloading extremely good quality movies, at 1 GB a piece, yes, that will eat up the limit, but if you are doing that I would think you would spring for the high speed unlimited service. Otherwise the stuff coming off, say netflix, seems pretty small and one would have to watch a hell of lot of TV to reach that limit. Again, i would not want to subsidize such use. On regular TV, the more you watch the more ads you see. On the web this is not the case.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So does this mean everyone will have to lock down their wireless routers to keep their neighbors from jacking up their internet bill?
The limits kind of seem like bullshit. We pay more for all grades of connection than in (many) other countries, even in the cities where population density is highest, and get less for it. I might point out that we are seeing a re-consolidation of telcos back into Ma Bell (but this time with a Death Star twist) that can't possibly be good for consumers. And "oddly" the frequencies that were supposed to help solve this last mile problem are being held on to for another little slice of time so that more people can get their television converter box handouts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"