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.

Comments

Last sentence is stupid

[YesIAmAScript]

The top paragraph points out that the 60mb service has no cap.

Re:Last sentence is stupid

[hemp]

The top paragraph points out that the 60mb service has no cap.

For now.

Re:Last sentence is stupid

[SydShamino]

Absolutely - - - - as long as they stop advertising all plans below 60mbs as "unlimited".

That's been the problem the previous times bandwidth has been brought up. It's not that caps are bad per se, it's that advertising "unlimited" then implementing a (often hidden) cap is fraud.

And of course, another complication is the fact that last-mile competition is stifled by private ownership of the wire, which together with an undue burden on residents for unlimited fiber pulls, creates a very high barrier to entry for new companies willing to offer truly unlimited service and take market share from the entrenched (literally, in this case) competitors.

Re:Last sentence is stupid

[edmicman]

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.

Re:Last sentence is stupid

[CaptCovert]

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.

Yes, one would have to watch a hell of a lot of TV to reach that limit. I have 6 'users' in my home, all of whom could theoretically be pulling down these movies. Will I hit my cap? Chances are, yes.

OTOH, why should I, someone that is using the bandwidth that I paid for (for completely legitimate reasons, mind), be penalized simply because you use less? You are not subsidizing my use of the internet, you're simply not using all of the internet available to you, and declaring that everyone should be pulled down to your standard, or you are 'losing money'.

Also, are you getting some sort of price break when my usage is capped? I mean, if the point of this is to save you money (in the form of a lack of subsidization), where are those savings?

To put this into perspective, let's consider a hypothetical: You own a gym membership. You use the gym in what is considered a 'standard' manner. Let's say, 1 hour a day, Monday - Friday. I own a gym membership as well. I, however, am a health nut, and devote 4 hours a day to physical fitness, including weekends (when I spend 6 a day). Well, the 'average' user (you) only uses the gym 1 hour a day, and even 99% of the gym members work out no more than 2 hours a day. Well, since it'll only impact a few, the gym decides to implement a policy that allows someone no more than, say, 21 hours per week (7 days a week, 3 hours per day). I mean, I am using up this finite resource (If I'm on a particular weight machine, you can't use it), and I'm using it a lot more than anyone else. Should my usage be capped off, simply because I'm using the service provided to me?

Analogies like this can be created for nearly ANY service industry that offers a flat rate. That is the risk that you, as a company, take when offering a flat rate. The fact that so many companies are trying to back out of it in the tech field now sickens me. Society would be up in arms quite a bit more if it started happening in other industries.

Re:Last sentence is stupid

[drinkypoo]

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.

$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes

[slifox]

Just like Comcast... I'm getting sick of this crap

If you get 250GB/month, then you're actually allowed a constant usage of 0.78mbps, regardless of whether you can burst up to 15mbps (or whatever).

Comcast internet service runs $50 to $70 on average, depending on the burst speed you get.
However, the limit is always 250GB/month. So doing the math, you're paying $65 to $90 per megabit/sec!

At any given datacenter, you can buy (100mbit-burstable) bandwidth at $5 per megabit/sec (price includes renting a server, rack space, power, and cooling).

Someone will of course respond "then don't use their service." Well, thats great, I'd love to. Unfortunately my government subsidy to Comcast gave Comcast a monopoly on the lines... and for some reason there are areas of the city that are "designated RCN" areas, while others are "designated Comcast" areas. What is this bullshit??

I'm angry at telecommunications companies.

Re:$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes

[AK Marc]

If you get 250GB/month, then you're actually allowed a constant usage of 0.78mbps, regardless of whether you can burst up to 15mbps (or whatever).

For Internet "use" (meaning actual interactive use, streaming HD video, VoIP calls, web surfing, game playing, etc.) you are sitting there. Presuming you work, you spend 9 hours a day at an 8 hour a day job (lunch) plus an hour each way for the average person, and you have lost 11 hours a day. Add in 8 hours of sleeping. That's 19 hours a day. You blow 1 hour a day on bathroom time getting ready for work, fixing food, etc. We'll assume you are on the Internet while eating. So, for a weekday, you have about 4 hours a day of Internet use. Toss in 16 hours every weekend day (8 hours of sleep, and nothing but Internet all day long) and you are looking at being at a computer around 50 hours a week. That's more like 3 Mbps. So, what are you doing that is 3 Mbps for every second you are sitting at the computer? You can stream regular TV 100% of your usage, while downloading ISOs, checking mail, chatting, calling people over VoIP and such without ever hitting the cap, depending on compression, you could even be watching HD TV 100% of the time. Even if you are a porn downloader, with common compression, you could download 24/7 and still download faster than you can watch it without ever hitting your cap. I'm sure people out there will hit it. But I have no idea what they are doing that would qualify as "residential Internet use" that would have them smack a 250 GB/month limit.

Re:$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes

[Wiscocrew]

Some people use their connection when they're not sitting at their computer.

Re:$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes

[Wiscocrew]

And some people have more than one person using the connection.

Re:$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes

[cheesebilly]

You blow 1 hour a day on bathroom time getting ready for work, fixing food, etc.

Last I checked, only Kramer fixed his food in the bathroom... in the shower specifically.

Re:$65 per mbps is a bit expensive, assholes

[Braino420]

I for one am glad for the caps.

You're glad you're getting less from your ISP even though you're paying them the same amount? Very suspicious.

The #1 thing I want is for the terms of service to state the service, not promise infinite speeds and infinite bandwidth.

Everybody would; that's the problem. Comcast et al have promised "unlimited" and that's what everyone expects. I'm kind of surprised that you would take a cap as apposed to Comcast providing what they originally offered. Or, Comcast could also re-evaluate the way they have been selling and offer a choice to their existing customers. Instead they simply change the contract. All within their rights, but I'm still shocked you're satisfied by that.

The caps they put in place are completely reasonable.

For you. For now.

That metric would only be relevant if you were using bandwidth constantly. Since home users do not do so, then this complaint is moot.

What? Citation needed. Have you seen the difference between business/residential rates for internet? I think if you did, you would stop considering this as a possibility for any home users. There needs to be a tier in-between that is reasonable.

If you have a few hundred thousand dollars, they will happily run a line to your house, and provide you with $5 per megabit/sec service.

Wow, so you do seem to know the difference. So you are totally unreasonable then. Great.

The government is to blame for the monopoly situation. So I place my anger there. The telecoms are actually starting to come around (hence the bandwidth caps).

This is what really gets me about your post, and why I think you probably work for some ISP. The government is to blame for giving them money to set up an infrastructure? Aww poor monopoly, you should be allowed to abuse it! As John Stossel would say, "Give me a break!"

If you don't work for a ISP, it's important that you understand that it's reasonable for the ISPs to use all of the money that has been given to them thus far and upgrade their infrastructure. Many countries are waay far ahead of us now as it relates to residential broadband. But instead of upgrading their infrastructure, they are choosing to spend money looking for ways to limit their customers. I don't know why you wouldn't want to join most other countries with their 100+Mbps broadband connections, but this is definitely putting up road blocks to us getting there. Please look a few years into the future and see the potential that such fat connections would have for the internet and see how ISPs are getting in the way of that. You may not need these fat connections now, but as people get them there will be more services that can saturate them.

Wow, they are lucky.

[elij]

Where I live in Canada, my only high speed option is the dreadlord Rogers Cable. MY monthly limit? 95GB, and that's with their most expensive (re: 54.95 monthly) service. Granted, I can go over but I'm charged a rather whopping 2.00 for every 1GB I'm over. I'd love to see other options but I'm SoL where I live.

What happens at the end of the month?

[b4dc0d3r]

I realize these are pretty high caps, but what happens at the end of the month when your heaviest users hit their caps? Isn't it going to be a stretch to say that you cap usage due to bandwidth constraints, yet because the heaviest users are not using it the available bandwidth skyrockets?

Another thought is, you buy/lease/subscribe to a line with 20mbps and that's what you expect out of your service. Is it reasonable to expect that they multiply each user by their speed and have enough bandwidth to supply all of their customers? We all seem to understand when phones get overloaded during emergencies, but if that internet doesn't come to us immediately it's suddenly bait and switch, that we can't use what we were sold?

My point is, I suppose, we are sold the connection to the ISP at a certain speed, but we are not guaranteed that it will function at that speed. If bandwidth is available, why the arbitrary cap? Shouldn't it be more like you lose priority after hitting a certain level?

Re:What happens at the end of the month?

[sssssss27]

If bandwidth is available, why the arbitrary cap? Shouldn't it be more like you lose priority after hitting a certain level?

Exactly. I have no problem with caps or even quality of service. If the ISPs actually worked with their customers then a lot of these problems they are having could go away. I wouldn't have any problems with my bit torrent packets having lower priority than someone's VOIP packets. One is far more sensitive to latency than the other. I also wouldn't mind them decreasing my uploading bandwidth during peak hours and giving me increased uploading bandwidth during non peak hours.

Re:What happens at the end of the month?

[jjhall]

I have no problem at all with QOS implemented by an ISP as long as it is fair, such as all VoIP packets getting the same priority, regardless of whether they have their own offering or not. As long as they don't prioritize their own services, I think they should still be allowed to maintain their common carrier status.

I do however have a problem with changing the upload speed. If they want to cap my download, go for it, but leave upload along. QOS in Smoothwall, Tomato, DD-WRT, and other routers is based on a constant upload bandwidth. This means in order to ensure you have proper-functioning QOS during a rate cap, you have to configure it for the capped speed at all times. You can no longer take advantage of your uncapped speed.

The best way to handle high-usage customers is to downgrade their priority once they hit a threshold. That way if my neighbors aren't using the bandwidth, I can. Why let the pipe sit there empty? When the neighbors need it, my priority goes down to make sure they see the speeds until they hit their own cap.

Since most peering arrangements are based on the percentage of traffic moving in one direction based on the other, they should be encouraging customers to be on the uploading side as it will help tip the scales in their direction and actually reduce their bandwidth expense.

Re:Same old song and dance...

[Shakrai]

and while some companies will have limits, others wont, and they will advertise that way

Or they'll just all collude in the manner that the wireless companies (SMS pricing) have and not bother to actually compete with one another.

Re:Ok

[Amouth]

I'm fine with caps at all ranges - as long as they are advertised as such - and i don't mean in the small print - if they advertise a connection as unlimited it should be just that.. unlimited.. not "unlimited until 200gb"

Re:Doing the math... (OT: Google calculator)

[vivaoporto]

Google can help a lot on this kind of calculation.

(250 gigabytes) / (25 Mbps) = 22.7555556 hours

Sometimes, because of how advanced google can be at providing answers for everything and anything, I wonder if with Google we are moving towards singularity. I for one welcome our all-seeing eye overlord.

P.S. It amazes me even more to know that the link to this very Slashdot article was returned by the above linked google query even before I submitted this comment. Scary (and circular) stuff!

Botnet Zombies

[TheNinjaroach]

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.

Re:Just like slashdot

[Sensible Clod]

Listen, bud. The agreement we signed didn't say anything about how much we could use per month. We're paying for a dumb pipe of X megabits per second, to use as much as we like. They want to change the terms AFTER the fact. My monitor indicates that in 2008, 9 months out of 12 we exceeded 100GB, and 3 of those months we exceeded 250GB.

They are just greedy money grabbers who took billions from the federal government for upgrades, and kept it instead of upgrading. Should it surprise you that they want to make another money grab now?

Interesting posibilities...

[DarthVain]

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!

Re:New 60Mbps service

[nabsltd]

But if they're lucky, customers will be able to hit that cap quickly.

This refers to the 60Mbps service being offered. However, the summary itself says it will have no cap.

Still, at 15Mpbs, you can hit the 100GB cap for that service level in just 14 hours.

For the 25Mbps service, you hit the 250GB cap in 22 hours. Or, as others have pointed out, the 250GB cap allows you to average 760514 bits per second (about 750Kbps). If you download something that takes just 2 minutes at 25Mbps, that means you essentially can't use your connection at all for the next hour to bring you back to the average.

If you can't actually get the quoted max speed (which is usually the case), this helps a bit, but then you still end up in the situation of paying for more than they can possibly deliver.

24hrs @ 25Mbit/s = 263GB (!!)

[Anonymous Coward]

They should put that in the ads. "You get 30 times less bandwidth than you could if we weren't just a pack of evil dicks! Buy now!"