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Time Warner Expanding Internet Transfer Caps To New Markets
Akido37 writes "Time Warner Cable is expanding its transfer capping program to new markets in Rochester, NY, Austin, TX, San Antonio, TX, and Greensboro, NC. It seems they have been testing plans with 5, 10, 20, or 40GB of data transfer per month, with prices ranging from $30 to $55 a month. BusinessWeek quotes Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt saying, 'We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business ... We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.' Ars Technica adds, 'The BusinessWeek article notes that only 14 percent of users in TWC's trial city of Beaumont, Texas even exceeded their caps at all. My own recent conversations with other major ISPs suggest that the average broadband user only pulls down 2-6GB of data per month as it is. One the one hand, this suggests that caps don't really bother most people; on the other, it indicates that low cap levels aren't needed to keep traffic 'reasonable' since it's actually quite low to begin with.'"
No you don't. Unless you're attaching huge files to the emails or transferring huge files over AIM, you would wear your fingers to bloody stumps before you could approach generating 1GB of data over a text channel carrying natural language.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
This is so clearly Bait & Switch that TW should be proscuted within an inch of their corporate lives. Their top officers should be in jail, to wit:
1: Promise unrealistic, unlimited downloads and speeds that discourage all competition.
2: Once you have the monopoly and the consumer has nowhere else to go, bring in onerous download caps that actually reflect the basic capabilities of your pitiful system.
3: Buy off Washington so that you won't be punished for #1 and #2.
4: PROFIT!
The really Big Lie in all of this is that the argument for caps is that the system only has a very limited capability. Yet WITHOUT CHANGING OUT A SINGLE PIECE OF HARDWARE you can get a much higher cap simply by paying a much higher amount of money. Where did all that extra bandwidth come from? Clearly cable companies lie like rugs, and the public and regulatory agencies continue to buy into those lies as we're all being screwed over!
1) All ISP's do this. Most oversell bandwidth at a more ridiculous rate than they used to oversell modem ports.
2) Actually, they've done pretty good keeping prices low. If it were still only the bells running things we'd be lucky to have DSL.
3) Standard. All companies do this.
4) Not in the network division.
One of my friends works in TW Data. They've done checks and most people (read: over 95%) never break 15gb. Sucks to be high bandwidth users I guess, but if you're part of the minority, you're going to get charged more. As far as bait & switch, if you read your service agreement, they can change prices (et al.) at any time with notice. Now if you have a contract price, that will have to be honored through the end of the contract.
Mind you I'm not defending them 100% because I think the 5gb cap is low. 10gb would be far more reasonable for a mixed family (though I guess grandma and grandpa probably have a hard time breaking 2gb) situation. Gamers (especially consoles) and those downloading videos (incl. P2P) are the ones that are going to be hurt by this. I'd worry but my work pays for me to have a business line. Those are not being affected by this.
People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
'We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business... We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.'
Lol what? Does he think we're fucking stupid?
Time Warner (aka Road Runner) started experimenting with cable modems in 1995, but didn't go big until 1997ish.
Is CEO Glenn Britt really saying that their business model hasn't been viable for over a decade?
More likely they've been overpromising for over a decade and it's only been recently that demand has caught up with the promises.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Or he's a software developer and attaches lots and lots of patches/binaries/tarballs/images/powerpoint presentations/pdfs to emails and various bugzilla installs. Which is not hard to believe; I'm a (very part-time atm) software developer and on a good month I can do 900MB in email traffic alone (totalling up and down). If I were a full-time developer again I could easily see 10GB in traffic.
Earthlink isn't the same as RoadRunner, it just uses the cable network, but not they have their own internet peering, and they're not bound by RoadRunner's stupidity. I've already with Earthlink and they confirmed there are no caps nor any plans for them. I'll be switching to them once TW announces a timetable for this (I live in Rochester, NY).
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Abusive? How? What if this guy, I don't know, watches movies on Hulu at 480P? Or Share's linux ISO's? Or watches stuff on youtube, or browses the web (since the whole goddamn thing is now flash laden and thus more bandwidth intensive)? Or plays non-pirated video games?
Really, the ways to use above 1GB are easy. For you to say you only use 1GB a month I can tell is a complete and total lie. You can burn through 1GB through websites and email alone easily. People burned through more than a gig on DIALUP. What you meant was "1GB a day", which is still pretty low and also a lie since people don't tend to use a constant amount of bandwidth.
> If you're on Time Warner, call and complain. Tell them that as a result of this new policy you are researching alternatives and as soon as you find one you will be canceling service.
I hate to tell you this, but it won't work.
Aussie users made a similar threat when one of our biggest ISP's introduced download caps.
A spokesdroid for the ISP said (paraphrased) "50% of our bandwidth is consumed by 5% of our customers. If they take their business to one of our competitors, we'd be delighted"
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)