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.'"

Comments

Only 40Gb/month?

[makomk]

Only 40Gb/month on the top plan? Here in the UK, TalkTalk's "free with any reasonably expensive phone package" ADSL is 40Gb/month... though it's not really enough these days, thanks to stuff like iPlayer.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[NotNormallyNormal]

I think my "basic" plan has a cap around 60GB/month for $35 CDN. There are still several residential plans above mine where the caps are over 100GB.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[MozeeToby]

Maybe this is redundant but I think it needs to be said.

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. Let them know that you will be telling you family and friends who are less technically minded to start looking for alternatives too. Remind them that even if their profits on heavy users are slimmer, it is those same users who the rest of their customers go to for advice.

Then follow through, and make sure that everyone you get to switch tells the operator that "A friend who is very knowledgeable recently canceled your service because... and recommended I do the same."

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[AliasMarlowe]

40Gb, as in gigabits??? I suppose they'll generously up that to 40GB as in gigabytes.

Now if they made it 400GB, we'd probably stay below the cap most months. There have been a few months when we've been above 500GB, but have never broken the 1TB level. Our service is capped at 100Mb per second, every second of the month. If we saturated it, we'd reach 1TB in about a day.

And in answer to the inevitable question: no we're not sharing movies or music. Having a high bandwidth means you access more stuff, and don't worry how many MB anything is.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[Yaur]

"stuff like iPlayer" is exactly what they are afraid of. This isn't so much about bandwidth costs, though that is somewhat important, as it is about protecting their legacy video model.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[erroneus]

This is the correct answer if you are in one of their markets and are presently affected. If you are not presently affected, there is no sense in drawing attention to yourself. Presently, I am a Time-Warner internet user and prior to that, AT&T and Comcast... been bought and sold a lot. During this time, the market for ADSL has expanded greatly to the point that my download speeds are very very good as there are far fewer cable internet users in my area than DSL. I get over 1MB/sec downloads on my torrents quite often. I have no need to complain at this time.

But your suggestions for argument are exactly what is needed as feedback to the company. Eventually, they will listen... they will have to. If they brought it to my market, I would absolutely insist on using ADSL as leverage against their actions.

Many users have no effective way to measure their own usage and have no way to keep tally of their downloads either. This is especially true as P2P technologies are increasingly being used in Netflix and other such legitimate services.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[TubeSteak]

'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.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[bhtooefr]

Myself, my options are:

Time Warner (I'm paying $44.95/mo for Earthlink via TW, but I'm not in a capped area)
A ripoff artist phone company that claims $14.95/mo for ADSL, but they have about $50-70 in hidden charges on the phone bill, resulting in over $100/mo for basic ADSL and home phone
Dial-up for about $40 for the basic home phone and $10-20 for the dial-up
EvDO with a 5 GiB cap, and I don't have good cell reception here anyway
Stealing wifi from a neighbor that has the same options

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[fastest fascist]

Here in civilized Northern Europe, I don't even know anyone who has a transfer cap. Somehow the ISPs seem to stay in business.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[TheRaven64]

40GB is enough for 90 hours of iPlayer video, or about three hours a day, which is a lot more than I'd want to watch. It's enough to listen to my favourite Internet radio stream for 16 hours a day. It's not an excessive amount, but it's probably more than most average users need; I'd be surprised if my mother used more than a fraction of that, and I know a couple of people who use HSPA broadband with 10GB/month caps for their home Internet connection.

By the way, 40GB is only enough to refresh this page once per minute every day, or three times per minute if you are caching all of the scripts, stylesheets and images.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[Chosen Reject]

Someone could think it is the exact opposite, as in you're not using what you paid for. But I don't think either is true. In reality, you chose to pay for a connection that had a certain capacity even though you knew you didn't need it. But you thought it was a fair deal, the seller thought it was a fair deal, you both agreed, you're both happy. The GP went to the same seller, thought it was a good deal, the seller thought it was a good deal, both agreed, and both are happy.

I don't get angry because someone else spends longer at the gym than I do, even though we're both spending the same monthly amount. If I really thought it was unfair, I could spend more time there, or ask to pay less, or go somewhere else where they limit the time you can spend in a gym.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[andymadigan]

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).

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[ckaminski]

Which is the REAL Clinton/Bush legacy. Letting the entertainment networks buy the communication infrastructure. :-/

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[castironpigeon]

I'm in the same situation as I'd imagine most of us are. None of the cable ISPs have any reason to listen to customer complaints as long as they have a monopoly in their service regions. The only surprise here is that they've waited so long to start squeezing.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[Red Flayer]

The problem with this is that only people who hit the cap are going to be negatively affected enough to switch to a different ISP.

Guess what? Time Warner wants those people to switch, since they are the ones breaking their overselling calculations. The quicker TW can unload the high-volume users, the better it is for TW. That is, of course, unless high-volume users pay additional charges for their excess volume over the cap. Then, those users are profitable again for TW.

Personally, I think tiered pricing by volume is a good idea, since it more fairly distributes the cost of providing service.

Plus, I was able to download some 8 TB of porn before there were caps, so I'm good for a while.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[Nevyn]

Plus, I was able to download some 8 TB of porn before there were caps, so I'm good for a while.

But what about next week?

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[ckaminski]

You don't have media companies controlling the media distribution networks who control the Internet broadband/access networks either. It's a sorry state of affairs here in the U.S. for broadband.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[0xDEAD]

Done, done and done. I let TWC know when I turned in my 3 DVR boxes and shut down my Cable/Phone/Internet service which I had for 10 years that this was one of the major reasons I was switching to FIOS. I have not regretted the switch at all either, FIOS quality and service have been excellent (and I had my doubts as I hated my Verizon land line service!)

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[the_womble]

So you are want to get people who would never hit the cap to switch in order to protest that they are no longer cross-subsidising you?

It is perfectly reasonable to charge heavy users more.

It is a lot better than Comcasts approach of a high cap and cutting off those who breach it twice.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[DigitAl56K]

Here in San Diego, I have one of their RoadRunner packages. I get up to 8Mbps (and often the full 8Mbps), but I see it's also common to have up to 50Mbps. On a 5Mbps line you can download about 50GB in 24 hours. On an 8Mbps line just over 80GB. TW reps have announced a 100GB "super-tier" via Twitter. Even so, you can exhaust that in under 2 days at only 5Mbps.

Sounds like a lot of bandwidth? 720p H.264 will run 5-6Mbps for decent quality (my opinion). If you watch 24 hours of it you'll blow through their 40GB plan in around 19 hours of viewing (based on 5Mbps avg for the video). 1080p? Let's call it 8Mbps average for the video bitrate (favorable for the ISP in my opinion) and you'll exceed your $55 plan (according to the summary) after watching only 12 hours worth of content.

Tier based pricing such as this will kill innovative new services. If this becomes commonplace I doubt you'll see some of the video sites emerging today serving a lot of HD. We're even less likely to see online music stores adopting lossless formats. Because end users will only be able to download a limited amount per month there will be less pressure to lower bandwidth prices for backbone/CDN - "demand" (and I use that term loosely in this context) will outstrip supply.

I see it like this: Thanks to things like YouTube HD, Hulu, Netflix online, Veoh, and so forth, we're *all* downloading more, no matter what the ISPs try to tell us "the majority of their customers" use. Their margins will be getting squeezed. You aren't benefiting from this new tiered model because "you aren't subsidizing high use users" - you're going to be paying about the same, if not more, and your plan will give you less downloads and greater risk (if you exceed it).

I also cannot help but wonder for ISPs that are linked to media giants whether there is some line of thinking that says "We're bleeding due to piracy, people are dropping their cable packages, motions against BitTorrent haven't worked, let's find another way to stem the bleeding". If this were a factor it would be putting self protectionism against national infrastructure interests.

Anyway - the main thing to keep in mind is that this is not just an issue for your net access and wallet today, it will limit the kind of services and media that are developed tomorrow.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[AliasMarlowe]

This just means that you are an abusive user who should pay a hell of a lot more than I do for Internet access. I only use 1 to 2GB per month, since I rarely do bulk downloading. I think every plan should include 10GB of throughput and each additional GB should be an additional charge. Then assholes like yourself can pay your own way rather than sponging off my payments.

WTF? I live in Finland, so it's most unlikely that you're subsidizing my internet access.

You're talking through your ass with the "abusive user" allegation, too. My ISP has two 10Gb switches as uplink for the local fiber network I'm attached to, and there are just a few hundred fiber subscribers. The optical switch they installed in my house can serve 8 cat6 ports at full speed (and 800Mb is only a fraction of the fiber's bandwidth) - they have clearly planned for us using far more bandwidth than we do today. Even if I used 1TB per month, that would only average 3Mb per second, or about 3% of the capacity of one cat6 port. The current pair of 10Gb switches can handle 700 houses with throughput like that. As I said, our monthly usage is generally less than 400GB, so the switches could handle 1700 houses like ours. In fact, every other fiber customer they have could be using MORE bandwidth than us, and it still would not affect my bandwidth.

Our ISP has done it right: they have adequately provisioned the infrastructure. We don't need to care how much bandwidth our neighbours are using, and they don't need to care how much we're using. The ISP has also overprovisioned the so-called "last mile" segments to each house. The bottleneck, when it arrives, will be the pair of 10Gb switches, which are the easiest to upgrade (much faster switches are already available).

FYI, I pay euro55 per month for the internet access, and also get IP TV and a package of pay channels. The ISP must consider it profitable, as they offer the same package to others, too. Here (Hiltulanlahti in rural Finland, actually), ISPs do not persecute their customers with miserly third-world usage caps. In Helsinki, of course, a similar package starts at about euro45 per month.

Just out of interest, how much are you paying for the few GB you use monthly? And which city/state/region is it, just for the record.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

OpenDNS on your router.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[spitzak]

Absolutely agree that you should get a bill saying "you used this many GB" and multiply by the rate and that is what you pay, and that would by far make the most sense.

The service providers don't want this however. Same reason they only sell cable tv as "packages". Lots of people will end up paying a lot less, and those that pay more will have a strong incentive to go somewhere else. Also users will probably figure out that Flash ads are actually costing them 1 cent each (or whatever) and then they are going to be mad and *really* start blocking them.

For those reasons I don't think this is going to happen. I actually feel that a cap (plus the ability to do something on a web page that says "I know my bill will be increased, please turn off the cap now") is the best solution that anybody will actually consider.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[dgatwood]

I cannot see why we get electricity, gas, water, garbage service and other things measured and pay for the amount we use should not also apply to Internet bandwidth.

With the exception of water, all of those other things you mention have very real marginal costs. The more you use, the more the company has to spend. Electricity costs the company proportionally because they have to use more fuel to produce it. With gas, after you exceed a certain amount, somebody has to go out and drill another oil well to capture more. Similarly, with water, if you exceed the natural capacity of the aquifer, the wells eventually dry up and you have to spend money to drill new ones and/or truck in water until the aquifer replenishes itself. Garbage service costs more because you have to hire more people to work more hours if people use it more heavily. There are very real, tangible marginal costs involved with all of those things.

Internet bandwidth is not like that at all. Initial infrastructure costs notwithstanding, the cost of moving a terabyte of data is approximately the same as the cost of moving a gigabyte. Adding lines to increase capacity costs money, but within the limits of the available bandwidth, the wires have to still be maintained and equipment periodically replaced whether you transfer a terabyte or a byte.

Also, all of the things you mention can be conserved and used later. By not using water, you are increasing the levels in the aquifer (to a point) that can be used later when you have a dry spell. By not using electricity, you are causing generators to be taken offline, saving fuel that can be used to produce power later. By not using as much gas, you are leaving gas in an oil field that can be retrieved later or stored in tanks for future consumption. Internet bandwidth, however, cannot be conserved. Once a second has passed, the gigabit you could have transferred in that time was either transferred or it wasn't. If it wasn't, you can't transfer two gigabits in the next second to make up for it.

The marginal cost of providing Internet bandwidth is zero, so the marginal cost to customers should also be zero. Customers should pay for the infrastructure costs amortized over the life of the hardware plus some percentage for profits. Any other scheme is a scam.

The problem is that these companies have lied to consumers for years saying that they can provide X Mbps (for some value of X) to customers in hopes that they would never really use that much, knowing full well that they were massively overselling their capacity to turn a substantial profit. Now, as customers start to do more with that bandwidth, instead of turning around those huge profits to expand the infrastructure, they are looking desperately for ways to continue to turn huge profits without actually improving the infrastructure. After all, it's not enough to break even. They have to make more profit than the year before to add value for their shareholders. At some point, such an economic model breaks down and they have to pay the piper. I think we're to that point, and no amount of tiered bandwidth is going to fix that. If they continue down this path instead of spending the money they need to spend to improve their infrastructure, they will soon be supplanted by disruptive technologies. Maybe that's good, but it certainly won't be good for companies like Time Warner.

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[Cramer]

Usage based billing works well for finite, tangable things -- which the things you mentioned are. Bandwidth and bits, just don't work like that. A DS3 is always a DS3; it's always moving 45mbps of either packets or an idle pattern. Bits are transient, temporal creatures. They exist only when we use them. They cannot be stockpiled for a rainy day or a nuclear winter. The bandwidth of my DS3 that wasn't used today cannot be used tomorrow.

As I have said many places, if TW cared about network traffic, they would throttle connections above some "cap". Instead, it's as clear as a road flare, they want more money - period. And this is how they're going to get it. Most of their customers aren't exceeding the cap, so expect the caps to be lowered and bills to increase. This is stupid; their network cannot handle the demands of modern networking, so instead of spending anything to support the ever evolving networking demands, they want everyone to go back to the relative stoneage of dialup era limited use. They advertise faster and faster connections (to stay competitive) but don't have the infrastructure to support it, and won't spend the money to be able to. (the modern web ceased to be usable at dialup speeds many years ago.)

Re:Only 40Gb/month?

[dgatwood]

I also cannot help but wonder for ISPs that are linked to media giants whether there is some line of thinking that says "We're bleeding due to piracy, people are dropping their cable packages, motions against BitTorrent haven't worked, let's find another way to stem the bleeding". If this were a factor it would be putting self protectionism against national infrastructure interests.

We're talking about Time Warner Cable here. They're a cable company. They make almost all of their money by selling pay-per-view movies and providing cable TV service. They see the direction of the market, and it is rapidly headed towards their main market being worthless as more and more people get their entertainment via the Internet. At that point, they will be a trivially replaceable commodity data pipe and their bread and butter dries up. Anything they can do to limit their customers' adoption of alternative ways of getting TV shows online is helping to extend their doomed TV-based business model that much farther.

Indeed, that's why I think the FCC and/or FTC need to step in and say, "No, you will not." This is a very clear example of anticompetitive monopoly abuse by TWC to stifle coming video-on-demand technologies, alternative distribution channels, etc. If the government allows this behavior to continue and to spread to other ISPs, in the long term, everyone loses.

First, they came for the downloaders, but I did not download, so I had nothing to fear. Then, they came for Slingbox, but I didn't own one, so I rolled my eyes. Then, they came for the YouTube users, but I did not use YouTube, so I did not care. Next, they came for the iTunes, Unbox, and Hulu users, but I never watched TV online, so I remained silent. Then, they came for me and there was no one left to speak out.

Here's my thoughts

[77Punker]

According to 77Punker,

Re:Here's my thoughts

[77Punker]

I was making fun of a typo that happened when the article was originally posted. At the bottom of the post, it read:

"According to Ars Technica,"

This was corrected shortly after I posted my joke.

Re:According to Ars Technica,

[2phar]

I think the submitter reached their cap.

Conflict of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Warner has an interest in keeping media businesses under control, therefore it cannot allow streaming services to gain traction. Video streaming in HDTV quality will easily reach these limits, but almost no other internet usage will.

Re:Conflict of interest

[syncrotic]

I can't emphasize how important a point you've just made.

The cable and telecom providers have collectively decided to create in peoples minds the idea that a "reasonable" cap is a few dozen GB, give or take: a level set so as to discourage the small but growing number of users who download much of their video and don't bother spending $1000/year on broadcast cable / satellite. From the cableco's perspective, the worst of it is that the users downloading video are exactly the technically literate sort that want, and under other circumstances might be willing to pay for, high-end cable packages with HD channels.

Bandwidth is just not that expensive, nor is it anywhere near as scarce as the cable companies are suggesting. This issue is being framed in terms of cost and scarcity to hide the fact that this is just protecting an old business model and its rather generous revenue stream.

Re:Conflict of interest

[betterunixthanunix]

"but almost no other internet usage will."

1. Open source developers or enthusiasts pulling ISOs
2. Artists who share their work with others
3. Employees remotely accessing systems at their job using VNC
4. Work-at-home investors who pull a lot of market data

And there are many others.

Re:Conflict of interest

[NormalVisual]

Bandwidth is just not that expensive, nor is it anywhere near as scarce as the cable companies are suggesting.

This is exactly right. How is it that it's prohibitively expensive for the average Joe to get decent connectivity, yet I can maintain a colocated server in a very nice data center at a constant 70 degrees F, with a UPS system that will keep my server up for two weeks after the mains goes away, with a terabyte of data transfer each month on a dedicated 100 megabit switch port (and I've yet to see my transfer rate drop below 10Mb/sec), and a /27 netblock, *and* a SLA, all for $100/month? Also, when I submit a service ticket, they respond in less than two minutes and can discuss the issue intelligently without stepping through an inane script. And, in the unlikely event I overrun my bandwidth allocation for the month, they'll just charge me a reasonable fee for the overage and never utter a word about cancelling my account.

Re:Conflict of interest

[TooMuchToDo]

Because colo providers have much lower capital expenditure costs than cable/DSL ISPs who have to roll out coax/fiber to everyone.

Re:Conflict of interest

[NormalVisual]

For the most part that's true, but those costs are also spread across a *much* smaller number of customers for the colos, and ISPs also have their costs sharply reduced by the generous rights-of-way, franchise guarantees, and other subsidies they receive from the local government.

ISPs have it within their means to offer vastly better service at the prices they currently charge while still making a substantial profit. They simply choose not to do so.

5gb is just ridiculous

[qoncept]

I don't even know what you could do with 5gb a month. I have dd-wrt running on my router and UPLOAD more than 5gb a month using email and AIM to chat.

Re:5gb is just ridiculous

[Jherico]

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.

Re:5gb is just ridiculous

[Rycross]

Even 40 gb/month is ridiculous. Back at my old job, I could eat that up in a week using my MSDN subscription to set up a development workstation. Nowadays, I could churn through that in a month easily just playing around with FOSS, Hulu, YouTube, Skype, XBox Live/PSN downloads.

I really hope this doesn't become a trend. If all my ISP options switch to a cap, then my internet usage is going to take a dramatic hit. Of course, I'm sure that's what they want -- they'd rather me buy their cable TV and phone plans, rather than use IPTV and VOIP. And they'd rather have me entertain myself with their offerings rather than my XBox 360 or PS3.

Re:5gb is just ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Obviously those 86% probably don't even need a broadband Internet connection at all.

My cable line is capped at 40 GB/mo and I hate that damn thing. At 10 Mbps you can blow out the cap in less than half a day. And you're suppose to use it for the whole month?!

Other countries don't seem to have a problem wiring up nearly their whole population with 100 Mbps connections and such. The problem in the US just that companies are just plain stupid and wasteful (bad designs, poorly managed, wasting money, etc). That plus there is not enough competition. You got one, maybe two broadband/TV/phone companies in every area.

Re:5gb is just ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:5gb is just ridiculous

[MoonBuggy]

Just to add backing to that: by my calculations 5GB of text data in a month would require typing at over 20,000 words per minute, 24 hours a day. I'd be very impressed to meet someone who types at almost 350 words per second without the requirement for food or sleep.

Seriously, though, while a 5GB cap is pretty crappy (even leaving last.fm running on one machine would push that, let alone video streaming) it's just making ones own argument look invalid to claim you're going to exceed it with email and IM.

Re:5gb is just ridiculous

[WTF Chuck]

It doesn't take that long to hit 5Gig when the cat lays on the keyboardddddddddddddddddddddddddd

Re:According to Ars Technica,

[brusk]

The poster fell into a comma.

This is amazing...

[Darundal]

...there is going to be a broadband ISP worse than Comcast. I only wonder why they are expanding the test to larger markets where they don't have significant competition from other ISPs

Re:This is amazing...

[Akido37]

I only wonder why they are expanding the test to larger markets where they don't have significant competition from other ISPs

That's the whole point. Here in Rochester, NY, we have no other option but DSL. In Buffalo, NY (about an hour away), they have Verizon FiOS.

We are getting screwed, they are not. We have no other option for broadband, and they do.

Re:This is amazing...

[punkr0x]

I live in Buffalo, but the fact that these caps are coming to Rochester bothered me enough to email Time Warner saying that if they ever bring this to my area, I'll immediately switch providers. Too close for comfort!

Hmmm

[krou]

According to Ars Technica,

What, did Soulskill hit his cap or something? DAMN YOU TIME WARNER CABLE FOR KEEPING ME IN SUSPENSE!

Caps are...

[Aladrin]

Caps are to stop the heaviest users, not the lightest ones. That 14% (which is a lot, not a little) that exceeded their caps are the ones they are targeting. That 14% ties up the majority of the bandwidth and light users get poorer service because of it.

For the record, I have always been one of the top users of every ISP I've ever been with. I was '#1 abuser' for the smalltown ISP I had back 12-15 years ago. I haven't ever let up. (Yes, that's what the ISP called me to my face.)

Overall, their customers are going to be a LOT happier without caps... Caps make customers worried about extra charges on their bill. Most customers will pick a slightly higher priced 'unlimited' plan over one with a cap, even if they would never hit the cap even on crazy months.

Time Warner will figure this out again soon when their competitors get a good hold on their market.

Re:Caps are...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Warner will figure this out again soon when their competitors get a good hold on their market.

Competitors? In the United States? That's a laugh.

14% is a lot

[averner]

14% of users going over the proposed limit is a lot. This means one out of seven. In contrast, Comcast has a cap of 250 GB, and cites figures of around 1%. As web-based video services continue to grow in popularity, I can only imagine the amount of people having issues with their cap. Maybe this will be just the thing to spark some competition!

Re:14% is a lot

[Taibhsear]

Comcast... Maybe this will be just the thing to spark some competition!

You must be new here...

Isn't this really pre-emption of competition?

[the_rajah]

As people start to get movies and TV shows via the Internet, they're moving away from cable TV content. Cable wants to maintain their monopoly. It's time to get the Justice Department looking at this.

5GB/ MONTH?

[Taibhsear]

FUCK. THAT. Thankfully I don't have Time Warner. Unfortunately I do have Concast. I already got warned once for being over my 250GB limit. Since they want to charge me $7/mo more for an HD converter box (that I can't buy anywhere, only rent from them) that my tv does natively (and at a higher resolution over the air than what they send compressed) and I actually pay for. The basic subscription I pay for includes HD channels but I can't watch them unless I pay for the converter box or plug the cable straight into my tv and lose the ability to watch On Demand programs. So I download the programs I do want to watch in high def.

Want a good comparison? Take the amount of time the average customer spends per month watching tv. Calculate the relative bitrate for a tv program (including commercials) adjusting for resolution, multiply it by the average viewing time, and I guarantee you it will be greater than the any of the current bandwidth caps. Bandwidth caps are bullshit. They're just another way to milk more money out of the consumer. The system can handle it. If they need more bandwidth for the whole network, light up the dark fiber and/or upgrade the infrastructure we already paid for years ago.

Re:5GB/ MONTH?

[MozeeToby]

While I agree with the general tone of your comment, your comparison is not really valid. TV signals are broadcast, all users get the same thing. Furthermore, the TV signals aren't sent over the big pipes of the Internet, they are received at your local cable companies offices and sent through the companies cable lines from there. The Internet is different data for each individual, and ISPs do pay a per gigabyte fee to send data across the big pipes that make up the backbone of the Internet.

In all honesty, I would be ok with a per gigabyte fee if the fees were reasonable. Say, $10 for a 10 mbps link plus whatever the ISP pays to send my data through the trunk lines (I'll even throw in a +15% on that figure so they can make their profit).

Re:5GB/ MONTH?

[ivan256]

While I agree with the general tone of your comment, your comparison is not really valid. TV signals are broadcast, all users get the same thing.

Not anymore. Read up on Switched Digital Video. It's not fun when you try to watch something in the evening or on the weekend, and you get a "try again later" error 'cause too many people on your segment are watching unique content.

Thankfully, FiOS came to my area and I sent Comcast packing.

Makes Comcast look great

[AvitarX]

Comcast allows 250 GB, this makes them look fantastic.

I don't really object to a super low plan for less, but 40 GB is a low max. I've done that with legal content plenty of times. I can imagine getting there binging on youtube and hulu even.

This looks more like an attack on their competition (internet eating away at TV viewing), than a need to meet customer demands.

Price fixing practically...

[blahplusplus]

They're attempting to force "heavy users" to pony up for bandwidth that already exists in abundance in their network.

My own ISP started bandwidth capping in the last year and a half and cut me down to 60GB without notice and I was pissed. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the *IAA's of the world are influencing these decisions.

Bait & Switch

[Nom du Keyboard]

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!

Re:Bait & Switch

[Inglix the Mad]

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.

Re:Bait & Switch

[slyborg]

One of my friends works in TW Data. They've done checks and most people (read: over 95%) never break 15gb.

There's a solid, unbiased, and verifiable piece of data for us all. As noted by a number of other posters, this means jack anyway since we are just on the cusp of real on-demand, Internet-delivered video, and usage will only go up in the future.

I'd worry but my work pays for me to have a business line. Those are not being affected by this.

And you don't have the faintest idea what the pain level would be, since you apparently do your personal Internet use on your company's dime. Never ceases to amaze me how people will defend giant corporations engaging in anti-consumer behavior based primarily on the argument that, hey, it doesn't affect me right now.

Here are some facts on Time Warner Cable as of end of 2008, courtesy Yahoo Finance.

Gross profit: $9 billion on revenue of $17 billion, or better than 50% gross margin. They did well enough to pay their CEO $8.82 million dollars last year. And you defend the necessity of these bandwidth penalties on what basis other than the fact that you don't have to pay for your Internet like the poor fools that have TWC? I don't have TWC, either, and I'm outraged by this, because (a) it is part of an industry-wide collusion to do the same thing, and (b) is a perfect example of the unbelievable corporate greed that caused this financial mess the world is in.

Re:Bait & Switch

[Cramer]

Ummm, what contract? One of their biggest selling points in every ad campaign I've seen in the last few years is the whole "no contracts" line.

Re:Online gaming usage?

[wisnoskij]

It is not the playing that would eat into it so much as the patches.

640KB is enough for anyone

[nick_davison]

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.

And, in the days of 56.6kbps modems, just about no one pulled down 100MB of data per month. Why don't we cap it there?

Oh yeah... because we actually like society advancing not staying stagnant.

Just because most users don't, currently, constantly bang up against capacity limits, that's no reason to cap them at it to ensure they will as their usage patterns grow. Well, OK, it is if you're terrified their usage patterns are going to include cancelling your hugely profitable cable TV service and watching their content online. Which, let's face it, is the real reason these caps are getting introduced almost exclusively by organizations who don't want you able to circumvent their other business model.

Re:Online gaming usage?

[Rycross]

How about digital delivery? Steam, XBox Live Marketplace, and PSN? You can legally download original XBox and PS1 games through those networks, and plenty of games through Steam can top 5 GB by themselves.

Heh.

[faloi]

It's neither here nor there, but I recently switched away from Time Warner in Austin. My cancellation call included the sales speech that they didn't cap usage like some other plans. I resisted the urge to tell her that Time Warner would be soon, because they're following the trends.

Austin's a tech town. Let's fight this!

[OpenGLFan]

Let's fight this, Austinites. My gf and I are engineers, and we VNC into work on weekends and for late nights, and we use more than 2GB/month just on that.

Here's the letter I'm sending to my senators and representatives. I need to figure out who to send it to at Time Warner and the Statesman. (The big newspaper, for out-of-towners.) I'm looking for advice and critique and sources for some of the arguments I've heard here. (Look for the [brackets])

Dear ________,

I am an electrical engineer with *company*, and like many engineers in the emerging high-tech center of Austin, I rely on high-speed Internet connections to my home. In these times of economic hardship, it is more important than ever for working professionals to be able to access work computers and other information quickly and economically.

Time Warner Cable has announced that they are implementing tight limits on the amount of information that they will provide to users of their cable modem services. While Austin's workers attempt to reach a compromise between work and family life by accessing critical business operations over the Internet, Time Warner plans to restrict their networks for these heavy users. They are instituting these caps in spite of the fact that a vast capacity of their fiber-optic lines remain unused, and in [year], Congress gave [millions] of dollars to cable companies to improve our nation's digital infrastructure.

For Time Warner to pocket this investment and make no improvements, then attempt to extort outrageous fees that infrastructure from Austin area workers, is outrageous. Only the fact that there is no significant competition for broadband access allows cable companies to unilaterally impose these restrictions on those of us who depend on the Internet for our livelihood. As Congress has given heavily to cable companies and has seen no improvements, I would urge you to closely examine the stranglehold this company has upon Austin's digital infrastructure and the abuse of monopoly power that this upcoming cap represents.

I look forward to your quick action in this matter, [and I anticipate supporting you in [your next election] (for elected officials) ].

*OpenGLFan*

I'm getting kicked out of my home over this...

[boyko.at.netqos]

I interviewed Alex Dudley, VP of PR for Time Warner Cable at Network Performance Daily on this. I tried to be impartial, but as I mention in the intro, this would raise my bill 500%, and would be a 1000% markup from Time Warnerâ(TM)s wholesale rate, and as TW is a monopoly in my apartment complex, the net effect is that Iâ(TM)m getting kicked out of my home when the billing goes live, so the interview gets heated at points. FTA:

NPD: I was wondering if you ever considered this⦠tracking the high-end users, and⦠only when the line is congested⦠throttling back their service using QoS priorities. Giving them--

Dudley: Thatâ(TM)s exactly what Comcast did about a year ago, and it caused a complete outrage and the FCC hauled them before the committee and told them they had to stop doing it.

NPD: Actually, I covered that. That's actually the result that Comcast applied after the FCC asked them to choose a different system . You're talking about the Sandvine stuff that was sending forged RST packets and the issue there was that the RST packets looked like they had come from the sender itself, which was essentially kind of a classic " Man In The Middle" attack . A kind of a fraudulent thing.

-------------

Dudley: â¦because of consumers that are using amounts like this, what we're seeing is a need for network expansion. â¦We figure⦠the top 25% of users use 100 times more network bandwidth than the bottom 25%.

NPD: Well that's just standard bell curves.

Dudley: Iâ(TM)m sorry?

NPD: Well, when you put any system on a graph like that⦠because of the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle or whatever it's called, when you put something on the bell curve, of course the top 25 are going to use the most bandwidth because they're the top 25â¦.

Previously, I wrote on how bandwidth caps have a chilling effect on Internet participatory culture.

This would suck for me right now

[PJ1216]

I just installed an internet backup service. My initial backup is about 250gb. If there was a 5gb a month limit, it would take me over 2 years to backup my system. And after that, my internet traffic is essentially doubled for anything I download that I'd want backed up (me downloading it and then me uploading it again for backup). Unless others follow suit, TW will have problems from the telcos who aren't as reliant on the cable revenue or spreading a lot higher bandwidth out there (like Verizon FiOS). TW is just trying to see how much longer they can try and force people to use the old infrastructure. Why give people a better experience if you can force them to use what they already have or force them to use even less?

A threat that won't work.

[The Famous Druid]

> 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"

Re:A threat that won't work.

[dgatwood]

And those 5% of customers recommend service to the other 95%. Smart companies have long since learned that you do NOT piss off your "pro customers". It eventually comes back to bite you in the backside with such regularity that it almost goes without saying in most industries. The telecoms have near monopoly status, so they can afford to not care. For now. This, too will change.

Re:Doesn't follow at all...

[Inglix the Mad]

How about "cue the Steam users?" Or the Hulu users? Or the PSN/Live users? Or the MSDN users? Or the FOSS users? In case you hadn't noticed, there are a plethora of perfectly legal ways to bust a 40 GB cap in a month. The problem is that a lot of these legal uses compete with the companies' other entertainment options. So they'll cap it so that the legit users can't get their entertainment from the 'tubes, then turn around and tell you that you shouldn't care because all those other guys were filthy pirates anyway.

If they actually gave a damn about your service quality, they'd be upgrading their network.

Truth be told, about 10% of the customers any ISP has will be screwed by this. I'm not going to deny that. Then again that 10% accounts for well over 80% of the network usage. Then again if you can get your heavy users to jump to your competitor, you've screwed them (your competitor) by being able to keep your prices low.

I don't agree with this 100%, but /.'ers are not representative of the average user on the internet. I'm guess this will also be their DOCSIS 3 deployment money. Not that it'll help too much. Just like VDSL, it's all limited at head shed.

Re:Who can I switch to?

[MidnightPsycho]

You can get Earthlink cable internet in Rochester. The pricing isn't as attractive as RoadRunner is now - but maybe it will be after the caps? http://www.earthlink.net/access/cable.faces There is one bit of satisfaction with this though - TimeWarner has to allow the Earthlink traffic over their cables . . .