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Time Warner To Offer Unlimited Bandwidth For $150
unr3a1 writes to tell us that Time Warner Cable has responded to the massive criticism of its new plan to cap user bandwidth with a new pricing model. Users will be given a grace period in which to assess their pricing tier. The "overages" will be noted on their bill, allowing them to change either their billing plan or their usage patterns. "On top of a 5, 10, 20, and 40-gigabyte (GB) caps, the company said this week that it would offer an additional 100GB tier for heavy users. Prices (so far) would range from $29.95 to $75.00 a month, with users charged an extra dollar for every GB more they download, although that charge is also capped at $75. An 'unlimited' bandwidth plan, therefore, tops out at $150."
-Comment about lack of competition
-Comment about poor quality of US bandwidth relative to other countries
What did I miss?
F U
What an awesome deal!
Whale
I thought Shaw was a bunch of pirates. At least I don't seem to have a cap on my service.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Is there anyone who didn't see this coming?
First they whine that unlimited is not unlimited. Then they put a number on what 'unlimited' is, and change the contract that you had already signed. Then they decide that they can actually give you the service you originally signed up for, but only if you pay them $150 more.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I mean, I thought the original package said "unlimited"?
Or is this really just "ulimited*"?
*Unlimited til you use more than $150 of bandwidth.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Just how greedy are these fuckers? If I wind up having to pay $150/month for internet, I'm going to cancel the cable TV, which is already approaching that amount. Can't imagine I'm the only one thinking along those lines. I guess TW's left hand doesn't care what its right hand is doing...
Time Warner To Offer Unlimited Bandwidth For $150
When will the hurting stop? Bandwidth is measured in kbit/s, Mbit/s, etc. Please express this in some rate related to seconds if you're going to use it because the phrase "unlimited bandwidth" means to me that I should be able to sit down and at the drop of a hat (or the spinning of several platters) have a DVD from my friend's computer located on my computer.
... not as seksi as bandwidth but for the love of god please keep these ideas separate. Unless you're going to start talking about bandwidth as in GB/month or TB/month which would drive the hardware and network guys nuts because that is a meaningless metric.
I think a more appropriate term would be something like "no monthly download limit" or some such thing
My work here is dung.
If they're charging a max of $75 for the overages, whats to stop someone from using the $29.95 plan, and maxing the fee...effectively getting an unlimited plan for $104.95 (plus obligatory taxes of course)
-=Bang Bang=-
You have to draw a line somewhere, and put a price under it.
At current exchange rates, $150 works out to be about £100. By comparison, I'm getting uncapped 24mbps ADSL downloads for £22 per month in the UK. I think this might be the one sole instance where the UK gets a better deal on something than the US.
The other story I saw on this said that the monthly bill was capped at $75. They assumed that meant subscription + overages. So the 'unlimited' plan would be only $75. (Still high for an ISP only charge.)
Is there a 'horse's mouth' release anywhere that doesn't have that ambiguity?
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
We usually get a flat plan for 15-20mbit/s over dsl for ~40 EUR/month (1mbit up)
and in japan (i heard) are the prices for fibre-to-the-desk very similar
why are you guys still fucking around with those cable companies?
How about going without a computer, TV and or phone service... Go outside - have fun for a change... Ex-pale kid.
Funny. Over at speakeasy, I can get a line that is not only faster, but guaranteed bandwidth, and is unregulated as far as what I do with it. No idiot company blocking my ports, bitching about my fileserver, etc. Further, I can sign up for a resell plan and make money on my line, with speakeasy doing all the billing. Oh, and I can have that bundled in with VoIP access too? All for around the same $150? Gratuitous link: http://www.speakeasy.net/home/
Please mr. ISP, tell me again how you aren't a simpering moron?
For $14.99 a month via DSL.
Technically speaking, there's no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, though, I would expect if an ISP advertised "unlimited usage" for a 6 Mbs line, I'd be able to download (6 Mbps / 8 bits per byte * 3600 s/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = 1944000 megabytes = 1.944 terabytes per month). Sadly, no.
The problem I have with these plans is that they're charging more for essentially the same service as before. Sure, you'll always have those people who are "excessive downloaders" who - by the cable company's definition - are "abusers". But the problem is that these people: A.) Expect to use the bandwidth for which they've paid, and B.) Are so few and far between that they don't affect the overall usage significantly.
Unfortunately, for most, the only way to get a fair price is to talk your congressman into price controls; ISPs are often monopolies in the area in which they serve.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Definitely disappointing, but not surprising.
The problem is, residential broadband networks were never designed to handle the uses many people make of them nowadays (particularly due to P2P) - there are some heavy users who transfer terabytes of (sometimes of dubious legality) information every month.. it is unreasonable for these people to pay the same price as someone who just checks their e-mail and sends photos to their grandchildren.
The caps and prices here are quite unacceptable - double the cap and half the price, and maybe we're talking..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
The problem with the mainstream model for ISPs is that in an unlimited use plan, the less aggressive users subsidize the consumption of the aggressive users. Most slashdot readers may not have a problem with that, but I think that a lot of people would rather pay a reasonable, and cheaper rate, for bandwidth they use than pay more for a theoretically uncapped amount that they won't use.
Says the guy with so little life that he goes around wasting his time posting this crap.
They just don't want you streaming Netflix over your cable. They want you to sign up for their on-demand service.
Yeah, but does "unlimited" really mean unlimited?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why wouldn't you just buy the 5 Gig plan at $29.95.. then go over it at $1 per Gig up to a limit of $75... then you would have unlimited for $104.95... not $150?
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
'unlimited bandwidth' would be basically infinite transfer -speed-. I think what is being offered is no cap on -contents-, which probably means unlimited -throughput-, but at some limited bandwidth (speed). At least my ISP has a sliding scale for real bandwidth, you pay more for more speed, and I'd be really surprised if TW doesn't have the same thing.
Here in Rochester, the Boring & Mainstream Local Media (TM) has picked up on this pretty heavily, mainly in the "backdoor price increase" sense
We use phone-company DSL, so I'd have no idea aobut how TimeWarner is currently working.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm a Charter cable customer in the St. Louis area. As many probably know, Charter recently filed bankruptcy recently. I have read rumors that Charter is preparing a similar move to what is described by the OP, though I have options. ATT recently established decent service where I'm at ($30/mo buys me 3Mb DSL vs $46/mo for my current 6Mb cable) and to my knowledge has no monthly transfer limits. Given that we use our connection for a LOT of Netflix streaming, this is important to me. There are some decent options in St. Louis between ATT and a few others, so I hope that Charter doesn't get stupid with their pricing. I've been pleased with their service thus far, but I would drop them immediately if they start capping.
Why are ISPs trying to turn into cell carriers (for ones which aren't already) and squeeze every last penny from consumers. On one side, at least someone is honestly selling what they can provide, but at ridiculous pricing tiers. I can easily imagine them trying to charge for certain ports, and applications. One more reason to donate to the EFF
If I hadn't lost^H^H^H^H ever had faith in the FCC I'd wish they would do something about this debacle before it gets really out of hand. Wait, what am I talking about? That happened long ago. I'd like to see something positive happen with their latest proposal though.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I've been a little tuned out, last time I checked in only hearing about Time Warner testing this capping out in other markets (I'm in NYC), thinking it would never happen to me. So I take it this means a cap is already imposed for me, presumably with prohibitive surcharges after I break it?
:(. They paid someone to come up with that?
The one thing I like about Time Warner is that they tend to look the other way (you know what I'm talking about) unlike OptimumOnline for example with their silly letters. I also like having a somewhat static IP without ports blocked and a general laisez faire attitude about running any kind of daemon, at least off-paper.
Question to Verizon FiOS users in NYC: Is it really badass in general? Same kind of throughput regardless of the nature of your packets? Duplex? Any scary letters show up in the mail? Any downside for me, other than the schlep, to switch from TW to Verizon FiOS for both Internet and television? Because I'm this close to making the two phone calls. Sad because I live close to the Time Warner building and I like the building. It's a nice building. But I spend more time on the Internet than I do walking by their building so I'm not going to let that sway me entirely. But Verizon is such an ugly name. I mean.. Verizon. ugh
I could have just googled this, Time Warner NYC's TOS and pricing, but I want my post to serve as an example of what happens to a Time Warner customer once he reads this New York Times article. God bless free market competition.
Unlimited, and this time, we mean it. Trust us.
If you are trying to sell high-speed access, you need to assume that people are going to be downloading about half a terabyte worth of HD video content a month. If the system cannot support that for every customer (10MBit average sustained four hours a day), then you are in the wrong business.
The more I read about these companies' stupidity, the more I want to start a co-op ISP. In LA it isn't that hard to lease a wavelength off of DWP (assuming you have them passing nearby) to connect to one of the hubs in El Segundo, Downtown, or wherever. Negotiate with a community for the right to run local links, and you can have a system installed for under $500 per node, and all your costs are paid after 12 months, with just bandwidth remaining.
This isn't rocket science...
Playing left 4 dead on xbox 360 for one minute online results in about 1 megabyte of data transfer for that minute. 1 * 60 = 60 MB for 1 hour. 4 hours a day = about 1 GB so at 30$ a month, I can play my xbox online for 20 hours, or 5 days at 4 hours a day... Not to mention thats no web surfing, email, etc. This is for the entire month. Not to mention those autoplay video advertisements. Youtube videos are highly compressed but still megabytes in size. Could you imagine trying to use windows update, SP3 took over a gigabyte of downloads. The new debian linux is 25GB for the entire thing, true you can get by on 4GB or so...
but yet you managed to post?
'Friends and family' websites. Get unlimited Gb to your 5 favorite websites. You can choose Google, /., Reddit, Engadget, LKML while little Suzie can choose MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, AmericanIdol.
This kind of bs shouldn't be allowed to happen.
I don't see this comparison made often, but I like to express the data transfer cap as a sustained bandwidth and relate it to the peak bandwidth they advertise. 5 GB cap in a 30 day month is 5 GB / (30 * 24 * 60 * 60) = about 2071 B/sec sustained rate over the month. That's right, if you average 2.1KB/sec for the month, you hit the cap. That's sure a lot lower than the advertised (peak) bandwidth.
is that the government should force their rates lower, and then bail them out when they can't pay their bills.
The only reason they want caps is because they know that the internet is starting to compete with their cable offerings. It has nothing to do with bandwidth. They are already upgrading their infrastructure to support huge amounts of bandwidth. The cost to do so is minimal for cable because the latest upgrade happens to occur at the head end and at the modem in the house. That is $40-$100 a home half of which is paid for by the consumer. That is nothing to charge or make back. What they really want to do is tier their pricing in a way that they cannot be out competed by internet TV. We need to break this MaBell up now.
This fight never had anything to do with "network capacity". They are saying the don't have enough capacity to stream internet video. Yet they do have enough capacity to stream HDTV 24x7 - so longs as you are paying Time Warner for it.
This is exactly what happened to radio, and then to television.
The only goal these companies ever had, is to price the average person out the "real" broadband market.
Only the wealthy voices, will be disseminated.
If I go over, what's my recourse to dispute it? I want an itemized list of each movie I watched, icecast I streamed and stippercam to which I whacked off. Phone company does it, and we all KNOW they suck.
Also, what about roll-over gigs? Are nights and weekends free?
Personally, I have the lowest tier of TW business class through a deal my wife has at work. Wondering if I'll be affected. Hrm...
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
I don't mean to gloat, but really ? I mean, I get a 5 mbps fiber connection for 10$ a month, and there is NO LIMIT on how much I download/upload. A 10 mbps connection is just 5$ extra. I'd say I rack up about 500 gb of traffic a month, judging from the statistics in utorrent. But I guess this is the price I have to pay for living in eastern Europe.
From the article:
"Here at Time Warner Cable, consumption among our high-speed Internet subscribers is increasing by about 40 percent a year"
So basically they want to see their profits go up by 40% per year, since I'm sure the 10GB cap isn't going to become 14GB next year.
Does Time Warner offer some kind of better, more expensive internet I didn't know about? How come their bandwidth is worth so much more?
Can't be just greed, can it?
The more I read about these companies' stupidity, the more I want to start a co-op ISP. In LA it isn't that hard to lease a wavelength off of DWP (assuming you have them passing nearby) to connect to one of the hubs in El Segundo, Downtown, or wherever. Negotiate with a community for the right to run local links, and you can have a system installed for under $500 per node, and all your costs are paid after 12 months, with just bandwidth remaining.
This isn't rocket science...
Ah, tell me again, what does rocket science have anything to do with Greed? When it comes down to finding ways to make even MORE money, simplicity, fairness, and even Common Sense are usually absent.
You mean: "Is it limited unlimited or unlimited unlimited?"
The Worst Lies of All? The Ones You Expect
Anyone know what the best way to complain? I have TWC, and I've already emailed them to say I will cancel when this comes to my area. I seriously doubt that will have much of an effect, though.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Ok, lets see, this server with i already pay 100+ dollars for, to watch maybe a dozen out of a couple hundred channels, wants to charge me even more for having an internet life? Isn't it bad enough that i have to pay for channels i'll never use like the spanish speaking channels, or that i have to buy blocks of the same network that shows the same thing on each channel? And lets see, i spend most of the day either asleep or at work. Something isn't adding up. Damned thieves...
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Oh, the prices are too high, but I definitely like the fact that they're telling customers how much they can use for their money.
The whole "unlimited usage for a flat fee" model never really made any sense to me. Competition will force overselling of their actual bandwidth and just about begs for soft caps or other sorts of invisible limits.
At least in areas where there IS competition (which is unfortunately few in the US), a model where ISPs explicitly specify what you get for your money will cause competition to drive appropriate pricing. Yeah, a the segment of society that wants to be able to download 300 GB per month for a $30 flat monthly fee will be really disappointed, but that's reality -- bandwidth to your home costs more than 10 cents per GB (or wherever the actual number falls).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In Germany, you get 10GB per month for $30 - wirelessly via 3G, tethering explicitly allowed (a 3G USB stick is included).
For that price I can get unlimited Internet from AT&T's U-verse along with cable and telephone. You really want to play this game Time Warner? I don't think there's enough competition, but I think there's just enough to drive you into the ground.
..On whether these caps will affect Earthlink Subscribers? (of which I am one.) If so, I will be looking for another provider and make sure that they know that the Bandwidth caps/Metered Billing are the reason I'm leaving.
If you're a TW/Earthlink customer, and use any linux/BSD/Opensolaris distro and update frequently, you should be concerned about this.
Do not read this
So no IPTV for Time Warner customers, eh?
There should be a law disallowing charges based on usage that you have little to no control over. How much bandwidth is being sent to you? You don't know and you may not have even asked for it. The problem is in many locations there are no real alternatives for high speed access. If Time Warner is going to charge per usage then they should have an obligation to tell you how much you're going to use before you click on a link or receive any packet. (impossible I know - and thus the charges are unreasonable.)
I signed up for unlimited bandwidth at $50 years ago, then they decided to just change that and impose some random arbitrary limit that they won't even tell me.
Why the hell would I bite on this new 'unlimited' plan?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I currently pay 65 SEK, that's less than 8 dollars, only 52 of those go to the company, the rest is taxes.
100/100 with a static IP.
I like living in Sweden.
I take it you haven't seen 2 guys 1 horse, or 1 guy 1 cup yet.
I am paying 65 per month right now. I have RR through Brighthouse Networks. I have yet to see the 15 Mbt down two Mbt up. I am paying for. But I DL LOTS of Anime I can see going over 40 gigs a month easily I don't pirate movies or music just current season Anime fansubs.
TW sucks and I would love to see them go down. I hope Brighthouse tells them to FO.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Here in Australia i pay $150 for only 60GB.. And they charge for uploads too :-(
http://www.bigpond.com/internet/plans/adsl/plans-and-offers/
Looking over http://help.twcable.com/html/policies.html it looks like they have already written into it that if "your tier" of service has bandwidth limitations they may cut you off or charge more as applicable.
However.. I know I, as a current subscriber, didn't agree to sign up for a class of service that has such limitations, and no class seems to currently be advertised as having them that I can find on the time warner web site. That being the case, any such change would require notification and a period in which I can accept and continue or cancel and find another ISP..
Hey Time Warner, guess which one I'm likely to do. Oh, and if you charge me for it first without notification, guess who's in breach of contract.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Bandwidth usage doesn't decrease. It never will.
Limiting your users bandwidth, is a sure way to kill your business as an ISP.
You're greed, and quest for growth and profit is going to destroy your company. You know damn well that your services are overpriced as they stand now. Thats why you can offer that new "$15 for 1GB a month" plan.
Time Warner even says that 30% of its subscribers fit in that 1GB usage area. Well that means right now, they have 30% of their subscribers paying $50+ dollars a month, where as in the new plan they can pay $15 a month?
Somethings not right here Time Warner. It seems to me that you're overcharging 30% of your subscribers and you still dont make enough profit to cover cost? I'm calling BULLSHIT.
This is a way to increase monthly charges. You cant honestly tell me that Time Warner is perfectly happy with giving 30% of its subscribers a deal on their monthly bill. No business is that honest, certainly not Time Warner. That would mean 30% of its subscribers is now paying $35 less, but the 70% high bandwidth subscribers are now going to be paying a $1 for every extra GB? Do they expect those people to download 35 GB extra a month to make up for that $35 dollars they're losing on the other 30% of their subscribers?
It seems to me that Time Warner knows that right now, most of its subscribers use MORE than that 35 GB extra a month, other wise they would not be doing this.
The end result is, a sneaky way to increase your montlhy bill from $50 to $90-$150 a month (depending on how much over you use).
Do you get charged for using their On Demand services? Does that bandwidth go against your limit?
Frankly its all bullshit and Time Warner knows it. Stop playing magic tricks with your customers and start realizing that those virtual signals that travel those copper wires and fiber cables... they should be GETTING CHEAPER with the increase in demand... not more expensive.
How much would you pay for an intel 486dx2 CPU today?
Time Warner was never a good ISP and they were always a poor cable TV provider. Nothing is new here.
I'm on Verizon FIOS and i love it. Granted they nickel and dime me for HD TV and the cable boxes... but atleast its not time warner :)
Verizon TV is an evil deal. You pay for the monthly service, but if you want to actually SEE it on your TV, you must pay for cable boxes. So imagine this sceneario. You pay the monthly service but dont pay for the set top boxes. Bascially that means you have cable tv that you cant see.
The fucking brilliant minds at these "providers" are insulting cheese dicks.
But i'll still take FIOS any day.
For the uninitiated:
In the states, the original meaning of "unlimited" was dial-up AOL at $19.95 a month - an end to billing by the hour.
That plus toll-free local access numbers and flat-rate billing from the telephone company brought folks online in the tens of millions.
Cable, DSL, or satellite introduced you to affordable "always on" broadband.
You signed on for residential grade service at a mass market price: a shared connection, no fixed address, no guaranteed quality of service.
Terms of Service subject to change.
You were not the geek with his insatiable appetite for bandwidth and a wallet clutched more tightly than Scrooge McDuck's.
You were not the geek who - off hours - forgets the first lesson of gainful employment:
Get it in writing.
Leach off of my neighbor's open wireless.
No. I like the internet.
That's what it would cost you if you bought their ultimate cable package with internet and phone service.
Damn, it is good to have 10/2 mbit with no other limit for only $53.1 :D
Here's my take on this..
I had all their services, except phone, for around $120 a month. I found that personally, 100 channels of crap and their high speed internet just wasn't worth it to me. As more content comes online, more people will also find this out.
We have completely dropped cable television and now support our TV fix with Netflix, Hulu, Joost, Youtube, etc. We watch what we want, when we want on my 42" TV hooked up to a PC.
I think they see the writing on the wall and instead of loosing the TV and phone revenue streams which can easily be replaced by the web, they are saying. sure.. go ahead and stream TV, get yourself a magicjack and use our internet to do it, but you will still be paying us $150 a month.
Luckily, we moved where there is a local ISP option, and now all I pay is $55 a month for unlimited Internet with 12M down and around 2M up.
Its about keeping a dying business model alive and getting their 3 service bundle price no matter how you do it, not so much about their bandwidth being saturated by the evil P2P scourge.
Can someone make a good claim, based on statistics and such, how much do bandwidth really cost??
It is very difficult to make an inform judgment what the sliding scale price should be when you don't know anything. I heard broadband is pretty cheap at S. Korean / Singapore over copper lines.
Also if TW is raising price for top users, shouldn't it lower price for those emailing and browsing mom-and-pops? At what point does this become price gauging?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
From http://a.longreply.com/109511:
We will introduce a 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 per month (offering speeds of 10 MB/1 MB). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.
OK, 10 mbit / 1 mbit is a pretty decent upgrade for most people. And I'm assuming that even moderate torrenters aren't doing a whole lot more than 100 GB / month - this is 3 GB per day!
Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.
Ah, so here's how it works. You keep paying per GB, up to a max of (plan rate) + $75. If you're using less than 100 GB / month, you're getting a nice bandwidth boost (admittedly with a cost increase you didn't ask for). If you exceed that, you'll be paying up to $150 / month.
The key thing here to me is the upload rate - you'd be paying a real premium for 1 mbit up under current plans. If you don't care about upload, of course, you're basically getting screwed, but I don't think it's as bad as a lot of people are imagining at first glance.
Funny, their filings state:
"High-speed data costs decreased for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 primarily due to a decrease in per-subscriber connectivity costs, partially offset by subscriber growth.
"In 2007, TW made $3,730 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $164 Million to support the cost of the network. 2007 total profit on high speed data: $3.566 Billion"
"In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion"
If you expect to always to exceed 100 gigs then buy the $29.99 package and pay an extra $75 each month for a total of $105.
Like any company, cost of running business costs money! If bandwidth usage is increasing, well so should their product pricing. At the rate, their customers want them to run their business model - They would be out of business in a heart beat!!!
Us damn geeks, we screw ourselves (well mainly because we live in parent's basement, et al) all the time with this garbage. See if we didn't slobber all over ourselves to wait in line for days to pay top dollar for shit then companies wouldn't rape us.
Calm down, eat a dorito, keep your current 14.4k/ISDN/DSL/CABLE/T# connection and IGNORE this. Please. If there is no interest they will LOWER the price of it, up the regular speed, or do away totally with the idea... all are GOOD things. By jumping in blindly in a rabid fervor all you do is ensure every internet provider will charge... wait for it... $150 for their unlimited service. Why wouldn't they? Ugh, for a group who is so collectively smart we sure are dumb. :)
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Obligatory mention of 1996 Telecommunications Act that these fuckers still have yet to deliver upon, and it's past their deadline. What did we give out 200 billion for, again? To get screwed over?
This would be a perfect FML post from our citizens as a collective whole.
"Today, We paid $200 billion to the telecom companies to deliver bidirectional 45mbit internet and 500 channels to our houses. They told us to fuck off, capped our data rates, charged us more, and sold our asses out to the NSA. FML."
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's just insane. It makes it 10 times more expensive than to send a burnt DVD ($.5?) through the mail (~$1 I guess?).
That pricing scheme is about as out of touch as Dr Evil in that scene where he asks for a ridiculous $1 million ransom for not blowing up the planet.
You can get internet transit in a datacenter on the order of $6 per Mbps per month wholesale; peering is way below that.
That mean that for $6 you can transfer ~320GB a month; Warner is going to charge 50 times that.
Sure, it's not the same thing entirely obviously, but the main difference is that you have to build a line to the customer, and you're paying for that already whether you use it very little or a lot.
The only remaining difference therefore is the connection between local concentrators and the backbone; nothing special and particularly expensive about it.
Therefore this is a total rip-off, and most likely monopoly abuse.
Check out I've been dealing for way longer in Alaska: http://www.gci.com/forhome/promos/xtreme/ultimate_xtreme_tier_2.htm
And at its cheapest: http://www.gci.com/forhome/promos/xtreme/xtreme_asd7.htm
Those are the Anchorage rates.
Now for where I live in Southeast Alaska, and this service just got launched in December. We were formerly paying roughly the same rates for stupidly slow DSL. A 1mb line was about 125 bucks. Can we poor ole Alaskans have some nationwide nerd outrage too please? Alaska has been needing to import an angry torch and pitchforks mob for a while.
I'm one of the fortunate few to be in Rochester, NY and fall under the tyranny of Time Warner Cable. I've talked to their customer service reps. I've read their statements. And yesterday I had the opportunity to hear some of their low-level execs try and defend the plan at a town hall meeting with our congressional representative (who's on our side BTW).
They simply don't acknowledge that access (bandwidth) is not at issue here, limiting the use of that bandwidth in terms of some arbitrary amount of data is the issue.
If you look at their 2008 SEC filings (linked by their corporate site timewarnercable.com then you'd see their costs went down about 12% from 2007 and their revenues and new customers both rose about 10% over 2007. Clearly usage is not really an issue.
The issue they're not admitting to (except in their SEC filing) is Internet video like Hulu and Netflix is their primary threat and the way to mediate this threat is to make it more expensive to watch videos on the Internet than to pay Time Warner for cable and Video on Demand services.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
That title is so bullshit. The spin is so much, I feel sick already.
The title should have been saying something like "Time Warner to limit internet usage, charging 150$ for full use." Or something similar.
The current title has marketing spin of a positive connotation... and this is a very poor, and bad thing.
Take action at Stopthecap.com.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
No bandwidth is ever unlimited. What the $150 plan gives you is the right to operate your connection on a 100% duty cycle. I think charging for actual usage is fair. I wish they would offer plans where the cost is fixed and overages are dealt with by throttling. This would allow folks on a budget to manage their usage more easily.
Seriously. "Brown outs"... who the hell are they kidding?
The intertoobs may get clogged!!
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
TWO CHAPS ONE CUP
(both worksafe and brainsafe, oddly enough)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Doesn't seem to be an easy way to get biz connection. I've submitted forms a few times to them, which is (was?) the only way you can seem to contact them about getting a biz-class connection. They don't seem to want my business that much, but then, they don't really care. In my neighborhood, they're the only player for broadband. I live 4 miles from an Embarq regional headquarters building, and Embarq sees fit to send me glossy mailers to get me to sign up for DSL, *but they don't provide DSL service to my area*. They just provide annoying glossy mailer service. :/
creation science book
Does that mean I can get the 5gb a month plan and my bill will be $105? Somehow I doubt it.
Would be nice since they're raping their customers if they'd just go ahead and make the upload unlimited.
I'll pay metered *if* its burstable both ways. I won't pay metered for an upload speed of 1mb/s.
Shadus
Anyone know if / how this affects Time Warner business Class? Could that be a way around these restrictions? (Then again, what is the price of TWCBC?)
$75 would only get you about 60GB here.
As long as they don't count uploads towards your limit, it seems like a good deal.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
They originally sold us unlimited Internet access.
Now we've surpassed capacity. The answer isn't to limit our usage.
It's to increase capacity. The ISPs are all too fucking cheap to do it.
The Internet will suffer large losses in traffic due to shit like this. They will turn it into a ghost town.
Traffic will ebb and advertisers will pull out and services will increase in cost and decrease in value and quality of content will drop and the Internet economy will flounder.
All because the gate keepers are narrowing the gate while the lines are growing.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I wonder how many corporations will be offering content, for free, on the web, as a means to increase the bandwidth usage of a subsidiary ISP property.
To take that further, I wonder how many will be CHARGING for content with one subsidiary, then double-dipping by charging for the required bandwidth to access aforementioned content, with another subsidiary.
Smells like cable TV, to me. At first Cable was supposed to supplant the ad-supported content model, only to reacquire and incorporate it into a pre-paid service. Double-dipping at it's finest.
I wonder if Time Warner is actually providing a means for people to track their own bandwidth usage in near real-time, in order to avoid the "overage" penalty, or does TW hoard that information and make people cower in fear?
I'm betting it's the latter, since that promises to make them far more money, either through penalties that people couldn't see coming or from people buying unnecessary bandwidth upgrades out of fear of said penalties.
... Finding more ways to get you to pay MORE money for the same (or worse!) services since the beginning.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Yep, I've heard that before..
Here in Austria I currently pay 20EUR for 8Mbit flat. And I mean flat. Several hundreds of Gigabytes of traffic are no problem. Some of may friends even get in the Terybayte range. And Austria isn't even one of the cheap-broadband countries. Go to Sweden or Germany and you are likely to find even better offers.
Um... if I know I'm going to be using more than 80gb/month then why would I pay for the 75gb/month plan? It's cheaper to get the 5gb plan for $30, pay the $75 extra, and save yourself $45. It's also cheaper if (by some miracle) I use less than 80gb.
Please tell me I missed something.
ISPs need to pay for backbone bandwidth of the amount their customers consume. This is something that most consumers do not understand. In fact your consumer facing ISP or division of an ISP is just a company/division that engineers, maintains and links your home to and maintains a link to a backbone network like Level3, AT&T, Verizon Business, NTT, etc. But what I donâ(TM)t agree with Brett is that itâ(TM)s VERY Cheap especially in an urban area and a mega corporation like Time Warner can definitely afford the 10Gb level interconnects to get costs as low as 2-10cents/GB on backbone providers like Level3 in bulk. It makes it even cheaper for companies like AT&T & Verizon since they own their own backbone networks (they just hand it off to another division of the company and can get great rates due to their Tier 1 power, settlement free peering). Sure thereâ(TM)s a competition aspect per the cable companies but in the end itâ(TM)s all about cost and profit. Right now the in the US itâ(TM)s one of the most competitive markets in the world for IP transit due to the fact that we have multiple backbone providers HQâ(TM)ed in this country and competition. Now what I agree is that it needs to extend to the consumer and access networks. If companies are going to do caps, they better price is in realm of what their actual costs + profit are. Time Warner charging $1/GB is CLEARLY price gouging, in fact I see margins of that estimated at 50-80% including the access network costs. Yes the usage distribution of end users is uneven clearly and light users are subsidizing the heavy users but Time Warner is still making profits so I donâ(TM)t see why they need to start this now. Also another problem with access networks/consumer level bandwidth is that itâ(TM)s shared bandwidth and thereâ(TM)s only a limited amount of capacity on a DOCSIS 1.1 cable network before thereâ(TM)s congestion. If utilization gets high enough there needs to be node splitting (expensive, time consuming), increased bandwidth per node (DOCSIS 3.0) or shaping so everyone gets an equal amount. Itâ(TM)s only fair that way. Personally I really like Comcastâ(TM)s idea of 250GB/month since it balances costs with the current dynamic of IP transit costs. PEOPLE YOUR CONSUMER INTERNET CONNECTION IS NOT A DATACENTER CONNECTION. If you really want to know what dedicated bandwidth costs go price a T-1, DS-3, OC-X, GigE or some other kind of dedicated connection. Of course itâ(TM)s for businesses and service level gurantees but what your really paying for is unlimited dedicated bandwidth. Now personally I wouldn't mind paying a few cents for a GB but $1/GB? Your kidding me.
when they roll this bs out in charlotte. att will have a new customer. if wesley willis were alive, he'd eloquently tell twc to "suck a male camel's dick".
If so, then how fast, how much, and any caps?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm in Austin, TX where we will be affected by this in October. Luckily AT&T just dropped fiber into my neighborhood -- bye byte TWC
Man it was stupid how they changed the names of those to ride the 2girls1cup bandwagon.
Both of those were horrific for what happened, which was amplified by the noises "Mr Hands" made and the strange lack of noise Mr Jar Shattered in Anus man made.
If a denial-of-service attack is launch on a customer, would they have to pay the max fee, even if they didn't request the data?
Ad-based web businesses might suffer the most, as more users will seek ad-blocking software to save money on bandwidth.
This is obviously a price gouging scheme they had in the works. You should write/call your representatives/local media/FCC...etc and let them know how you feel about this. Let them know that not only this, BUT the fact that cities preventing competition from entering is unacceptable and you want a change. If you don't, I hope everyone enjoys getting violated with the $150 price a month, you know other ISP's are going to follow them if they get away with it.
I have Fibre to my house (currently at 10Mbs up/down) and unlimited in the US, Canada, and Europe VoIP for $80/mth. I have had this since 2005. Get the monopoly telco's out of the way and it will be much better. Oh yeah, I live in Silicon Valley... where Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T data services suck.
It's not $150 for unlimited - it's $105. If you're going to be using that much bandwidth, don't buy the highest package - buy the lowest one. Since the overages are capped either way, you'd be better off buying the dirt cheap 5GB plan and paying $75 in overages than buying the $75 100GB plan and still paying $75 in overages.
Sure we have, it the web cam in the TWC board room. They repeat the show at every board meeting.
I suspect that Netflix is the driving force behind this tiered plan: Time Warner wants you to use their on demand service, not Netflix Instant.
Which is why we shouldn't allow one of the nation's largest media conglomerates to operate one of the nation's largest content delivery services.
"The problem is, residential broadband networks were never designed to handle the uses many people make of them nowadays"
People say this, but I don't understand it.
So Comcast, Time Warner, et al were building these high speed networks just 5-10 years ago, but they only expected people to use them in little tiny burst for a few megabytes a month? That really doesn't make any sense if you sit down and think about it. If they only meant you to use a little, there wouldn't have been any need to go much beyond 1 Mb/s, because if you went beyond that they'd flood the network.
If you want my take, the big growth period for ISP's are over, and these guys are faced with one of two alternatives to keep profits growing: (1) Lower costs (2) Raise revenue. They've chosen to do both, which may work in the short term. But the usage caps don't make sense from a technical standpoint, rather they make sense from a business standpoing because they begin to lower the average cost per subscriber, and it will likely raise revenue across the board.
But I don't believe there is any technical limitation on the networks driving this change.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Want another example of this hurting an average user? I work in the marketing department of a small local company, where I do a good portion of their graphic design work. I work at home between two and four days a week, depending on circumstance, and use my Time Warner Cable services to connect to our server at work where our files are stored. I easily hit a few GB a day between utilizing my work files and other stock photo and movie clips from the web. When you combine the VOIP I use to dial into the office, suddenly the hike in my cable bill becomes about ten times the cost of commuting (assuming the government standard ~50 cents a mile). So much for saving money by telecommuting!
Where I live TW is the only choice and they have me locked in for a contract and now they pull this crap, Their All-in one bill is over $140 together, The only reason they are doing this is because they are overselling their bandwidth capabilities and are too lazy to upgrade. However in Japan for about $39 USD a month you can have a 100mbit connection... I did some calculations and here is a spreadsheet of all their bandwidth limits. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pM-HBGrOKUusQ1a7nyMhwWA
Unlike Congress, which absolutely and completely does not care how many people call them and tell them to stop stealing from us, Time Warner is a business whose lifeblood comes to it through voluntary exchange. If enough of their customers call up and threaten to terminate their accounts if Time Warner changes the pricing model in their area, they will get the message.
"Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds." -- that's straight from the corporate memo.
what happens when someone who doesn't like you writes a program to send you 100g of data your firewall on your modem or router will drop these unrequested packets, but is that before or after time warner has charged you for them? Can someone online drive you to finical ruin, and would you even be able to contest these charges?
If the maximum fee for exceeding the cap is $75, then what prevents someone from ordering the cheapest plan ($29.95) and going over the limit as much as they want? If you really plan on downloading 500GB per month, it would be cheaper to order the cheapest plan and exceed the limit than to order the priciest plan, since the maximum fee is the same anyway.
Unless the slashdot post was just poorly worded, of course
They are also adding a $99 unlimited plan.
The cable companies are losing too much revenue to Netflix. Too many people are learning they can get more for less than $10.00 a month via Netflix then they can get from the cable company higher priced premium channels. The only way to stop the loss of revenue is to tax Netflix users by making them pay more for watching shows via Netflix rather than pay for the premium channels. Raising usage charges are nothing more than increasing the TAX for using their system.These type of usage taxes by cable providers are no different then monopolies of yesteryear and that is why laws were put on the books to protect citizens from monopolies. However, I am sure you will get a bunch of apologists saying we should all be happy and feel good about the great service the cable companyies are doing.
I live in Rochester, NY, and you know who's going to get hurt the most out of this? Not Time Warner -- it's Microsoft and Apple.
Xbox Gold is now too expensive. So long to that. I can't afford the bandwidth for downloading demos and games on Xbox Live, especially when it's going to cost $1/gb once I hit my first 75gb for the month. I might as well unplug my 360 from the router. That's a couple of hundred dollars a year that Microsoft lost from me.
Using iTunes is now too expensive. I similarly can't afford to buy albums and videos from Apple. That's about a hundred bucks a year that Apple lost from me.
Time Warner may lose me as a customer, but that means they're losing the $45/month I'm paying them now for high speed Internet.
Why isn't Microsoft and Apple bitching their heads off about this? Do they not get it?
Volpone
what does this solve other than give Time Warner more money? If the high users sign up for the high end and the low end people sign up for the cheap deal, people are still suffering from slow connections. this doesnt' address it. likewise, what if EVERYONE signs up for the $150 plan. people are using what they pay for, network is still slow, Timewarner does nothing to improve it, and just bask in the increased profits. what incentive does any ISP have to improve their network if they are making money off the tiers of service.
The reason is, this costs more than business class service. I've long been a proponent of those power users that need more than a residential connection offers going and getting a business line. I have done just that for years. You need more, you pay more. So how's that work out? Well I'll break it down:
Through Cox, which is who I use, 10/1 business class cable is about $140/month. A similar residential plan is 12/1 and is $47/month. So, what's the extra $100 get you?
--No transfer limits. You can use as much of your line as much as you like and you'll hear not a peep out of them. On the consumer side I don't think they have a hard cap but if you torrent all the time, they'll call and yell at you (had that happen to a friend).
--No port blocking. On the consumer connections, they block some ports like 25 and 80 since you aren't supposed to run servers. No ports are blocked on business lines.
--Along those lines, servers are allowed. You can do whatever you want on a business line. Residential lines are for residential access, not servers, but business lines have no such restrictions. I've been running a couple servers for years on my line.
--A real SLA. There are uptime and response guarantees, and if they don't meet those, they owe you money. It isn't the one sided service agreement on residential lines where they tell you what it is, this is a signed agreement that says what they agree to provide, and what you can and can't do.
--Static IPs. The connection comes with one, and they'll sell you more at $5/month.
--Better tech support. You have a 24/7 number to call that gets answered fast. They also don't give you the run around about having to plug the cable modem right in to your computer, they know you are running a network, and will escalate tickets much easier. If there is a problem, they get on it as that SLA means if they don't they owe you.
--Finally I don't know for sure, but I suspect that you are on a different, less congested frequency. The reason is friends who have their consumer plan say you only get full speed sometimes, often it is more loaded and you don't get your full 12mb. I never seem to get less than my rated 10mb, no matter what time of day. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I suspect business accounts are on a different frequency from consumer accounts and thus have less contention.
So the point of all this is that while a business account is a lot more money, you get a lot more for it. It isn't just a case of "We'll let you use it as much as you like." It is a much higher level of service all around, and thus commands a higher price.
As such it is totally unreasonable that for an even high price, Time Warner thinks that it is ok to say "Well we won't kick you off, probably, if you use lots of bandwidth for this price." Screw that. At the price they are talking, they need to be offering real business class service. Makes me wonder what the heel their business accounts cost :P.
I made another post saying it is, but you can't compare to through the mail sending of data. You often discover that not only is that cheaper, it can be faster too. Seriously, for large amounts of data, it can take less time to just Fedex a harddrive than to send it over the net. Where the break point is depends on how fast your connection is. At work (a research university) we have a group that has found for them it's around a terabyte. They do research involving huge images and videos and such, and at a TB or above, it's faster to just Fedex disks. I mean to transmit a TB of data in 24 hours (which is about the time Fedex can get a package somewhere) you have to sustain a rate not less than about 93mbits/sec. That's pretty substantial, even with a university connection. So, just mailing disks is often a better way to go.
Seems a little counter intuitive, but really is the case if latency isn't important.
If the summary is correct, then "unlimited" bandwidth can be had for $104.95. The lowest tier is $29.95, and the maximum overcharge for any tier is $75. When you get unlimited refills, always buy the smallest cup.
Any way you slice it, though, it is still a rip off.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
are not such a burden in countries with sufficient competition? ... or something.
It's fascinating how when there's only one broadband provider, somehow, people start downloading much more
Terabytes? Seriously, what exactly are they downloading?
I'm a Time Warner customer and - assuming "terabytes" means a minimum of at least two - I would have to download 24/7 at my connection's top actual speed (~830 KB/s) for an entire month in order to hit that number.
Looking at my download logs I only recently hit 1 TB after 2+ plus years of being a "heavy user" by Time Warner's reckoning. The whole thing's just a smoke screen to raise prices.
There is a plain and simple response to Time Warner. Anyone with a subscription to HBO and/or Cinemax should immediately cancel those premium channels. Anyone who subscribes to Time Warner cable can cancel all premium channels.
n/t
Considering that the parent company of Time Warner is the same as Warner Music and Warner Bros,...
Please consider again, as the Warner Music Group is now a totally separate entity, which was clearly spun off from the Time Warner group several years ago, and its stock has lost something like 1,500% of its valuation in the last two years. (from $30 a share to $1.50, although it's bounced back a bit since then, currently at $2.89)
Time Warner most likely still remained a minority shareholder in WMG, but IMHO they have other far more pressing matters to address at this time.
z.
Are there any worthy alternatives? Does any service truly compete with TimeWarner? I live in Austin, the AT&T service is a second tier competitor. TimeWarner is a monopoly in our area. They should be regulated as such.
I'm too busy beating something else, thanks to my internet connection.
Something tells me that soon this offer will be closed....
If you consider the rates for dedicated lines. 1 mbit (when purchased in the small quantity of 100mbit) cost (last I checked) $10/month. That was the absolute cheapest provider at the time (cogent). Average was along the lines of $30-$40/mbit (level3, and other companies I typically see major ISPs using). So figure if your cable connection is 10mbit and you are maxing that out a lot of the time $150 is NOT that unreasonable. Billing at 95% (which could be done for residential use) is typically around the same price.
There was a time (about 8 years ago) when I was stuck.. about 300 yards from being able to get DSL through the phone Co.. The cable company was offering it, and I asked, and it was coming to my neighborhood "soon",, and sad thing (infuriating actually) was that the telemarketers for both would call, and call to try and sign me up for something I wanted to do but couldn't.. I moved (unrelated) shortly thereafter, and had a choice between the phone co and cable.. fast forward to my move 4 tears ago, and I have 3 choices.. dsl, satellite, and cable.. It's never been a competition for me, given the choice I would go any day with the phone co, over the cable providers... I mean the phone companies are not exactly the most decent of companies, but lets face it.. the cable companies are waaaaay over priced, and have been since what.. the 70's ? .. so I have always gone the dsl route even with the talk of cable being faster (if no one else was using it supposedly)
If you have a choice, I don't know why anyone would give another dime to those cable people.. I dropped cable TV long ago, and think people are idiots to pay even $60 a month cable bills, let alone those (you know who you are) that pay 2 or more times that a month.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
I'm young and live in an apartment with some friends. I'm thankful for only ONE thing today - that I am the only technically inclined one in the bunch. Not only would we hafta fight over the proper way to split a bill, but we'd hafta mediate who used most of the bandwidth. Eventually, this would lead to our having to split it directly in 2 or 3 or 4 ways and finding a system to keep track of these things.
How much bandwidth does an average gamer use? Would someone that plays alot be affected by this?
Time Warner Cable should take a note from the recent info coming out that Blockbuster is likely to fail as a company very soon:
If your primary business strategy is to squeeze money from your customers at any cost which results in alienating your core customers, you are generating substantial ill-will that will not go away.
It's all fine and good as long as you have that nice monopoly, but as soon as there is an alternative, watch as customers leave in droves and don't give you a chance as you try to re-orient your business strategies.
While this may be a good financial change in the relatively short term (a few years?), long term, there's going to be hell to pay, i'd expect.
Earlier this year, TW and Viacom had a falling out. The commercials blaming each other.
Recall the letter from TW, stating that, if the Viacom channels were not renewed, don't worry, you can always view them online?
TW makes sure to do what they can to make as many people as possible aware that, Hey! We can watch shows online!
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
We here in Austin have been paying close attention to the upcoming 'trial'.
One must wonder what they're smoking in the board room at TW, as their proposed per-gig prices are radically higher than all other nationwide competitors, and sure to drive business away from them if they're ever really put in place.
This link:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/the-price-gouging-premiums-of-time-warner-cables-data-caps.ars#
gives a breakdown of pricing between some of the bigger providers. If you go with their lowest package (an insanely paltry 1 gig a month - why not just go back to dialup?) TW is nearly 90 times more expensive than their next major competitor (Comcast), and over 150 times higher than their lowest (ATT). Go de-regulation!
Now, the numbers above assume a hard cap of 400 gigs for the competitors, as they have theoretically "unlimited" plans. However, even going to TW's 10 gig package, which is more in line dollar-wise to the competition, you'd still be looking at roughly 25 to 45 times the price of the same competitors' offering. Even at their maximum (which works out to $175/mo, not $150, and assumes the largest package with the most overage fees), you're still four to eight times higher, but that's coupled with the fact that your monthly bill has quadrupled from what you'd have with a different provider.
According to the new pricing scheme, I'll be allowed about 2 gigs LESS for the same price than what I already consume on average, and have been faithfully paying for over 11 years now. No gaming, no file sharing, no music or movie downloads here, but what with 2 VoIP lines, remote backups, email, etc., our house still goes through about 10 - 12 gigs a month. In today's ever-evolving data-heavy world, that's not excessive.
Oh, they'd get my voice business too, if only I could have the land line also ring the cell whenever anyone calls. It's so convenient only having to give out one number. All three of the VoIP providers I've used in the past five years offered this feature ("simultaneous ring", or "find me/follow me"), not sure why they don't. I've asked.
Though I swore off ATT years ago, it'll be U-Verse for me should these idiotically sized packages ever actually get put into practice. It'll have to be, as neither Verizon or Comcast has any physical presence in Austin, and Grande is concentrating on business. So once again, go deregulation! Competition, what's that?
Speaking of business, if you use RoadRunner at your shop you pay 2.5 times more than what you would for a residential account. If these caps really come into place, you can just about forget any such thing as complimentary WIFI at your local restaurant, bar or other establishment.
And this is how we're increasing our broadband presence in America? Shame on you, TW. How unpatriotic can you be?
What, you think bandwidth is just used to pirate content? You don't realize that there are companies that have plans to deliver media electronically?
Tons of companies will be affected by plans such as this. Netflix, OnLive, Valve/Steam, Microsoft, YouTube, Sony, etc etc... not to mention now on iTunes you not only pay for the song, but you pay extra to download it.
The TCO for music, games, and video may push people back to physical media when all things are considered. If ISPs hike up their rates, they may raise the bar too high for online delivery, and brick and mortar retailers will become much more viable in these areas once again.
Twinstiq, game news
Geez... what a world we live in. Before, the customer was always right. Now, we're just a bunch of stupid nothings who get raped up the arse by large corporations. However, this is corporate USA we're talking about. I'm a canuck and our rates are a little more reasonable (unless you deal with Bell...). I have a 30mbit connection from my local cable provider that costs $64.95/mth with a 70gb cap, but I also pay an extra $20/mth ($84.95+taxes/mth now) for unlimited data. The funny thing is that it's not advertised, I got lucky and knew a guy who worked for the company as an installer and he told me about it. It's little on the steep side, but I'll gladly pony up an extra $30 for triple what I was getting from my DSL provider (Bell @ $54.95/mth for 7mbps) with no limits and no throttling (Bell loses here once again as they throttle connections).
Whelp one thing I know about Time Warner is that they are completely undermining the customer with setting up bandwidth caps. One thing I learned after being a Systems Administrator for a few years working in the One Wilshire building in downtown, Los Angeles is that a company like Time Warner has so many peering agreements setup via datacenter specific buildings such as One Wilshire that they save a massive amount of money. One Wilshire has a service called the Any2 Exchange where you can peer directly with any provider in the building to save money on bandwidth charges. Direct peering with providers keeps your transit costs down since most of the data transfer will feed through the exchange itself providing for almost a zero hop relationship, keeping you from paying another bandwidth provider to connect you to the route you would like to take. You can view Time Warner Cable's peering information here: http://www.crgwest.com/Any2Exchange/participantdirectory.aspx I guess they like pulling fast ones on consumers.
"Ideally, prices should boil down to a reasonable margin over actual costs. "
Not true. Prices should reflect what the market is willing to pay. That is ideal.
The cost of producing an item is not related to it's selling price. If the selling price is below the cost of production, nobody will produce it, of course. eBay is a pretty good indication of almost perfect competition (shill bidding aside). What you're proposing should be the end result of pricing, provided there is perfect competition, but in the absence of that, then pricing bears no relationship to cost.
I'd go further and say that I'm willing to pay what it costs and then some. But as I look on Time-Warner and Comcast's balance sheet (yes, available online), the margins on internet and TV are very high precisely because there is no competition. So I'm not willing to suffer higher costs and caps simply to make the balance sheet look better for these guys.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I find that what is important is the amount of download, and not necessarily t1 speeds for residential service. I have a plan for a dsl line connection, which gives me unlimited downloads (around 650k-700k bytes per second) at $30.00 Canadian. I presume you can get the same thing from www.acanac.net The American dollar is worth about $1.25 Canadian, so that my $30/mo is actually about $25 US. Give it a checkout
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"Get it in writing."
Doesn't help much when the last line of the writing is always something in the vein of "AT&VeriziCast-Warner reserves the right to change this agreement without written advance notice." They're the local phone monopoly, they have the right to offer crap service, and you have the right to pay $40 a month for it, or get dial-up and pay them $20/month for a land line and an ISP $20/month for internet access.
0 1 - just my two bits
..., as long as the cap includes any media they want to push on you. Make it too expensive to watch THEIR movies on the web, which they are dying to have you do, and they'll have to rethink their pricing.
Thank god I'm not an ISP any more. 150 bucks for unlimited 8mb down services is cheap. Let's see... If they are buying it at $10 per megabit, that is less than a 100% mark up not counting the infrastructure it rides on to get it to the NOC. That's not counting what it cost to build the network to you or what it costs to keep it running. If your a BW hog stop making others pay for your downloads. Don't want to pay higher... don't download every thing on the planet. It was always a funny balance with broadband... the only users/abusers that wanted faster connections were the ones normally downloading illegal music, movies, and porn. Now the media/content owners want to protect their content and make you pay per bit. Their going to get paid one way or the other. Why do you think they became/bought ISPs or are in bed with them? Uhhh DUH...
Ohh and if someone could do it cheaper.... they would. END OF STORY.