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."

Comments

Oblig

[guga31bb]

-Comment about lack of competition
-Comment about poor quality of US bandwidth relative to other countries

What did I miss?

Re:Oblig

[interkin3tic]

Obligatory observation that having the perspective that someone happens to have it worse still doesn't change the fact that these guys suck.

Re:Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

Oblig comment about how those $150 dollar/month heavy users will likely still be throttled anyway, regardless of any promises or assurances the company is going to make to the contrary.

Anyone?

[Renraku]

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.

Re:Anyone?

[dave562]

So you mean to tell me that things change? Holy I-Ching Batman! The providers are becoming more transparent and letting you know what you will get depending on what you pay. Up until a year or two ago, an "unlimited" connection really was unlimited. For most subscribers, it still is unlimited. Only the people out there on the cutting edge are bumping up against the caps. There is finally enough content available that people are able to tax their connections nearly full time. Being asked to pay $150 a month for truly unlimited internet access isn't that bad of a deal.

I'm only thirty, but I'm already having an old man moment here. I don't think a lot the people posting on Slashdot realize how far technology has come. I remember connecting to the internet at 14400. I remember connecting to BBSes at 2400 baud and being able to type faster than the connection could echo back the characters. Busy signals were a constant problem. Swapping 1.44MB worth of data took over an hour (at 2400 baud). If you dialed outside of your LATA, you had to pay toll charges. Compared to back then (get off my lawn!), we're in a totally different world. The amount of content that is available nearly instantenously is mind boggling. Until I discovered ways around things, I was spending hundreds of dollars a month in phone charges to get the same kind of software that I can get from the Pirate Bay... and that was in the mid-1990s.

The term "entitlement generation" has reached my ears from time to time, and discussions like this one serve to highlight the truth of the matter. Where the hell do you people think all of this capability comes from? Do you think that the cable company just plugs in a router, and all of a sudden "the Internet" just works? I wonder how many network engineers Time Warner employees. I wonder how much those guys make a year. How about field techs? Customer service operators? Sales reps? How much do they have to pay in property taxes and electricity to keep their CO's running?

Here's a dose of reality for everyone. If you don't like the prices, don't pay them. If you can do without, do without. If you can't, suck it up and deal with it. You don't need a 10mb+ pipe to get on the Internet. Spend $25 a month and get a DSL line and you won't have to worry about bandwidth caps. I was on a 3mb DSL line up until this year, and it worked just fine. It cost me $45 a month. I make far more than that in a couple of hours at work. Lets say you make $20 an hour, and given that this is Slashdot, I'd be surprised if anyone made any less than that. For one day's worth of work, you get unlimited, high speed internet access for a month. Now check your reality. Is one day worth of your labor worth an unfair trade for the labor of all of the people who have to labor for you to have an always on, available, high speed internet connection? Or is your labor so much more valuable to society that the one day of your labor is worth so much more than the labor of all the other people who give you 30+/-1 days a month worth of internet access?

Re:WOW

[cabjf]

"We'll give you the same access you have now, just for three times the cost."

Well, I guess they finally figured out how to make pirates pay. And the artist still gets no money.

Netflix

[Stonent1]

They just don't want you streaming Netflix over your cable. They want you to sign up for their on-demand service.

And THIS time

[Sir_Real]

Unlimited, and this time, we mean it. Trust us.

Sham

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not terribly surprising

[berzerk8]

So you think that the average user (IE the person that just checks email and sends photos to their grandchildren) should be the standard to which we are all charged 29.95 for a 5gb plan? I can download 5gb in a couple of hours without there being any "dubious legality". Those of us that are more technically inclined should not be punished because of the "average user", who are in all likelihood the people on the phone with Dell when their wireless mouse runs out of batteries...

You missed...

[Khyber]

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."

$1 per GB -- 4x the cost of DVD+stamp

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.