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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."
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=-
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.
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...
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.
Oblig comment about likely all unlimited users' information will make it into the hands of the MPAA/RIAA, who will conclude that the only way a user could use that much bandwidth is if they were pirating copyrighted content.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Albany, NY was one of RoadRunner's test cities, and they ran it out of Troy, NY, just down the street from RPI. If you want to find a group of people who are going to abuse a system, RPI students are right up there. Regardless of what residential broadband networks are designed for, I know what they were actually used for in 1997 during RR's ramp up. The problems RR faces now are problems they had at the beginning -- a buddy of mine paid his tuition using ad revenue from hosting a porn site on his residential cable modem. They say P2P is bad because it's hundreds of incoming connections and a whole pile of outgoing bandwidth -- exactly what this buddy of mine was doing for his $40/month residential connection. Roadrunner handled Napster well, and it handled the next P2P replacements well.
Roadrunner used to control their bandwidth by mirroring major destinations (TuCows, back when it was interesting, for example) and peering with bigger ones with dynamic content. Time was, their binaries usenet collection was the best around.
Roadrunner and the mega corps want to decrease their costs -- everybody wins when they get special peering with major destinations. Private pipes to YouTube, Hulu and the like will take care of their video streaming costs much better than the typical general purpose backbones. Major outfits like YouTube who have hundreds of easily deployable servers could certainly come up with a handful of mirrors for the most in-demand content and put it on RoadRunner's own network. BitTorrent's P4P and Ono, with the cooperation of the ISP, can drastically reduce the load on the ISP -- but RoadRunner is seemingly absent.
10 years ago, RoadRunner was on the forefront of doing everything right and treating the customer the right way (I disagreed with them on disabling accounts of those of us who had personal mail servers, but I now see it was prophetic). Today, they have lost sight of their ability to find win-win situations with new partners.
To these people, users of Hulu and Netflix aren't seen as so different from pirates. They believe that none of them are paying enough. And their outrage at having to actually reevaluate their business models is going to show itself in an orgy of price-gouging until they are prosecuted as monopolies and broken into a thousand little pieces.
If you really want to be made sick, go look at a corporate chart of Time-Warner and see just how much of our society they have seized while our government, in a sickening display of anti-regulatory corporate dick-sucking, has just let them do it.
It's a small thing, but one must never pay for any product from Time Warner, as long as there is an alternative. And if there is not, simply do without. It is surprisingly easy.
You are welcome on my lawn.