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Time Warner Transfer Caps May Inspire Fair-Price Legislation
Time Warner's recently announced plan to expand their broadband transfer caps to new markets drew heavy criticism, which prompted their attempt to smooth things over with a ridiculously expensive "unlimited" plan. That wasn't enough for New York Representative Eric Massa, who now says he will draft legislation to "curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a monopoly on service." Massa said, "Time Warner believes they can do this in Rochester, NY; Greensboro, NC; and Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and it's almost certainly just a matter of time before they attempt to overcharge all of their customers," adding, "I believe safeguards must be put in place when a business has a monopoly on a specific region."
Right on! The government needs to FORCE both the cable and telco companies to separate the data, television and telephone components. They should be regulated as separate companies and therefore separate monopolies. Grrrrr...
What I have in Western Washington (near Seattle) is Comcast and Verizon. They both charge basically the same price for all services. If there were TRUE competition, i.e., many different companies, there's NO WAY they'd be able to charge such high prices without losing customers. But, since there are only 2 companies, they basically have all the benefits of collusion, without any actual collusion. I mean, if one of them decided to charge some arbitrary fee, the other one would follow. Double-Grrrrr....
From Time Warners' financial filings:
"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"
Stop shilling for corporations. Clearly the unlimited broadband model has been extremely profitable.
Wake up and smell the non-corporate content suppression.
Is it just me or do I find the complaint against Bandwidth Caps ridiculous?
I only seem to see people complaining about it in America, most of Europe (afaik) has gotten used to having bandwidth caps.
Are you out of your mind? The reason why you see people complaining about it in America and not in Europe is because a lot of European countries do not have any kind of download caps whatsoever so we don't have to complain about it.
I work at a relatively small ISP, and our Internet circuits cost us $50-75/meg (plus we have multiple paths for redundancy), and that doesn't include our infrastructure (routers/switches, UPS/generator, A/C, people, etc.). If you want a guaranteed 6 meg pipe, you shouldn't expect to get it for $99.
You—like many other people—are confusing "speed of pipe" and "number of bytes transferred".
We know your ISP doesn't pay $50 per megabyte transferred, because you'd have to charge customers thousands of dollars a month for the equivalent of dial-up access. You might pay $50 for each megabit/second of pipe you want to the Internet, but if you do, you are getting severely overcharged.
If you sell me a 6Mbps connection, then, yes, I (and everyone else) expect to be able to use all 6Mbps twenty-four hours a day. Most users probably won't use it 24/7, but they all expect that whenever they get on the Internet, then that's the speed they'll get.
Your costs don't change if people do use their connection to download 24/7, because all peering agreements are based on transit out of a network. So, you don't want people uploading a lot, but downloading is essentially "free", since there are no costs beyond the price of the pipe, and that is charged based on the max speed, not the number of bytes transferred.
Last, there are ISPs that realize everything I have said is true, and manage to provide the full speed that was contracted for every hour of every day, with no limit on the total bytes transferred, all at a reasonable cost. And, those ISPs aren't losing money.
Capacity is only unlimited if income is unlimited. Even in a monopoly people will only pay so much, so there's a limited income to expand the network - which puts hard physical limits on capacity, and to make any money at all the network has to be contended.
Thing is is here in the USA cablecos and telcos received almost $200 billion to buildout broadband but they did not. All they did was use the money to pad their bottom lines. They also battle attempts by others build out broadband. Some articles and posts on /. have been about this, whither it's telecos trying to block muni wifi or cablecos trying to block cities from installing cable. One example is A Broadband Utopia. Commercial broadband businesses tried to stop it but were unsuccessful. They were successful though having the Utah state government enact a law that requires it to be open, which was planned from the beginning. Because of the network Comcast was forced to offer a $90 bundle.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?