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."

Comments

Re:America against Bandwidth Caps

[nacturation]

So let's say you go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. The restaurant advertises you can eat as much as you want for stays of up to 2 hours, as long as you don't waste food, and that they will clear used plates from you table within 2 minutes. The cost the restaurant charges for this is $19.95.

Assuming you can eat one plate of food in 5 minutes, and that it takes you 3 minutes to get a new plate of food, then you can consume one plate of food every 8 minutes. The 3 minute refill time is also enough for their 2 minute plate clearing to come into effect. Thus, over the course of 2 hours or 120 minutes, you could consume 15 plates of food.

For a $19.95 price, this works out to be $1.33 per plate. If you go into the restaurant and only consume 3 plates of food, do you expect your bill to decrease to $4.00?

The big problem with caps

[RobertLTux]

lets see (pulling the numbers from /dev/null and /dev/urandom)
in a 1 gig block of data you have
200 megs of overhead
200 megs of retransmits due to the ISP [redacted]ing with the data stream
300 megs of ads and DRM [redacted]
100 megs of wasted data due to fancifed download links and redirect pages
200 megs of actual useable data

so if they want to do caps then they should be hands off of the data stream (no protocol blocking or shaping
unless they have an actual with pen signed QOS agreement AND THIS AGREEEMENT STANDS UNLESS RESIGNED)