Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner Broadband Cap Trial Rescheduled In Texas
jcrousedotcom writes "Time Warner cable apparently has heard that folks aren't too happy with their plan to meter their unlimited connections. From the first paragraph of the article: 'Time Warner Cable's proposed trials of consumption-based billing were originally slated to begin in several markets this summer, where customers would be a part of a tiered pricing scheme. Pricing would have started at 1 GB per month for $15, and go up to 100 GB per month for $75, and include a per-gigabyte overage fee. The public's reaction was less than favorable, and the trials in Texas have been rescheduled.'"
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network and was not prepared for the advent of HD video and streaming services. The hard fact is that they cannot (and never could) deliver "unlimited" bandwidth. So either they:
a) Raise their prices considerably on all their "unlimited" plans--sucks for the light users, who are basically subsidizing the heavy users who want to stream HD video and movies
b) Covertly start throttling back heavy users--sucks for everyone, since no one even knows how much they're being throttled and there is no option of paying a premium to escape it
c) Set download caps--sucks compared to the "free ride" heavy users are getting now, but at least it's out in the open with no throttling bullshit (and light users don't get penalized).
Personally, I'll gladly take c. But there is for sure one option that is *NOT* on the table:
d) Everything stays priced the same as now, without throttling or download caps
So pick a, b, or c. And stop kidding yourself that you can pick d.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yeah, I could see how they'd get pissed.
I could see Time Warner trying to set this up with NEW customers, but, with existing ones...how can they change it in the middle of the game? I know they say in the TOS they can change some things, but, can they legally change the basic service agreement on what a person contracted with them to provide?!?!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
TW Exec 1 - "What was that?"
TW Exec 2 - "That was the sound of a million subscribers switching to DSL and our stockholders crying in pain."
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
Why is Time Warner all of a sudden "listening" to the complaints of its customers?
Does anyone else think that there has to be a catch?
The only people who logically wouldn't support a tiered system like this, are those who use far more bandwidth than the "average" person--and who therefore, are currently NOT paying for it. As a comparatively low bandwidth person myself, I prefer a tiered solution, where I just pay for what I use.
Now if only we could buy our cable channels the same way, where you only pay for what you want and not for the bazillion shopping channels too . . .
TW Scam Artist: So this is how it works. See this graph here? Stats are showing that 80% of your users lie in monthly usage between 1GB and 100GBs of usage and they're paying about $45 as it is. So we reward the ten percent below 1GB with 1/3 their normal cost and we hit the 80% in bell curve here with 66% increase in price.
TW CEO: And the 10% above 100GB per month?
TW Scam Artist: Fuck 'em. We don't even want their business and what they're doing is probably illegal as it is. We hit them with one crippling monthly payment and they leave. There will be splash back but nothing our mitigation team can't handle.
TW CEO: I see. How on earth are we going to market a 66% increase to 80% of our users?
TW Scam Artist: We aren't. We're going to cherry pick stats. That's 1,000 songs downloaded from iTunes. Do you download 1,000 songs a month? No. That's 1,000,000 webpages and we point out that that isn't humanly possible to do in a month. We gotta be careful and skirt some of the obvious stuff like if you stream netflix, youtube, vimeo or any video site just a few hours and you're already in the $75 range. Avoid that. And avoid questions on people who download DVDs or even large updates to popular software like Warcraft and Windows.
TW CEO: So we just unleash this on them?
TW Scam Artist: No, we do a trial run and expect bad feedback. Then we say "oh gosh, some people didn't like it, so we're doubling the lower limit to 2GB!" and that loses us like 1% of the bell curve but we don't care. The people feel like they're vindicated blah blah blah they don't even realize or sign anything when this goes into effect. After that bullshit trial run, we are free to unleash it because it looks like we've done our homework and compromised our profits in the interest of the consumer.
TW CEO: Why are we doing this, are we having network and hardware problems?
TW Scam Artist: No, are you stupid? That shit gets better daily. Oh, did I hurt your feelings? I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was employed by a bunch of dumbass hippies waiting to roll over whenever an opportunity of epic proportions gets dropped in their lap.
TW CEO: My apologies, here's your sack of money.
My work here is dung.
The biggest problem here, as far as I can tell, is dealing with privacy laws or fear of reprisal in dealing with privacy issues.
No ISP worries just about the overall network, they worry about the last mile connections just as much. Since neighborhoods share a certain-sized pipe to the backbone, that pipe's overall usage is their major cause for concern. I know everyone here thinks this has to do with profitability, but when you run a business and see a limited-supply item skyrocket in usage (i.e., everyone is using YouTube or Hulu or whatever), you have to take steps AHEAD of schedule to price in expansion of that limited-supply item.
What the ISPs need to do is offer ALL users upgrades immediately to routers that will display their current monthly usage in a simple LED/LCD screen. This would not be hard to do, but it would be costly. By doing so, users would get comfortable with what they're using in terms of data transfer to/from their ISP. Get people involved NOW.
If things keep moving upwards in terms of data transfer needs, then you can let people know that there either has to be caps or there has to be price increases. Anyone who thinks "unlimited" means unlimited bandwidth is a retard. Unlimited means you don't have to disconnect your modem when you're done: you can stay connected for an unlimited amount of time.
I have _THREE_ mobile broadband cards to deal with the 5GB caps and to deal with areas with network shortfalls: AT&T, Sprint, TMobile. The 3G service is great, and I use about 20GB a month between the three. I have 2 running at all times through my Cradlepoint router, and when one gets past 5GB, I pull it for the rest of the time period and stick in the third. It's great for me. Yes, it costs me $200, but for business purposes its a write-off and I need my access everywhere. Even my TMobile G1 untethered exceeds 5GB per month -- from a handheld phone.
My home DSL is uncapped, but I don't have a problem paying more if I am in the top tier of users (I'm not). The problem is figuring out how much I am using.
I'd rather see a hardhack than a software interface to the router, especially for beginning users. Throttling after hitting a cap is the best move, I'd say, because they still have web/email access, and they'll have to learn to cut back on video or music next month (or buy the larger cap).
I didn't even know they'd been charged. Was it crimes against the state or something?
Hang 'em, I say!
I think the idea is sound, but the prices are way too high.
We currently pay about $50/month for cable modem (for four residents). If Time Warner cut their prices by two thirds—or even by half, as we don't come close to using 100GB/month—they'd essentially match Comcast, but I'd get a discount any month I don't hit the max. I'd switch over in a heartbeat.
Not that I expect them ever to do that.
So start getting used to the idea of being charged for how much you use...
It's not bandwidth they need to cap, it's download speeds.
Seriously, just because someone downloads 3TB's of porn doesn't mean the internet is going to run out of fuel. The kicker is how FAST they are downloading.
If everyone in the world started downloading at 4MB/sec then we would have problems. It's not how much they download.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
As a Rochester Time Warner customer myself and my friends who are also customers are pretty upset about all of this. The big problem is that as far as broadband goes choices are slim. Either Time Warner, or Earthlink, who buys its bandwidth from Time Warner. Beyond that its either Clearwire, Frontier DSL, both of which suck, or shell out a ton for a commercial grade installation in your house/apartment, which probably isn't actually an option. I've already said that if someone like Verizon were to introduce FiOS to the area at the same time Time Warner did this, they'd probably have a lot of people jump ship...
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
It's clear that squeaking is doing some good. So lets squeak louder and harder. Personally, I don't use TWC (thank god), but if I don't say something now, it will be a matter of time before this is an "Accepted" practice.
I pretty much agree with you, except for the part where you blame the problem on the recent growth of streaming media. This problem has been around since commercial ISPs started appearing. Streaming media has just made the issue impossible to avoid.
Somehow geeks can't get it through their heads that providing bandwidth costs money. Back around 1992, I started to watch a talk on CSPAN about the potential of this new thing called the Internet. I tuned out when the geeks in the audience started flaming the speaker for suggesting that you should ever have to pay anything beyond a simple connection charge for unlimited bandwidth. About the same time, an online service I was subscribing to (Netcom) started morphing into an ISP — and promptly faced a rebellion from users who couldn't understand why Netcom wouldn't let them resell access.
How hard is this to understand? It's like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and expecting to get a week's worth of food for $5. It's very funny that so many techies are devout "pure" Libertarians, yet seem unable to grasp the most basic concept of that philosophy, "There is no free lunch."
e) reasonably priced tiers
Set your prices so your percent profit margin + per-customer profit for must customers is the same regardless of usage.
Say you want a gross profit of $1/customer/month + 50% of total revenues with the idea of plowing most of the profits back into future network improvements, aka "retained earnings." Say your low-bandwidth customers cost $11 each to service, and your high bandwidth customers cost $10/each plus $1 per 10 GB. Set your prices at $12 for low-bandwidth users, and charge your high bandwidth users $11 plus $2 per 10 GB. I pulled these numbers out of a hat, but the point is, if you use real numbers and reasonable gross profits and are open about it, people won't complain.
If you've got a customer who wants to pay for 2TB/month, that's a nice $411.
Oh, and of course you need to provide a way for customers to know and control their usage, a way to forgive customers who are tricked such as through a virus, and a way for customers to say "I don't ever want to pay more than X, if I approach X then throttle me to dialup speeds" so their children's friends don't bankrupt them.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Samuel Greenholtz, a retired manager from Verizon, offered this absolutely impenetrable thinking on why broadband providers needed to impose caps on customers and were forced to charge way too much for them:
While a tiered pricing structure may have been inevitable in the long run, if the corporate bashing horde stayed out of the way, the vast majority of users would have avoided paying more for additional capacity. Time Warner Cable does give the politicians what they are looking for â" more bandwidth availability for all of its subscribers. Still, the lowest speed package is not going to be enough for most of the consumers â" and so they will have to take the higher tier offerings â" along with the new overage charges. Had the MSOs been allowed to just cap excessive users, most of the subs would have continued to receive a reasonable amount of bandwidth at the same flat price.
Ironically, all of the illogic obsession with net neutrality will result in even more of a usage-based pricing scheme. There will now be several layers of capping. The anti-ISP crowd has actually created a more beneficial pricing system for these companies. And there is certainly nothing unfair about this development. But the clamoring for so-called equality resulted in an acceleration of the removal of the all-you-can-eat advantage for consumers.
Stopthecap.com is referenced in the article to which Slashdot linked. The citation above from Sam Greenholtz was so outlandish, so clearly showing pro-corporate stances, I had to call it out. I didn't think the corporate side was so violently opposed to net neutrality and unlimited bandwidth, but with gems like "illogical obsession" and "corporate bashing horde", I'm surprised that there's not any active raping and pillaging.
They haven't rescheduled anything. This is the exact same start date I got when I called them. This is just more fluff.
I called and emailed (to make sure I cost them the most money) to verify that my price lock guarantee wouldn't allow them to charge me an extra cent or restrict my access. Once I'm done with that I've notified them I'm leaving.
This is going to be really unpopular once people understand their marketing. My mom and dad don't have cable, but they do have Road Runner. They watch Netflix Watch Now movies (as they really like old movies and British TV shows, a place where Netflix excels). My Dad mentioned that he was hoping it would lower his bill. I pointed out that he was exactly the sort of user they were trying to get more money out of. He doesn't utilize their enormously profitable cable division and he's downloading movies from a competitor. He's going to be a direct target of this price gouging.
If my Dad (who's decently tech savvy) didn't spot this then the "unpopularity" they're seeing now is going to be nothing compared to what happens when they try to attempt to bill people for it.
In theory I'm fine with tiered pricing. However, its application by TWC is terribly unfair. Cable companies should offer a pay as you go plan similar to what cell phone companies offer for lite users. For example, $2 or even $3 per GB/month. Heavy users can opt for a monthly plan with a fixed download limit and a reduced $1 per GB/month over that limit.
As it stands now, as a current TWC customer, I would pay approximately the same amount each month with a 5 GB download limit. It's a terrible value proposition for the customer. No wonder so many people are protesting.
At the very least, offer a chance for some customers to actually reduce their monthly bills.
I live in the Greensboro market for Time Warner and there are many people who are upset here. It has been on TV and in the paper here for the last 2 weeks or so since they made the announcement. The mayor has already said she is planning on talking to AT&T and Verizon. Now whether she actually does or not...
I've worked for TWC in the past, and I have no love for the company. However, I can see the points people are making on both sides of the argument.
Average user says "Yay cheaper!"
Heavy user's/techies says "Noooooooo!"
Here is an interesting concept I am going to pass along that is overlooked by majority. Just an opinion. I have no idea whether or not any of this actually plays into TWC's plans.
Possible future of technology, computers, and software....Cloud Computing.
Not familiar with the term? Get familiar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Granted...this technology is still a ways off from affecting average internet users...but the possibility weights very heavily towards more and more cloud computing.
Its feasible in the future...that an average household PC would be not much more than a terminal workstation connected to some server farm someplace else. The server farm would be doing all your advanced computations, processes, storing information, even running video and streaming it back to you.
Sounds cool yeah? Yay technology. Oh...wait...now just imagine how that might affect an average user's throughput/bandwidth. Even your average user is now the equal to what they call "heavy users". You think streaming a few video's from youtube or netflix was bad...yuck.
TWC has been running this way for along time, low end users, high end users...and have never bothered to change it until now. Sure you can blame the crappy economy if you want...but I doubt it. They are looking towards the future.
This technology exists. This technology is evolving. Its possible this technology is the future. It would be silly to assume theres not at least one person at TWC who knows this.
One of my personal guesses is, they see this as a possibility and just want to get it into place early so people do not understand what they might be getting into. Internet usage has no place to go but UP. Low end users are never going to use less...only more. Higher users are only going to use more. Even your average user, which they consider low usage...they are getting more informed, doing more and more on the internet.
Even crappy social websites are attracting millions of users, streaming music and video on their sites. (myspace, facebook, etc.) internet usage has no place to go but UP.
One other point...one of the largest growth industries even in this bad economic times...Online gaming. Its never been bigger. Its estimate to keep growing. Everything from browser games to MMOs. They'll be eating up more and more usage as well as size and complexity grows.
All these are things TWC knows.
They aren't just trying to stick it to the heavy users...they are trying to stick it to everyone. Thats how TWC rolls...maximum profit. They are very good at misdirection. They don't give a crap about anyone.
For twelve seconds, you have been asking: Who is Anonymous Coward? This is Anonymous Coward speaking. I am the Slashdot Account who has no life. I am the account who does not sacrifice anything. I am the account who has deprived you of sensible postings and thus has destroyed your threads, and if you wish to know why you are perishing-you who dread blather-I am the account who will now tell you.
Really they are only (supposedly) oversubscribed during prime time.
If top tier users get some QOS that sounds reasonable. As a top tier user, I don't care that all my bandwidth is at 10meg all the time, I just want to be able to use the internet without worrying it's THIS episode of The Office or SUSe ISO or Ubuntu update that will push me over the edge.
They Could make QOS transparent, If you use more than X (say 100Gigs a month) You will be QOSed between the hours of 6 and 12PM. All your traffic will be "bulk" except for DNS and small HTTP query's.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
You know, option E, where the ISPs actually upgrade their network to handle what they're selling people which they were supposed to have done years ago. I mean, weren't they provided with tax breaks and such for that?
Which reminds me, if thats true where exactly was the government/civilian oversight on that when the ISPs basically took the money and ran?
The rape^H^H^H^Htesting hasn't been delayed at all. October is the date TWC has been saying it would start in Texas since they announced the whole thing. The San Antonio Express-News is just clueless, and sadly other media sites are picking up on their article and repeating the nonsense.
Jeremy http://alucinari.net
Tried to go visit the stopthecap.com site through my Comcast account and guess what? Connection interrupted during negotiation.
Okay, F-them, I'll read it out of the Google cached page. That completely stalled out also. How long has it been since you've seen the Google cache stall out for minutes? Sniff, sniff, something stinks here.
Where to I find a service that gives me the IP address for a DNS lookup?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
a 5 screen flash heavy page with 98% ads and the actual info is on screen 3 but is a graphic bar thing that has about 15% shimmy
what we want
an RSS feed and email alert at the 70-80-90-95 mark
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
They aren't just trying to stick it to the heavy users...they are trying to stick it to everyone.
That should have been your subject line. :)
There is a conflict of interest - TWC has a real issue with low vs high capacity users, and fairness to users is the other side. They also have plant considerations planning for DOCSIS 3.0 and the associated equipment. First, the proposed plan is egregious in setting arbitrary caps. There should be a universal cap (rate differentials remain based on speed bandwidth, not consumption) based on the highest 2-5% of all users. Say the cap would be 90% of the highest 2% of users. If the highest 2% consumed 100 GB on the average over a 3 month period, the cap would be 90 GB with a standard $0.50 per GB above. The cap should be reset every 3 months to allow for new high use services to develop. The cap should be raised arbitrarily by 20% every 6 months regardless of heaviest users. Secondly , Congress of the FCC should ensure that this is not simply a way around proposed network neutrality rules. TWC could (and probably would) exempt their preferred services from the bandwidth cap creating a tremendous preference, especially for streaming music, video and images. A new form of the old walled garden. And finally, the cap set must allow for video streaming video to traverse the TWC network in greater and greater volume. To use its monopolistic broadband position in most of its markets to restrict user chosen video is about as truly non-competitive as anything Microsoft ever pulled. A cap is a bad idea (like charging for local voice calls by the minute) that completely changes the Internet from a world wide network open to all users and uses to a private TWC owned system.
I understand your viewpoint - you want one less thing to worry about. But in every other area of your expenses, you just budget for an average amount - gas, food, whatever.
Unless you get unlimited, never-expiring rollover minutes/bandwidth - and good luck with that - the "plan" model ALWAYS favors the provider. It's like this:
The optimal price model for the consumer is where you pay for exactly what you use at a fair per-unit price.
Of course, what's missing from these "metered" plans is to take it the other direction. If I'm going to pay extra for using more than a cap amount, I want to pay zero when I use zero and pennies when I use very little. It's only fair.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network
The ISPs you refer to either underbuilt their networks, or they oversold their capacity, or a bit of both. But don't lump all ISPs into the same bucket of inadequacy.
d) Everything stays priced the same as now, without throttling or download caps
So pick a, b, or c. And stop kidding yourself that you can pick d.
I have d; it's not even very expensive at eur55/month, and the ISP appears to be profitable. Fiber to the house delivers 100/10 Mbps uncapped internet access (accompanied by IP TV, FWIW). Also, the ISP has adequately provisioned the network infrastructure for these speeds. At present, ALL of their customers could use 1TB each per month without overloading the main set of 10Gb switches. And to reach higher delivered capacity, only those main switches would need to be upgraded. Each customer's house is already provided with an optical switch with 8 cat6 ports. They have planned on us using even higher bandwidth than at present.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
TWC is *definitely* jacking around with the connections in Los Angeles (e.g., interrupting long-standing ssh sessions)
What's your experience, TWC customers?
When I read the headline, I was hoping TW was getting sued over the cap. /., I didn't RTFA).
Then I RTFS (this is
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I bought and paid for my own cable modem to save money...I don't like having to pay rental fees, or the high $$ they charge you that you can buy for significantly less elsewhere.
Generally I agree buying is better than renting and debated about buying my own cable modem instead of renting one. I went ahead and rented mine when I signed up for cable. About a year later I had difficulty connecting so a tech was sent out to diagnose my connection. It ended up the modem died so the tech was able to replace it immediately with a new one. He said it should be faster than the old one, and it certainly seemed to me it was faster. Now if I had bought the modem it would have cost me more than the cost of renting.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
your company will become stagnant, outdated, irrelevant and surpassed by nimbler, smarter companies.
Unfortunately there's little if any competition. In many places there's only one choice, Cable from one company or DSL from another. A small number number have the choice between cable or DSL. But a lot don't have either choice.
Competition ladies and gentleman, a wonderful thing.
I totally agree.
For some reason it seems like Time Warner Cable didn't get the competition memo.
Time Warner doesn't want competition, they know of they have competition they'd have to compeat and lower their prices and or provide a better service.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
5 x $ = 100 x GB/month
purchase 100 GB/month for $75/month
sublease 1 GB/month to everyone in the apartment building for $5/month
100 x 5 - 75 = $425
Profit
Somehow geeks can't get it through their heads that providing bandwidth costs money.
And what others can't get in their heads is that broadband providers were given hundreds of billions to buildout broadband and given monopolies but they didn't build broadband out.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If you're the kind of user who wants to fight download caps, odds are your the kind of broadband customer that NO ISP WANTS; cable, dsl or otherwise.
Not everyone who does not like caps are heavy downloaders. All I do is surf the web and download email. I don't download HD videos or torrents yet I oppose caps. The only restriction I had when I signed the contract for my broadband was that high speed was not guaranteed. While I wouldn't be happy if my speed was capped I can accept that, what I can not accept is capping my bandwidth, how much I download and upload.
And unless broadband providers buildout broadband then they should give the hundreds of billions of dollars they were given in taxpayer subsidies back to the taxpayers.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Your sanity is the end of progress. Once everyone has transfer caps there's no need to upgrade the infrastructure. No upgrades -> no new services. IPTV will die as it will cost more to watch TV over the net than paying for cable. Don't kid yourself; there's no "byte shortage" in the world. The only reason for the caps is to stop streaming video. It has nothing to do with p2p. The big players all also own cable services. They want to make sure people can't drop cable and watch shows online. And don't think at&t DSL will be far behind. They own U-Verse which offers cable TV.
Backbone bandwidth costs around 3 cents per GB. Time Warner plan to charge me $1 per GB for it. How is that "fair"?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This sounds a bit like Negative Option Billing. At the least, the Canadian Cable Company(ies) that tried this weren't very successful when it came to cable subscriptions. One company had lineups 100's of customers long at its sales outlets to return their cable modems.
Its not exactly the same since its really a TOS change. But nonetheless, telecom and cable companies are always trying this. They end up losing face and a lot of customers in the end. Doesn't have much appeal to shareholders either.
How in the fucking jizz do you get a post that long? Seriously. That's just retarded.
This is a law of human nature.
The FDA currently kills 100s of 1000s of Americans every year, and 10s 0f 1,000,000s of people around the world, because they are in bed with big pharma.
The FDA does less-than-well in guaranteeing safe food and drugs, but the costs of their regulations have almost stopped new drugs from being developed. Only 19 in 2007, as I recall.
A new drug costs an average of $1B to develop. Thus, new drugs can't be developed for any market of less than $2B per year.
Big pharma likes that: no competition from the little guys.
Every regulated industry has a similar story of un-intended consequences of the regulation which largely defeat the intent of the regulation.
Regulation doesn't work, never has. It just stops progress, prevents the market from dealing with the issues.
"The market" btw, is a natural mechanism for a parallel evolutionary search algorithm through the enormous state space of our world-wide econo-socio-political system.
You CS people will recognize the problems of scaling such searchs.
Remember those Slashdot articles a few years ago about Google buying up dark fiber?
And more recently, building massive data centers near power stations?
I wonder if they might be waiting for something like this to open up their ISP division and bury Comcast and TWC by offering unmetered service?
[End Of Line]
Silly question
a wow nerd, playing 4 hours a week night, and all night sat how much would they use a month? is it way over that, or way under?
thanks!
Thats happening anyway. Telco's were given unrestricted monopolies in exchange for a promise to upgrade thier infrastructure. Telco's did not keep their promise, they had no reason to as there was no punishment for breaking their promise.
So by your supposition there has been no improvements in broadband in Australia? So we are still stuck on 128K ISDN from a single provider as was the case in 2001? I think not. The difference between the US and Australian system is that we regulate the hell out of abusive monopolies, we ensure competition and it is this competition that forces telco's to upgrade their infrastructure, not just for their own customers but aslo so they can resell the infrastructure to other ISP's. Also Australia has strict truth in advertising and consumer protection laws so telco's have to advertise caps, they cant pull this "unlimited" with conditions in small print BS that you get with US Telco's. Australian ISP's are held to the letter of the contract, if the Telco changes their cap they cannot reduce the cap of the plan I'm currently on regardless of weather its in contract or not. So in Australia what TWC is doing is illegal, but so is advertising an unlimited service that they couldn't or wouldn't deliver.
Australia's biggest problem not upgrading local infrastructure (you may not know about the A$43 Billion project to install FTTH started by the federal government) but the fact that there is extremely limited bandwidth going out of the country due to our extreme isolation (only 3 undersea cables run into Australia). If it weren't for this limitation we'd have much larger caps.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Its about limit the independence from cable companies. We have youtube, hulu, netflix, and every major network having their programming available on the web. You will soon not need your cable company at all. Unless, its cheaper to stay with your cable company than stream your programming from the internet.
Get the picture now?
Another chocolate-deficit-day? Here too. Easter is supposed to make up for that, but I didn't get one byte, sorry, bite.
Why the hell would I pay $15 for 1GB a month when I can get over 17GB for $10 just using dialup?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
((((((56.6/8)*60)*60)*24)*30)/1024)/1024 = 17.49
Why the hell would I pay $15 for 1GB a month when I can get over 17GB for $10 just using dialup?
slashcode doesn't allow equals symbol?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I'm a Time Warner San Antonio Roadrunner subscriber and I got a very strange letter from them yesterday.... They want me to trade in my existing modem (which they own anyway) on a new one so I can use "PowerBoost" for free. Apparently, PowerBoost gives you more speed (if it is available) for the first 10MB of a download, then goes back to your normal speed. Of course, nothing is for free, so I suspect they need me to have this new modem in order to switch to the tiered bandwidth system. So, no thanks, I'll keep my existing one for now. Of course, they can make me trade it out if they want to by cutting it off, but why should I take their bait and make it easier for them to screw me? BTW, I understand that Earthlink (piggybacking on TW) won't have bandwidth caps, so I'll switch to them if I have to. Don't have TV cable anymore, so to hell with TW. Unfortunately, the cable is my only option until AT&T activates this fiber they buried in front of my house a YEAR ago!!!
Because people suck at figuring out what's best for the value (service per cost).
Example: Video cards and CPUs often follow a price/performance bell curve. At the top is going to be your $100 CPU that has great performance. One step above will be the $200 CPU that has slightly better performance, and above that will be the $400 CPU requiring a special motherboard that has slightly better performance than the $200 CPU.
They're attempting to place their service somewhere to the right of the top of the bell curve, around where it hits zero.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
There's no fallacy in there. Even if it was under warranty when my cable modem failed I could have had it replaced as quickly as I did, nor would I have gotten a faster one as a replacement.
If you buy a new modem off the shelf, based on your own research and subject to your own maintenance, it's unlikely it would just flame out after a year.
And you don't think a cable company modem wouldn't last a year?
you can really tune the performance and get measurable speed increases 24/7.
You can tune performance using company owned modems as well. At the tyme the modem I had failed, when the tech replaced it he offered to do a tuneup but I said I'd do it myself. Speedguide.net can help as can others.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Many people wonder why you Yanks get yourselves worked up about it.
People in the US get upset over capping because they were sold unlimited access by the cable companies. Capping is a limit.
Also though many Americans may not know it the US governments, federal, state, and local, have given broadband providers hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to broadband providers to buildout broadband. Instead of doing so they pocketed the money to pad their bottom lines.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Exactly!
This is why we need to teach these fascist telcos, and cable co's a lesson right now.
If you sit on your ass and don't fight, we as a collective get less intelligent, if IPTV cease to exist what makes you think our alternative voices will not cease to exist? This at a time our country purposely because of Congress +Fed +Banks ain't doing so well financially.
You hit it right on. They TW doesn't want an alternative uncontrollable voices on the web.
And that thing with AT&T is creepy. I had this AT&T dude hanging around the house for like a day, and eventually I went out there and asked him what the fuck he was doing? He was selling "whatever my current bandwidth is" to higher +U-Verse for $40 ea. Month. I said, got newsgroups? No. I said got local public access stations? No. It went on like that. He said he could fire it up right now and replace me existing kit even though I have a year contract with someone else. Then he tried on last hard push to sell me. And then finally I closed the door and he was still out there until the end of the day. Crazy encounter! I felt like telling him to get off my grass. Early on, I decided to be friendly though.
When he pushed the U-Verse part, i said I got players like mplayer, TVUPlayer, a hodge-podge patchwork of aps, os's, utils, urls, and network relays that probably brings in 4-5000 channels (i think) maybe more.
He didn't give a crap that my passwords for networks and domains was linked to my existing contract service's email. (Yeah i said that horrible)
They don't CARE.
I said sometimes I produce video for public access tv and I need to move a lot of data consistently. I said, I update a lot of differnt kinds of boxes, and maintain many from home. Mostly he would go back to the speed when talking about DSL service. I said what good is speed when you can't transfer the available data? Silence.. I said, well, I am actually kind of too busy to do this even if I wanted to, it would be hardship on me to fix all the passwords and ip numbers and crap.
I, on top of this, can't help to think about FISA in the back of my mind. Now this unconstitutional shit is in place, they dig spying on us, our lives are stressed out and our business is falling apart, and they want to charge us more so they can bring us more corporate fascist television channels?
Why do I need the web?
Oh that's right alternative voices.
Fact checking. Uncensored sources.
Maintaining a presence, Business.
I am all with someone else that suggested we just fucking lay our own CAT5 house to house. Fuck this nonsense by these telcos!
Half you reading are probably SCARED to answer. After all, talk about AT&T and get service cut off.
RIGHT!?
-- And they talk about piracy. heh look in the treasury.
"Time Warner can do what ever they want if they pay back the $200 billion in infrastructure they received from taxpayers enabling a monopoly in some areas. "
Yeah you get an insightful without actually citing any sources.
Your article is suspect.
"If that is true, the question of what is "fair" is somewhat more abstract than just saying someone who uses more should pay more. After all, people who watch more hours of cable television don't pay more than those who don't."
The reason is that he's comparing an Apple and an Orange. They're different technologies that operate on different principles. No wonder people are having so much difficulty with this whole cap issue when they can't even get their analogies right.
I remember, back in the early 1990's when access to the Internet required a dial-up connection. The billing was based on the amount of time the user was connected. My first month I paid something like $20, because I wasn't on that much. But then I found many interesting people and things out on this thing called the Internet. The next month my bill was $200 or something like that. I was online after work every day. The consistency of my usage of my broadband connection now is: every single day all day long. I work, I play, I watch... everything on this laptop. I need email always checking (set to check mail every minute) for new work coming my way. I do web sites for a living. My bill would be ten times that in today's world. The connection is never severed. With the television: if my picture didn't get pixellated (sp?) every two minutes, right at the moment of the punchline or the action car chase, maybe I might consider paying more for the connection. Right now, my laptop shows better quality tv than my television does. Where does satellite fit in to all of this mess? Do they gain all the cable company's business?
instead of cable companies cutting back on the internet that we love.
why not cut back on the 200+ channels of stupid stuff we never watch but are forced to pay for each month as part of our 'satellite and or cable plan' which offers a multitude of useless shows and entire channels.
think of the money and bandwidth they would save.
I wouldnt mind paying for metered bandwidth, IF it was a 2 way street. so If I wanted to only pay for showtime, tnt, the weather channel, the history channel and the discovery channel, that would be my bill every month for these channels. THEN I would not mind paying for metered bandwidth.
Give and take is a 2 way street.
how ever, us giving them our money and them taking away our service doesnt work.
this has been flawed for a long time, they keep shoving these changes down our throats, and we continue to let them.
and we wonder why the economy is screwed. because were a nation of enabilist consumers who enable consumption.
~DF
TW is lying. Look at their federal reports. The cost of delivering data service is dropping at better than 10%/year and revenue is rising at better than 10%/year. Cost in 2008 was less than $150 Million and revenue was more that $4 billion. And, their subscriber base increased by a million people from 2007 to 2008.
I don't know about other areas, but in the Austin, Round Rock, Texas area TW has enormous amounts of fiber in the ground. They laid it down back in the middle '90s when I was working for SBC. I remember executive turning purple over the idea that TWC could afford to build out the kind of infrastructure they built out.
OK, so TWC is lying. They are lying about why they need to raise prices. But, they see a strong reason to do it. I do not claim to know that reason. I am sure it is related to two facts. 1) They were just spun out of Time Warner. 2) DOCSIS 3.0.
What are we going to do about it? Well, I happen to use a wrt54gl router with the tomato firmware so I now exactly how much data comes in and out of my house. With the recent connection of a PC to my TV our usage has gone way up. We currently use over 2GB/Day. There is no pirating going on. There are no P2P servers running. There is a lot of gaming and Hulu.com going on.
Our current household cable bill is ridiculous... My two college student "children" live at home so we have 3 DVRS, the digital tier, a bunch of premium channels, 2 telephone lines, and 10 Mbps Internet service. I am actually a very happy TWC customer. I have been for years.
Looking at what bandwidth caps will do to my current bill I held a family meeting on what to do about the situation. The answer from everyone was that we can live with out TV, we already get that on the net. We can't live without the Internet.
Our plan, if TWC puts in bandwidth caps, we will 1) Get a pre-paid cell phone for the one person who still uses the land lines. 2) transfer the main phone number to a cell phone. 3) Sign up for TWCs most expensive teir, the one that is still unlimited. While seeking any other lower priced service provider. 4) drop TWC telephone and TV services except for maybe basic cable.
Yeah, that's right. The consensus was that we do not need TV or telephone service, but we do need Internet service.
And, oh yeah, I've been talking to the neighbors about splitting the cost of a T1 or a fractional t3/DS3 and sharing it using wireless repeaters. When you look at $100/month from TWC sharing a T1 with a couple of neighbors starts looking very interesting. We're taking the idea to the neighborhood association. Providing broadband Internet for the neighborhood looks like something that can be done quickly and once installed would not cost very much.
Stonewolf
How exactly are they updating you on how many MB or GB you've used each month? I mean I can log into my Verizon account and see how many minutes I have used for the month. Will they offer a similar thing and will you be able to access it without using up more of your allotted bandwidth?
To me this sounds like a step backwards. It reminds me of where we started with minutes/month ISPs like AOL. And if they are switching to the cell phone payment model, will we get rollover if we don't use all of our bandwidth?
You get mobile internet (7.6Mbit) for $3/month and then $0.1/Mbyte and a maximum cost of 30$/month.
Nice to have on that computer only in use on trips etc ;)
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20090416/BUSINESS/90416024&referrer=NEWSFRONTCAROUSEL
Are there things you can do to the actual modem itself to 'tune' it?
I don't know about tuning the modem itself but I imagine if it possible you can find out by googling.
I run 99% linux and a couple of osx boxes...so, the windows stuff doesn't do me much good...
I use OS X, though I have two Linux PCs I haven't used one in about 1 1/2 years. That reminds me, I want to upgrade one and make it a server. Thanks. As for Linux, again Google is your friend: "cable modem" tuneup OR optimize linux. It's probably be a good idea to add the distro you're using like ubuntu.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Because games on dial-up suck. They're going after the gamers and the movie downloaders and are using the P2P abusers to justify it. Of course they're also trying to leverage their media services by creating a walled garden. This lets the attack piracy and lock out their competition with one move.
I can vouch for the water thing.
where I am living now we get water for 30 min every other day.
When the water comes you turn on all your facuets and pumps and start filling up buckets.
Everyone in your neighborhood coincidentally is doing the same thing.
Trickle sums it up pretty nicely.
The trick is to buy a really expensive powerful pump.
How much extra does your dedicated pots line cost?