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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.'"
They certainly will have to pass on the costs, and I would prefer openly, but why-oh-why do they pick the tiered level approach? It's the same way the cell phone companies do it: you have to guess how many minutes you're going to use ahead of time, then get shorted for what you don't use and pay huge overages for when you exceed you're initial guess. Let's get back to the electric utility model where you are charged for exactly what you use, and if anything, you get lower off-peak rates.
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
What's wrong with picking d? It just means that at peak times, when your ISP has to process more data than it has bandwidth for, everyone's transfer rate goes down. This happens until those watching streaming video get fed up with the "buffering..." and go do something else, at which point everyone else's transfer rate goes back up.
Nobody has to pay more, no schemes are necessary, and those ISPs who also happen to be Cable TV operators get to rejoice in the fact that streaming video failed. Everyone is happy.
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. All the data so far shows that a very small percentage of people are very heavy users and it remains to be be seen if that is actually causing any problems for Time Warner. What is clear is that Time Warner is trying to protect their outdated cable tv business model, and as long as we paid for the infrastructure they should have limits to what they can do with it. They should publish data on their problems if they want any reasonable resolution. Until then, "d" is the only option that can be picked.
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.
. . . I'm going to guess it's much more fair by using the electric utility model and much more profitable by using the "heads-I-win_tails_you_lose" model of cell phone companies.
Guess which model they're going with?
The problem is the issue behind this whole thing has nothing to do with internet traffic and the poor ISPs who can't keep up. It's about keeping people from watching content on the net rather than on the TV, or on the Cable Provider's website which they charge for. Hulu has deals with the networks, not with the cable providers. TWC doesn't like that.
What costs? Their bandwidth costs have been going down, and their profits have been going up. There are no costs they have to pass onto the consumer.
You mean the cost of losing their cable business because Hulu, Netflix, and iTunes do what they do, but better and cheaper? I think that's the cost they're passing onto the consumer. It's an anti-competitive penalty to lock consumers into the "Time Warner Family of Products".
Back in the day when people had landlines, did they think that their "unlimited local calling" allowed them to use the phone while everyone else also was? They probably, if asked, thought so, but in reality if everyone in the city picked up their landline to place a call at 6PM, many (actually, probably most) of them wouldn't have gotten a dial tone.
If your house has 200 AMP service from the electric company, do you think you can draw 200 AMPs at any time? Well, no, not if everyone in your area is also using "their" 200 AMPs at the same time.
What do you suppose would happen if everyone in a town supplied with municipal water turned on all their faucets at the same time. Yep, they would get a dribble compared to what they would get if they just turned it on at a random time.
Virtually all utilities "over subscribe". I'm betting that if you read the medium sized print in your residential cable broadband contract, you will find that they don't guarantee bandwidth. If you want bandwidth guarantees, try business class services.
I'd agree, if the advertised "Up To X Mb Per Second" isn't available much of the day, the advertising would be dishonest, but in my limited experience, most times of the day, ComCast meets their "up to" bandwidth advertising.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
This is also one of the biggest concerns with bandwidth metering. A customer sells in 8 year old XP machine that shipped with Automatic Updates off. His brand new Vista machine shipped with Automatic Updates on. His bill jumps up and he doesn't know why.
Windows Update, Apple Software Update, Java Update, Adobe Updater, Virus signatures, Spyware signatures, all the badly coded 1024x768 Flash websites that think they are Web 2.0. Suddenly this all costs money, and we haven't even gotten into the malware and viruses that are "surfing" for you when you are not around. The average consumer will not understand how they used so much "bandwidth" when they just check their e-mail.
... fair and simple...
The cable companies don't roll like that.