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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you look at their tiers? Basically they have:
1) Affordable tier for people who think the Internet means email.
2) Raping tier for people who know about websites like YouTube.
They're effectively placing all their users who use the Internet regularly in the same bucket as file traders.You only have to download a few movies monthly off of iTunes or Netflix to need their unlimited plan.
If you are a slashdot user, my guess is that you are in tier 2. Or you read slashdot using lynx.
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
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.
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.
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?
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