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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.'"
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.
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.
All the evidence I've seen shows that d.) is entirely possible. Time Warner Cable has been making large profits already with the current system and their is no evidence that there is a bandwidth crunch. In fact all the evidence points to bandwidth caps having little or nothing to do with network management and everything to do with a cash grab. Best of all the COO of Time Warner Cable Lendell Hobbs agrees with me. "Mr. Hobbs tried to strike a balance, saying that while the company is concerned about the cost to maintain its broadband network, investors should not be worried. He said it was "absolutely not" true that Time Warner's profits were being squeezed by the cost of heavy broadband users. "If you are getting feedback that there is an immediate problem, nothing could be further from the truth," he said." http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/time-warner-cable-profits-on-broadband-are-great-and-will-grow-because-of-caps/
Well said.
Besides that, I don't see how throwing more money at them will magically clear up the problem. We already tried that[as you mentioned], yet here we are again. "Bury us in money, and everything will instantly be OMGZ!!! Ponies!"
I read my TOS with my ISP before I signed. There is no clause or restriction on usage of bandwidth/data amounts.
What limits there are involve not setting up a webserver, or connecting more than three computers to the net at a time.
The service I get now for $40 USD/month would jump to a minimum of $75 USD/month.
Sounds like a raw deal to me. I'm not with TW, but don't like the thought of this becoming an 'industry standard'.
FTFA:
[my emphasis]
Yet all of those services have joyously and lavishly been advertised and marketed by these very same ISP.'s. What did they expect? Was this not what they were aiming for by promoting them?
I'm not buying this load of BS.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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".
Is this a serious answer, though? The vast majority of the land area of the US is almost unpopulated. But *MANY* people live in highly populated areas.
For instance:
San Francisco: 6688 people per square km
New York: 10482 people per square km
Chicago: 4816 people per square km
For comparison, Tokyo has a population density of 5847 people per square km.
So, to re-ask the grandparents question: Why are our urban areas so far behind Japan and South Korea's urban areas?
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
New Marketing Idea. Do what ATT does for cell phones
Rollover MB's
Sign up for a plan for X MB per month. Download capacity you don't use goes into the bank. Overages are charged at a set rate.
Over the cap for two months in a row and get bumped up a level. Have too many MB's in the bank and get dropped automatically down a level.
Fair and Simple.
You could get even more complex if you desire, where MB's consumed vary with network load. Downloading a torrent during the busiest time of day counts double towards your cap, Download at 3:00AM and it counts half.
I just wish these companies would man up and and have fair pricing. And for all of the people who signed up for Unlimited plans, suck it up and deal with the change or go elsewhere. Every other industry (credit cards, insurance, medical care)can periodically change the service agreement. Besides, as COMCAST I'd hope the heavy users got mad and went elsewhere.
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
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.