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Time Warner Pulls Plug On Metered Billing Tests
fudreporter is one of many who writes to tell us that Time Warner is not planning to continue their tiered consumption tests at this time. The company is not completely admitting defeat, stating that they "may return to the idea in the future," but for now the test has been shut down. "The plan would have established several tiers based on how much consumers use the Internet. Time Warner Cable had said at the time that it believed that consumers who download the most content need to pay more to cover infrastructure upgrades. The plan was first announced two weeks ago, then modified with higher download caps last week. In a news release yesterday, Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said, 'We will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met.'"
If they'd just started with a simple price per gig and kept it to the reasonable electric/water model, they'd have been fine. The Cell phone model was a lot of the reason they had backlash I suspect.
We will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met.
Translation: We like having customers and don't want the government taking away our freedom to implement usage caps quite yet.
It doesn't make sense to bill transfer like you do water or gas. Water you don't use is still there tomorrow. Transfer you don't use is lost forever.
Since the cost to run the system is fixed, price per gig is lowest when you're maximally utilizing the system. Since a per gig charge encourages people to use less, it's encouraging less economical behavior.
As in any other industry, if your customers want too much of your product you should make more. Punishing your customers for using your product is just backwards.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I get what TW is trying to do here. With hulu, youtube, netflix, p2p, bittorrent and the plethora of other options for downloading entertaining content users are going to slowly start canceling their cable services. Especially the premium content that TW get's so much revenue from (HBO, Sports packages etc.)
Now you can pretty much stream any sporting event live, so even that isn't going to keep viewers subscribed.
But they are missing one critical piece. Most users don't know anything about how the software on their computers work. They automatically assume that their A/V product will protect them from every botnet and worm out there. Is some 66 year-old woman who is infected with a botnet and sending out gigs of SPAM per day really using the bandwidth she would pay for. She has been diligent in trying to protect he computer by installing A/V software, but she is by no means and expert and shouldn't be expected to know that a botnet has infected her computer. The botnet software is designed to hide itself from her knowledge.
So who is TW going to charge for that bandwidth usage. Because as far as she is concerned all she did was download a few pics of the grandkids, send a few emails, and do some genealogy research. Then she gets hit with a Tier1 usage bill. She won't be able to sufficiently explain the extra usage, and I'm pretty certain the person answering phones at TW won't be able to explain it either.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
Time Warner Cable had said at the time that it believed that consumers who download the most content need to pay more to cover infrastructure upgrades
Meaning, if you are a heavy user, you pay for the infrastructure upgrade (that you never actually get, while they oversell those upgrades!), and STILL get charged for being a heavy user! It's genius!
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Wrong. The internet backbone is fundamentally limited and, thanks to bittorent, it's finally being congested. Think about it this way: if everyone maxed out their connections all the time, everyone's connection speed would be a small fraction of what they currently take for granted. As media streaming -- bittorent, netflix, hulu, or whatever -- becomes increasingly popular, connection speeds WILL hit a wall. When people do realize that internet bandwidth is a limited commodity, something is going to have to give. I, for one, am not going to pay the same monthly fee for 1GB/month (to use basic sites like slashdot) that 100GB/month users use to download illegal media. Sure, I'm opposed to RIAA, as is everyone on slashdot. But there comes a point where I'm fed up with these bandwidth leeches.