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Time Warner Shutting Off Austin Accounts For Heavy Usage
mariushm writes "After deciding to shelve metered broadband plans, it looks like Time Warner is cutting off, with no warning, the accounts of customers whom they deem to have used too much bandwidth. 'Austin Stop The Cap reader Ryan Howard reports that his Road Runner service was cut off yesterday without warning. According to Ryan, it took four calls to technical support, two visits to the cable store to try two new cable modems (all to no avail), before someone at Time Warner finally told him to call the company's "Security and Abuse" center. "I called the number and had to leave a voice mail, and about an hour later a Time Warner technician called me back and lectured me for using 44 gigabytes in one week," Howard wrote.
Howard was then "educated" about his usage. "According to her, that is more than most people use in a year," Howard said.'"
Fuck them.
...of ISPs I will avoid.
Hey, I might be moving soon, so I might actually have a choice. Is there anyone decent out there?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My bandwidth usage averaged about a gig a week, between internet radio, VoIP, etc. but then, I noticed my usage jumping to 12Gig/week virtually overnight. Initially I feared a virus. Then I checked, all of the traffic was going to my wifes computer. I then cross-referenced it, the day it jumped was the day she found Hulu, and signed up for Netflix. Now imagine 3-4 computers in the house, each one with someone seperately watching netflix or Hulu....
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Absolutely right. 44 GB is more than most people use in a year.
I can understand that there is a lot of resistance against usage caps from people who use that amount in one week. But the majority would not want their fees to go up because of that kind of usage.
Why is it so difficult for people to comprehend that if you use more, you're going to have to pay more?
And why is it so hard for TWC and others to advertise what they actually offer instead of what they know they can't deliver? The word "unlimited" means "no caps" or "without limit". You don't get to redefine it by slapping on some fine print.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
44 GB?
That is just 10 DVD's!
Not even two per day for a wholeweek!
Why is that abuse if he paid for bandwidth and the didn't tell him that there is a lower limit?
44 Gigabytes in a week ???
If you want that level of service, you've got to pay for it. Anything else is taking the piss.
Squirrel!
Or at least, that's what I got out of some guy in Florida after getting an AUP violation warning letter. Now I have a local ISP which out and out tells me I have a 30GB cap, but it's a local WiFi ISP so I'm not complaining, I'm ecstatic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For an example, please reference this comment.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
DSL.
But then I have the lowest tier so It would take a decade to download 44 gigs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
No way?!
Ever thought of a few distro ISO's?
Windows updates? Or RC's?
Some music streaming in the background between 8 and 18:00 to ease the silence. That is half a G per day!
44 is not much at all. And no, I am not in South Korea.
And yes North Korea sanctions are abusive. USA should shut up and solve their own issues. See a parallel here?
Actually, yes it is. If you subscribe to online streaming media such as Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, at 1GB/hr for high-quality, yes, it is not only doable, it is easily doable.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
All this cutting off, severe capping etc. has been common practice by UK ISPs in the UK for about 2 or 3 years now such that pretty much all of them do it.
If you're lucky you'll start paying about 50 times above cost for extra bandwidth per-GB on top of your "unlimited" subscription next.
The problem is, I think the internet rush has finished, that is, pretty much everyone that was ever going to be a potential internet customer is already one nowadays, so ISPs are struggling to figure out how to further increase profits. Pretty much all businesses wont ever be happy with a fixed profit margin, they'll always want to increase it and this is what's happening both here in the UK and now seemingly in the US - they're doing away with users who actually use what they're paying for, they're cutting the amount of bandwidth available to everyone else, and then charging more with a massive markup if you want more.
I'm not really sure how else ISPs can increase their profit margins though to be fair, content is the obvious one, ISPs in the UK like BT are going for Phorm, but that's most certainly not the answer. Content seems to have failed so far because it's generally meant working with the music and movie industry who are still clueless about the internet and hence impose unrealistic licensing and DRM restrictions on the content. I think ISPs would need to become content producers if they want to get anywhere, but I guess that requires thought, effort and investment and apparently they feel it's better to simply screw your users for more profit instead. Time Warner though should at least have less trouble moving into the content bundling business than most but again, it would require more effort than simply screwing the users.
I understand that bandwidth isn't an infinite resource and some heavy users are a problem in that respect, but I do think that excuse is severely over-used, I'm not convinced there is as much of a bandwidth shortage as ISPs would have us believe, it's just an easy and convenient way to justify fucking the user over for more money.
One would think being sold all you can eat service, then having it cut off for using it would be seen as universally crappy.
Except for like, Adult Swim, Hulu, and Netflix online shows? Me and the wife regularly use them all.
Fewer commercials, watch what we want. Its great. Comcast has yet to complain to us.
I've left the Ubuntu images up and I'm getting clobbered.
Damn dude, how much porn can one man take?
Every house on every block doing it.
And wait until boxee, netflix, tivio, etc., finally have that killer set-top box and everyone wants one.
There was just an article a week or so ago that everyone using bandwidth at the same time didn't cost comcast a dime more than if nobody was using it.
But there are parts of the Backbone that are oversold, and it would be physically impossible for every customer to use 100% of the bandwidth at one time and get the speed they were advertised.
I know that may not be true for some large ISPs, but if it is a smaller ISP, they oversell bandwidth. And they HAVE to in order to survive and make a profit. You could not sell 3 meg down for 29.95 a month and built out an infrastructure that would deliver 3 meg to every customer at the same time...or maybe you could, but it would take a hell of a long time to pay it off. Might be different in socialized countries, but that is the reality here.
transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
In Stockholm, no one questions one's usage, even on genuinely unlimited Internet accounts, ie, unless you're accessing unlawful content.
There, unlimited means umlimited .
I think it's a matter of rights of individuals & profits of companies.
Let's all try to get past this, eg, by reducing data costs (so companies don't have much to "lose" when users use what they will, of downloaded Internet data).
All this capping and "unofficial capping" seems to be causing more problems that it solves.
If tiny Stockholm (or Sweden) can sell symmetric, 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps, unlimited Internet service for ~ $11 / month, then let's find out how the other ISPs around the world can do it, in future.
BTW We're aware of Aussies, who use over 150 GB / month, albeit at 1.5 Mpbs, each month.
Hey, it's not like they pump out CO2 at untenable rates... they just find enough to keep their modems running most hours of the days of each month...
They have a cap system but they don't charge for extra data. In the case of my plan, I pay $80 per month for 20gb but if I go over it I start paying $3 per gig. So it isn't as though I lose my connection - I just have to pay more.
Btw, I remember years ago with unlimited internet on dial up and the net result was exchanges would get clogged and the phone number to dial up the ISP would be constantly engaged. It is the same situation now; as soon as you have unlimited people abuse it. For me, have a tiered system with a price for extra traffic.
Those who use bugger all will only pay for what they want, those who want large amounts pay for it, and those who want a free ride find out quickly they can't get a free ride.
For now, perhaps.
As more people discover streaming video, and demand better picture quality and less jittering, the demand for bandwidth will skyrocket. One HD movie per week would be over 200GB per year, probably closer to double that.
Comcast may cap, but at >250GB. 250GB is not a problem.
50GB however, is grossly anticompetitive, because someone who's a heavy user of video-over-the-net instead of video-over-cable will hit that cap in easily.
Test your net with Netalyzr
That was just over a 1/4 of the 44GB....got something better?
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
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Yeah..I downloaded in the same week both versions of Win7 BETA 7000, Ubuntu 8.10 and did a couple of system builds. If you're streaming 10hrs a day of music 7 days a week at home, you need to go get a job.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Right now, the ISPs are charging the same price to heavy users and light users. Heavy users cost the ISP more than light users. Therefore, their profit motive is to maximize light users and minimize heavy users.
Tiering would align their profit motive with heavy users (due to volume discounts).
As long as heavy users keep demanding that light users subsidize their usage, by not charging differential pricing, the ISPs will continue to be profit motivated to cut off heavy users. They will continue to be on the side of content restriction. They will continue to be the enemy of we heavy users.
Choose your poison: Get the ISPs on our side by letting them profit from our heavy usage, or keep them in an antagonistic position towards us. I like getting free money from light users, but it's not a healthy market strategy. It puts me in an adversarial relationship with my ISP. I'd rather pay for what I use and have them treat me as their golden customer.
Support tiered pricing (and net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business). Get the ISPs back on our side (like they were in the 90's, when we geeks were their only customers). It'll cost more, but we'll be the golden-haired boys again. Stop demanding free stuff you cheap fuckers.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Cable faces the predicament of being next in line behind print newspapers only for them the situation is even more awkward since they themselve provide the very service that they fear will lead to their demise. They push watching streaming video and music, faster download speeds and a "better" internet experience but dont really want you to use it. Its a rough spot they put themeselves into and the only way cable providers can fight the inevitable is to limit usage and hope the customer base is incapable of finding better alternatives.
I'd read this thread in it's entirety before going with the prevalent "Us vs Them".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
No way, huh? This is sarcasm, right? I can easily use that amount of bandwidth per month legally.
Example of usage:
I stream internet radio pretty heavily.
-streaming internet radio @ 128Kbps x 6 hours/day = 345MB/day = 10GB/month
Hulu hd content is between 480Kbps and 1000Kbps.
Figuring for an avg. of 700Kbps:
-hulu hd @ 700Kbps x 4 hours/day (figuring for my usage and my wife's... VERY generous estimate) = 6.3GB per 5 days/week = 25GB/4 weeks (month)
I'm already at 35GB/month. And that doesn't even include our VoIP usage (skype and ventrilo), downloading of OS/software patches or downloading/seeding linux distros, or anything else I might want to legally do every month.
Ridiculous.
Of course, most contracts are written so that the big company preserves the right to do any damn thing they want at any point, but it still might be worthwhile looking at your contract, and then going to your state/county/city consumer affairs office and asking them to look at it. Cable companies are normally regulated utilities.
dave
I uploaded 27GB P2P in 2 weeks this month and then started having really spotty connection issues a day after I stopped. Is it more likely that Comcast is playing mind games, I overheated my hardware, or that there is no connection between the two events?
I doubt the city could tolerate you though.
Sorry... 10 DVD distributions of Linux.
And, yes, I DO that on an off and on basis, plus do streaming video, audio, etc.
Of course, I spend $170 a month on a business level connection with baseline SLA's, etc.
It's not unforseeable that someone COULD do it with legal content.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
We must free internet from state control, and also from big corporate control. Internet infrastructure should be in the control of comunity, not in control of profit and state.
If the terms and conditions ban that sort of usage, then the customer has little to complain about (other than the lack of notice).
If there is nothing in the terms and conditions about such usage, then the supplier is clearly in breach of contract. That might suggest the customer could sue (was there any financial loss, time and cost of equipment while investigating, etc)?
Or maybe, if this is a pattern of behaviour, or company policy not mentioned in T&C, the local trading standards authorities might take an interest? Or it could constitute some sort of fraud, or false advertising?
Is there such a thing as a private prosecution in your jurisdiction?
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Assuming all the big equipment, cabling and infrastructure is paid for... what is the real cost to the provider for using that much bandwidth?
The Admin and the Engineer
You don't advertise an all-you-can-eat buffet, and then kick out a customer when they sit down and eat for three hours straight.
Metering use or at least advertising you have a bandwidth usage policy is better than just getting your line cut when they decide you've had enough for the month.
If that happens to me, *I* will be the one giving the lecture, and I will be receiving a credit for the time that my service was down, and I will be receiving additional credit for the inconvenience if they first sent me out to try new cable modems before actually telling me what happened. (though it sounds like in this case many of the reps there are not aware of the policies)
The reason we see them try to pull this BS (and frequently get away with it) is because customers let themselves get pushed around, walked all over, and generally taken advantage of.
They don't want to scare off new customers by advertising any limits, but at the same time they want to enforce limits. Can't have it both ways. Imagine going to a restaurant on a saturday all you can eat buffet to have a big breakfast with your family, and as you are parking you see the advert in the window for saturday morning all-you-can-eat, and notice the little note at the bottom, "(we will kick you out if you eat more than $20 worth of food)". Tell me YOU wouldn't find somewhere else to eat breakfast? So it's not surprising they don't want to disclose anything like that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Cutting this customer off is like cutting off an infected limb to save the entire organism. It's quick and simple, but more complicated solutions involving medication, research and development, and (Oh no!) Work could leave the patient with the use of that limb.
The better solution would be to implement a reverse speed booster. So many companies are promoting this new feature to their customers. It's simple. If you're downloading a file, the first minute or so works very quickly, then slows down to the speed at which your ISP quoted you when you bought their service. In this way your smaller files can come to you much faster, while users such as Ryan Howard are kept in check.
Go one step further then. Users who use reams of bandwidth consistently for their bit torrents or netflix or whatever-the-hell-hulu-is, can remain customers with their speeds capped.
Probably the best way to do this would be on a per-connection basis. If your 30 connections to some bit-torrent swarm are using most of your bandwidth, they can be throttled but the short-lived http connections to slashdot.org (who reads that anyway?) can run at full burst speed, expiring before the throttle timer kicks in. Meanwhile, your long-lived connections to a game site might use lower amounts of bandwidth and require no throttling. The results could be no inturrupted service for anyone, especially those light users who are tired of your kids slowing the neighborhood cable node to a crawl at 3:02pm with youtube.
The only problem is, the ISP would have to spend money to develop such a system, and probably purchase new and more hardware to implement it. Far easier to pay someone for 20 minutes to lecture you on bandwidth usage and then terminate your service.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
This is nuts! I could easily blast through 44GB. I just bought the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV on steam the other day. That's 15GB right there. I also downloaded that windows 7 beta iso. That's another 4GB. I watched half a season of The Office in HD on Netflix. 4 or 5GB right there. And consider this, I'm not the only person that lives here. Everyone else in my family is using youtube and Hulu and downloading god knows what!
I've been picking up games on Steam whenever they're on sale for a few years now. I checked my folder and I've got about 200GB worth of games now! A lot of games take up 7 0r 8GB these days so this isn't really that crazy, and I got most of them on the cheap so I've gotten quite a few over the years. What if my hard drive fails? What if I lost my backup files? Should I wait 5 or 6 years to get them all back?
Am I being unreasonable here? I'm paying for internet, why can't I use it?
That was just over a 1/4 of the 44GB....got something better?
That was 1/4th for a single machine. Now imagine a family of 4, or a slight increase in quality...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Almost every cable company is regulated by state/local government commissions - usually a utility commission.
Unless your TWC contract specifically states you cannot use above X amount... as long as you pay your monthly bill they cannot shut off your service!
Report them. Let them lose their franchise with your city and see what they think then.
If you're streaming 10hrs a day of music 7 days a week at home, you need to go get a job.
And what if I work from home, and like listening to the music while I work?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
People complain because they offered a way to pay when you want to use extra bandwidth - and then complain when those that use the single price are cut off when they exceed the limits?
Come on, be reasonable. If you want a lot of bandwidth campaign for plans that let you pay for it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"According to her, that is more than most people use in a year," I'm thinking they're confusing 'year' with 'day' :)
This almost makes me want to switch back to TWC, except that the quality of the line to my house is so crappy. TWC should, however, be explicit about disconnection rules in their ToS, and they should definitely inform customers when they're cut off.
If I was this guy's neighbor I'd be especially happy he got the axe.
and i thought i was hogging bandwidth when i recently run rsync on my favorite Linux distro mirror, i have my own private mirror on my harddrive including full sources & build scripts all weighing in at just a little over four gigs, pay a good chunk of change for a bundled service for broadband, cable TV, & landline telephone, so i am going to use some of the bandwidth i pay for...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Well if you can't afford that much usage than don't sell it. Let's say you get 1 Mb/Second transfer speeds. Then basically that is 60 Mb per minute or 3600 Mb per hour or 86400 Mb per day that you could download. Go to MB and you get 10800 MB per day, or 10.5 GB per day. Assuming the math is right, but the point is even with a 1 MB per second, in a few days you will reach their limit of 44 GB if you download all day. So the question is if bandwidth is so bad and they can't afford 4 days of downloading at 1 Mb/Sec, why would they be selling 3 Mb/Sec connections and more. It would seem that higher speed connections only encourage people to reach that limit even faster. Sure and if they start charging for each GB over the limit, I'm sure they will roll out 100 Mb/sec service with a ridiculously small limit. I wish congressman weren't such idiots to fall for their whining. It's pretty clear that the cable companies want to kill video over the internet (unless of course it is their own service, or people like you tube want to pay them for the extra bill). I think some of the quotes were only a few dollars per subscriber to upgrade their network. With their current inflated prices they get more than that, but rather than upgrade they take it as profits. If they were really cash strapped I wouldn't mind an extra 5 dollars per month to upgrade their network, but they won't upgrade they'll book it as profit or use it for something else. Basically the cable providers are fuckers with outdated business models trying to make a power grab and rip people off as much as possible. They also have a monopoly in a lot of areas. I suspect they wanted to be caught traffic throttling and saying the internet is going to collapse so that they could try to kill internet video publicly. Then they try to charge, and now they just cut people off. Soon they'll start rolling out their own unlimited video services that will not do bandwidth caps, just watch.
My parents had a rather expensive package from Time Warner, the quality of service was inconsistent for their cable, internet, and phone service.
I had them look into DSL.
Shocked at the price difference for comparable service, my dad gave Time Warner a call.
The customer service rep offered to cancel my father's service, which my father gladly accepted. There was no effort to even keep him as a customer. I know CS reps have a script from which they operate, but you'd think that Time Warner would have one written out for "customer just realized they were getting dicked and would like a better deal," because I have witnessed many people abandoning Time Warner for crap like this.
My parents are now piss-pleased DSL customers.
I've got the lowest grade DSL, but for what I pay for service, I couldn't even get in the door with Time Warner.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
If cable providers want to measure/assess bandwidth usage, they need to include all of their content distribution, not just open Internet traffic. Most providers reserve >99% of their available bandwidth for TV channels and telephony, with only a fraction available for open use. That figure must be driven down, for providers that use public rights-of-way.
Viewed from this perspective, "most users" watching TV are consuming far more bandwidth than Internet users - an HDTV channel is about 18 megabits/second, or 800gB per hour.
(I know, they have a different upstream business model for these different types of content - the point is to pry them away from those legacies, not allow them to stifle competition)
How is it different to an all you can eat restaurant who states that the sitting is a maximum of 2 hours? Unlimited doesn't mean unrestrained, out of control and glutinous.
The main reason why the ISPs in Stockholm are able to do that is that they don't see those subscribers as a revenue stream to be strip-mined for ever higher profits.
Most of the cable and telco players are publicly traded entities which don't do dividends and rely on their market capitalization to "deliver shareholder value". That comes from an ever growing, absolutely unsustainable profit growth model. In order to do it, unsustainable as it is, they have to come up with ways to either shed costs or get new takers without expending money on infrastructure. This is just yet another way to do it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What s/he wrote was:
Notice that the person is referring to unlimited accounts, and that "unlimited means unlimited" in the context of how much bandwidth one can consume having subscribed to such an account. The logical conclusion, then, is that right being referred to is the right to get what you were sold and paid for, without secret limitations.
Schmuck.
Here's another argument in support of tiering:
Everyone's talking about Hulu being the problem, and mention is made in one of the comments of multiple heads in a single house watching Hulu or Netflix at the same time.
Here's a thought; cache locally. Distribute to your peers over wi-fi or portable storage (ie: your iPod). The same video should not be getting sent over the backbones twenty times to different apartments in my apartment complex.
Problem with that? DRM. Hate DRM'd media? Make the DRM consumers pay for their retarded use of bandwidth. Meanwhile the more enlightened among us can be locally caching and off-backbone distributing non-DRM content like The Wood Whisperer (just found that, awesome for the physical hacker in you).
Tiered pricing would totally screw the single-view-per-download business model, which only really makes sense for DRM'd media.
Aligning bandwidth consumption cost to the ISP with bandwidth consumption cost to the customer is efficient pricing. The ISPs will profit more from heavy users, putting them on the side of the heavy users. Content control business models will have a harder time competing with future-oriented distributed distribution models. And all it will cost is paying for your extra consumption.
It is the core essence of market efficiency - aligning the price to the customer with the cost to the provider. It's a good thing.
(and support net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Here you go, just posted it, 19GB of legal content in one shot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1211717&cid=27712841
Having installed Steam just yesterday, I can go through 8 pages of game demos with 25 game demos on each page, each game demo varying in size from hundreds of MB to 2-3 GB.
It would not be unreasonable to try 4-6 games each day for a week, doing 6-10 GB of download each day.
They advertised my plan as unlimited so they should suck it up.
Get in the game Time Warner. If you cant provide "Broadband" service, dont disconnect a single user... disconnect them all and go out of business because you fail at being an ISP.
Today's bandwidth usage is more than yesterdays....
I remember when 300 baud modems couldnt deliver enough megs a day.... and now with youtubes, hulus, itunes, torrents, online software distribution, videogames, voip, web browsing, FLASH etc... Broadband requirements are going to increase every damn minute.
If you cant provide it... We'll find other businesses who will.
Is about 100-120 MB each day.
Considering that all those wonderful flash advertisements out there will gobble up about 10-20 MB each day (unless you block them) claiming that most people don't use that much in a year is ridiculous and uninformed.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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will be allowed to create and educate themselves on the internet. The moment someone creates a limit on how much information one can send or access is the moment the divide between rich and poor begins. There is no bandwidth congestion, look at all the other countries with HUGE amounts of bandwidth to each individual person. Over here, we make money by bandwidth limitation. When we should be making money by bandwidth creation like every other country. We suck and so do our companies. We are killing our own culture and limiting creation and education with these bandwidth caps.
Because there are no disabled people or people who work from home in the world, right guys?
Break out the tin foil, but is there any chance that this could be retaliation for being involved in the "anti-cap" campaign?
I use an EVDO Rev A card for field work, and I am a light user. email, web, etc. No Windows service packs, no downloads, no torrent, no itunes, no porn, no movies. The card is expen$ive for data over my limit (3G / month). oh... and I only use it for field work; I don't do my home surfing on it.
I hit 2 G easy every month which is 24 G per year for a VERY light user. If I didn't purposely control my usage it would be very easy to hit 3 G per month.
10 years ago, web pages were 10 to 20 k bytes, now they are 150 to 250k or more. People send picnic pictures attached to emails that total 50 megs. I get my daughters gymnastics notices (single pages with about 600 bytes of text) wrapped in a Word doc with backgrounds and headers that total megabytes. This is a FAT DATA world!
I would certainly say 44G per week is a high user but not extreme.
The ISP may have some legitimacy for surcharging for overage (don't know what "Turbo" is) but cutting off without notice is just plain wrong.
Internet services in america are really bad. Limiting the internet traffic limits? I call that fascism!
IMHO, 77gb a week is excessive for home use.(today, in a few months maybe not) Why not just sign up for business service and eliminate this problem, plus get better service? At home, regular 3mbps service costs $61.01 per month with Comcast, I pay extra for the 6mbps/2mbps service which runs $72.05 per month. Both services generally take 24-48 hours for a tech to arrive on site if there is a a problem. Meanwhile for $79.95 a month you can get business service with a static IP address 3mps upload (download is up to 20mbps depending on where you live), all with a 4 hour response time for service. Seems like a no brainer.
44 GB/week = 76 kB/s. I decided to be nice and seeded 60 GB of ubuntu images in 2 days. Thank god for decent broadband=)
has fouled your spark plugs. Or mebbe clogged your air filter.
Try a tank of premium gas.
that's more than they want users to consume.
Who the fuck are they to tell us how much we can use?
They just sell the unlimited access.
I really hope congress introduces legislation to prevent this bullshit in the future.
unlimited means unlimited!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'm a scientist. I often transfer small portions of our datasets to my home computer so I can look at little things without walking a mile in to the lab. Small portions of 700GB datasets are still quite large. I'm not running a business, I'm just trying to use the connection and hardware I paid for and own respectively.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
How is it different to an all you can eat restaurant who states that
It's stated, that's how.
AT&T and Verizon are arguably "most" of the telecom players in the U.S., and they both pay nice dividends. Comcast pays a smaller dividend, but it is there:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=T
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=VZ
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=CMCSA
Charter recently declared bankruptcy, which is pretty much the exact opposite of providing shareholders with value. Time Warner cable does not pay a dividend:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWC
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
the cable company has something to lose (overpriced stale programming revenues) the more you use the internet. the electrical company will just sell more electricity the more you use the internet.
who cares about if we have less people per transformer in u.s.? bridge the shit and let's move on please.
This is why capitalism failed: because commoners and the intelligent don't understand that no transaction is one-sided except theft (which is why government is theft, by the way).
You aren't the consumer of broadband, you are a party involved in a transaction. You decide that a broadband connection is worth more than the dollars you have. The provider decides that the connection is worth less than the dollars they want. You consume broadband, they consume dollars. You're both providers of something. It's not an equal trade because both of you are profiting.
Here's why you all will fail: unlimited broadband does not mean unlimited data. It means unlimited connect time.
Do you people remember dial-up? You paid by the hour (x.25/Compuserve). That's how it was. Then there were some "unlimited" plans but you'd get disconnected every few hours. You might have still paid for the phone minutes.
Then broadband came along offering unlimited connect time, not data.
Ugh, when will people learn? There's a ton of competition on the broadband-consumer side, but not a ton of competition on the dollar-consumer side that offers broadband. Whose fault is this?
I'd point to the voters of the communities that allow monopolies to exist rather than letting competition reign in pricing.
I'm also an Austin Time Warner customer, I'm locked into them because of my apartment complex, and I recently had a really bad experience with their tech support, so I am not a fan at all. What Time Warner is doing is similar to what AT&T Wireless did when I worked there. In cell phones all of your profit comes from about 10% of customers who do not buy new phones, don't call customer service, and do not upgrade their plans. Time Warner is trying to scare it's customers that do not make them a profit, but cost the company money. Talking about the technical aspects on a forum like slashdot is great, but ultimately there is only one solution. This is a large company and large companies only respond to a large number of complaints. I plan to complain today, and I urge every Austin, if not nation-wide, customer to call and complain. We ARE their customer base and if we remain silent than they can bend us over.
No cable or dsl provider has even attempted to argue that they are offering unlimited time. You are the only person to try that one. Furthermore, here in the uk several ISPs have explicitly claimed unlimited downloads on their advertising before cutting people off for exceeding their FUP.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
What if you're independently wealthy and don't need to have a job?
US taxpayers paid for $200 billion in infrastructure so there should be limits on what Time Warner can do.
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/congressman-to.html
Write your congressman to support this bill
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
I've done that myself - with several unusable downloads of DVD's (maybe it was my burner, who knows), then switching over to CDs.
Add on a few canned VMs, Solaris, and some big software downloads from technet and that's my first weekend of playing with VMWare server.
I don't do it all the time. But I have done it. Heck, this week I downloaded Adobe's Design Premium Suite at about 4GB and it took 3 or 4 tries to get it.
I have VOIP, but I don't talk on it much. I stream video occasionally - usually network TV as I don't use BT very often. We do typically upload 12GB or more a month in photos as well.
I pay for the high end service, but so did this guy. I don't see my usage as out of line. It's extreme at times, but so is most everybody's who is willing to pay to get the best service.
First off, I have to laugh at the folks in Europe and Asia bragging on their Internet infrastructure. This is *not* an infrastructure issue. In the Austin, and Round Rock, Texas area TWC already has huge fiber infrastructure. The cable box for this part of the neighborhood is in my back yard. The fiber bundle going into the box is two inches across.
Back in the middle '90s TWC went billions into debt to build out mixed fiber coax infrastructure. When they opened a ditch they dropped a minimum of four cables. Each cable was 4 inches across and each one contained thousands of fiber strands plus power.
The connection to my home is DOCSIS 2.0 There are 4 Gbps coming in and 1 Gbps going out and more than enough fiber to handle that all the way back to the head end. They have the bandwidth. They have already paid for infrastructure.
So what kind of an issue is it? Two things, good old capitalism and a corrupt government.
TWC is desperately trying to preserve their cable tv business and their telephone business. Having sold an all-you-can-eat service they are finding that people are actually using it that way and the people are using it to bypass TWC. They are using it to use VOIP for dirt cheap prices and service like hulu.com that let them access the video they want when they want it. They do not want to be in the business of selling commodity network transport.
The trouble with commodity network transport as a business is that there a few opportunities to sell high profit premium services. You can only compete on price and performance. And, if there is any competition at all, you find your self in a race to see who can sell the "best" service for the lowest price. TWC and AT&T are scared to death, and will fight anyway they can, to avoid winding up in the commodity transport business.
That is where the corrupt government comes in. Those two companies have manipulated the laws in Texas to their own benefit and are doing the same everywhere else. Look at the laws barring cities and counties from build their own networks. That is like barring governments from building roads. Oh, yeah, governor good hair (Perry) has been trying to eight years to privatize all the long distance roads in Texas. And, he is succeeding to.
Republicans are proof that God hates the USA.
Stonewolf
Or what if I connect to my home PC from work, and stream my personal music collection to my office?
(I don't actually do this, but I have considered setting it up this way.)
There are no set limits in the TWC contract. People are complaining because they are not getting what they paid for which is unlimited usage at a fixed maximum bandwidth.
Stonewolf
Hey - I _might_ get to 5 Gb. this month 'cuz I'm building a new computer and downloading Vista SP1 and some Ubuntu images - 4 of 'em so far, all about a full CD's size. Sooo... I'm supposed to pay as much as people trying to watch movies and TV shows thru the internet instead of warming up their DVR and getting them that way, or via Netflix? I don't think so. Split off a "poweruser" tier between business and home user and it's $80 - $100 a month, while my usage goes to $30 a month. Somebody's gotta pay for all that equipment to keep that big bandwidth available. Shouldn't be me, sitting down here reading slashdot, doing e-mail, and surfing the web. I want to send pix to someone for a magazine, I generally send a CD thru the mail. As for 1st run movies, I'll see you at the theater. Better video, better / louder / higher fidelity sound, sometimes even THX, and better popcorn. Yeah, its expensive. Cry me a river. You get what you pay for.
Daily trafic in my 100/100Mb/s fiber in Sweden.
Date: D-load: U-load:
2009-04-23 25.23GB 290.01GB
2009-04-24 33.08GB 467.41GB
2009-04-25 42.02GB 275.35GB
ISP: www.riksnet.se
"which is why government is theft, by the way"
I LIKE ROADS ASSHOLE
For YEARS, TWC's commercials bragged "unlike dialup it's always on!"
I'm surprised to not see anyone else point out what is really happening. They are attempting to manipulate the data collection process! They collected data in Beaumont which said 86% (or something) of people wouldn't be impacted by their caps. They have now turned their eyes to Austin (and other cities) and started collecting data for their re-education campaign to promote caps. Obviously Austinites user much more and they are seeing this as they look at the data. Therefore, they are simply shutting down "heavy users" during their collection phase. By doing this, they can show that "the average users doesn't consume more than 40GB in a month". The REASON that barely anyone will consume more than that is they close the connection for those who do. Brilliantly evil in a way but a complete manipulation of what they data will say with regard to real usage.
This is why capitalism failed: because commoners and the intelligent don't understand that no transaction is one-sided except theft (which is why government is theft, by the way).
Huh? You had me and then you lost me. Please explain that last part, because I can't see any logic in that statement.
Lets hope these guys are seriously considering the future. Bandwidth usage is going up and will continue to go up. 44 gigs in a week may be more than the _typical_ user on their service but that will change as more services are provided over the net. (Game downloads, HD movie downloads, TV downloads, etc) These things all exist already but I would guess their usage will become heavily mainstream within the next 10. It's high time "unlimited" meant unlimited. ISP's are getting away with too much for too little.
If they're going to price according to amount of data transferred, everyone should get the same speed guarantee, at least where possible (as would be the case with DSL and distance).
Capitalism failed because the Capitalists broke it. It's a false dichotomy. Pure capitalism doesn't work because inherently the only motivation is to make money. When you're willing to do anything to make a profit, including buying politicians who make the laws so that you can have monopoly on the business in that area, then you have effectively broken capitalism.
I really want to start my own municipal cable/internet/telephone service much like the town of Wilson, North Carolina. But I know that would never happen without a really compelling reason. My local town is owned by TW.
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
or knew how to make a new /.
Well anyway here it is:
http://www.multichannel.com/article/195969-Time_Warner_Cable_Tweaks_Bandwidth_Billing_Plans.php
The *sole* problem with heavy users is that light users cannot get enough bandwidth when some heavy users occupy the bandwidth. However, if there are no other users in the network, heavy usage is not a problem at all.
The most direct solution to this problem is to impose a priority scheme in which network packages generated by light users get a higher priority to get through the network.
I see no reason why TWC can't implement this priority scheme, but chooses to "punish" heavy users in other ways.
Governments stole the property the roads were built on in the first place. Roads can be privately owned and operated, and in some places they are. I live on one such road. Government taxes to maintain and build roads are generally paid for by fuel taxes (proper to a certain extent), but large portions of this tax are stolen to fund unrelated projects. Roads are but a small portion of government expenses, local, state, and federal. I don't know about my state's expenses, but locally 2/3 goes to schools, which is theft from those who don't use public schools to indoctrinate children generally. Also the federal level, about 2/3 is (unconstitutional) transfers of money from one group to another. I.e. theft.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
AFAICT, ISPs in the U.S. have been relying on the average bandwidth per user being fairly low. They knew that a few people would be downloading distros and other large files, but lots of their customers would only use email or read blogs. Some ISPs trusted this business model so much that they even started using "no bandwidth caps" as a marketing point. The other ISPs then felt forced to follow the same policy.
Long story short: they bet their businesses on internet usage patterns staying relatively stable.
Of course, internet technology keeps improving, and hence usage patterns keep changing. Internet video is now big (and still growing fast), and people can now (legally!) get their music, films and TV over the internet.
So the ISPs have lost that bet.
What happens next? I expect the ISPs to increase their prices and/or introduce bandwidth limits and/or go out of business.
(I live in Australia, where the ISPs always had usage caps, so my interest is purely intellectual.)
Believe it or not, back in the dial up days we had unlimited for $20/mo., and the number was local so that cost nothing extra. I was fairly young, so there might have been a usage cap without me knowing, but we never once couldn't connect. Go Concentric!
Your ad here.
Where we're going we don't need roads.
They need to hurry up with those flying cars. And now .
Your ad here.
There's no way someone can use 44GB in a week on legal content.
You are either, 1. Mistaken, 2. Misinformed, 3. Lying or 4. Trolling.
Hulu, Youtube, iTunes, Netflix, MusicMatch and a plethora of other services are high bandwidth and completely legal.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Was looking at doing that with my phone so that I can play any of my music or vids from my home storage bin anywhere, however trying to find a phone company in australia that would let me download 10G or so a month on my mobile without it costing upwards of $5,000AU was impossible.
...
Kids these days reading too much Ayn Rand and not enough Hobbes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
This is why capitalism failed: because commoners and the intelligent don't understand that no transaction is one-sided except theft (which is why government is theft, by the way).
So government is theft, by definition? (by your standards) Then please stop using roads, ignore the police (they may not do their job properly, but that is another issue, imagine what the world would be like with NO police at all), please don't expect any kind of help if you were born with a handicap, don't expect the navy to step in and protect you in case of war, etc, etc, etc. While we're at it, please stop breathing.
Thank you.
I'm not saying anything is milk and honey, but there are some not-so-dark sides to this government theft you're talking about. Again, please stop breathing.
So explain to me where it clearly states the limits on Data?
You know, that's an important part of a contract. If they are going to sell you a service, and what you agree to is an "always on" connection at X speed, it is reasonable to assume that connection will always be on at X speed, or close to it. In fact, just browsing the website, there is no disclaimer, or any statement restricting the service. It is quite reasonable to assume this connection has no limits, because they didn't place any limits on it! Not that they told you about, not that you agree to. BTW, in case you don't get it, it's the "agree to" part that is important. You have to agree to it to make it legal
It is quite unreasonable to expect someone to make an odd jump to "unlimited time" from "Always on at X speed". Never mind the fact that, by disconnecting this guy they did not fulfill "always on" or "unlimited time" of your argument.
Your argument is bogus no matter how you look at it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
So as soon as I heard the rumors about TWC implementing bandwidth caps I installed Cacti to poll my wireless router and monitor my usage. I work from home over a VPN, listen to some streaming music and play some games, watch a few videos here and there. I'm using between 5-10Gb per week and this is just normal Internet use.
If those bastards cut off my account I will *not* be a happy camper. They sold me unlimited Internet and they had better honor their commitment!
I need some help with this. Is bandwidth a non renewable resource? The reason I ask this is because I thought the problem with heavy users is they soak up the bandwidth and slow down the whole network. So how does putting download caps fix this? If I download 500GBs a month between 2am and 5am and some dude downloads 200GBs a month between 5pm and 9pm, who's the bigger problem?
If you tell them the real reason you're cancelling 1) The company doesn't really care. They want to get rid of you. You're wasting your breadth. 2) If you tell them you're moving, they'll try to sell you the service where you're moving to. Unless you tell them overseas!
So when it came time for me to cancel service many years ago, I lied. I told them "I have a severe case of CARPEL TUNNEL SYNDROME". I got no resistance. They can't really ask you any more question, or you'd have to be a real douche to. I was off the phone in about 1 minute, service cancelled and tech picked up my modem. I told them it was really hard for me to drive (truth, I do not have a car).
So Time Warner Cable didn't get their way with their bullshit tiered plans, so now they're throwing a temper tantrum and taking it out on their customers? Fuck them with a spiked mace, I say. I hope they get driven out of business, and good riddance to them!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Of course pure capitalism doesn't work, neither does pure socialism. However, capitalism requires less effort to be made to work well than socialism.
The key is to leverage the "willing to do anything to make a profit". It's called MOTIVATION, and greed is a very effective motivator. Properly leveraged it can be extremely beneficial with very little effort. Socialism lacks this kind of motivator, as very few people are actually inspired to do their best work based on "the good of the people", and most modern socialism relies leaching off what is left of the capitalism in the system.
"Capitalism" didn't fail, it just did what it always has and always will do. What may have failed (and it hasn't gotten there yet folks, these things take time to play out and work out) is our leveraging of capitalism in this instance. And who do we appoint to make sure capitalism is leveraged to our best benefit (via regulations on industry)? That's right, local, state, and federal representatives.
So where is the failure? Is it capitalism doing what it has always done, and will always continue to do? Or was it the government's failure to reign it in? If a government official can be bribed, that's not a failure of capitalism.
Who set up these monopolies in the first place? Who CAN set up these monopolies? Only one entity, and that is the Government of these United States. I suggest you read up on the history of our telecomunications network. There were good reasons for it, but the monopolies created the current situation, and we have done little to fix it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The problem in the US is very low population density we always hear that lame excuse. But many (if not all) of your high density city have sucky broadband access. Only countryside and small cities would have a problem with low density. The *SOLE* problem you have is the partially again one you cited in the next sentence. The problem in the US is very low population density combined with a duopoly when it comes to internet service. The problem is that many high density corner of the US have a partial or full monopoly, not even a duopoly. So there you have it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Before you flame me, read the rest.
I never signedup, bought or paid for 'unlimited bandwidth'.
I did however sign up and pay for unlimited usage for the original agreed on bandwidth.
In the years I've had my service I've seen at least 3 'bandwidth upgrades'. We started off at something like 2-3MB/s down and 256k up I believe, its been years and I don't recall exactly.
Since then the downstream has went to 5MB/s then 8MB/s and an inside source tells me that once the DOCSIS 3 upgrades are tested and complete in the area, we'll get another bump to 10MB/s (no where near what DOCSIS3 can provide, but 10MB/s is plenty for any normal home, overkill if you think about it and if they actually delivered it).
They do this so they can come out and advertise and tell us how great they are for upgrading their network. All the while, I still don't actually see anything faster outside of their internal network test site because their backbones aren't upgraded at the same pace.
When I signed up, there were roughly 200k users in my 'region'. There where sometime last year around 1.2 million.
If you take a look at their external connections, they have been upgraded FAR slower and no where near fast enough to keep up with the increased load on their network.
The last mile has nothing to do with this, its all about those 20 or so links to the rest of their world off their network and how they don't want to pay for those.
Stop fucking telling me about how you're giving more more bandwidth and just make what I fucking have actually work like you claim it without the bullshit fine print off white text one white background small print that is illegible on a television that says you won't actually get those speeds to anywhere that matters.
I'll gladly take 3MB/s unlimited usage I signed up for over 10MB/s internal speeds with no where near that to the real world and random introduction of caps and limits as they determine based on arbitrary rules.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
On top of that, most of the taxes you pay are social security and medicare, which are mostly just transferring wealth to yourself - that is, from the current economically viable you, to the economically non-viable you (who received public education as a child, or will receive health care and a paycheck in old age). I'll grant SS gives better returns to some than others by design, but it's not nearly 100% redistributive. Put another way, SS and Medicare are politically "hard to kill" because they benefit so many people, which is to say, they're not so bad after all. Democracy works.
To what are you referring? Are you aware that the vast majority of people who pay into social security ultimately receive a payout from it as well?
In neighborhoods where one bandwidth hog is interfering with others' experience, they should just throttle you. But they should also:
*Tell you up front when you'll be throttled
*Tell you what the throttling will be
For example, they can announce this to all customers:
*During times of heavy network contention, heavy use by one user can interfere with other users. Therefore, until we get your neighborhood upgraded, your neighborhood will be subject to throttling during times of heavy use. To be fair, users who infrequently use the service will be given priority during times of congestion. During a congestion situation, users who have used more than 1000% of the average user's usage in the last 30 days will be limited to 75% of their stated bandwidth. If congestion remains, they will be limited to 50%, then 25%, then 10% of their stated bandwidth. If congested still remains, users who have used more than 500% of the average user's usage in the last 30 days will be similarly limited. If congestion remains, users who have used more than 150% of the average user's usage will be similarly limited, followed by all remaining users. Users can check their last-30-days usage, their neighborhood's 1000%, 500%, and 150% of average usage cutoff values, and their neighborhood's current congestion level at http://www.ispname.com/customercare/youraccountname/usage. Current congestion levels are based on the last 10 minutes.
The exact numbers and who gets priority are just there for examples, it's the principle of "if you've already eaten a lot this month, let other people to the front of the line when there is a line."
In cases where the entire local system is congested, do the same but add city-wide congestion levels.
In cases where the ISP has resources available but those resources have an incremental cost, such as the cost of transmitting traffic to other networks that it does not have peering arrangements with, they should either eat the cost, raise rates for some or all customers, or redo their rate structure entirely.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
'Turbo' simply takes advantage of unused time slices on the cable network to give a user more bandwidth than the standard amount that can be shared by all users at any given time.
On a given network segment assume (these are completely BS numbers to make it easy):
100 users
100 'time slices' per period of time (for example 1 second)
100MB/s of bandwidth is available per time slice, or 10GB/s total
100MB/s of bandwidth per user on that segment to the termination point (CMTS units that terminate your cable modem service and hook it into the rest of the network)
Each cable modem gets 1 time slice per time unit to send data, and that gives them 100MB/s average speed.
The 'Turbo' part has the CMTS and the cable modem working together to say:
Hey, only 40 modems are using their time slices, we have 60 spare. Your cable modem is using ALL of its time slice and would like more. So the CMTS and the cable modem agree that they will use 2 time slices for a period of time while the network is under utilized, now you've got 200MB/s and no one else notices a difference in their performance.
When the network becomes more saturated and those other timeslices are needed by other cable modems so your extra time slices are revoked and you go back to your single time slice so others on your segment get what they've paid for.
Time Warner actually limits the amount of time you get those extra time slices as well, which is fine since they are still (in theory) giving you what you actually paid for, the 100MB/s. The rest is just extra. A partial problem occurs however as their advertising will slowly shift to just telling you how fast you CAN get when no one else is using the network, which they already do to some extent by telling you a speed that you can get if their backbones weren't so ridiculously oversold.
Now, in reality it isnt' based on time slices at all, its based on unused frequencies and harmonics and all that stuff.
Really however, this isn't anything new. Pretty much every shared networking system on the planet works this way. Most shared networks aren't nearly as well behaved as a cable modem network. Ethernet for example does this exact thing, but there isn't anything built into the protocol to make sure everyone gets their fair share, whoever happens to do the best at collision avoidance and retransmitting can monopolize a Ethernet based network. Token ring on the other hand would be a perfect example of how 'turbo' can be fairly implemented at layer 2 as each node in the ring gets its fair shot as a talker, the more nodes that give up their token, the more other nodes can use that token without the possibility of it being monopolized by one loud mouth.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You know, I don't have to be on the computer for it to be streaming. Computers are amazing devices that do work for us. One of the things mine does is near-constant uploads to a remote backup site... while I'm at work.
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I send them a letter saying that I cancel at the last payment made. I then cancel the future payments.
In the UK, this is part of the direct debit guarantee.
Mine is 260 GB in one month. My limit is supposed to be 60 GB. Yes, I finally got contacted by Telus to warn me of my usage and I've brought it down.
"Well I can't disconnect over the phone, you have to bring the equipment to your local office."
Or you could just download 44 gigs and he'll figure it out.
Then broadband came along offering unlimited connect time, not data.
That's simple wrong. I NEVER get "unlimited" connect time- I am limited to 30 x 24 x 60 minutes per month, sometimes 31 x 24 x 60. Heck, a few months ago, I only got 28 x 24 x 60 minutes.
I don't know about my state's expenses, but locally 2/3 goes to schools, which is theft from those who don't use public schools to indoctrinate children generally
do you really want to live in a world where the people that cant afford school dont get it?.
Sure enough ... the joke became reality.
Because there are no disabled people or people who work from home in the world, right guys?
Err...Disabled people are people....
No; cutting off without notice should be just plain illegal - as should be capping without requiring a simple to use monitoring tool that clearly warns the user to stop before running off the edge of the cliff.
Of course, this is based on the laughable assumption the FCC actually has a pair.
you really want to live in a world where the people that cant afford school dont get it?.
Yes, because that will never happen.
Education should be competitive. If it was, we'd see TONS of competitors reaching every level of education need. I know a few megacorporations would love to get into it, but I also know some local parents who would love to start their own local learning centers.
Wal*Mart offers generic drugs to the uninsured for $4 per month. Thank you, Wal*Mart. Target offers relatively decent, designer-designed clothes for under $20. Thank you, Target.
Education is not a right, but it also shouldn't cost $15,000 per year per kid. How ridiculous. Thank you, State, for making education too expensive at EVERY level by over-subsidizing bad educators.
Seriously, what's wrong with you people? 44GB in a week? I think I average about 1-1.5 *TB* in a week, I pay about 30 USD, and my ISP does not whine and keep delivering what they promise.
This is 2009. Internet is not supposed to be a 5 minute/day batch download of email, it's a fully interactive real time media. You can transmit and receive any information you want to and from any location in the world, whenever you want. An idle switch cost as much for your ISP as a used switch. Start using it.
c++;
I'm sick of hearing this excuse from Americans as an excuse to why Korean, Japanese, and Europeans have long since leapfrogged us in technology infrastructures.
Since when is the ability to stream crappy movies per household a measure of tecnological infrastructure?
I'll admit that I have used our free "friends and family" in-network calling the same way. Average call was ~2 hours, about the length of my daughter's nap...
I live in Austin, and I moved recently, and after the tech guy went up in my attic, I ended up with the cable modem being set up in a bedroom.
After he left, a lady purporting to be from TW called. She said it was very important that I not move my cable modem. She repeated herself 3 times but wouldn't tell me why.
I sort of didn't believe it, and so I moved it soon after to use with my XBox360, because that pig is wired.
Works fine. I was wondering if maybe they installed a usage meter on just one outlet or something. That seemed pretty tinfoil-ish, but now that I see this story, and it relates to Austin specifically, I wonder.
1) Social Security money has a negative rate of return.
2) Social Security money is not put into a bank where you get to draw from in the future. The money you pay in now is used now. It does not even have to be used for health-care.
3) If you've ever seen a couple try to live on Social Security, you'd be mad about #1 and #2.
4) $100/mo from 18-65 in the S&P 500 is about million dollars, which would give easily 80,000 a year withdrawal without hurting the principle, or 6600/month to live on. The highest social security comes out to about 20,000 a year, or 1600/month. Social Security hurts those it is supposed to help.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Er, /s/health-care Social Security Checks
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
They need to hurry up with those flying cars. And now .
So invent antigravity already. Dig up some inertron somewhere, and sell it to Detroit. Until then, we'll have to drive ground vehicles, and make due with VariEzes.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Education should be competitive. If it was, we'd see TONS of competitors reaching every level of education need.
uh, no, you'd get rural places with little to no education or crappy education because there isn't any money for it.
Funny thing about capitalism...it goes where it can make money. Gov't serves *everybody*, even in cases where it loses money. It is a form of socialism and it works quite well thank you very much.
As for Walmart, the drug offering is indeed a nice gesture, but its a blatant attempt to draw people into stores that give their community a net *loss* of jobs. Walmart is also a prime example of our trade imbalance with China, they wouldn't be so cheap if they weren't getting it all from China. Now because of their size, everybody has to be that cheap and we lose jobs that could be done here, but are just cheaper to do in China. Quality is less (lead in baby toys) and the money leaves our country for theirs. No 'trickle' down affect as the money is respent through the economy.
I happily agree that some education programs aren't economical, but I'd say most are reasonably well run. The system can use tweaking and innovative ideas, and yes, even some firings, but all in all we've got a pretty damn good education system in this country.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Most weeks I'll be over that, heck in a good afternoon I'll be over that. What exactly do they consider too much I wonder. So much for video on demand and such.
but locally 2/3 goes to schools, which is theft from those who don't use public schools to indoctrinate children generally.
And just who do you think is going to be paying for your sorry ass in retirement? Its today's kids. Sure you may have enough extra, but the current system relies on today's workers to pay for today's retirees benefits. Most people will need *some* help in retirement, and an uneducated workforce ain't the brightest idea.
As for roads, sure private roads exist, but only with gov't oversight. What stops someone from buying *your* road and charging you $1000 a trip? hmmm? Me thinks you'd like gov't in that case. Or did you want to pass the full cost of roads and utilities into the price of housing? nice work there putting houses out of reach of most people, that'll sure help the economy!
Gov't is about spreading out societies costs so that society as a WHOLE prospers better than it could if everybody had to pay for absolutely everything they used or consumed. You come out much better in the long run.
Hey, maybe your neighbor has swine flu but can't pay for treatment? or did you just want them to keep spreading it or even die?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
When the cable company got the right of way to build out the system in your town it was governed by your local cable commission(at least in the North East of the US). Basically saying what they could and could not do, what services they had to provide (ie Public access facilities and the likes) Maybe its time to tap those people in this instance if it is deemed that they are in violation of their contract with your town then the cable commission can levee fines and revoke the right of ways ( at least in the town I lived in). the cable company, in this case TW, will have to sell and move out of the town/city. If your cable commission members do not comply with the request of the constituents then I'm not sure what the recourse would be. but it is nice to know that there is some recourse locally.
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
by running an app that continuously download some of the websites graphics, using up their allocated bandwidth? Perhaps if enough users continuously downloaded iso's and torrents we could teach time Warner what heavy bandwidth is.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
FIOS.
Now only if they would wire my building. Grr...
No, it's a success of capitalism, any trade is a good trade.
You seem to be making the argument that a mixture of capitalism and socialism is still capitalism, therefore capitalism wins. Nice try, but no cigar.
If you can read this you've gone too far.
Even during months when I don't use bittorrent, I can still rack up 5-10 Gigabytes of traffic per month. Bittorrent triples or quadruples that. I send e-mail, surf, play streaming music for several hours per week, watch videos on YouTube, get software updates (Linux distro.), online F.P.S. games, etc. I pay for high speed ADSL at 3/1.5. Down never goes above 2.7, up never hits 1.5, and I have a monthly cap of 60GB/month, with a surcharge of $1/GB/month (which I'm all very happy with). I have never blown the 60GB cap although there are a few months when I've come close. I usually get to about half way. 44 GB is quite a bit, but depending on the service, not unreasonable. I would suggest that if some tech. says he's using too much bandwidth, either court or another service provider are in order. We are all quite aware that things are not 'tubes', and half the dot-com bust was from hardware manufacturers who couldn't sell new hardware because software got better at the same time. Suddenly there was too much bandwidth to go around. See JDS Uniphase, 360 Networks, etc. There is still more than enough bandwidth to go around for everyone. Look at Japan with 1.5GB/s fiber in every home. Time/Warner are being mental (tech. too).
This is an outrage. And, I bet, he can't even get high speed internet from another company because they have the territory locked up. http://www.aarongreenlee.com/
I agree with the argument, but cable and telco in the US have never made a good effort to clarify their expectations and to clarify customer usage expectations. They advertise "unlimited" and "always on" everywhere with mention of bandwidth limitations in the fine print of a TOS somewhere.
if companies were SERIOUS about limiting usage, first they'd need to issue new hardware routers capable of letting the user monitor and control their own usage. Whether it be by time or by choosing my own throttling, if I, me, can't control the flow from my end adequately, then they're pissing up a rope. Think about power or water... I can go and watch the meter on my house every day if I think I need to control it... what does the cable/telco give me to monitor their wire at my end?
Second, if they are serious about limiting bandwidth (and I understand being "gated communities" they are "leechers" on the internet so can't get better rates through peering) They should start issuing monthly usages to all accounts. Then they need to start issuing billing showing daily usage with breakouts by hour (or time periods) so that "power" users can see what they're doing. After 6 months of identifying usage to customers, then they can conduct negotiations with their customers to address their financial concerns about usage! As you point out BOTH sides need to see usage capping as a negotiation and cable/telcos don't really think they have to put forth reasonable rates (I believe overages are billed at 100X market bandwidth rate which is unacceptable negotiation with a customer)
That's the REAL problem with the article. The TOS is not being enforced in a uniform manner, it's being followed capriciously, and without proper notification... it may be the letter of the contract, but if they haven't been enforcing it before, then the cable company is in the wrong. This isn't plates at the "all you can eat"... if the cable/telco was a real utility, they'd provide a means to measure at the customer's site, until they start to do that, they can stuff it.
I agree. Even here in Moscow (capital of Russia) now we have something like symmetrical 30Mbit connection for 40$. Completely uncapped. Seeded 3TB/month of ubuntu CDs and such in a month and nobody have any complaints. And that is in 10M city of country with average population density far lower than in US.
Somehow I've got about 6 competing network providers to choose from. There were attempts to introduce caps about 4 years ago, but they failed miserably -- who wants limited "unlimited" plan, anyway...
$20 per month at 56k will only ever be 5Gb max (when I added it up a long time ago) That's assuming you never hang up the phone to make calls, i.e. you were limited by a trickle of bandwidth and a need to use the line for other purposes.
The present situation is that cable/telco are installing massive pipes to use for Video on Demand and other services. They're trying to play both sides. They want all the houses to have always-on service to the cable boxes at high bandwidth speeds and siphon a part of that off for internet use. They're massively over-selling the lines offering 6-10Mb service 24x7. They can't afford the internet bill for more than a few customers actually using what they were "promised".
They don't WANT to clarify that the "all-you-can-eat" plan is really a "10-plate-per-day" plan because the FTC and customers using "11 Plates" will start to get upset because that's not what they were sold. They also don't seem to be negotiating fairly in the matter... they are charging $60 for plates 1-10 and $25 for plate #11 and customers are getting rightfully pissed off. They do it without notice and without negotiation or offer of a reasonable higher tier for plates 10-20.
except that the people that run wall street did such a good job making sure the banks were properly protecting their money... now imagine if YOUR Social Security was suddenly taken away because of what happened in the last 9 months!
Hi fellow Comcast subscriber!
It's still theft because you are loaning your money to government at an extremely low interest rate. Technically the interest rate is 0% because you only get adjustments for inflation. If you give your friend a 0% loan, you are taxed on the difference between a market rate loan and your 0% because it is determined to be a gift.
> Time Warner technician called me back and lectured me for using 44 gigabytes in one week," Howard wrote. Howard was then "educated" about his usage. "According to her, that is more than most people use in a year," Howard said.'"
Here in Australia we're a technological backwater with an antiquated phone system run by monopoly. Our ISPs charge far too much and have been capping us for years.
Yet even in a backwater here ISPs like TPG offer 150Gb a month plan and Supernerd a 200Gb a month plan. There are many people on these plans. I find it hard to believe America, largely uncapped, would be using less. So 44Gb a week sounds pretty normal. I'd say the Time Warner technician (who, let me guess, didn't give their real name despite knowing Ryan Howard's) was full of sh*t and hiding behind that wonderful thuggish corporate anonymity.
XYZ Government Program hurts those it is supposed to help.
fixed that for you
There is no right to an education, and nobody except your parents is obligated to provide you with one. The reason public schools exist, and the reason there's a law that says you have to go, is that that is society's way of preventing the neighborhood from filling up with illiterates. This helps to protect property values.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
YOUR taxes don't pay squat for schools, no matter how high they are. Businesses pay the majority of property tax, they pay tax on the real value of equipment and goods (like computers, cars, and inventory) and they pay at typically double the rate home owners pay (as most states give home owners big discounts businesses don't see).
Businesses get good value for tax money. They get roads to transport their employees, clients, and goods. They get police and fire service to protect their property. They get courts to mediate disputes. They get schools to train the population so there is a good pool of cheap labor.
The idea that ISPs should just let people use as much bandwidth as they want is kind of ridiculous. When some people are using in one week as much as others use in one year, it only makes sense to charge the heavy users more money. You know sort of like...every other utility on the planet. You pay for the amount of electricity you use, you pay for the amount of water you use, telephone service you use, etc .....
I am one of the people who use a ton of bandwidth so yes I am saying that I should be paying more than others.
That said, if it the company doesn't have such a policy in place, it's obviously wrong to be cut off for using a lot of bandwidth and I would be extremely pissed if it happened to me.
Not only that, but he seems to be ignorant of the fact that government is a two-sided transaction: the voters pay taxes to finance the activities of the government they supposedly elected. The transaction becomes one-sided only if the government ceases to do the taxpayer's will. Thus the whole point of the exercise is to come up with a way to get the government to keep its side of the deal, which incidentally is the same problem as with, say, a plumber or a roofer one paid a deposit to, but made vastly more complex as they are multiple "customers" here, many with directly contradictory to each other's demands.
this is where the rubber-meets-the-road in the discussion of network neutrality folks!
See, Content providers want Cable companies to pay lots extra for the privilege of hosting VoD services because if "everybody did it" it would cut into secondary sales of their media products. Content providers have no problem setting up their OWN websites, using ISP (cable) bandwidth, but keeping the ad revenue for themselves. This is the problem in the system.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have "cable" plans anymore. We'd just have one pipe and access to TV shows everywhere thru our ISP, or if the show wasn't hosted on our ISP, it would be on an "affiliate". The shows would be "inside" the ISP network, so the cost would be effectively zero to transmit. This is where net neutrality gets in the way... what's to keep people to the shows they paid for, and not getting torrents or going behind the ISPs back to Hulu? As soon as you start identifying which content is "shows" then you allow the ISP to break neutrality. If you don't let them limit shows, then they limit all streams or big files... then your Linux distro gets cut off for being too big.
Who gets to write up the new rules? We don't NEED cable and telco anymore, we could do with just one service now. The problem is that one service would have to be pure data and fast enough to stream all your shows on while the other would be pure content providing. It means Comcast/TWC and Att/Verison would have to merge/go away.
I'm a TWC/RR customer and if they suddenly pulled this on me, I'd have their asses in court for a Contract Violation in a damn hurry. My Contract specifically states that I have 256K up and 512K down bandwidth available 24/7 and yes I sometimes push that cap by using BT to seed/share latest Linux Distro. Another issue is that I have up to 6 computers on the same IP with 4 of them being on a WiFi connection but unlike many others, I actually use the minimal security features of the router (Listed Mac Restrictions - Secure Passwords - NO SSID Beacon) along with having the wifi set to 802.11b mode only (salved conflict issues with several "G" routers in neighborhod). Yes it would cost money to get a lawyer to take em to court but in my case and state (California) I'd be able to do so successfully as the state has already ruled that changes in a T.O.S. is not enforceable as a contract provision because any terms changed in a T.O.S forces a change to the contract, which then has to actually be signed for by the customer. The state feels the same way about EULA's, which are unenforceable as they include terminology that basically creates a One Sided Contract, defeating the entire purpose of contract law (meeting of 2 parties in agreement).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
If you like Korea so much, go there! It stinks almost all the time, and I don't mean the breath of everybody but you. It just stinks like shit all the time.
But the Aussies are charged between 50c and $1 per gig, so it's hardly "unlimited." Over here, Telstra are still selling "broadband" plans with a 200MB per month cap! That's not even enough to check email and keep windows and your virus software up to date.
Not exactly sure how this relates to CO2 production though.
sustainable living
I'm in Austin and they haven't cut me off yet. But maybe that's coming soon ...
Clearly there are a lot of assumptions in that figure. If everybody invested in S&P 500 stocks on the scale necessary to replace Social Security, the returns would go down because there would be too much capital. That might sound like an unfounded assumption, but look at it this way, all monetary sleight of hand aside, the world GDP in any given year almost exactly equals world consumption. That is, few goods can be stored for years, and services cannot be stored at all. Imagine, hypothetically the whole population stashed away lots of cash, but only had a few kids. So when they were old, there would be lots of money in banks but very few able-bodied workers. What would those savings be worth then? Getting your bedpan changed would probably cost $10,000.
So my point is, everybody simultaneously getting rich though mass investing is simply not going to happen. By in large, on average, adjusted for inflation, you will get back what you put in plus a little more. US history to date, especially post-war US, was a historical anomaly because the nation was so rich in under-utilized natural resources so the population was rapidly growing, and other nations were relatively under-developed so wealth was pouring in from all over the world. Those things aren't as true any more and probably won't be as true again.
You wrote '33 KB' (instead of 33 'Kb') when you calculated that.
P.S. Talking about numbers like that without adjusting for inflation is extremely misleading. If those are 2009 dollars, that means you're talking about somebody who started saving $100/mo when they were 18 which was 47 years ago, in 1962. That's the equivalent of an 18 year old now saving $705/mo! How many 18 year olds are capable of that? Furthermore, if retiring at 65 now, you have about 20 years to go, so that will be more like $44K inflation adjusted by the time you die. Is that enough? Probably not, but there's really no telling - remember, you are assuming no medicare safety net, so you are quite likely to incur hundreds of thousands in medical expenses, though it will be extremely variable. Thus the only way to be sure is an extremely expensive private insurance policy, which you won't be able to get at all unless you have the good fortune of clean health record.
go fuck yourself you dumb cunt
Thank you for sparing me unnecessary explanation.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think I stream about 5 hours every day. Not on my computer but my denon reciever, it often plays a stream from I come home to I go to bed. In the weekend it sometimes run all day. And sometimes I just turn down the volume for an hour or two and it is still playing the stream.
But a girl in my class in high school did for about a year. She had straight As while she was there too.
When she came back she was about half a year short in her math education and the half she did cover in the USA she had to relearn to do without using a calculator.
And our math professor made fun of her because of that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I hit 2 G easy every month which is 24 G per year for a VERY light user.
That's easy to fix? Disable images, add FlashBlock, NoScript, AdBlock and Filter.G Updater to Firefox.
In your email client, change and select to read all standard mail in plain text.
[End Of Line]
Most Australian ISPs offer you options if you do go over.
Internode has a reasonable option of buying a data pack, at $2.50/GB, which is quite reasonable considering the high cost of backhaul from Australia. Other ISPs allow you the choice of shaping to 64Kb or 128Kb when you go over, or allowing them to invoice, at $5/GB to $10/GB. (Telstra is the outlier, and charge ~$150/GB, but no one who knows computers uses Telstra)
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I keep seeing TW's 'unlimited' claim compared to all-you-can-eat restaurants' similar advertisements, but I don't think any of you have ever seen your brothers get kicked out of a Cici's for eating too much for too long, or heard similar stories from your dad about his brothers decades earlier.
By that logic, you're also living on stolen property right now.
I hope you intend to give it back to the native inhabitants of the land, and go back to where you belong.
Unlimited *connect time*? On an unswitched circuit?
Wow...how much connect time do you have on your water supply?
Or your electrical power?
That's unlimited too? What a paradise!
-=Maggie Leber=-
For those of you who wish to keep track of how much bandwidth you're using, FreeMeter's an open source meter for XP that lets you both monitor your speed, chart that shit out and you can set it to alert you when you hit whatever limit you set it to. A must if you're in Texas, are a TW customer anywhere else or like to tether. Sourceforge, yo, it's legit.
Download!
and didn't we already pay these scumsucking leeches several bil$ for that? What was it... 10 years ago?
FUCK THEM.
ps - captcha - IRATELY
Watch in awe as TWC continues its petulant tantrum! No metering for them? No better connections for us! No one gets anything *nice if they can't have what they want!
(*barely standard)
This has nothing to do with pure capitalism. These providers are granted monopolies by the government and that is the exact opposite of capitalism.
Yeah.. pure capitalism doesn't exactly work.. the arguement goes something like this:
Sometimes everyone benefits from Free Market.
Therefore, sometimes not everyone benefits from Free Market.
We should have a system in place to protect people when Free Market goes really sour. Lets call it Government Regulation.
But conversely a government regulated economy also doesnt exactly work.. it goes something like this:
Sometimes everyone benefits from Government Regulation.
Therefore, sometimes not everyone benefits from Government Regulation.
We should have a system in place to protect people when Government Regulation goes sour. Lets call it Free Market.
Currently, these providers are Government Regulated in a harmfull way. A 3rd party cannot come in and provide fair competition: They arent afforded immediate equal access, and are usualy even prevented from ever gaining equal access.
I appreciate your strong views against capitalism.. but do us all a favor and keep the bullshit ones to yourself.
"His name was James Damore."
We've just come off the back of the biggest glut of easy money yet not one ISP seems to have taken advantage of it to lay more fibre. If there was an easy bet to be made five years ago, betting that bandwidth demand would increase would be that bet.
There was easy money out there, yet no one seems to have taken advantage of it. No one seems to have invested in laying more cable in the last quarter. It seems that most capitalists these days are risk-averse. Which to me is very sad.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
A single season of a TV show in 720p HD on iTunes is... 30GB.
The entire run of Battlestar Galactica (+ the miniseries) is 105GB.
It really isn't hard to use 44GB.
Lol, my router stats report that so far this month I've downloaded ~738 gigs, and uploaded some 443 gigs.. :-)
No transfer caps here
And yes, most of that traffic is indeed BitTorrent, but mostly not illegal!
Unlimited != infinite.
You got unlimited time insofar as that no limit was imposed on you. The fact that you were only able to connect for a finite amount of time due to the fact that only a finite amount of time actually passed is irrelevant.
Yeah, I know, it's a joke, woosh, and all that. :) But I still felt compelled to point it out, as many people confuse "unlimited" and "infinite" (and "endless", which is still different).
So, if you only use 40mb a week that means they will lower your bill? The door needs to swing both ways if your going to punish people for using unmetered bandwidth you should reward those that don't. Whats happening here is the kind of class action that keeps lawyers driving their Tesla's.
Because there are no disabled people or people who work from home in the world, right guys?
Err...Disabled people are people....
I was going to ask you what part of GP's response made you think that he thought disabled people weren't people, but then I realized that you mentally parenthesized GP's response incorrectly. He didn't ask:
Because there are no (disabled people or people) who work from home in the world, right guys?
Rather, he asked:
Because there are no (disabled people) or (people who work from home) in the world, right guys?
Personally, I think it's time to design a new version of the English language that's LR(1).
That's simple wrong. I NEVER get "unlimited" connect time- I am limited to 30 x 24 x 60 minutes per month, sometimes 31 x 24 x 60. Heck, a few months ago, I only got 28 x 24 x 60 minutes.
Guess AOL was really on the bleeding edge then with their 31.25 x 24 x 60 service.
...Stu
I wrote a letter to the FCC. I was promised "always on" for my DSL. "No dial-up." Well, this was back before PPPoE. They decided to change the service to include PPPoE, and routers didn't support it well at that point. They had software you had to install. So I complained that my DSL wasn't operational unless I had a "dial-up" program running and connected. They moved me back to DHCP (the real problem was that PPPoE encapsulation broke my VPN, and it was too new for them to be responsive to that). So yes, you can have "connect time" on an unswitched circuit. Think of it like electrical where the breaker tripped every time you left the house.
Learn to love Alaska
Socialism is not communism, but for a lot of brainwashed americans these two somehow got mixed up.
LEt alone, you have little understanding of definition of capitalism. Arguably, USA currently is very close to socialism, ironically. Much more than Sweden. How much $$$ do you guys have in 401k's and pension funds? Do you know how many of those are invested in your own workplace? That's taking about "collective ownership of production means".
XYZ U.S. Government Program hurts those it is supposed to help.
Fixed that for you. You only need to look at your neighbor north to see that things don't have to be that way. And maybe learn a thing or two, instead of whining about evil government oppressing you with taxes...
The first link doesn't seem to say anything about 200 billion. where did you get that figure from?
A claim like that needs to be backed up, or you should be modded down.
I subscribe to Cogeco Cable Internet up here in Canada and they disconnected my Internet service for sending too much email [ie. a virus or worm.] That's fair but it was the way they did it: the service was just disconnected not even a static page telling me to call the office.
At first I thought it was my new distro, just installed, so I tried it with an older computer and an earlier version of Linux. No luck. Then I replaced the router. No luck. Next was a windows laptop, wireless and wired. No luck. Cables? No Joy.
Finally, I called the office and they turned my connection back on and advised me how to clean up our virus problem. It turns out it was my Son's laptop which was never here when I was scanning for viruses.I subscribe to Cogeco Cable Internet up here in Canada and they disconnected my Internet service for sending too much email [ie. a virus or worm.] That's fair but it was the way they did it: the service was just disconnected not even a static page telling me to call the office.
At first I thought it was my new distro, just installed, so I tried it with an older computer and an earlier version of Linux. No luck. Then I replaced the router. No luck. Next was a windows laptop, wireless and wired. No luck.
Finally, I called the office and they turned my connection back on and advised me how to clean up our virus problem. It turns out it was my Son's laptop which was never here when I was scanning for viruses.
I've always been taught not to have your money in the stock market if you need it within the next ten years. There are less risky investments, at that point.
Unlimited != infinite.
Unlimited
1 : lacking any controls : unrestricted
2 : boundless, infinite
3 : not bounded by exceptions : undefined
infinite
1: extending indefinitely : endless
2: immeasurably or inconceivably great or extensive : inexhaustible
3: subject to no limitation or external determination
Honestly, check out Grande Communications. It's a local (Texas-based) ISP that is available throughout a lot of Austin and they provide superior service to TWC. They have second-tier support that will do on-site repairs over the weekend. You'll NEVER get someone from TWC out over the weekend. First or second tier.
Grande is currently offering 300 digital cable channels, 8mb internet, and a hard-wired land line for $94 per month.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This incident happened to me as well in Austin, TX. What the security center guy told me was that they only shut your service down if it's causing issues to other users in the area. i.e. VoIP users. I think he cited something like 27 gigs in a week, which I don't think is that much. The funny thing is, I had just upgraded to RoadRunner Turbo through their 3 months free promotion, and that's likely to be the culprit because now downloads are pulling at 2x to 3x the bandwidth as before, which can contribute to congestion of other users in the area. Anyway, I'm jumping ship to AT&T DSL the first chance I get. All this talk of capping and random service disabling is just completely indicative of monopolistic practices. Time Warner is a soul-less company with nothing but greed and a total disregard for customer satisfaction. Hope the decline in customer base will wake them up to their wrong doing. (I doubt it though)
With the advent of digital distribution and online media we'll see 44GB usage very often. I just downloaded a single game that was 8.7GB plus updates. I watch online movies with Netflix and listen to streaming music often also. I'm sure my usage is enormous right now. I see more and more people using online distributions and media so there's nothing the cable companies can do. People are going to use increasing amounts of bandwidth and if they insist on fighting the tide their customers will simply look elsewhere.
Unless there is a specific limit of use in the Terms of Use/Service, then a user should be able to upload/download as much data as they want. I can understand not wanting non-business users to setup major servers or commercial systems but not a user who downloads movies, music, play games, etc, etc. That is complete foolishness to limit these users and even worse to randomly shut them down. I am still pretty close to canceling my Time Warner Cable services here in Greensboro, NC and I would like to try and push a bond referendum to the Greensboro city council to do what Wilson, NC did with their fiber-optic network (right to the house) and the Greenlight services they created: http://www.wilsonnc.org/living/fiberopticnetwork/ http://www.greenlightnc.com/
See my other reply, as it pretty much responds to your reply. Oh, and do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.
Indeed, I have studied some aspects of the telecommunications world and I am vocationally familiar with the topic.
Yes the gov't set up these monopolies, but I think the intent was the same as the intent of copyright, to give the business a limited monopoly in this business to spur growth. Unfortunetly this had the same effect that it did with copyright, corporations who owned the monopoly extended it indeffinately through regulation.
I don't think that the founding fathers of our great country could have envisioned the kind of beast that is a corporation of today and it's implications on the American citizen.
Therefore, I want to rectify my statement: Capitalism hasn't failed, our government has failed.
Well, there isn't much evidence of Hobbes idolizing serial killers... that's so popular with the kids these days (http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm). Then again, the youth of the day will always be taken in by charming sociopaths, whether they are Charlie Manson, William Hickman or Ayn Rand herself.
Or, wasn't THIS -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1198841&cid=27622135 proof enough, of that (my subject line)? You're just some wanna be minor league tech that thinks he "knows it all", until he is plainly shown up and all are shown, he is clearly not (even though he gets off on calling others names).
I'm cancelling all of my TV service, including the 3 rental boxes I have in protest. I know their practices apply specifically to internet, but giving them money for TV is supporting their decisions. If they want to screw us on usage of our "unlimited" access, we'll screw them on acquired services. Hell, the prices should be going down since I have the same service I've had for the past decade. This is old technology now.
I live in California and am not affected by these issues YET, but I know that when they figure out how to screw the other cities, they'll bring it here too. I feel that we all have to act now in mass, no matter whether our service is affected yet or not. I used to believe they offered the best service, but now I see they offer the greediest service.
By cancelling all of my TV services, I'll be able to make a point. I'll keep the internet service and start researching other providers in the area for now but warn them that if this continues, it will go the way of the wind.
I'm not sure how much bandwidth I use, but with Netflix streaming I can easily see 44gb/month occuring (~6gb [im guessing] per movie * 8 = 48GB. You're telling me I'm allowed 8 movies per month? Sorry, that doesn't cut it). These aren't the kinds of things I should be concerned with. The only limit I should see is 10mbps * 24x7x365, which I don't even get close to reaching.
noobs.
You are mistaken. Some trades are bad trades.
The entire 'trades are (always) good' arguement falls apart when what you are discussing isnt Laissez-faire.
That most definately includes artificial monopolies on necessities. Some necessesities are happenstantial such as water, sewage, power, healthcare, shelter, food, telecom, and even transport. Other necessities are artificial such as automobile and homeowner insurance.
Not all trades are good for both parties. Most trades in America are that way, but definately not all.
"His name was James Damore."
I should perhaps have been more clear. I was mocking Biggjeff5's argument, whereby he claimed that the things wrong with capitalism were not failures of capitalism. Buying and selling politicians is just as capitalist as recruitment, the emphasis placed on trading is the failure of capitalism. Markets should be used as a tool of society, not treated as society's master.
If you can read this you've gone too far.
I think you meant, "And how!"