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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.'"
A single hulu show is roughly a gigabyte if you have the bandwidth. 44 hours a week is not unusual for television watching in some circles.
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.
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
Read the article, they were paying for it. The customer in question had the premium "turbo" service.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
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
Hey, I might be moving soon, so I might actually have a choice. Is there anyone decent out there?
If you really don't want to deal with that crap, find a company that does BUSINESS DSL. I've been with One Communications for years. Their service has been really good. 99% of the problems I've had were the direct result of Verizon borking my DSL line. I had my modem die at 1am, and they had me a new mode by 5am and I was back up and running.
UPS Sucks
In my experience, Tomato is a better router package, and isn't offered by a guy that likes to play fast and loose with the GPL and rebrand other peoples' work as his own.
Probably not. Terms of Service would generally allow a company to do whatever they please. I imagine somewhere in there it says they reserve the right to terminate any customer account at any time for any reason.
I love my sig.
Agreed. Even under the laxest consumer protection laws, companies do not have the ability to disconnect you and then not inform you, and certainly don't have the ability to not tell you when you call in trying to fix the problem, which is what happened to this guy...they didn't bother to inform their own technical support.
So their tech support jerked him around for hours trying to fix the problem, including multiple trips to the stores. It probably wasn't tech support's fault...if the tech support drones knew he'd been disconnected, they'd happily tell him and make him someone else's problem over in customer service.
He has, at minimum, a lawsuit for his time, his gas, and his lost productivity of not having an internet connection (Because he could have spent that time getting another ISP.) they wasted with that nonsense. Sadly, he's probably already returned the cable modems, or he could stick them with that bill too.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have ADSL2+ on here (in Australia), syncs at 13Mb/s down and 800Kb/s up.
I am on a plan which says I can download upto 80GB a month, this means there is no fucked up phone calls, not dicking around about "omg are they going to call me". If I download 40G in one week, it means I have 40G left for the rest of the month, they wouldn't give a fuck if I downloaded at 13Mb/s constant till I hit cap, thats the advantage of a limited account from a good provider, theres no bullshit invisible limits, just you getting what you pay for.
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