Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I wouldn't call it "circles" as much as "couches".
44 GB is more than most people use in a year.
...yet.
Rather than going after "abusers", you want to start upgrading your network now to accommodate them, before the majority discover sites like Hulu and Youtube.
But the majority would not want their fees to go up because of that kind of usage.
Nor, I suspect, would the majority want to get hit with that lecture the second they discover how to actually use the connection they've been sold.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
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
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.
He did pay for it. He signed up for an account and everything! I am pretty sure 44 GB is less than unlimited, which is what he is paying for.
It reminds me of this hilarious self-car wash near my parents house. It has a HUGE sign that says "WAS AS LONG AS YOU WANT!" and then a tiny little disclaimer saying "up to 20 minutes". Well at least they are a step above Time Warner... they have the disclaimer that EXPLICITLY states what the limit is.
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
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"
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.
When I worked for Lucent as a network engineer, I ended up doing some work for Cricket Wireless down in Fort Lauderdale.
You see, Cricket was started by some wireless guys that looked at the numbers and said "Hey, the average length of a local telephone call is under 3 minutes. The median length is under 1 minute. At those network usage levels, we could start a company giving people UNLIMITED local calls for $20 a month and make a killing!" Right?
Wrong.
I was down there with a couple other engineers to assess how best to upgrade Crickets collapsing network. You see, people figured out that they could buy two of the phones and use them for things like BABY MONITORS! Just dial and drop one in the crib. Don't hang it up and wander around with the other, all over town if you want. It was cheaper, had better sound quality and less interference than normal baby monitors. They were seeing the average call length jump to over an hour, with some peaking at 8-10 hour calls!
Needless to say, this was NOT in their business model. They didn't take into account that the average usage was so low because people had to pay for it.
Just about every other utility -- electricity, gas, water, sewage, garbage -- you pay by volume used. The Internet isn't any different.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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!
Then TW shouldn't sell unlimited transfer volume to people.
Or, if they already did sell it, let the contract run out at the next possible opportunity without renewing it.
But cancelling it overnight? Unacceptable. Making people jump through hoops just to find out what happened? Unacceptable. Lecturing people for making use of the resource they paid for, the one that TW *contractually agreed* to provide? Unacceptable.
Besides, 44 GB per year is 120 MB per day. Do you seriously think that "most people" don't use 120 MB of transfer volume per day? Oh, sure, those that only check their email or read the occasional news website won't. But as soon as you're starting to do things like watch streaming video (e.g. on Youtube), play games, use iTunes etc. etc., it's actually quite easy for anyone to reach this volume.
Also, consider how much he actually COULD have transferred. If you assume that he's got e.g. 16 Mbps downstream (average here in Germany where I live for broadband users), that's about 1.7 MB per second that could be transferred at most. 1.7 MB times 86400 times 7 is 1028 GB - that's a *Terabyte* per week.
In other words, he was using less than 4.3% of what he COULD have used if he had actually gone all out and made FULL use of the resource that TW *contractually agreed* to provide to him.
4.3%. And you think that's excessive, just because TW oversold their capacity dozens if not hundreds of times and because they couldn't figure out that if they advertised "unlimited" Internet access, people woudl expect to get, duh, *unlimited* Internet access?
Where do you live - Bizarro World?
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.
I was just thinking about that, 44 hrs/wk that's over 6 hrs a day 7 days a week, which does seem a bit extreme. But then I realized, that's if you're the only one in the house. How many houses have three televisions now? Imagine an entire family that uses hulu. Even three family members could easily average over 40 hrs combined video time a week if they preferred different shows, which is not at all uncommon.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I've actually bought last night the Orange Box from Valve, because they have a promotion this weekend: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/
So far, I've installed Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Team Fortress 2 and these two games downloaded from Steam servers 8024 MB, because some resources are shared between these games in the package.
The estimated bandwidth usage required for the rest is:
860 MB Half-Life 2
2160 MB Half-Life 2: Episode One
6132 MB Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2606 MB Portal
So we're looking at 19GB that I could burn through in a single day with my 20mbps connection.
Keeping in mind that most games are 6-8GB nowadays and some come up at promotional prices like 5-10$ from time to time, I don't believe using 25-50GB in abusing the internet connection you've paid for.
On the contrary, the ISP is abusing the poor people that don't require fast connections making money from plans those people don't use.
As I said in other discussions, I personally am opposed to usage caps but I'm not opposed to pay per bandwidth used provided the transition from unmetered to pay per traffic is done fairly for the consumer.
What I'm trying to say is that, if a consumer currently has a 10mbps plan and pays $50 for it, the customer expects that he should be able to use at least half of that anytime he wants during a month. It's not something unreasonable.
So if a company decided to switch to billing him for bandwidth, the plan should cost a small fee for the equipment and for certain speed steps, like $10-15, and then the payment per GB should not be much higher than the previous plan, because it's not fair to pay for less.
So: 8 mbps unmetered gives you around 2.8TB of traffic if used to the max all month, and you pay for this $50.
Let's assume a reasonable usage of this connection would be half of that, so we're looking at 1.4TB (1400 GB) for 50$.
This means an equivalent pay per traffic plan could be:
$10 - base subscription
$0 - capped at 5mbps
+$5 - raise cap to 10mbps
+$10 - raise cap to 20mbps
[...]
+$40 - raise cap to 50mbps
$0 - 10 GB of traffic included in the plan (more if cap raised higher than base 5mbps)
$0.03 - 1 GB of data transferred from Internet to computer (cheaper if cap raised higher than base 5mbps)
$0.05 - 1 GB of data transferred from computer to Internet
The $0.03 is determined from 50$ / 1400 GB. Upload bandwidth costs more because it often costs the companies more and I want to be fair with them.
With this plan, mom and dad will pay $10 bucks.
A very heavy user with a 10mbps connection using it to the max will pay 10$ + $5 for 10mbps cap + $99 (0.03 x 3300GB) = $120
In theory, ISP companies will compete and bring prices down but in US as long as there are monopolies I doubt it will happen even with a change like this.
This goes someplace, so bear with me.
For a few weeks I went on a DL kick where I decided to do all my vinyl into digital. I have 1104 vinyl LPs. About 1/3 I bought the CD for because I liked the convenience. I have bought hundreds of CDs as well - I now own about 1400 CDs.
I ripped all the CDs into a drive over the period of a few months, and the drive became part of a gigantic home jukebox of some 27,000 songs running off of iTunes on a MacBook.
So, that left me at around 840 records on vinyl. I could buy a USB turntable and spend hours digitising and labeling it, and I seriously considered that - there are some fairly decent digital turntables out there.
But then I thought: hold on... let's do the math. 840 records, each taking about 1.5 hours EACH to digitise, cut apart in Audacity, and then put the ID tags in as I export as MP3. So, now we're looking at around 1300 hours. So, if I do four records a week, that will take 6 hours a week and 4 years of my life...
Fuck. That. Shit.
So, I went link hunting and found some systems like chewbone.blogspot.com where I enter in the record I'm looking for and a series of links for DL come up. YAY!
So, each record at 192 is about 80 megs, or about 12 per gig with a result of about 70gigs of music. Over the period of a few weeks idling on vacation, I was able to do this.
And now, I'm done. So the ISP would have seen a massive splurge in activity. And I now have 32,183 songs on my drive, and a lot of it digitised version of vinyl that some kind soul had the patience to sample and upload to a file system.
I learned a lot about those file systems, too. I now officially hate rapidshare. They're good if ou pay them, but they suck monkey balls if you don't. Megaupload is often slower than rapidshare, but they don't insist on a 15 minute waiting period. The best is mediafire. Also, as a mac user using Stuffit Deluxe, all you people using .rar files can go fuck yourselves. Zip files work JUST FINE thank you, and they open easily in OSX. And to think zip files were "those funky windows things"...
So, anyway, had my ISP been itchy about bandwidth, I'd have been shut down for doing something that isn't (per my intent) "evil". I was just looking for digital copies of my incredible and incredibly obscure vinyl collection. And I was rather scrupulous about it, too. Example: DOME. They had 4 records, I only have the first one on vinyl. I only DL'd the first one. If I want the others, I can go find the vinyl or buy the CD.
NOw, I'm not making some case for flawless seamless integrity or consistency, but I am sugesting that in the greater scheme of things, ISP choking bandwidth will result in people abandoning ISPs....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
So pay for TiVo and internet just because your ISP doesn't think you should be using the internet that much? Get real.
Nick
But the majority would not want their fees to go up because of that kind of usage.
I don't understand why you would think the fees would go up? The ISP's cost per GB towards the backbone provider goes DOWN each year as technology improves. Yet the cost the ISP charges the end user stays the same or increases. Why would we not expect some of the extra profit made by the ISP to be re-invested in their network? Or are you saying that running a large ISP gives you a license to never upgrade your service and charge ever higher fees?
To make an analogy:
Imagine a that there's a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet that sells monthly admission. This of course means that anyone who signs up for the service can come in at any time they want and eat as much of anything that they want.
Most patrons only come in for one meal a day, though there are quite a few that come in for two or three squares a day.
Then one day, someone decides to take full advantage of the service, and spends every waking hour in the buffet eating. He's not necessarily gorging himself, but on top of his constant stream of small entrees, desserts and drinks, he tends to eat some of the most expensive and labor-intensive dishes that the business provides.
Then, without warning, the buffet decides to kick him out.
The problem isn't that he should be paying for every meal. He did sign up for a service that provided, quite literally, all you can eat. This would imply that what was provided was unlimited food, or (sorry, I'm a math student) he was limited to an infinite amount of food.
Despite this, he was kicked off for eating a finite measure of food.
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
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?
The difference is that the restaurant is stating the limit, TWC is not. If they clearly stated the limit, and the limit was reasonable(their previously advertised caps were not) people wouldn't care so much.
iirc I have a 250gb cap on my comcast line. I wasn't happy when they introduced it, but it's far above what I will use in a month and they stated it clearly. I wasn't thrilled but I don't have an issue because they were upfront and reasonable about it.
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.
in 3D 1080p interactive porn terms, 44G is not that much in a week.
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.
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
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
I've thought about opening up a few complaints with the BBB and maybe even the state PUC for this kind of crap.
Forget the BBB - they're a paper tiger with no teeth. The PUC could likely put some screws to them though, and get in touch with your state AG as well. If you're being charged late fees that you didn't legitimately incur, the AG in particular might be interested in that. When they're told that you'll be getting the state involved in the problem, you will likely find that Cricket's reps magically gain the power to fix your bill.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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.
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
Kids these days reading too much Ayn Rand and not enough Hobbes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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
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).
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
'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
"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 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.
XYZ Government Program hurts those it is supposed to help.
fixed that for you