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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.
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.
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.
One would think being sold all you can eat service, then having it cut off for using it would be seen as universally crappy.
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!
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.
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.
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) = $120
In theory, ISP companies will compete and bring prices down but in US as long as there are monopolies I doubt it will happen even with a change like this.
So pay for TiVo and internet just because your ISP doesn't think you should be using the internet that much? Get real.
Nick
will be allowed to create and educate themselves on the internet. The moment someone creates a limit on how much information one can send or access is the moment the divide between rich and poor begins. There is no bandwidth congestion, look at all the other countries with HUGE amounts of bandwidth to each individual person. Over here, we make money by bandwidth limitation. When we should be making money by bandwidth creation like every other country. We suck and so do our companies. We are killing our own culture and limiting creation and education with these bandwidth caps.
The difference is that the restaurant is stating the limit, TWC is not. If they clearly stated the limit, and the limit was reasonable(their previously advertised caps were not) people wouldn't care so much.
iirc I have a 250gb cap on my comcast line. I wasn't happy when they introduced it, but it's far above what I will use in a month and they stated it clearly. I wasn't thrilled but I don't have an issue because they were upfront and reasonable about it.
I use an EVDO Rev A card for field work, and I am a light user. email, web, etc. No Windows service packs, no downloads, no torrent, no itunes, no porn, no movies. The card is expen$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.
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
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).
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
"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.