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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.
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.
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!
Read the article, they were paying for it. The customer in question had the premium "turbo" service.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
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!
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.
So pay for TiVo and internet just because your ISP doesn't think you should be using the internet that much? Get real.
Nick
South Korean ISPs can afford to have backbone pipes of dozens of 1 Gbit fiber optic lines. Time to grow up and upgrade you decades old infrastructure USA. If the companies cann't do that maybe it is time for socialism and have government do it. Best Internet in the world with lowest cost is municipal Internet.
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.
Well, the people using 40 gigabytes a month are just a harbinger of the future.
They can oversubscribe right now, but they can't stay at the same oversubscription numbers forever, if they do, they will be shooting themselves in the foot (as far as new revenue and better competition against dialup internet service is concerned) -- i.e. they can't offer "5 megs download", and not expect customers average usage to eventually increase over time to 5 megs sustained usage when they're doing things on the internet like watching high-def movies.
Just to be clear, using 5 megabits of download speed sustained for 2 hours a day, results in a usage of 4500 megabytes, or 4.5 gigabytes per day. Which is a weekly usage of 31.5 gigabytes per week, and 126.0 gigabytes per month.
And what if someone wants to watch two movies one day?
This is not even counting usage of commercial download services like iTunes, which are only becoming more and more popular. It's definitely forseeable someone may want to watch a few movies during the day (esp. on weekends), and download a bunch of music and videos off iTunes.
The ISPs are going to have to eventually upgrade their infrastructure to be able to provide as much per month to every customer that their customers want.
It's just a fact that logically arises from the fact that customer demand is increasing as more commercial bandwidth-hungry services are made available. This is a good thing (not a bad thing) for ISPs, as it means the customer pool will also increase, the more popular and useful these services are, gives more people reason to want high-speed connections.
It's only a question of time.
By cutting off these "extreme users", they are only delaying the inevitable a little bit, and pissing people off (possibly losing more and more customers, to competitors, who will respect that bandwidth requirements for ordinary users are in a process of massively increasing and/or realize the demand).
When it comes to new video technologies, new uses for bandwidth, there will often be a small number of early adopters of new technology, who will ultimately increase demand from the public both for new ISP services and for better ISP services.
By discouraging, shunning, or disconnecting these users, they are disconnecting/shunning new sources of revenue for the coming years... These people will pick competitors like AT&T.
They'll eventually have to build out their infrastructure further, and if they want to be competitive, INCREASE the speeds of the links they offer (so that they're oversubscribing again, but at a bandwidth much higher than their customers need).
The problem in the US is very low population density[...]
This comes up again and again, as if the population were evenly distributed. I don't know how this meme got started, but it's foolish and needs to stop.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
No, it's not.
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.
Americans just flat out refuse to acknowledge when they aren't number one. I got news. We're not #1. We're not #2. We're not even in the top ten. And we DON'T have an excuse.
There are major urbanized areas in the US with a land area and population density equivalent to all of these other places with high speed broadband. Why don't we have real broadband on the NE coast? Why don't we have real broadband on the California coast?
Face it. TW and companies like it are no longer a part of the solution. They're not even a part of the problem. They ARE the problem.
The simple fact is that TW is trying to protect their Cable TV business by degrading their internet service.
And this is the real reason. Time Warner knows that anyone who downloads 44 GB a week downloads a whole lot of video and entertainment. And because of the likely cable monopoly that is the area, that is money coming directly out of their pocket. So the only logical proposition for them is to terminate heavy users. No matter how much they pay TWC, they will never pay enough to make up both data costs and lost opportunity costs.
Fer fuck's sake, how deeply bought off are politicians that this is in place? This is a classic case of a vertical monopoly abusing its position. Not to mention that it's compounded by the fact that there is at best a limited oligopoly providing internet access.
The reason this development bothers me is that this is actually the most rational approach for a cable provider. This is the future for cable - or for any provider with an existing content delivery arm.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"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.