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Time Warner ToS Changes Could Mean Tiered Pricing, Throttling
Mirell writes "Time Warner Cable has recently changed their Terms of Service, so that they are allowed to charge you at their discretion via consumption-based billing. They were shot down a few months ago after raising the wrath of many subscribers and several politicians. Now they're trying again, but since they make exclusions for their own voice and video not to count against the cap, this could draw the attention of the FCC."
This is not at all strange.
AT&T justifies it by noting that accessing internal content doesn't use up their backhaul bandwidth. I would think the FCC would be somewhat sympathetic to this argument.
What's most important is that for truly equivalent services, the providers should not be able to discriminate.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Could they possibly be any more out of touch with their customer base?
Why not mandate that if Time Warner uses any public property for their lines that they must be high capacity and they must not throttle/charge based on bandwidth. While I despise regulation of any free market the fact remains that a lot of Time Warner's lines run through public property so they should answer to the people.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If they use that justification, than I want to be able to have torrent(any) traffic that stays inside their network not classified against my cap either.
they are allowed to charge you at their discretion
When selling most goods and services, it's "here is our price per [measurement], take it or leave it". They do not look into why you are buying the item, and what you are using it for, and charge you based on that. And you are informed of the rate before you decide to purchase the goods or service.
For some reason I'm having trouble putting my thoughts into words just now, but when they're deciding what to charge me for bandwidth based on what they think about my use of it... I don't think so.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
The thing is, the large telco/cablecos' VoIP offerings don't come anywhere close to being an equivalent service. I can't do nearly as much with TWC's VoIP service as I can with my current ala carte provider (Vitelity), and it costs many, many, many times more than what I pay now.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Here's what's going on. Big content providers are primarily in the business of distributing movies, music, tv shows. Distribution used to be expensive because of exclusive licenses for limited radio spectrum or having cable pay for your content. Along comes this damn inconvenient packet switched broadband and basically reduces distribution costs to a ridiculously low number. So, some people who aren't as smart as you, or for that matter a poblano pepper decided that:
* By raising the cost for residential broadband, it would make it cost you more to download Heroes vs. just watching it on their cable/on demand network.
* Because you can get your shows for less through the cable company, then they can sell all the commercials and make more money.
* Big content benefits because they can wrap everything up in a nice DRM wrapper on the DVR box you rent and then they get to sell you Cloverfield eight times over the next four years.
There's just a couple of small holes in the plan:
* It's probably illegal. If it's not it's so anticonsumer the FCC will have a lot of fun with these jokers.
* The internet is not exclusively used for infringing on big media copyrights. Last I looked there were at least a few more things to do online than movies and music.
* There are emerging technologies that are going to absolutely screw any business plan counting on a last mile monopoly (google meraki just for fun). Just for the hell of it, I'm going to start a mesh in the apartment complex I live in ($20/month/2.5MBPS).
* Getting tiered pricing requires everyone to do it at the same time, and last I looked, the internet only ISP isn't gone yet... and won't be gone for some time.
-- $G
I changed TWC's terms of service first.
It's written on the back of the check in 1 point font.
"Accepting this check indicates the acceptance of the following changes in
service billing:..."
That's a good point and technically possible aswell. I wonder if anyone has suggested it to them tho, rather than just bitching about it on forums :)
Is it legal to change the terms? Do they count as a contract in the legal sense?
I guess if you're paying month by month, changing them and, ideally, notifying your customers that you did and that's just the way the cookie crumbles, they can continue to purchase their services or not. But what if you got locked into one of those deals? You know, three months at such and such price but then you have to stay on for nine more months at full price or whatever?
I would have to say that these large Cable Companies are probably getting scared of possibility of IP based Television Companies cropping up and taking their client base. Their core product has to change from Cable Television service to IP Connectivity.
Looks like I may have to switch off of TWCable... sad. It was good service for a long time.
I was frankly disappointed to see the redundancy in your sig (not to mention bad security practice). Also in an effort not to be offtopic one could liken it to TimeWarner being struck down last time but just ploughing on anyway.
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
If they and the other major providers form a cartel and manipulate the government to implement this across the board, and kill off competition, then we are all baked, baked, and baked.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Voice and Video isn't on same channel as Data. Gigaom is just reading controversy where there is none. Video and telephony infrastructure operate on private channels on private infrastructure.
I wonder what corporate genius thought this would make it more acceptable instead of less acceptable. This is like the Simpson's "can we have a pool dad" chant.
Wince the ISP's are tied ( or are actually one in the same... ) to the content producers, it is only a matter of time before we end up in a situation where you are punished for using competitors.
Oh, and punished as a customer in general, like comcast does now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is nice, but most people have four choices for Internet service:
Cable
DSL
3G
Dialup
For a lot of people, choice #2 or #3 isn't an option due to coverage areas, choice #3 and #4 are too slow to be useful for a lot of things.
So, essentially Cable is a monopoly. This is why they are trying the usual garbage.
Its ironic that while the rest of the world gets faster links like 4G, US bandwidth actually suffers and gets more expensive as time goes on.
I'm also pretty sure that it is only a matter of time before a company like NebuAd or Phorm makes a deal with a cable company to insert ads into people's web pages.
That seems quite fair to me.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Here's the trade. You cap my net, I block all ad servers. That should save me a bundle. Unclog the tubes with Drano.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
So is your sig saying that I'd have to have root permission to access your arse?
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Welcome to the American "free market" system. Enjoy your stay...
No more of this "up to X mps for $50 a month". If they promise X but can only deliver 1/5X then they only get to bill me $10 a month instead of $50.
The cable companies do their throttling at the cable modem. It turns out this cap can be bypassed. There were some guys back in my hometown that got caught doing just this. The cable company threw the book at them.
It would make more technical sense to do this at the headend, since they could keep the control closer to them. It would also allow customers who wanted to exchange data locally to do so at the full loop speed without chewing through upstream bandwidth. Instead, I'm stuck talking to my neighbor two apartment buildings away at 384kbit/sec. Obviously what makes the most technical sense does not necessarily mesh with what makes the most business sense.
Well, that depends how much difference there is between how much the backhaul bandwidth costs them, and how much they resell it to you for.
In the case of Time Warner's proposed fees, they were planning to charge about 10x the free market rate, which is a bit much when you're a monopoly in many areas.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So basically Time Warner is saying "we can charge you whatever we want based on whatever we feel like and you must agree to this or fuck off"
Time Warner really gets it
>I'm stuck talking to my neighbor two apartment buildings away at 384kbit/sec.
The problem is that you dont know where the bottleneck is. Im sure in cable networks the bottlneck in many scenarios is local and in other times its the backhaul. Assuming there's 100mbps of unused bandwidth between the cable node you are on and the node your pal is on may not be correct.
Not to mention, the docsis protocl may not be able to understand who to lift the cap for and who not too. Considering there's no business reason to provide that service, perhaps you and your neighbor should spring for a wifi link.
I think the sad part of this scenario is that there should be a business reason to provide this type of service. I imagine a municipal run ISP would be able to handle this pretty well and it would help the community. It would be nice to have a 50 or 60mbps link to everyone on my local node. Oh well, perhaps someday the municipal government will wise up.
I wonder what corporate genius thought this would make it more acceptable instead of less acceptable. This is like the Simpson's "can we have a pool dad" chant.
I have watched my 5 year old newphews do it to my aunt, and it goes through, so im guessing its the 5 year old on the board there or the ones as smart as a five year old say that they need more money, and milking "dumb" public worked before/elsewhere so do it again
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Well, if 1000 people all on the same provider each downloaded a piece of a torrent, than had their torrent preference set to share those pieces amongst other customers on the same provider, than they are going to be taking a lot of bandwidth off the WAN side of things if you could look at all the customers as one huge LAN. However, that is not the really case as a single Cable company in the US may use 3-4 other backbone providers pipes to route your IP packets about the country; whereas, if you instead had their torrent preference set to use the maximally local geographical/routing location of the peers on a torrent you might have something there.
There are things like Geo IP Tool and its brethren but they sometimes stray quite a bit from the actual mark and have absolutely no standard for their naming conventions. There are enough IpV6 address to assign one to every living thing on the planet bigger than an ant.
Tools like this that rely upon IpV4 are not going to be as useful as when people might be born with an IpV6 address embedded in them along with a bunch of other transhumanistic-inspired tech.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Bandwidth caps and metered billing might sound agreeable to some people now, but you have to consider it will halt online video in it's tracks, just like the cable companies want. I'm always reading about how formats like dvd and blu-ray are supposed to be ultimately doomed because everything will be streamed or downloaded online, Adobe is bringing flash to TVs, etc. How can any of this happen with bandwidth caps and tiered pricing? Especially HD video? Cable companies feed us the online video internet apocalypse baloney, but it's all about protecting their core TV business and maximizing their bottom line. Oh well. Refusing to change with the times went really well for the recording industry.........
It makes sense to limit it in both places, actually.
You want to apply your ACLs/bandwidth restrictions as close to the traffic source as possible, that's a best practice in network design, and limiting it on the modems is a good thing.
However, it's also not sufficient -- the cable modem is potentially under the control of an adversary who may wish to use more bandwidth than you permit.
So capping should be done on the modem, to minimize waste of bandwidth and DoS possibilities on the network between modems and head-end.
Minimizing the number of packets that need to be discarded after they've already crossed the cable modem network.
And capping should additionally be done on the head-end, in case an end-user somehow circumvents the bandwidth cap on their modem device.
The cap on the modem itself could also be potentially higher than the cap on the head-end, to allow for better throughput between local users.
But in practice, these type of transfers are rare, and in general, not worth designing the system to optimize.
I would think that sympathy should diminish if they find the backhaul bandwidth isn't of significant cost.
And that they still meter and charge for other bandwidth that doesn't cross the backhaul but isn't to AT&T-specific services.
e.g. maybe it's to services offered by other ATT users
Yet TWC seem to trying to apply exactly the same type of broadband plan to you over there in the US as we have here. Coincidence? I think not! ;)
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
Have you tried walking over to his/her apartment?
That's not true in the slightest. Here in NZ, we've had Tim Berners-Lee himself come here just to complain to our government about the state of our broadband. And I don't think Tim Berners-Lee is "noone".
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Childish whining like the OP about cable companies' not metering their own television broadcasts or telephone calls, but metering Internet, gets nowhere. You all want cake, and you want it free, and to eat it too. But the cake is a lie.
Cable runs telephone on reserved, engineered capacity (PacketCable) for which subscribers pay a fee. It doesn't touch the Internet; it goes to a media gateway into the phone network.
Cable runs video on many channels, some analog, most QAM nowadays. That's sent from the head end, mostly from satellite feeds, some from over-the-air receivers and ATSC-to-QAM remodulators.
Internet goes on a separate CMTS that goes over middle mile facilities to an ISP backbone. That all costs money. UPSTREAM capacity on cable is VERY limited; it only works upstream to 42 MHz, and broadband only above about 20 MHz. It is a terrible medium for providing content or running file servers, which is what Torrent is about.
So heavy uploaders in particular, and heavy users in general, tax the shared capacity of the Internet and worsen everyone else's usage (gaming response, data performance, etc.). So I'd rather be on a system that invites the heaviest users to go elsewhere, thank you.
Sure they could "buy" more capacity, but why should I pay more so that a handful of bozos can exchange movies? Tiered pricing allows my price, for using under 50 GB/month, to stay reasonable.
I would prefer a free market in ISPs, with DSL still open to any ISP so that there would be an open market. The FCC could fix that. But regulating ISPs per se is a truly, deeply dumb idea.
Well the reality is, it is not about what they are planning to charge it is about economically excluding other content distribution companies from potential customers and establishing a content distribution monopoly.
This is forcing a legislative stance, where bandwidth providers will only be allowed to supply bandwidth and absolutely nothing else, otherwise the will always attempt to restrict use of that bandwidth so as to increase profits well beyond reasonable terms for cost of provision of that bandwidth to arbitrary content valuations, invented access restrictions and claiming access to their customers as a profit centre whilst hiding constraints and disruptions of their customers services from those customers.
The same laws that applied to controlling telephony or even public roads have to be applied to the internet to ensure what has become a vital public service remains so.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This is not stealing. This is wanting something bad enough that you're willing to pay interest on a loan to get it. This is a basic economic premise regardless of whether one is poor or rich. And btw you haven't answered how the rich person became rich in the first place?
Operators usually justify throttling by saying that unlimited usage degrades service for everybody on the same cable. That justification makes sense.
There is no reason why "backhaul bandwidth" should be a problem. If it really were a problem, they could fix it by increasing upload bandwidth (rather than decreasing download bandwidth).
See, I used to have it set to just say "su"... and got comments from people who didn't understand why there was no login name. So I changed it... and now I get comments from the other camp. I can't win! I'll just change it back to the way it was. Then at least the people bitching will be the dumb ones.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
That sounds about right. Good luck figuring out THAT password.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
I wasn't talking about New Zealand. I'm talking about Australia. Big difference, wouldn't you say?
TWC isn't in my area. I have Comcast, so I don't really care too much what TWC is doing. Even if I did, TWC doesn't serve my area, and even if it did, I have the commercial service with Comcast. Since I pay a premium, it's very likely I would be exempt. On Comcast, I'm already exempt from the 250 GB/month bandwidth cap.
I imagine a municipal run ISP would be able to handle this pretty well and it would help the community. It would be nice to have a 50 or 60mbps link to everyone on my local node. Oh well, perhaps someday the municipal government will wise up.
There's a town in North Carolina that has tried this. As far as I know, Time Warner took the matter to the state to try to get them to force the town to shut it down. I don't know how far through or if anything has come of it yet, though.
Just when I thought I was in with cable Internet they push me away again.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It doesn't work like that. Nodes (eg. your cablemodem) don't talk to each other; they talk to the headend. All traffic has to pass through the headend. DSL can work closer to your ideal, but traffic still has to pass through the DSLAM at the very least -- dsl modems connect to the DSLAM, not each other. However, very few ISPs run their DSL networks like that... every one I've seen trunks everything back to a concentrator.
Good luck trying to tell which traffic is inside your local network.
Sig is for Signature, so you don't have to manually sign every post.