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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."
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 :)
i beleive a change in TOS/contract that changed the ammount you can be billed should typically excuse you from any early termination fees, see point 3 in this article: http://consumerist.com/272305/6-ways-to-cancel-any-cellphone-so-you-can-get-an-iphone
FWIW I just switched from TWC to Earthlink cable.
The funny thing is, TWC is still the cable provider, but Earthlink is the ISP. I still have the same cable modem TWC installed, etc. After I called Earthlink and signed up for their service ($20 a month cheaper than TWC for 6 months, then $10/mon cheaper than TWC forever...no contract) I had to call my local TWC office and they toggled something in software that made me get an Earthlink IP.
I don't know if TWC will be able to start making Earthlink charge more, but when I talked to the people at Earthlink they specifically told me there were no bandwidth caps, no tiers, and no plans for such.
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.
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.
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
Actually they don't even need the government-they just do what they did here. i am at the edge of a rural area, and three times in the last five years a small startup has come along and tried to offer broadband to those that have gotten the finger from the local duopoly. The latest is Wifi, and it looks like they'll go under by summer. the pattern they use is always the same. They let the startup come in, sell them backbone access at a decent price, and then when their dialup customers begin dropping their crazy priced dialup services they just jack the backbone access until they can't stay in business. So basically they have decided that the rural customers can "suck this dialup and like it!"
I learned this is their SOP by a buddy of mine who had his own mini-ISP trying to serve the same area nearly a decade ago. His business was out of their "service area" and when he saw plenty of other businesses and homes that were in the same shitty boat that he was in, he just did what any capitalist American should be able to do and tried to solve the problem. He paid a good chunk of money out of his own pocket for a T-1 and leased space off of it to his neighbors. He set up a little server with a freeware repository and Windows updating from there, and according to him after having "10k on a good day" dialup he and his customers were quite happy.
Then the teleco got wind when the neighbors stopped paying for their crappy dialup and changed the TOS to "number of attached nodes" or some BS and raised his rates 4000%. They made it real clear "don't like it? Sue us". When he talked to his lawyer the lawyer said "Yeah you can sue them. For about half a million and a decade or so out of your life. Of course by then you will be completely bankrupt and won't be able to afford the appeals. If you are that crazy good luck, but I can't take the case. It would be economic suicide." So now the line sits rotting in a field, the business is empty because he moved away rather than go back to trying to run his business on 10k dialup, and the people there are screwed. Just as the WISP will be out of business by summer because the backbone charges are forcing them to charge $150 for 756k and of course at that price they can't keep enough customers in a rural area to stay afloat.
So IMHO the only way we are going to get real competition is to go eminent domain on them. They have used our public right of way to run their cables, we paid them billions of dollars in tax breaks for nationwide high speed and got nothing but the finger, it is time to take it back. Take it back and force companies to compete for the lines while we use part of the money we make from the lease to run nationwide fiber. To those companies that want a monopoly? We say "See those rural customers? The ones we paid you to serve once before? You will get a monopoly for x number of years for running fiber to them. The farther and fewer there are, the more time you'll get. Have at it." The maybe those like my mom who was 2 blocks from the cable when she and dad built their house 29 years ago will actually be able to get broadband instead of STILL being two blocks away after 29 fricking years even though nearly 2 dozen houses have sprung up on the lousy quarter mile straight line from the junction box!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
>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.
Whah, whah, whah. We got users actually taking advantage of our "unlimited" offer... now we don't like it and we want to charge them through the nose for going over some arbitrary limit (absurdly low in the era of VOD etc.), or gouge them with an "unlimited plan" that costs hundreds of dollars (over the cost of the cable TV if they have it.)
Sorry, if they didn't want people using it "unlimited", then don't advertise it like that and then change TOS while the customer has your service. Either man up and friggin' say it's "X" GB a month (like they SUED Comcast into doing), or don't put a cap on it at all. Throttle the up/down speed past a certain amount (certainly more than 50GB).
The cable companies made serious bank off the benevolence of imminent domain, using federal subsidies to lay the cable (meaning using OUR money to do it). Now they complain people are using "too much"? Bite me. Why didn't TWC try any tiered pricing in places where there was competition? Because it's a BAD IDEA. And if TWC does go through with their plans (try #2), you might well be the only one on their network. Good luck with that. The internet is filled with actual studies that prove your points to be incorrect regarding bandwidth caps and usage, not some "whining" by people who don't feel like being gouged by TWC.
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