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Oregon ISP Now Forcing Cordcutters to Sign up For TV to Avoid Caps (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Oregon ISP BendBroadband has revised its usage-based broadband policies to favor customers that subscribe to TV services as well. According to a blog post by the company, Bend is deploying a number of new speed upgrades, including new Ultra 50, Ultra 100 and Ultra 300 Mbps speed tiers. The company is telling users on its Bronze and Silver Internet plans that they should be eligible for a free upgrade later this month. But another post adds a different wrinkle: Bend says it's removing its current usage caps if you bundle TV and phone service. These caps have historically ranged from 150 to 500 GB. "Customers who subscribe to Bronze or above internet (including Silver, Gold and Platinum) and Essentials or above TV (including Preferred, Preferred Plus and The Works) are no longer limited on data usage and will no longer pay overage fees," says the company.The report cites similar practices by other ISPs, suggesting that it's quickly becoming an industry standard.
Pretty much like thousands of other ISPs, not ideal for the customer, but pretty common none the less.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The country with the actual claim to inventing the internet has one of the shittest internets. If any ISP around here even thought of having a cap on anything but the most basic of service they'd be laughed right out of business.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Oregon ISP BendOverBroadband
FTFY
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
ATT UVerse doe this as well. It makes cord cutting less attractive since what you pay for the bundle could be less than Internet, excess use fees and al la carte access to programing.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
BendBroadband:
Note to customers;
Time to Bend over.
You are whining about other people whining.
Their new slogan can be "Buy our crap to avoid our cap".
Sweet! So now when I pay to have my data caps removed, I get free (useless) cable TV service along with what I'm paying for!
ftfy.
A company is offering a service.
Here, let me fix that for you:
A government-sanctioned monopoly is offering a service, with no other competitors allowed to offer you a competing service.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This pretty well seems to be the cable business response, to the Internet business making cable well obsolete. They went around and used their rights of way to make sure they were the Internet providers so they could make sure to get you coming or going.
Boy howdie did the telco industry really drop the ball. They should have aggressively laid fiber on their rights of way and brought out speeds coax cable was never going to compete with and priced them competitively. Hindsight is 20/20.
However the public sector really dropped the ball here too. High speed internet access is basically noncompetitive in the US because cities though it was a good idea to trample private property rights and grant rights of way to private companies. eminent domain should NEVER be used to give land to private enterprises. Its not right or fair. When it comes to things like fiber, telephone wires, electrical lines local governments (maybe counties for long haul lines and stuff) should build them and lease them out; or maybe decide not to build them if existing resident land owners want to vote to discourage development in certain areas.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually, the guy has a bit of a point. We're getting screwed over by government-sanctioned monopolies because we voters are not holding our elected officials accountable and getting them to pass laws properly regulating these monopolies or getting them to use any of the laws already in place to regulate them.
You must be a boomer.
Internet access is a fact of life if you want to participate in any aspect of modern society.
Any other viewpoint is outdated or incredibly privileged.
False advertising nigger. Your HOSTs file doesn't stop an ISP's speed throttling.
Works vs. caps my ass you lying sack of shit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is what I like about Time Warner. With or without TV based on my plan (results may vary for others) I have no data caps.
Regardless of others opinions of Time Warner Cable verses other providers; I have had the "Least" amount of issues, and the "Most" amount of reliability from my internet service. About the only other way you can really get any better service from an ISP would quite possibly be to go with a commercial internet solution.
It's "free" for the insurance companies to give women birth control pills because the baseline cost without them includes the risk of covering your pregnancy.
Like wise for the ISPs they'd rather you were watching TV mulit-cast than streaming netflix on demand.
So they can offer you a bundle for less cost than they could sell you uncapped internet.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You have to pay extra for the unlimited bandwidth and get a worthless trinket (i.e. TV) as a free gift.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My in-laws had their cable and Internet service through BendBroadband. They are light users and were still getting overage charges for using to much bandwidth to the point that they had to regulate their usage. I called up BendBroadband and they basically told me "we are a small company so we can't do anything about it". They have about the worst channel selection guide I have ever seen and their DVR is even worse. (Possibly the worse DVR implementation I have ever seen.) I had my in-laws switch to DirecTV with CenturyLink and they never had problems again. In fact, their monthly TV/Internet lowered by about 20% and they got a DVR that was actually useful.
I'll tell you this though, for anyone that lives on metered internet you crazy not to use something to block ads and trackers. I use privoxy and it cuts my transfer utilization significantly.
Its certainly a much better approach the APK's never ending host file nonsense but I will accept APK's claim that even his method could help with caps if he has identified the ad servers adequately. That said privoxy is alot smarter and more granular its pretty easy to build regex pasterns against the invocation html for most ad systems and prevent requesting the resources. Which means you can block the ads without blocking the entire host or subnet.
APK's give it rest. Using the host file for content control is a 1990s solution. It might still work some of the time but there are many better methods around now. Please join the 21st century with the rest of us. I resisted too for a long time, but you'll like it here I promise.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Wow, they're not even hiding it or lying about it anymore. Remember when the caps used to be about "congestion?" Now the truth is explicitly admitted. Everyone, before you lose your cool over this, think. This really is progress. We've reached the point in "LA Story" where the someone is politely told, "Hi. My name is Bob. I'll be your robber." No subterfuge, denial, etc. It's out in the open.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Shut up subhuman, are you saying that stripping a webpage to 1/4 of it's size and discarding video ads doesn't affect caps?
See subject: You're adding on more to do the same job or less & the IP stack + hosts already do the job with less - eating more CPU, RAM, & I/O cycles to do so!
* Your "approach" is illogic logic & inefficient - period!
APK
P.S.=> Bottom-line: You accept I'm right on blocking ads (& speeding you up more w/ hardcoded favorites my program reverse DNS ping verifies right as you build your hosts file vs. ads + threats online too) - accept the fact I'm right on my subject & the above point also... there IS no denying it! apk
Actually, the guy has a bit of a point. We're getting screwed over by government-sanctioned monopolies because we voters are not holding our elected officials accountable
What he said was "If you want such a right, then vote for it, wait with the poor little me baby whining at Slashdot." but that's precisely what people did. We voted for that sort of thing. Then the telcos were paid $250M and we were all supposed to get 45 Mbps internet access by... I forget, but before now! Where TF is it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ugh. I know this is ironic coming from me, but why descend to that level.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Despite having many assassinations, car accidents, or robberies they do not become legal. Time for a class action?
OT: Any good writeupts for using Privoxy as a MITM proxy? My pet peeve these days is that the good parts of the https-everywhere movement have hidden a lot of crappy HTML in a place where my locally-hosted Privoxy can't get to it. (The most annoying ones are where the articles are in plaintext, but the CSS with the position:fixed floating masthead divs are served from wp.com via HTTPS, but if I could just pry things open enough to let Privoxy have a whack at the encrypted stuff here, I could have the best of both worlds.)
Our choices for elected officials are already defacto rigged. Either getting on the ballot or staying in office you to have licked the boots of the elite to get donations and access to party power structures. Most of those power brokers and large donors stay elite through behaviors similar to this. I see it as a vicious cycle that is not likely to change anytime soon.
still aren't watching it then in order to avoid data overage fees you'll have to agree to watch at least 20 hours of TV a week.
But you do have a right under the antitrust laws to prevent a company from unreasonably tying the sale of one product or service to another.
We already voted for that right. Starting way back in 1890.
I used to live in Bend, and had Internet through Bend Broadband for years. In fact, my first email address was @bendbroadband.com. I'm pretty sure it's still listed as my backup email on a few websites. Anyway, they like to advertise themselves as the smalltown hero. For a while (maybe it still is), their slogan was "We're the local dog, we better be good!" They even had a black lab as a mascot. Eventually I moved to a new area, where the only ISP in town is Comcast. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Comcast is better in pretty much every way, which is a pretty serious indictment of the quality of service offered by bendbroadband.
See subject: Between this point of mine vs. your "objections" I easily overcame https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... w/ common sense (illogic logic "Bolting on 'MoAr'" eating MORE on your end to do the SAME job or less)?
* You FAIL man - badly!
(Hosts files entries are like phone book entries (albeit in reverse), Phone # & name pretty much - lol, to 'normal non-programmers', RegExp looks like CHINESE!)
APK
P.S.=> Sometimes it really, *REALLY* makes me wonder if you guys here can THINK FOR YOURSELVES (especially for efficient operations, but then again, I look @ the web now as well as programs out there & I SEVERELY doubt it - see my original post on the size of webpages & bugs galore in today's work from "today's coders" & I "rest my case")... apk
My cable company (Armstrong) bases your cap on a combination of your service tier and your other services, and has for some time, so this is nothing new.
Comcast offers cheaper Internet if you throw in TV. I had Internet only and paid $65/month. I now have Internet and basic cable and pay $55/month (w/ HBO streaming). I never turn the TV on.
It has been said that 63% of all statistics are made up
>>>A government-sanctioned monopoly is offering a service, with no other competitors allowed to offer you a competing service.
I work for one of those non-existent competitors. There is far more competition out there than most people seem to think. That's not to say that all the competitors compete on price. (if price were the only competing factor, we'd all be getting cheap, shitty service)
There seems to be a very widespread belief that the only thing worth competing on is price. I guess that's why Walmart is so popular.
Libertarians believe in the absolute right of business owners to rip anybody off all the time.
No, nobody is forcing you to do anything. Unless of course you take into account that no Internet is a severe economic hardship and almost an economic death sentence. But that's ok, if you don't like the terms they offer all you have to do is move somewhere else because, hey, free market at work and all.
Jackasses, all of them.
You continue to show what a despicable person you are.
prohibits such practices as being anti-competitive. It makes no sense for an ISP to force consumers to buy two or more unrelated services. In the 50's Eastman Kodak was prohibited from selling photo films *and* processing services together. I hope Comcast & friends is the new Eastman Kodak.
The incumbent cable company is the only broadband choice for many people in the US. Cable companies that adopt this policy are in violation of US anti-trust law.
Cable companies that use their monopoly status to harm competing video services should be held liable for the damages caused to the competing video services.
Microsoft tried this with a web browser and operating system years ago - and it tied them up in court for years.
Obama, are you listening?
Hey, I remember voting in my town to allow the cable company. They said our subscription fees meant better reception and no ads. That lasted all of a year.
Now i'll gladly vote to revoke the deal.
C|N>K
Where I live we have 2 choices (disregarding DSL as at 7Mbps it does not rate as broadband anymore). 1 is Cox Communications, they actually service the whole state. The other is a small company called Full Channel, they are a very local cable company servicing my county only. When FIOS did their rollout here they wired the whole state except for my county since it already had "competition". If Cox wanted to they could lower their prices for 6 months and drive Full Channel out of business, but they won't. And Full Channel does not really have any say in their prices as they must try and stay competitive with Cox if they want to keep their customers. Basically Cox uses this little local company to give the appearance of competition.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Problem: Market abuse by government-subsidized, government-sanctioned, and government-regulated monopoly
Solution: Post incoherent rant about "libertarians" on Slashdot
Ever stop think about just exactly where and when your intellectual life went this far off course?
You mean the industry backed monopoly forced on the municipality.
In some cities there is competition and even for some people in parts of states, but for the large majority of the area in the US there is no competition.
An unregulated natural monopoly is offering a service, when it is not economically viable for competitors to offer you a competing service.
If you actually read the contracts the cable company writes when "negotiating" (i.e. take it or leave it) with the town, you'll see that the contract make the town liable for the minimum level of profit for that cable company. Isn't contract law fun?
As usual all they do is dowmod hide your post's points they can't disprove. You crushed DarkOx here https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... and here https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... and he shut up pretty fast afterwards didn't he?
Does this apply to Trump? He's self funded and the elites hate him.
1) Offer unlimited internet with no data caps if you will only subscribe to the TV service.
...
2) Wait a few months.
3) Reduce the data caps on everyone who doesn't take the TV service to some arbitrarily low number.
4) Wait a few months.
5) Raise the price on all services.
6) Wait a few months.
7) Put data caps back on everyone, perhaps a bit higher for TV subscribers.
8) Wait a few months.
I ended up front ending it with squid configured with SSL Bump. There is lots of documentation on that, they you just configure squid to use privoxy as its upstream.
Squid can do lots of caching to which is nice in my situation. (allows multiple devices to benefit)
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This is the first unlimited residential internet service they've ever provided. Providing it for people who subscribe to their TV service is a good first step... Their email server has been down for days while they switched email over to their new parent company, TDS Telecom. Their internet has been up and down for months for DOCSIS 3 hardware and firmware upgrades. I think this has put a black eye more than providing the first unlimited service to their customers.
'They' downmod your posts because your posts are often just spam garbage.
Also, just because many people agree that blocking ads is a good idea doesn't mean that we 'accept that you're right'. It's a commonly held opinion, not a revelation from you.
In the end it's entirely up to them on how they wish to charge for their products/services. However, it is up to you as the client to decide whether you want to move to another service provider... it's business 101 guys, come on!
You're being protected from digital dysentery; with the boob tube, the BS flows practically only in a hydrating direction, not a dehydrating one.
See subject: I block ads to avoid caps w/ hosts (1 file native to the IP stack). Privoxy is many parts not native that is harder to work with and more "moving parts" for breakdown/exploit AND resource consumption. There's also NO QUESTION regular expressions are NOT EASY for normal users. Hosts' data is easy for them to understand by comparison.
* Enabling/disabling hosts = easy too should I want to let in content from a site like ads (not that I would today, it's too dangerous with 'malvertising' & slows you down + EATS UP CAPS since today's webpages are SO BLOATED!)
Marginal results? LOL - hosts work to block out ads (& tons of other threats) AND GAIN YOU SPEED 2 WAYS (adblocks + hardcoded favorite sites @ top of hosts for faster resolution speeds vs. remote DNS)... what's 'marginal' about that? Nothing.
APK
P.S.=> I don't NEED scripts or regex complexity for hosts, a native single part to the IP stack RUNNING IN KERNEL MODE SPEED does the job... apk
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/antivirus + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lighten dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.
Ads rob bandwidth/speed paid for, security (openbid adnetworks abuse), privacy in tracking + anonymity.
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogtrackers) natively. Hosts != blockable by ClarityRay (like. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slower usermode browser addons)
Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.
Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... @ 2.3mb++
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & yes it is safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
See subject: I can validly technically backup anything I wrote here & none of you trolls can prove me wrong https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
(From respected security &/or technical sources behind me - what do you have? Downmod hiding the fact my subject above extolls OR trolling me off-topic like you are now is about it... lol!)
I've also been blocking ads BEFORE there was an "almostalladsblocked" using hosts (since 1997) so I can make the claim you are projecting is a "revelation" from you, lol... & doing it far more efficiently using what you already natively have that works in kernelmode as part of the IP stack itself vs. STUPIDLY illogically "Bolting on 'MoAr'" eating more resources + using more moving parts (for breakdown/exploit) like you fools do, lmao!
APK
P.S.=> I'm out there DOING things of value for more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity online whereas you & "your kind" by comparison are NOT - & that, IS TRULY, that... apk
See subject & https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... as hosts data = easily user edited for adding OR removing entries + it's FAR MORE EFFICIENT using what you already natively have in the IP stack itself in kernelmode speed (vs. illogically "Bolting on 'MoAr'" resources wasting usage in more moving parts for exploit + breakdown) + easily enabled/disabled via my program which obtains valid current data from 10 reputable security community sites for more speed, security, reliability + anonymity online FOR FREE...
* Courtesy of "yours truly", gratis... & you have IMMEDIATE control of the data (for adding or removing what you wish to it easily NOT WAITING OUT OTHERS UPDATES too!)
APK
P.S.=> Letting others do the job would probably BE the ONLY OPTION for most users with complex regex vs. hosts that are EASILY understood by users (same ease as understanding a phone book entry - NOT true w/ regex @ all for most users)... apk
It is time to classify internet access as a public utility. Period. It is totally unethical for ISPs to capitalize users every year with another unreasonable rate hike - or worse, unreasonable options. My elderly mother watches 3 broadcast stations only, and relies on the iPad (Facetime) to keep in touch with her grandkids (et al). She cannot afford, nor physically tolerate, the extensive travel to keep in touch as often as should be. Internet communications fill that need. She does not even want cable TV (which is all garbage reruns anyway), yet is being told that cable TV plus internet is $40/mo (for pitiful speeds of 768K - this is NOT DSL!) yet internet alone is $65/mo - for the same speed. Internet has become a necessity to maintain contact with our most valuable citizens - our wise elderly - to afford a more pleasant final years of existence and to keep them actively current within the family. This 'new' plan threatens to unreasonably increase her cost where there is no increase in her "income" (husband's pension) to cover it. So, perhaps she can cut back on food or water or sewer or taxes or other necessity to pay the cable CEO's rediculous salary! BULLSHIT! Make the internet more easily affordable and available as a right, since it has become as necessary as water and sewage, and police protection. What say you?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
You get the other service, cable or internet, for only 30% more than a high priced first service.
except the sat provider didn't offer internet at the time.
And even among those that do, such as Exede, the price per gigabyte is comparable to that of cellular Internet.
I think the difference is that over-the-top video services are unicast, whereas traditional digital cable television is multicast. Or has accounting for multicast over the public Internet been figured out yet?
The only numbers that matter are a maximum rate throughput available on the network against the current demand of users on the network at that specific time.
In theory, a 300 GB/mo cap translates to a committed information rate just under 1 Mbps, as 1 Mbps * 2629746 seconds/month * 1 GB/8000 Mbit = 329 GB/mo. But consider a situation in which the majority of home subscribers have proven unable to understand 95th percentile burstable billing but can understand metering during peak hours. In a situation like this, what is the way to manage these numbers? But I agree with you that metering at off-peak hours, when neither the upstream nor the last mile is congested, is just a cash cow.
Let me try to explain how the present situation fulfills each of the five tying criteria described in the article "Do the Antitrust Laws Prohibit Tying Products or Services Together for Sale?" by Jarod Bona:
Which criterion do you feel makes the bundling practice described in the featured article not a case of tying?
Does America no longer have broadcast (as in VHF/ UHF radio waves) TV services?
The USA has ATSC broadcasts, and STBs to watch ATSC broadcasts on pre-digital TVs are sold for under $100. But these under-$100 STBs don't support fast-forwarding near-live TV. STBs with this feature are made by TiVo, and a TiVo STB won't work without a subscription.
You mean there is NO other supplier of recording/ fast-forwarding STB in the US? That's astonishing.
Remember that the United States is the home of software patents. Other makers of DVRs that allow simultaneous playback and recording have to license the "time-warping" patent from TiVo, usually after TiVo files suit. The only other widely used DVRs are those leased by cable TV companies and satellite TV companies.