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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
I'll feed the trolls today.
You're adding on more to do the same job or less & the IP stack + hosts already do the job with less
False I am adding more software to do the job right. IP stack can't because we don't live in a world where hostname -> ip address has anything close to a 1:1 relationship. Second there are lots of cases where I want some content but not all content from a given host. Sometimes sites won't work unless you allow at least some content from a given host, I can put in rules to smartly allow the scripts I need and still block the rest, can you? Smarter filtering like squid+privoxy lets me do this. The host file is just a hammer the task calls for forceps.
You might be satisfied with very marginal results and stuff being broken, that you have to either leave broken or accept all crap from the source. Maybe that is good enough for you. Its not for me.
I have off loaded all of this to a low power always on little arm box, the provides these functions to all the devices in my home. So there is no overhead on the machine I am useing, and that little arm box uses basically no power when idle. My time and having a good web experience is more valuable than the pennies a month it costs to run; it beats dickering with a hosts file constantly.
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.
You're being protected from digital dysentery; with the boob tube, the BS flows practically only in a hydrating direction, not a dehydrating one.
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.