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Time Warner Shelves Plans For Tiered Pricing
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Apr 16, 2009 04:07 PM
from the meek-will-continue-to-subsidize-the-bold dept.
from the meek-will-continue-to-subsidize-the-bold dept.
The FNP writes "Time Warner has postponed their plans to test tiered data caps in Greensboro NC, Rochester NY, San Antonio TX, and Austin TX. This announcement comes shortly after the media started reporting on Eric Massa's opposition and protests planned for this Saturday outside of Time Warner's offices in Greensboro and Rochester." There's also a good piece at Ars on the fall of the current tiered-pricing plans.
Related Stories
[+]
Time Warner Pulls Plug On Metered Billing Tests 112 comments
fudreporter is one of many who writes to tell us that Time Warner is not planning to continue their tiered consumption tests at this time. The company is not completely admitting defeat, stating that they "may return to the idea in the future," but for now the test has been shut down. "The plan would have established several tiers based on how much consumers use the Internet. Time Warner Cable had said at the time that it believed that consumers who download the most content need to pay more to cover infrastructure upgrades. The plan was first announced two weeks ago, then modified with higher download caps last week. In a news release yesterday, Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, said, 'We will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met.'"
[+]
A Layman's Guide To Bandwidth Pricing 203 comments
narramissic links to IT World's A Layman's Guide to Bandwidth Pricing, writing "Time Warner Cable has, for now, abandoned the tiered pricing trials that raised the ire of Congressman Eric Massa, among others. And, as some nice data points in a New York Times article reveal, it's good for us that they did. For instance, Comcast says it costs them $6.85 per home to double the internet capacity of a neighborhood. But the bit of the Times article that we should commit to memory is this: 'If all Time Warner customers decided one day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the company's costs would be no different than on a day when every customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after another.'"
[+]
Time Warner Shutting Off Austin Accounts For Heavy Usage 591 comments
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.'"
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Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's exactly like normal hell; but your nose also itches.
Re:Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:5, Funny)
It's exactly like normal hell; but your nose also itches.
Fuzzyfungus, this generation's Dante :)
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Re: (Score:2)
Anybody who tries to screw over their customers, gets called on it, and then says that they are defering until customers can be "educated"(no doubt with an expression of injured innocence) has a one way trip to the special hell waiting for them. It's exactly like normal hell; but your nose also itches.
I believe China had special camps for that sort of "education" once.
Re:Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:4, Funny)
>>>they then burn down your house.
And I load-up my rifle and track-down the CEO and every regional manager. "What matter a few deaths in a century? From time to time the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be back (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It will be back (Score:5, Interesting)
From their recently filed 10-K report:
"Technological advancements, such as video on demand, new video formats and Internet streaming and downloading, have increased the number of media and entertainment choices available to consumers and intensified the challenges posed by audience fragmentation.
The increasing number of choices available to audiences could negatively impact not only consumer demand for the Companyâ(TM)s products and services, but also advertisersâ(TM) willingness to purchase advertising from the Companyâ(TM)s businesses.
If the Company does not respond appropriately to further increases in the leisure and entertainment choices available to consumers, the Companyâ(TM)s competitive position could deteriorate, and its financial results could suffer."
Full Document Here:
http://ir.timewarner.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=950144-09-1481 [timewarner.com]
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Re:It will be back (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but screwing your customers because you can't (or won't) adapt has never been a good business model.
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Re:It will be back (Score:4, Insightful)
It usually is when you have a monopoly. Until/unless a good substitute for Cable/DSL for the last mile comes along, they can get away with screwing us over because we don't have any real choice in the matter.
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Re:It will be back (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>it's evident that SOMEONE is going to end up regulating the market
You forgot the third option of giving customers 3 or 4 internet companies to choose from, and let the customer have the power to choose.
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Re:It will be back (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Utilities are regulated monopolies because of logisitical and physical limits. Imagine a world where you have 6 water companies all burying 16" mains in the right-of-way infront of your house. Or 12 power companies stringing lines all over the place. There's only so much room for water lines, gas lines, power lines, phone lines, sewers, etc. The more stuff hung from the poles or stuffed in the ground, the harder it is to keep track of it all to prevent them interfering with each other -- and eventually,
Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
The ISP's usual quote of "Its only 5% of our customers using 40% of traffic" argument flew in the face of the "So we're going to cap things so low everybody will hit it" response they kept trying to ram through.
If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit. Doesn't DirecTV's internet access do this already?
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Well not to mention the "we would have to spend some of our $billions of profit on infrastructure if everyone uses their connection fully wah wah!" argument only applies to prime-time, yet the plan they put forward in no way targeted peak usage hours. Download from 2am - 6am, you'd still hit the cap even though the cost to them for providing that bandwidth is marginal enough to be effectively zero.
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Re: (Score:2)
Thats exactly right.. freaking rate limit them to 128k/s Painful, slow, horrible, but still able to pay their bills online if they need to, or send an email.. painful enough that they won't do it again...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the issue is bigger than that. When you start hearing reports that the cost of upgrading the infrastructure ends up only being $75-$100 to handle it, what is the consumer left thinking? We're getting screwed. But now, I'm not satisfied with them merely walking away from their cock-eyed ideas for caps. Where's my infrastructure upgrade? Can I pay the one time $100 upgrade fee to get the 20Mb service? (I know it doesn't work that way, but come on!)
I think they got more than they bargained for by
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
See, we just set up a router in our room with the correct settings, then when one port hit its limit, we switched to another port. 3 ports per room, and 3 rooms jumped on this bandwagon. The downloaders could download, the laptops users could sit anywhere, and nobody could bitch.
You shoulda seen how we wired it though....each wall jack had a cable run to a 16 port hub, then the hub ran to a linksys router running dd-wrt with a few scripts to auto-switch the port it was using once a bandwidth limit was appro
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's spelled out in the contract they can limit it however they wish. DirecTV's satellite connection already basically does this. You get 200MB per day on their basic plan at full speed (and unlimited from 3am to 6am). If you exceed your 200MB limit, then you get scaled back to essentially dial-up speeds for the rest of the day until you get your 200MB back for the next day. It's written into the contracts, so legally it's fine. It's a little too limited for my tastes, but if it was truly down to be
Re: (Score:2)
If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit. Doesn't DirecTV's internet access do this already?
Better yet, get congress to give them a large sum of money to get better tubes. Pretty good idea isn't it? I wonder why no one has thought of it yet.
Re: (Score:2)
They've already got it, they just don't want to spend it.
Re: (Score:2)
So, then everybody pays for effectively the same thing, through their tax money.
I find that idea just as pukey.
It doesn't have to be gov't owned (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the wires should be owned by a regulated entity that doesn't play favorites with interconnection carriers and data providers.
If ACME Wire Company owned all the wires and local switching stations, and they invited all comers to install Internet, telephone, and cable switches in their switching centers, and they invited all data providers who could afford to do so to colocate at those centers, and they charged everyone - consumers, transport providers, and data providers - reasonable and presumably regulated rates, this would leave the telcos, cable companies, ISP providers, and data providers an opportunity to compete based on price, product, service, etc.
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Re:It doesn't have to be gov't owned (Score:4, Interesting)
However, the wires should be owned by a regulated entity that doesn't play favorites with interconnection carriers and data providers.
That won't happen. Every regulatory body will play favorites, heck, just look at MS basically buying out ISO, an international standards body. Congress is supposed to be in the favor of the people, that doesn't happen. The truth is, regulatory bodies don't do anything good. In fact, I'd rather be screwed by a company that I have a power (no matter how limited) to get into the market and make a better product then to be screwed by the regulatory bodies where I have zero control over them.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit.
Why? Why must the heaviest users per se be punished for using what they bought?
You'll always have some asymmetry in the use of bandwidth. Why not just charge people what the Internet actually costs*, and let them use it as much as they care to pay for?
(* plus a reasonable profit)
Oh right, I know the answer: the company exists not to fulfill societal needs and wants, but to move money from customers to shareholders.
Someone should set up a non-profit ISP; in general, non-profit companies rule: you pay less
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes tiered pricing is in place from a number of vendors, even cable vendors. The issue here is when your sum total amount of downloaded bits goes over a fixed limit you can't download AT ALL without incurring fees regardless of what speed plan you've signed up for.
I'm too lazy to do the math, but given predicted monthly caps could it be determined what the *effective* download speed over the month could be? my guess it would be pretty friggin slow.
Kinda like giving you a set amount of gas with your choice of cars: Yugo, Mustang, Ferrari. You can go different speeds but the faster you go the less time you have available.
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It's unfair (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be more understanding of the situation of metered billing and usage if I was under the impression that they were doing all they could with the money they had and physically couldn't do anymore, but that's not the case here.
It's not a problem with any technology, it's not prohibitively expensive, it's greed and nothing else. And until they can prove to me and the rest of the people that it really isn't about greed then we aren't going to stand for them ripping us off.
Not quite gone. (Score:5, Insightful)
eh heh (Score:4, Informative)
Back in the mid 90's, Japanese telecoms decided that they would charge for a piece of each 'type' of phone action...one rate for voice, another for data, etc., while billing was based on quantity (metered.
This was while it was trivial to find service in North America that was flat rate, but still unique per type.
It didn't take much to find ways around the J billing hassles, such as dial-back for international LD. And it only took a few years for the J telcos to wake up to what they were not getting and alter their methods to at least keep them in the game.
Metered use is just an example of the free reign that domestic telcos have - they can dig into the client's pockets....so they will. Rather than build it so they will come, they cling to business models that are increasingly going out-of-date. And with no one to stop them, the domestic phone market will once again become a killing field of grand proportion, with the victim, as usual, being the consumer.
Pay-for-use makes sense only if you lower prices (Score:5, Insightful)
In the NPR piece about this, one TW representative compared the current scheme to someone buying a salad and someone else buying an expensive lobster dinner, and the two of them splitting the cost 50-50. In other words, the heavy user is subsidized by the light user. But if this is their rationale, then making the heavy user pay for his/her fair share would mean that the light users would no longer have to subsidize the heavy users and that the light users should see lower prices.
But that was nowhere in TW's plan, which is why this all seemed disingenuous. I, for one, think it's fair for people who use more to pay more. But not when that is used as an excuse for price gouging. It seems much more likely that TW is just trying to protect their content delivery services from people getting movies digital competitors like Netflix's download service, which would been an abuse of market powers.
Re:Pay-for-use makes sense only if you lower price (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's break down this salad dinner analogy a bit more.
The analogy REALLY works like this.
Two people walk into a restaurant and buy dinners. One buys a lobster dinner, and one buys the salad dinner. Though all the dinner prices are advertised at the same price, in this case, it's advertised at the price of the lobster dinner.
Eventually, everyone starts coming in to the restaurant and starts buying the lobster dinner. The owner of the restaurant realizes that the cost of feeding everyone the lobster dinner is too high because they assumed that very few people actually wanted lobster and most would stand for the salad. Eventually, they start running out of lobster to feed everyone and start telling people you all can't have your lobster dinner. We assumed that most people just wanted salad and offered lobster as a bonus, we didn't expect everyone to jump on to the bandwagon and start buying the best thing we offered.
Rather than find another supplier of lobster and expanding their business, rather than overhauling their operation realizing that people really don't care for salad as much and want the lobster--they start placing the blame on the people that eat lobster. They tell the people eating salad that the people eating lobster are keeping all of their dinner costs high, and that the business owner isn't to blame for the high prices but the people eating the lobster that they offered are.
Meanwhile, the owner is walking away complaining about money when he's got a few million bucks in his bank account ripping off the people buying salad by charging them for lobster, and telling the people eating lobster that they can't have as much of it and need to start eating salad.
If my entire analogy sounds completely absurd, because it does to me, then you get an idea of how absurd this entire fucking scheme is from these cable companies.
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Sir, we're seeing a rapid increase in cancellation (Score:3, Funny)
"Look, the cancellation rate is dipping....oh, no it isn't. Doh!"
Good idea, bad implementation (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm torn on this one. Personally I think that metered bandwidth is the most equitable way charge customers, but I think that the way TWC went about it was a shameless money-grab.
We're already accustomed to consumption-based pricing. We see it all the time: electicity, water, gas, food, etc. Same should go for internet access. And in fact, metered bandwidth is the pricing model that many ISP's use for hosting companies and other ISP's.
But here's the catch, if TWC went to a per-GB model with the aim to keep their revenues the same as when they had per-month pricing, 95% of their customers would pay less. A LOT LESS.
But that's not what they were proposing. They wanted that 95% of customers' costs to stay the same, and have 5% of high-usage customers to pay more. Under that scenario, TWC would make TONS MORE MONEY. Essentially they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
If somebody wants to do metered pricing right, here's what they gotta do. Send each of your customers a letter saying "based on your monthly usage, we predict that your bill would be $AMOUNT under our new pricing model". However, seeing as how the cable companies have totally pissed away consumer trust, I doubt anyone would believe them.
Pay-per-bit is not equitable (or sensible) (Score:5, Insightful)
You pay for water by volume and electricity by Watt-hour because when you use either of them, the utility has to treat/create and provide more. They have a bunch of static equipment and pipes/wires that are capable of providing a fixed maximum flow/power, but they also have real incremental costs for every unit consumed.
Bits aren't like that. The ISP buys a bunch of routers and switches and fiber capable of providing some amount of bandwidth, but if that bandwidth isn't capped then whether you use the pipe or not makes very little difference. The next bit costs the same amount to send regardless of whether or not you used the bit before. At the link level, bits are being sent back and forth regardless of whether or not any valid application data packets are contained therein. Peering arrangements are based on outbound traffic, so your downloads don't cost them anything that way. So outside of the tiny amount of extra electricity needed to process a packet which wouldn't even be worth charging for, the number of bits you consume has no effect on their costs.
In short, bandwidth costs lots of money, but once you have it, each bit of data costs virtually nothing. Therefore charging for bits makes no sense.
The only way in which your usage of the existing bandwidth costs them more money is if that bandwidth is saturated such that they cannot provide their customers with decent service, or accept new customers, and they have to buy more equipment/pipes etc. The only time that's going to come close to happening is during Internet Prime Time. Outside of that, and you can peg your bandwidth all you want and it's not going to saturate your ISP's link.
A person who downloads 2 TB of data a month, but does it all in the middle of the night, is much less likely to cause any problems than a person who downloads 20GB a month, but does it all at 8pm. It's the latter one who is going to force the ISP to go buy more equipment.
That's part of why this scheme was so transparent -- it didn't even attempt to address the peak usage issue.
You want equitable? Here's equitable: You pay for bandwidth, however you want, at a per-month rate. You can use your bandwidth as much as you want. However, during peak hours if the ISP is saturated they throttle everyone's connection speeds proportionally to their purchased bandwidth. Then, heavy users have an incentive to download off-peak for better download speeds, and light users who are under-utilizing their bandwidth don't even notice except that their ISP is no longer gagging.
Oh and if this happens too much, the ISP goes out and uses some of their profits to buy more equipment like any business trying to serve expanding customer needs. :P
But instead we get some BS about how it's the number of bits you download that is the problem. Which it is, of course, from their scheming perspective. If you download lots of large files, and those large files happen to be TV shows and movies, then you might not need your $60-100/mo cable TV. That is the "cost" that they're worried about wrt large downloaders.
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What's the Problem? (Score:4, Funny)
"Yes" said the Time Warner representative, The $55 Lobster dinner was subsidized by the $5 Salad eater when they both equally split the bill at $30 each.
Now, under our new pricing plan, the Lobster diner will pay $95, their fair share after we total their usage and the Salad eater will continue to pay $30. Well actually they'll pay $35 after our proposed price increase. That seems fair to us. Why would any consumer have a problem when we level the playing field so everyone is treated equally? Currently only one consumer, the Salad diner, is getting screwed. With our new pricing plan both the Lobster diner and the Salad diner will be treated equally.
That makes sense to me.
Secret Conversation (Score:5, Interesting)
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Sure been tough lately being a Democratic member of Congress.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Tell me about it. Tea parties. Fox News.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I know a way you can get real popular.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Go on...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): People hate Congress and are afraid we're spending too much. I mean we're just rewarding our constituents after 8 long dry years but...
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah, I know.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): But there's someone even less popular than we are.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Lawyers?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Call that one a tie. Think even worse.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Uhhh...where's my teleprompter? Oh yeah, loaned it to Barrack. Wait, I got it!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Right, the cable television companies that we're supposed to be regulating to the benefit of the consumer.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Ha ha ha ha ha...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Well Time-Warner just decided to screw over their customers even worse than before, and they're starting it in our own great state of New York.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What are they doing?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Their costs are dropping and their profits are up.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Profits are up? Aren't we taxing them enough yet?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Probably not, but that's not the point.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): But raising taxes on other people and spending the money on pork is about all I know how to do - except to blame Bush for everything, that is.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): This is easy. I'm just a small member of the House and they're not listening to me, but you're the senior Senator from a powerful state. They can't ignore your voice.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What exactly are they doing.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They imposing caps that will raise the average user's bill by at least 66% while calling them pigs for using the Internet connections they actually paid for.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): God Forbid! We can't have that - unless they need the money for more campaign contributions [wink][wink][nudge][nudge].
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I think they need new private jets.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): So what do I need to do?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Tell them to cut it out, or else - and you'll be a hero to millions.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): That easy?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): That easy!
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): And if I don't, what's the downside?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They'll be protesting in the streets this weekend.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): We can't have any more of that. Except for NBC who is already in our pocket, I don't think we can shut down the rest of the news organizations a second time so soon. Not after the ratings Fox News got out of those tea parties!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Then we've got a deal? You'll remember who brought this to you?
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Of course, kid. The check's in the mail.
Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:5, Insightful)
I never knew how "good" Time Warner was until they sold out, in our area, to Comcast!
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Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:5, Funny)
OMG!
Time Warner was near the top of my list of crap customer service companies already.
I have no direct experience with Comcast, but have read various customer reviews over the years, so all I can say is:
Looks like you had a crap sandwich and now you get a crap sandwich with a side of crap. :/
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Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:5, Funny)
TWC CEO: Well, there's crap egg sausage and crap, that's not got much crap in it.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Comcast sucks, but Verizon is worse. :(
What's wrong with Verizon? The only thing that sucks about Verizon is that you are tied to DSL (unless you are lucky enough to live in FiOS land) and it may not be as fast as cable if you aren't close to the CO. Beyond that, they don't cap, they don't play games and they even go to bat for their customers when the mafiaa comes calling.
Verizon pisses me off on many levels but I haven't seen much to complain about with their internet service.
Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:4, Informative)
I've had Comcast in three different cities. They were great in one, and sucked unbelievably in the two others. I finally had to cancel where I am now because they couldn't get me a static-free picture or more than 128 kbps Internet. They sent 7 technicians out, none of whom were authorized to actually fix anything. I have Verizon FIOS now and I'm relatively happy, other than their pact with satan (i.e. MPAA / RIAA) and the three strikes policy.
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Re: (Score:3)
I have Verizon FIOS now and I'm relatively happy, other than their pact with satan (i.e. MPAA / RIAA) and the three strikes policy.
Verizon was one of the few ISP who stood up with the RIAA, and I don't believe they have a three strike policy. I might be wrong about that though, but a quick google search turns up nothing.
Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:4, Informative)
A better analogy would be for GP to build his own on-ramp to the interstate, because the local roads and the only existing on-ramp are all owned by companies that demand a fee for their usage. ISPs do form part of the backbone, but they also plug into a central internet exchange.
The problem is that a private on-ramp simply costs too much for only a couple of users, so you'd need to band together to make it worthwhile. In effect, set up your own community ISP. You'd also need to come up with a good plan to hook up all the homes to the on-ramp though.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd also need to come up with a good plan to hook up all the homes to the on-ramp though.
Just negotiate with the power company for the right to string wires on their poles..... oh wait, you mean the community gave an exclusive right to the cable company to do that and will use the power of the government to prevent you from doing so as well? Hmm.... "free market" indeed.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
DNS outages lasting hours at a time
The other complaints are more than valid, but OpenDNS [opendns.com] works very well for me, as an alternative to Comcast's DNS servers.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not actually. That's texas, this is new york.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure. Sounds great. Like my other utilities, let's go ahead and heavily regulate them and reduce profits (or deregulate them and let Time Warner's lines be a free-for-all). I'd be happy to pay about $0.07/GB. which is approximately what my hosting provider charges me for bandwidth. This was part of the problem. $5/GB is a tad high for me. $150/GB for what I currently get for $50 is ludicrous.
So sure, let them charge like utilities, and we'll regulate them like utilities. That will lead to massive price drop
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
These are good points. And you'll notice that people think current prices are expensive, but the $50/month is something they're willing to pay. Based on your formula that would be $50/100GB. Which actually seems like a somewhat decent price.
The problem is that me watching an extra 2 hours of TV is not an extra $20 on my electrical bill. Me watching an extra 2 hours of TV using Time Warner would be. I think ultimately what's freaking people out is that this makes cable broadband unaffordable. Perhaps the sol
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
More like they tried to pull a fast one on their service areas and got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. If anything, this should make you more alert to sudden changes in their pricing structure - not more confident in them.
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Re:This war is not over yet! (Score:4, Interesting)
AT&T is metering Beaumont now? OMFG! Why do I have to live in the one place in the entire motherfucking country that has metered 'bandwidth' on every ISP available? And why has no one else on Slashdot pointed out that there is a city in the United States where TWO major corporate ISPs are capping their internet services? Why isn't Beaumont the internet's net neutrality battleground instead of these other cities?
It was bad enough when Time Warner started doing it, but now AT&T has done it, and quietly for sure. I simply had no idea, and it was not announced in any way. I thought AT&T's trial was in Reno only. This is a fucking outrage, and I think I will spend my day off tomorrow contacting my representatives in federal, state, and local government. Seriously, this is BAD. I was shopping for DSL as recently as LAST WEEK to try to get away from paying Time Warner anything, even though I am (quite luckily) still grandfathered in to their unmetered plan. I thought I had no options because DSL isn't even available where I live, but now I quite literally have NO FUCKING OPTIONS, they have all been stripped away. It's only a matter of time before they start billing me the metered rate, so I have to act quickly. Does anyone else here live in Beaumont? We need to protest!
Here's [lightreading.com] another article I found on the Beaumont caps.
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