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Time Warner Shutting Off Austin Accounts For Heavy Usage
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Apr 25, 2009 09:21 AM
from the somebody-threw-them-a-shovel dept.
from the somebody-threw-them-a-shovel dept.
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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Time Warner Shelves Plans For Tiered Pricing 210 comments
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.
[+]
Your Rights Online: Hunting the Mythical "Bandwidth Hog" 497 comments
eldavojohn writes "Benoit Felten, an analyst in Paris, has heard enough of the elusive creature known as the bandwidth hog. Like its cousin the Boogie Man, the 'bandwidth hog' is a tale that ISPs tell their frightened users to keep them in check or to cut off whoever they want to cut off from service. And Felten's calling them out because he's certain that bandwidth hogs don't exist. What's actually happening is the ISPs are selecting the top 5% of users, by volume of bits that move on their wire, and revoking their service, even if they aren't negatively impacting other users. Which means that they are targeting 'heavy users' simply for being 'heavy users.' Felten has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands." Felten's challenge is paired with a more technical look at how networks operate, which claims that TCP/IP by its design eliminates the possibility of hogging bandwidth. But Wes Felter corrects that mis-impression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.
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Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck them.
Three Letters (Score:5, Funny)
DSL.
But then I have the lowest tier so It would take a decade to download 44 gigs.
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed and THIS: I tried to cancel all my TWC services over the phone. When asked why I told him because of their caps. I told him I'd be willing to come back if/when Time Warner states explicitly that they will not cap internet usage.
In the meantime I told him I'm taking my business to ATT. The rep proceeds to argue with me about metered usage for a good 5 minutes telling me that ATTs terms of service state they can meter at any time, and blah blah blah. To which I responded if/when ATT does meter in Austin I'll consider coming back to Time Warner if they aren't metering but I'm still leaving you guys now because ATT isn't metering in Austin.
He continues to argue the same ridiculous points telling me that the metering was only internet rumor and they weren't going to do that. My reply was something like what about your COOs statement about the metering or your PR reps Tweets?. It's all rumors. Finally I said, fuck it, fine, just cancel it all you aren't going to change my mind.
He says "Well I can't disconnect over the phone, you have to bring the equipment to your local office."
I hope he's reading this...thanks for wasting my time D-Bag. I'm bringing the equipment up there today.
=Smidge=
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy is a clown.My favorite thing to do is keep saying " let me speak to your superior." and "What about 'right now' don't you understand,moron?" until you are speaking with someone suitably responsible, then lay it on the line.
" So, I'm sure my readers will love a warning about your 'no-tell' capping system and your bungling service. It's nice to be able to finally let my readers know AT&T is the only acceptable broadband in the Austin area. Of course though readers from other markets read me as well. It's too bad we couldn't clear this problem up. Your service represenatives seem to think that Streaming entertainment constitutes too much bandwidth for your little network to take. I'm sure they'll be glad that AT&T aren't asshats to their customers and mind their own business."
Just ad lib it a bit and kick 'em in the crotch good. You'd be surprised how attitudes change with the threat of constitutionally protected opinions available to their customers.
If not, well, f**k 'em anyway. Blog it up.
Parent
Save your time ..... JUST LIE! (Score:5, Funny)
If you tell them the real reason you're cancelling 1) The company doesn't really care. They want to get rid of you. You're wasting your breadth. 2) If you tell them you're moving, they'll try to sell you the service where you're moving to. Unless you tell them overseas!
So when it came time for me to cancel service many years ago, I lied. I told them "I have a severe case of CARPEL TUNNEL SYNDROME". I got no resistance. They can't really ask you any more question, or you'd have to be a real douche to. I was off the phone in about 1 minute, service cancelled and tech picked up my modem. I told them it was really hard for me to drive (truth, I do not have a car).
Parent
Oh, I bet he CAN disconnect you over the phone (Score:5, Funny)
"Well I can't disconnect over the phone, you have to bring the equipment to your local office."
Or you could just download 44 gigs and he'll figure it out.
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Funny)
Hypothetical Will Ferrel: At TWC, we value our customers tremendously. Now, I hate to nitpick, but is there any way you could pay us money, but then, we don't give you anything in return?
Parent
Re:Two words: Capitalism Failed (Score:5, Funny)
Then broadband came along offering unlimited connect time, not data.
That's simple wrong. I NEVER get "unlimited" connect time- I am limited to 30 x 24 x 60 minutes per month, sometimes 31 x 24 x 60. Heck, a few months ago, I only got 28 x 24 x 60 minutes.
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
There's limits to that clause, set by the state, since they're in Texas. I think a little discussion about realistic minimums, etc. with the PUC would go a long way, actually- because they'll have the same discussion with TWC about them, and TWC won't like it at all. :-D
Parent
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
Terms of Service would generally allow a company to do whatever they please. I imagine somewhere in there it says they reserve the right to terminate any customer account at any time for any reason.
Terms of Service does not overrule general contract law.
Parent
The rise of Hulu (Score:5, Insightful)
My bandwidth usage averaged about a gig a week, between internet radio, VoIP, etc. but then, I noticed my usage jumping to 12Gig/week virtually overnight. Initially I feared a virus. Then I checked, all of the traffic was going to my wifes computer. I then cross-referenced it, the day it jumped was the day she found Hulu, and signed up for Netflix. Now imagine 3-4 computers in the house, each one with someone seperately watching netflix or Hulu....
And then imagine (Score:5, Informative)
Every house on every block doing it.
And wait until boxee, netflix, tivio, etc., finally have that killer set-top box and everyone wants one.
There was just an article a week or so ago that everyone using bandwidth at the same time didn't cost comcast a dime more than if nobody was using it.
But there are parts of the Backbone that are oversold, and it would be physically impossible for every customer to use 100% of the bandwidth at one time and get the speed they were advertised.
I know that may not be true for some large ISPs, but if it is a smaller ISP, they oversell bandwidth. And they HAVE to in order to survive and make a profit. You could not sell 3 meg down for 29.95 a month and built out an infrastructure that would deliver 3 meg to every customer at the same time...or maybe you could, but it would take a hell of a long time to pay it off. Might be different in socialized countries, but that is the reality here.
transporter_ii
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
there are parts of the Backbone that are oversold, and it would be physically impossible for every customer to use 100% of the bandwidth at one time and get the speed they were advertised.
Then that is the problem than needs fixing, not these "abusers".
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
Limiting the total data volume per month doesn't help either, because that doesn't keep people from using their quota at the same time as everybody else, so it doesn't prevent congestion. Flat-price metering has the same problem.
However, both provide reasonable constraints, alongside the "unlimited bandwidth" possibility.
Put another way: If everyone used 100% of the electrical capacity in their house, the plant would likely fall over. So what you do is, you charge for the amount used -- then people will at least make some effort to cut back. If they don't, and they still pay the bill, you invest that money in building infrastructure.
For all other utilities, this works. You very rarely have the power go out because everyone turned their AC on at once, or the water run out (or the sewers overflow) because everyone flushed at once (the mythic "superbowl flush", as busted on MythBusters).
Only with Internet do we find so much focus on limiting or penalizing "abuse", rather than simply charging for the amount used, and investing it back into service.
A simple comparison: Two "utility computing" services I know charge about the same -- 10 cents/gig upload (to the server), 20 cents/gig download. In other words, were someone to download 20 gigs from my computer on such a service, it would cost a grand total of... $4.
Contrast this to my current fiber service, capped at 20 gigs/month, for $65/mo. Overage is 50 cents/gig.
Look, I know it costs money to lay fiber. I know it's cheaper to buy bandwidth in bulk for a datacenter, than to run cables all over the last mile.
That still doesn't justify a tenfold increase.
The streams, which are essentially the same for a lot of users, give or take a couple of minutes, are sent in duplicate as unicast streams. That is a terribly inefficient way to send video.
CDNs help with this, and are likely a way for ISPs to both save money (on their connection), and make a little on the side (for hosting the CDN's boxes). I'm not entirely sure how that works -- maybe they usually pay CDNs for the privilege -- but I'd imagine it would be the other way around, or at least free.
If you can't do that, you lose the biggest advantages of a video streaming service: On-demand, and diversity. I can go to YouTube and watch a video no one else wants to watch at the moment, and I can have it start playing instantly, if my connection is fast enough, rather than having to wait for it to start broadcasting from the beginning again.
Multicast is cool, and I hope they find a way to leverage that, especially for live streams (like Internet radio). But it buys you very little for the kind of service we're talking about here.
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
South Korean ISPs can afford to have backbone pipes of dozens of 1 Gbit fiber optic lines. Time to grow up and upgrade you decades old infrastructure USA. If the companies cann't do that maybe it is time for socialism and have government do it. Best Internet in the world with lowest cost is municipal Internet.
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
This comes up again and again, as if the population were evenly distributed. I don't know how this meme got started, but it's foolish and needs to stop.
Parent
Partially right (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's not.
I'm sick of hearing this excuse from Americans as an excuse to why Korean, Japanese, and Europeans have long since leapfrogged us in technology infrastructures.
Americans just flat out refuse to acknowledge when they aren't number one. I got news. We're not #1. We're not #2. We're not even in the top ten. And we DON'T have an excuse.
There are major urbanized areas in the US with a land area and population density equivalent to all of these other places with high speed broadband. Why don't we have real broadband on the NE coast? Why don't we have real broadband on the California coast?
Face it. TW and companies like it are no longer a part of the solution. They're not even a part of the problem. They ARE the problem.
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple fact is that TW is trying to protect their Cable TV business by degrading their internet service. For this reason I think the government should get involved and split RR from TWC. Obviously TW's conflict of interest in this area threatens people's access to a service that has become a necessity of modern life (Cable TV still isn't). Letting them arbitrate how much internet access people get is unacceptable.
Charging people for using the internet "too much" is ridiculous. The problem is bandwidth on the pipe, not the number of bits it can handle in a month. Offer them speed tiers, not usage tiers.
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple fact is that TW is trying to protect their Cable TV business by degrading their internet service.
And this is the real reason. Time Warner knows that anyone who downloads 44 GB a week downloads a whole lot of video and entertainment. And because of the likely cable monopoly that is the area, that is money coming directly out of their pocket. So the only logical proposition for them is to terminate heavy users. No matter how much they pay TWC, they will never pay enough to make up both data costs and lost opportunity costs.
Fer fuck's sake, how deeply bought off are politicians that this is in place? This is a classic case of a vertical monopoly abusing its position. Not to mention that it's compounded by the fact that there is at best a limited oligopoly providing internet access.
The reason this development bothers me is that this is actually the most rational approach for a cable provider. This is the future for cable - or for any provider with an existing content delivery arm.
Parent
Re:And then imagine (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the people using 40 gigabytes a month are just a harbinger of the future.
They can oversubscribe right now, but they can't stay at the same oversubscription numbers forever, if they do, they will be shooting themselves in the foot (as far as new revenue and better competition against dialup internet service is concerned) -- i.e. they can't offer "5 megs download", and not expect customers average usage to eventually increase over time to 5 megs sustained usage when they're doing things on the internet like watching high-def movies.
Just to be clear, using 5 megabits of download speed sustained for 2 hours a day, results in a usage of 4500 megabytes, or 4.5 gigabytes per day. Which is a weekly usage of 31.5 gigabytes per week, and 126.0 gigabytes per month.
And what if someone wants to watch two movies one day?
This is not even counting usage of commercial download services like iTunes, which are only becoming more and more popular. It's definitely forseeable someone may want to watch a few movies during the day (esp. on weekends), and download a bunch of music and videos off iTunes.
The ISPs are going to have to eventually upgrade their infrastructure to be able to provide as much per month to every customer that their customers want.
It's just a fact that logically arises from the fact that customer demand is increasing as more commercial bandwidth-hungry services are made available. This is a good thing (not a bad thing) for ISPs, as it means the customer pool will also increase, the more popular and useful these services are, gives more people reason to want high-speed connections.
It's only a question of time.
By cutting off these "extreme users", they are only delaying the inevitable a little bit, and pissing people off (possibly losing more and more customers, to competitors, who will respect that bandwidth requirements for ordinary users are in a process of massively increasing and/or realize the demand).
When it comes to new video technologies, new uses for bandwidth, there will often be a small number of early adopters of new technology, who will ultimately increase demand from the public both for new ISP services and for better ISP services.
By discouraging, shunning, or disconnecting these users, they are disconnecting/shunning new sources of revenue for the coming years... These people will pick competitors like AT&T.
They'll eventually have to build out their infrastructure further, and if they want to be competitive, INCREASE the speeds of the links they offer (so that they're oversubscribing again, but at a bandwidth much higher than their customers need).
Parent
I don't understand this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it so difficult for people to comprehend that if you use more, you're going to have to pay more?
And why is it so hard for TWC and others to advertise what they actually offer instead of what they know they can't deliver? The word "unlimited" means "no caps" or "without limit". You don't get to redefine it by slapping on some fine print.
Re:The problem is (Score:5, Insightful)
When I worked for Lucent as a network engineer, I ended up doing some work for Cricket Wireless down in Fort Lauderdale.
You see, Cricket was started by some wireless guys that looked at the numbers and said "Hey, the average length of a local telephone call is under 3 minutes. The median length is under 1 minute. At those network usage levels, we could start a company giving people UNLIMITED local calls for $20 a month and make a killing!" Right?
Wrong.
I was down there with a couple other engineers to assess how best to upgrade Crickets collapsing network. You see, people figured out that they could buy two of the phones and use them for things like BABY MONITORS! Just dial and drop one in the crib. Don't hang it up and wander around with the other, all over town if you want. It was cheaper, had better sound quality and less interference than normal baby monitors. They were seeing the average call length jump to over an hour, with some peaking at 8-10 hour calls!
Needless to say, this was NOT in their business model. They didn't take into account that the average usage was so low because people had to pay for it.
Just about every other utility -- electricity, gas, water, sewage, garbage -- you pay by volume used. The Internet isn't any different.
Parent
The saddest thing about this? (Score:4, Informative)
All this cutting off, severe capping etc. has been common practice by UK ISPs in the UK for about 2 or 3 years now such that pretty much all of them do it.
If you're lucky you'll start paying about 50 times above cost for extra bandwidth per-GB on top of your "unlimited" subscription next.
The problem is, I think the internet rush has finished, that is, pretty much everyone that was ever going to be a potential internet customer is already one nowadays, so ISPs are struggling to figure out how to further increase profits. Pretty much all businesses wont ever be happy with a fixed profit margin, they'll always want to increase it and this is what's happening both here in the UK and now seemingly in the US - they're doing away with users who actually use what they're paying for, they're cutting the amount of bandwidth available to everyone else, and then charging more with a massive markup if you want more.
I'm not really sure how else ISPs can increase their profit margins though to be fair, content is the obvious one, ISPs in the UK like BT are going for Phorm, but that's most certainly not the answer. Content seems to have failed so far because it's generally meant working with the music and movie industry who are still clueless about the internet and hence impose unrealistic licensing and DRM restrictions on the content. I think ISPs would need to become content producers if they want to get anywhere, but I guess that requires thought, effort and investment and apparently they feel it's better to simply screw your users for more profit instead. Time Warner though should at least have less trouble moving into the content bundling business than most but again, it would require more effort than simply screwing the users.
I understand that bandwidth isn't an infinite resource and some heavy users are a problem in that respect, but I do think that excuse is severely over-used, I'm not convinced there is as much of a bandwidth shortage as ISPs would have us believe, it's just an easy and convenient way to justify fucking the user over for more money.
I'm fairly surprised at the early responses. (Score:5, Insightful)
One would think being sold all you can eat service, then having it cut off for using it would be seen as universally crappy.
Re:How is it different (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that the restaurant is stating the limit, TWC is not. If they clearly stated the limit, and the limit was reasonable(their previously advertised caps were not) people wouldn't care so much.
iirc I have a 250gb cap on my comcast line. I wasn't happy when they introduced it, but it's far above what I will use in a month and they stated it clearly. I wasn't thrilled but I don't have an issue because they were upfront and reasonable about it.
Parent
Thats a D*MN low cap, and anticompetitive. (Score:4, Informative)
Comcast may cap, but at >250GB. 250GB is not a problem.
50GB however, is grossly anticompetitive, because someone who's a heavy user of video-over-the-net instead of video-over-cable will hit that cap in easily.
Re:Thats a D*MN low cap, and anticompetitive. (Score:4, Insightful)
250 GB is not a problem NOW.
In a year or so, when you'll be able to buy blu-rays online, you'll be able to download a 20-30GB movie or watch it while it's being downloaded.
If you'll plan to watch a movie each afternoon with your family, you'll go over the limit in 2 weeks.
Parent
Gee, No Shit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, the ISPs are charging the same price to heavy users and light users. Heavy users cost the ISP more than light users. Therefore, their profit motive is to maximize light users and minimize heavy users.
Tiering would align their profit motive with heavy users (due to volume discounts).
As long as heavy users keep demanding that light users subsidize their usage, by not charging differential pricing, the ISPs will continue to be profit motivated to cut off heavy users. They will continue to be on the side of content restriction. They will continue to be the enemy of we heavy users.
Choose your poison: Get the ISPs on our side by letting them profit from our heavy usage, or keep them in an antagonistic position towards us. I like getting free money from light users, but it's not a healthy market strategy. It puts me in an adversarial relationship with my ISP. I'd rather pay for what I use and have them treat me as their golden customer.
Support tiered pricing (and net neutrality - which 1's and 0's is none of their damned business). Get the ISPs back on our side (like they were in the 90's, when we geeks were their only customers). It'll cost more, but we'll be the golden-haired boys again. Stop demanding free stuff you cheap fuckers.
Re:Gee, No Shit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Scared of competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Cable faces the predicament of being next in line behind print newspapers only for them the situation is even more awkward since they themselve provide the very service that they fear will lead to their demise. They push watching streaming video and music, faster download speeds and a "better" internet experience but dont really want you to use it. Its a rough spot they put themeselves into and the only way cable providers can fight the inevitable is to limit usage and hope the customer base is incapable of finding better alternatives.
Re:Scared of competition (Score:4, Interesting)
The future of cable TV is 'a la carte' over the Internet..
As long as I have a fast Internet connection, and a box for every TV (kind of like my fucking cable company now), I could have every service the cable company delivers now.. except then I would have more options from decentralized cable providers all over the world.
Parent
Soon only the rich (Score:4, Interesting)
"44G than most use in a year" ??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I use an EVDO Rev A card for field work, and I am a light user. email, web, etc. No Windows service packs, no downloads, no torrent, no itunes, no porn, no movies. The card is expen$ive for data over my limit (3G / month). oh... and I only use it for field work; I don't do my home surfing on it.
I hit 2 G easy every month which is 24 G per year for a VERY light user. If I didn't purposely control my usage it would be very easy to hit 3 G per month.
10 years ago, web pages were 10 to 20 k bytes, now they are 150 to 250k or more. People send picnic pictures attached to emails that total 50 megs. I get my daughters gymnastics notices (single pages with about 600 bytes of text) wrapped in a Word doc with backgrounds and headers that total megabytes. This is a FAT DATA world!
I would certainly say 44G per week is a high user but not extreme.
The ISP may have some legitimacy for surcharging for overage (don't know what "Turbo" is) but cutting off without notice is just plain wrong.
They are lying again (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, I have to laugh at the folks in Europe and Asia bragging on their Internet infrastructure. This is *not* an infrastructure issue. In the Austin, and Round Rock, Texas area TWC already has huge fiber infrastructure. The cable box for this part of the neighborhood is in my back yard. The fiber bundle going into the box is two inches across.
Back in the middle '90s TWC went billions into debt to build out mixed fiber coax infrastructure. When they opened a ditch they dropped a minimum of four cables. Each cable was 4 inches across and each one contained thousands of fiber strands plus power.
The connection to my home is DOCSIS 2.0 There are 4 Gbps coming in and 1 Gbps going out and more than enough fiber to handle that all the way back to the head end. They have the bandwidth. They have already paid for infrastructure.
So what kind of an issue is it? Two things, good old capitalism and a corrupt government.
TWC is desperately trying to preserve their cable tv business and their telephone business. Having sold an all-you-can-eat service they are finding that people are actually using it that way and the people are using it to bypass TWC. They are using it to use VOIP for dirt cheap prices and service like hulu.com that let them access the video they want when they want it. They do not want to be in the business of selling commodity network transport.
The trouble with commodity network transport as a business is that there a few opportunities to sell high profit premium services. You can only compete on price and performance. And, if there is any competition at all, you find your self in a race to see who can sell the "best" service for the lowest price. TWC and AT&T are scared to death, and will fight anyway they can, to avoid winding up in the commodity transport business.
That is where the corrupt government comes in. Those two companies have manipulated the laws in Texas to their own benefit and are doing the same everywhere else. Look at the laws barring cities and counties from build their own networks. That is like barring governments from building roads. Oh, yeah, governor good hair (Perry) has been trying to eight years to privatize all the long distance roads in Texas. And, he is succeeding to.
Republicans are proof that God hates the USA.
Stonewolf
Re:She was right (Score:5, Informative)
A single hulu show is roughly a gigabyte if you have the bandwidth. 44 hours a week is not unusual for television watching in some circles.
Parent
Re:She was right (Score:5, Insightful)
A single hulu show is roughly a gigabyte if you have the bandwidth. 44 hours a week is not unusual for television watching in some circles.
I was just thinking about that, 44 hrs/wk that's over 6 hrs a day 7 days a week, which does seem a bit extreme. But then I realized, that's if you're the only one in the house. How many houses have three televisions now? Imagine an entire family that uses hulu. Even three family members could easily average over 40 hrs combined video time a week if they preferred different shows, which is not at all uncommon.
Parent
Re:She was right (Score:5, Insightful)
So pay for TiVo and internet just because your ISP doesn't think you should be using the internet that much? Get real.
Parent
Re:She was right (Score:5, Insightful)
44 GB is more than most people use in a year.
...yet.
Rather than going after "abusers", you want to start upgrading your network now to accommodate them, before the majority discover sites like Hulu and Youtube.
But the majority would not want their fees to go up because of that kind of usage.
Nor, I suspect, would the majority want to get hit with that lecture the second they discover how to actually use the connection they've been sold.
Parent
All You Can Eat (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't advertise an all-you-can-eat buffet, and then kick out a customer when they sit down and eat for three hours straight.
Metering use or at least advertising you have a bandwidth usage policy is better than just getting your line cut when they decide you've had enough for the month.
If that happens to me, *I* will be the one giving the lecture, and I will be receiving a credit for the time that my service was down, and I will be receiving additional credit for the inconvenience if they first sent me out to try new cable modems before actually telling me what happened. (though it sounds like in this case many of the reps there are not aware of the policies)
The reason we see them try to pull this BS (and frequently get away with it) is because customers let themselves get pushed around, walked all over, and generally taken advantage of.
They don't want to scare off new customers by advertising any limits, but at the same time they want to enforce limits. Can't have it both ways. Imagine going to a restaurant on a saturday all you can eat buffet to have a big breakfast with your family, and as you are parking you see the advert in the window for saturday morning all-you-can-eat, and notice the little note at the bottom, "(we will kick you out if you eat more than $20 worth of food)". Tell me YOU wouldn't find somewhere else to eat breakfast? So it's not surprising they don't want to disclose anything like that.
Parent
Re:All You Can Eat (Score:5, Funny)
Close. It's more like "You don't advertise an 'all you can eat shrimp buffet', and have ten seats available to it, and then read industry reports that say people eat twenty shrimp in an average sitting, and then only put out a hundred shrimp, and then yell at anyone who eats eleven or more shrimp, and then refuse to buy more shrimp because it'll cost you money, and then you get money from the Government Restaurant Authority to subsidize your restaurant, and then instead of buying more shrimp you spend it on more tables so you can have more customers, and then you yell at anyone who eats more than FIVE shrimp, and then you tell people that it's all you can eat, but if you want to eat all you want it'll cost you ten times as much."
And then you get sued for a run-on sentence.
Parent
Re:She was right (Score:4, Insightful)
Then TW shouldn't sell unlimited transfer volume to people.
Or, if they already did sell it, let the contract run out at the next possible opportunity without renewing it.
But cancelling it overnight? Unacceptable. Making people jump through hoops just to find out what happened? Unacceptable. Lecturing people for making use of the resource they paid for, the one that TW *contractually agreed* to provide? Unacceptable.
Besides, 44 GB per year is 120 MB per day. Do you seriously think that "most people" don't use 120 MB of transfer volume per day? Oh, sure, those that only check their email or read the occasional news website won't. But as soon as you're starting to do things like watch streaming video (e.g. on Youtube), play games, use iTunes etc. etc., it's actually quite easy for anyone to reach this volume.
Also, consider how much he actually COULD have transferred. If you assume that he's got e.g. 16 Mbps downstream (average here in Germany where I live for broadband users), that's about 1.7 MB per second that could be transferred at most. 1.7 MB times 86400 times 7 is 1028 GB - that's a *Terabyte* per week.
In other words, he was using less than 4.3% of what he COULD have used if he had actually gone all out and made FULL use of the resource that TW *contractually agreed* to provide to him.
4.3%. And you think that's excessive, just because TW oversold their capacity dozens if not hundreds of times and because they couldn't figure out that if they advertised "unlimited" Internet access, people woudl expect to get, duh, *unlimited* Internet access?
Where do you live - Bizarro World?
Parent
Re:She was right (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually bought last night the Orange Box from Valve, because they have a promotion this weekend: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/469/ [steampowered.com]
So far, I've installed Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Team Fortress 2 and these two games downloaded from Steam servers 8024 MB, because some resources are shared between these games in the package.
The estimated bandwidth usage required for the rest is:
860 MB Half-Life 2
2160 MB Half-Life 2: Episode One
6132 MB Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2606 MB Portal
So we're looking at 19GB that I could burn through in a single day with my 20mbps connection.
Keeping in mind that most games are 6-8GB nowadays and some come up at promotional prices like 5-10$ from time to time, I don't believe using 25-50GB in abusing the internet connection you've paid for.
On the contrary, the ISP is abusing the poor people that don't require fast connections making money from plans those people don't use.
As I said in other discussions, I personally am opposed to usage caps but I'm not opposed to pay per bandwidth used provided the transition from unmetered to pay per traffic is done fairly for the consumer.
What I'm trying to say is that, if a consumer currently has a 10mbps plan and pays $50 for it, the customer expects that he should be able to use at least half of that anytime he wants during a month. It's not something unreasonable.
So if a company decided to switch to billing him for bandwidth, the plan should cost a small fee for the equipment and for certain speed steps, like $10-15, and then the payment per GB should not be much higher than the previous plan, because it's not fair to pay for less.
So: 8 mbps unmetered gives you around 2.8TB of traffic if used to the max all month, and you pay for this $50.
Let's assume a reasonable usage of this connection would be half of that, so we're looking at 1.4TB (1400 GB) for 50$.
This means an equivalent pay per traffic plan could be:
$10 - base subscription
$0 - capped at 5mbps
+$5 - raise cap to 10mbps
+$10 - raise cap to 20mbps
[...]
+$40 - raise cap to 50mbps
$0 - 10 GB of traffic included in the plan (more if cap raised higher than base 5mbps)
$0.03 - 1 GB of data transferred from Internet to computer (cheaper if cap raised higher than base 5mbps)
$0.05 - 1 GB of data transferred from computer to Internet
The $0.03 is determined from 50$ / 1400 GB. Upload bandwidth costs more because it often costs the companies more and I want to be fair with them.
With this plan, mom and dad will pay $10 bucks.
A very heavy user with a 10mbps connection using it to the max will pay 10$ + $5 for 10mbps cap + $99 (0.03 x 3300GB) = $120
In theory, ISP companies will compete and bring prices down but in US as long as there are monopolies I doubt it will happen even with a change like this.
Parent
Re:WTF ? (Score:5, Informative)
Read the article, they were paying for it. The customer in question had the premium "turbo" service.
Parent
Re:WTF ? (Score:4, Interesting)
This goes someplace, so bear with me.
For a few weeks I went on a DL kick where I decided to do all my vinyl into digital. I have 1104 vinyl LPs. About 1/3 I bought the CD for because I liked the convenience. I have bought hundreds of CDs as well - I now own about 1400 CDs.
I ripped all the CDs into a drive over the period of a few months, and the drive became part of a gigantic home jukebox of some 27,000 songs running off of iTunes on a MacBook.
So, that left me at around 840 records on vinyl. I could buy a USB turntable and spend hours digitising and labeling it, and I seriously considered that - there are some fairly decent digital turntables out there.
But then I thought: hold on... let's do the math. 840 records, each taking about 1.5 hours EACH to digitise, cut apart in Audacity, and then put the ID tags in as I export as MP3. So, now we're looking at around 1300 hours. So, if I do four records a week, that will take 6 hours a week and 4 years of my life...
Fuck. That. Shit.
So, I went link hunting and found some systems like chewbone.blogspot.com where I enter in the record I'm looking for and a series of links for DL come up. YAY!
So, each record at 192 is about 80 megs, or about 12 per gig with a result of about 70gigs of music. Over the period of a few weeks idling on vacation, I was able to do this.
And now, I'm done. So the ISP would have seen a massive splurge in activity. And I now have 32,183 songs on my drive, and a lot of it digitised version of vinyl that some kind soul had the patience to sample and upload to a file system.
I learned a lot about those file systems, too. I now officially hate rapidshare. They're good if ou pay them, but they suck monkey balls if you don't. Megaupload is often slower than rapidshare, but they don't insist on a 15 minute waiting period. The best is mediafire. Also, as a mac user using Stuffit Deluxe, all you people using .rar files can go fuck yourselves. Zip files work JUST FINE thank you, and they open easily in OSX. And to think zip files were "those funky windows things"...
So, anyway, had my ISP been itchy about bandwidth, I'd have been shut down for doing something that isn't (per my intent) "evil". I was just looking for digital copies of my incredible and incredibly obscure vinyl collection. And I was rather scrupulous about it, too. Example: DOME. They had 4 records, I only have the first one on vinyl. I only DL'd the first one. If I want the others, I can go find the vinyl or buy the CD.
NOw, I'm not making some case for flawless seamless integrity or consistency, but I am sugesting that in the greater scheme of things, ISP choking bandwidth will result in people abandoning ISPs....
RS
Parent
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're streaming 10hrs a day of music 7 days a week at home, you need to go get a job.
And what if I work from home, and like listening to the music while I work?
Parent
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Because there are no disabled people or people who work from home in the world, right guys?
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Re:That's another one for the list... (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, I might be moving soon, so I might actually have a choice. Is there anyone decent out there?
If you really don't want to deal with that crap, find a company that does BUSINESS DSL. I've been with One Communications [onecomm.comm] for years. Their service has been really good. 99% of the problems I've had were the direct result of Verizon borking my DSL line. I had my modem die at 1am, and they had me a new mode by 5am and I was back up and running.
Parent
Re:Porn much? (Score:5, Funny)
in 3D 1080p interactive porn terms, 44G is not that much in a week.
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