Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use

As rumored a couple of months back, Time Warner is starting a trial of metered Internet access. "On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte... [T]iers will range from $29.95 a month for... 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for... 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap."

Re:isn't this a breach of contract?

[risinganger]

No it isn't (yet). You obviously didn't read the short article as it states this trial is only running with new subscribers and not existing ones.

Re:Welcome to our world

[mrbluze]

I also download the occasional Linux distro, and a Fedora or Windows update can be over 200 MB

In Australia the plans are usually for bandwidth/month, so you pay according to line speed, GB/month etc, but it's fairly uncommon (except for wireless broadband) to be charged for excess usage (they just drop the speed to something painful like 64kbps).

Many of the ISP's have unmetered content, such as local mirrors for major linux distro's, file repositories and some entertainment related stuff. So, for example, all the Ubuntu updates for our computers are not metered - in some circumstances that's VERY useful (eg: an office with 10 computers).

But Australia's internet is a horrible state of affairs generally - just putting in our experience here FWIW.

Re:Welcome to our world

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, here in the UK I get around 16Mbps Down / 1.3Mbps up ADSL from Be. I haven't found anything to be throttled, shaped or 'managed.'
There is no bandwidth cap. They have set up their service precisely for 'heavy users' - they were one of the first ISPs to use ADSL2+ over here. Be it torrents, usenet, ftp or http, it just works - at around 2MB/sec. Even better, latency is minuscule when it comes to gaming - something else they consider important. You even get the choice of increasing your latency and dropping a little download speed in return for another megabit of upload.

Cost? £22 a month. Best ISP ever, even if they are now owned by O2. I think that works out a bit cheaper than Time Warner's offering, anyway.

Re:Welcome to our world

[OneSeven]

Some Australian ISP's used to let users elect to have either the painful throttling you describe, or to be charged extra for excess usage. These days most (all?) just do the throttling - most likely to try to get users to upgrade to more expensive plans. I'm currently on 64k thanks to exceeding my allowance for the month, and 'painful' barely describes it. I'd happily pay $10 extra for another few more GB this month, but certainly don't want to lock myself into a higher plan, as most months I won't be using as much.

Also - if you've got 10 machines running the same OS, wouldn't it be worth setting up an internal mirror / patch distribution server so you only need to pull the data down your internet pipe once?

Re:Welcome to our world

[morgan_greywolf]

Uh, yeah. Except that Time Warner isn't likely to do things like host local mirrors for major Linux distros. As it stands now, if you run Linux, you are. officially at least, unsupported as they only officially support Windows and Macintosh. And they only added official Macintosh support in like 2001 or 2002 -- before that it was just Windows.

Caching proxy server a better solution

[Mathinker]

> wouldn't it be worth setting up an internal mirror / patch distribution
> server so you only need to pull the data down your internet pipe once?

To mirror the entire Ubuntu update repository would probably be pretty wasteful unless his office is quite extraordinary. And just mirroring the files needed by one computer will not necessarily be OK for all the other ones, unless he's very careful to install packages only on an office-wide basis. I think a better solution for him would be to use a proxy (like Squid) to cache the update files.

Re:Welcome to our world

[mrbluze]

As it stands now, if you run Linux, you are. officially at least, unsupported as they only officially support Windows and Macintosh.

But honestly, who cares about that. Nowadays the support of the ISP effectively ends at the router, if they supplied it (or it's a model they support). I know AOL had stupid software you had to install etc., but that's not the case in the vast majority.

Back in the days of dial-up internet where you had to set up your modem, your winsock application, proxies, etc...etc.. they had experts who knew how to do things for a specific OS (too bad if you had mac in those days - go to a apple-specific ISP!), but now it's not really relevant.

Holding out on us

[stewbacca]

I talked to a TimeWarner rep when I lived in San Antonio last summer and he told me that they've had the infrastructure for 15mbps connections in place for a year or two, but cap the speeds between 5-10 on purpose. The "purpose", I see now, is that they want to try and milk every penny out of us for something that wouldn't cost them any more to deliver. I imagine it actually costs them money to cap our bandwidth anyway, so this is pretty dumb...especially now that I live in a market with another major provider (AT&T) for competition.

Re:Welcome to our world

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a matter of our gas prices being lower than elsewhere in the world, it's a matter of the profit being extorted from us to the oil companies.

Record profits for what, 6 years in a row or thereabouts? How do you foreigners oil price to profit ratio compare?

Re:VOD?

[bishiraver]

At least (for now) most people have several ISP's to choose from.

Bzzt. Wrong. Most areas have local-government-mandated sole cable ISPs. Ie, this neighborhood is given to TWC, this neighborhood is given to Cablevision, this neighborhood is given to comcast. Sometimes it's more like towns instead of neighborhoods, but the concept remains the same. Your basic choice is: Cable for decent speeds, DSL for shitty speeds. And if you're very, very lucky you can opt for FiOS.

Re:A little unfair hosters vs providers

[devman]

All the equipment is consolidated in a server farm where ever your hosting company is, so they buy bulk bandwidth and resell it to you cheaply. With residential services customers are spread out and require last mile infrastructure.

Simple Solution

[bemo56]

I'm really surprised someone hasn't posted this already, but use Firefox and the NoScript plugin [mozilla.org].
It blocks all ad content from being downloaded, I use it to speed up my horribly slow internet connection.

Re:Welcome to our world

[Daengbo]

If you install AptZeroConf [phidev.org] on every machine, then you won't have to any work at all -- it's all handled transparently.

Re:This isn't cost recovery, it's profiteering.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't really thing that you have 6 terabytes of bandwidth, do you? I dare you to try even hitting 1TB a month on your server (stick up a 1G file and download it 300 times a day for a month)--your QOS will go straight to hell because Dreamhost can't actually deliver as much bandwidth as they claim.

Dreamhost is probably the worst company you could cite. They're notorious for promising the moon and not being able to deliver.

Re:Welcome to our world

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs tried basing billing periods off the calendar month and quickly realised it was a terrible, terrible idea.

have you ever tried to use the internet when absolutely everyone using your isp is trying to wring that last little bit of quota out for the month? ("who cares if you get throttled 1 day from the end"). calculating billing periods based on sign-up dates spreads the load over the whole month, instead of having 2-3 days when the internet is unusable

Re:Cancel

[antdude]

Or back to dial-up (3 KB/sec at most for me with compressed files). I have no other affordable broadband options in my area. DSL is too far (20K ft. from CO). Forget satellite Internet services (slow, capped, and expensive). No local WISP services. IDSL/ISDN is too slow and expensive (100+ bucks a month??!?!) :(

Would you like to pay for a T1 connection for me? I think not.

Re:Welcome to our world

[Pulzar]

But hey, you just go ahead and keep blaming those Eeeevil Big Oil Execs and their OBSCENE 4% profits! Ignorance like yours must be fucking bliss.

Geez, talk about ignorance [yahoo.com]... Those gross margins of over 40% certainly back your argument that the oil companies are hardly making any money. The fact that only 4% of the gas price goes to the gas seller speaks nothing of the profits made for digging out the crude oil and selling it for ridiculous prices. Evil or not, they are making profits at a rate that many other companies would like to... You certainly shouldn't be feeling sorry for them.

Hue and Cry

[wreave]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry [wikipedia.org] In common law, a hue and cry (Latin, hutesium et clamor, "a horn and shouting") was a process by which bystanders were summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who had been witnessed in the act of committing a crime. ------------ On the OT, it makes sense to charge for BW used. That's how the ISPs typically have to pay for it. The unlimited model only works when overall usage is low. Personally, I am a frequent but not high-bandwidth user, and would prefer to pay a rate that reflects my actual usage instead of subsidizing all the torrent uploaders. It seems to me that simply charging for BW utilization would solve the file-sharing problem overnight.