Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use 589
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."
Welcome to our world (Score:4, Insightful)
About time too (Score:5, Insightful)
Far better this approach than one which says "Eat what you like, so long as you're reasonable."
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
What comes around . . . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
So, whats the news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Metering the bandwidth has little to do with them wanting to finance new infrastructure and a whole lot more to do with new ways to extract more revenue from their existing customer base. I mean, once you lock someone into a $150/month package deal of internet service, you can only do so much more to get money from them.
So this is how they're going to do it. Beyond this, they will still look at providing "premium" service rates for quality of service assurances.
Not to mention they will still QoS competitive products down. This will stifle innovation, as companies such as Netflix, who want to start online delivery, will now not be able to be as successful. Your freedom of choice to choose who you get content from is now limited to precisely your cable company because guess what? They aren't going to be metering your cable TV as part of the internet service.
Re:About time too (Score:2, Insightful)
In my humble opinion ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:3, Insightful)
Bastards, every single one of them.
Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here it comes (Score:3, Insightful)
What Time-Warner is doing probably has less to do with consumption and more to do with figuring out a way to nickel and dime you for every trivial service they can think of. First it'll be quotas, then they'll be a BitTorrent surcharge, then there'll be a 'speed-up' charge for port X. Before you know it your ISP bill will look like your phone bill.
$1/GB? Not bad (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, there needs to be an easy way to check your usage at all times. It amazed me how awkward it was to see my cell phone usage in the first few years I had one.
Cancel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a bold assumption to make...
40 gig a month?!?!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
time to start looking for another ISP
A little unfair hosters vs providers (Score:5, Insightful)
definite profit center (Score:0, Insightful)
Drop a few packets here and there when you need to increase the billable bandwidth!
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they don't have to prove anything of the sort. All they have to do is point to their TOS and the clause that is likely already there today stating that YOU are responsible for all data coming from your computer, legitimate or otherwise.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs and telecoms are greedy bastards calling Google and the like 'Freeloaders' for absolutely no reason. They pay for bandwidth the exact same way everyone else does. Time Warner and the like have practically 0% of their cost of business in the infrastructure once its built. You're on slashdot, we've discussed this on god knows how many occasions and anyone with the technical knowledge of building such an infrastructure and providing the bandwidth they provide for the price the provide knows how ridiculous their profit is. Don't try to pull this bullshit and expect not to be called on it.
Metered bandwidth is retarded. The lines are there, they dont' cost any more when they get used versus when they don't. The charge is artificial. They have oversold their external links and aren't upgrading. Have you paid attention to their quarterly reports and notice the ridiculous amount of profit they turn or are you just oblivious to that part of the equation?
There is no such thing as freeloading when buying bandwidth, so just cut that crap out. We all pay for our portion of the bandwidth we use, thats the way it works in shared networks. I pay my upstream for service, they are either a NAP or they pay their upstream and for their interconnects to others. Explain how its somehow different for the telecos than it is for google?
> There simply is not enough infrastructure to allow everyone to consume whatever they want, whenever they want, without making them pay for it.
First off, they should have considered that before they sold it to us, not my problem they can't provide what they said they would.
Second, telephone service in land lines has been unmetered for local service for decades. Cell phones don't charge extra for long distance any more, any metered charge is an artificial charge added because people are willing to pay it, not because it costs them 'extra'. Carriers typically have recipical agreements so its not like they charge each other for long distance anyway. Backbone providers do this as well.
Third, I've had plenty of bandwidth on my cable modem for the last 8 years. Unmetered. That is freedom. Charging extra and having limits is not freedom. I'm amazed that you even considered making such statement. Do you also believe warrentless wiretaps and being held without reason as a terrorism suspect is freedom? So now that they need to perform upgrades to compete with FiOS and the like, now they don't have enough bandwidth? Why is it that Time Warner has just bumped up residential service from 5mb/s to 7mb/s for standard service, and 7 to 10 for their 'turbo' customers, but they can't keep up with those people who use it without limiting them? Do you not see the wool being pulled over your eyes?
Perhaps they should fix their 'overloaded' backbone rather than sell more bandwidth that they claim they don't have and it costs too much to build out.
Perhaps they should implement fair queuing across the board rather than pick on specific protocols to control. If I'm using 10mb/s of my 10mb/s 'always on, unlimited' bandwidth, and someone else wants 10mb/s on theirs, and they can't provide it or figure out how to fairly share the bandwidth, they shouldnt' be in business. I was doing that at the ISP I worked at in 1996, without considering anything above layer 2, was there implosion in technology that suddenly caused this ability to be lost? I'm pretty sure that if they can provide machines capable of doing deep packet inspection, they can probably come up with a box or two that is capable of doing fair queuing at layer 2, don't you think? They can also probably spend a little bit of cash on network infrastructure.
I ask you again, which cable company do you work for?
The bad old days of CI$ (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the bad old days of Compu$erve Information $ervices when the clock was ticking at, if I recall correctly, $6.00 an hour... and much more than that if you entered some of their "premium" services.
Plus, if you lived in Roysburg, Winnemac, their list of dialup telephone numbers might helpfully list one under "Roysburg" while not bothering to mention that the actual physical location of their modem was in the city of Zenith, fifteen miles and a local toll call away. So you were also racking up a hefty phone bill at the same time.
People may hate AOL now, but when they came charging in with a flat monthly rate they looked like knights in shining armor.
And at least with CI$ the clock was ticking at a steady rate. With the Time Warner plan, in a million households little Genevieve will run across some funny and age-appropriate penguin cartoon website and watch it for weeks, and neither her nor her folks will have any idea it cost them $82.19 until the bill comes in at the end of the month.
The funny thing is that the trend is toward flat pricing everywhere else. It seems odd to read that the genius at Time Warner are moving away from flat-rate pricing at exactly the same time as the cell phone companies are moving toward it?
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Insightful)
Bear in mind that the USA is run by and for big business, not the 'consumers'. Politicians rely on "campaign contributions" to fund their business-class lifestyles, and when they've blown through that money, there are plenty of "lobbyists" ready to pay for access to them. The mind blowing costs of running a political campaign practically assures that most victorious politicians are corrupt.
While the breaking up of the old AT&T was a pretense that a telco monopoly wouldn't be tolerated, it just resulted in regional monopolies instead, and the eventual result was that the "Baby Bells" just re-merged into three companies that now form an effective cartel.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, a better solution would be to redirect all your web requests to a 'this is how to fix it' page until the traffic isn't coming from your setup any more. I'm sure someone is about to complain about how their grandma can't understand what that means and she just wants to see pictures of her grandkids.. cry me a river. Zombified systems are a threat to everyone on the network.
Re:Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then? (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me a content-thief; I don't care. I try never to purchase anything advertised on TV or the web.
Biting the hand (Score:4, Insightful)
Multimedia distributers such as Youtube, Netflix and iTunes and media rich social networking sites like LJ and Facebook are the reasons why demand for Broadband service is so strong to begin with. Tell people they can only use these services a little bit before being charged out the wazoo, and you've killed the whole point of the internet.
This might hurt the technophile and the hardcore online junky, but for Ma & Pa who only check their email once a week and occasionally watch videos of their grandkids learning to walk, PeoplePC is only $9.99 a month.
I think you're misquoting. (Score:5, Insightful)
The underlying problem is just as you described though - unless they come up with a DAMN GOOD tool to show you how much bandwidth you've used, how will the normal consumer know? Any app that phones home uses bandwidth. Updating your virus scanner or patching your OS (doesn't matter windows, mac, or linux) uses bandwidth. Xbox360, Wii, PS3 all use bandwidth. Instant messaging uses bandwidth.
Only a VERY select few people actually know how much bandwidth each of these uses. Training your average user to use something like Freemeter [lifehacker.com] is going to be pretty tough, and even then, that only covers their PC. It still misses the rest of whatever network devices you may have.
Setting a cap up is a grab to try to stick people with extra fees, nothing more. Welcome to the U$A, home of the hidden fee - now bend over, spread the cheeks, and take it.
"Unused minutes"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Afterall, if they want to get snobbish about counting, it should work both ways. If I'm paying for 40GB and I only use 15GB one month, I still want my other 25GB rolled into a reservoir that I can use the next month.
Truthfully though, this is a stupid idea. Part of the beauty of the Internet is flat rate. If one starts having a limited pool (which is totally an artificial limitation), then everything starts becoming an "is it worth it to download" scenario. Should I give this new Ubuntu Linux distro a try? I dunno. That's almost a gig of my quota and Slackware works fine. Should I use Gentoo? I dunno source code downloads are going to be larger than binaries. Should I even bother patching my Windows machine. I dunno that's 500MB of quota and it'll probably be fine if I install a firewall. Should I run TOR? No I don't know how much traffic would be routed through my machine.
Essentially this throws in giant anvil in front of the train that was the Internet. Instead of it becoming more ubiquitous, and more seamlessly integrated into our lives as a way for everything to talk to everything else, it's further segregating the internet into something that you "visit" and limit your usage of, rather than something that you simply participate in.
The correct interpretation (Score:3, Insightful)
Consequences of Metered Bandwidth on Freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
Great point, succinctly expressed. I totally agree. This is related to a point I was going to make: It annoys me that one cannot resell bandwidth. The notion that one person having 3 people in the house can grab bandwidth for all of those people at one price, but three people living separately have to buy 3 separate services seems unfair. In practice, it means that lots of people cheat and get away with it, while the people who don't cheat are charged a premium (or, more specifically: several premiums) for operating to the letter of the rule. For quite a while, I've been pushing the need for Universal Business Access [nhplace.com], and have only just recently written it up, but it relates to that.
Email has a similar kind of issue, where not paying is more expensive than paying, since we all pay for spam due to email being free, and the cost of that spam is certainly way higher than the cost that email itself would be--except to the spammers.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't stop someone from sending me UDP traffic - sure, my router will just drop it into the bit bucket, but from my ISP's standpoint it would still count as "download" bytes for the purposes of determining if I've exceeded my cap and cost me money.
Not sure how one would profit from screwing me this way... Perhaps just the same human trait that motivates random vandalism would be sufficient. Perhaps the fact that I followed the "hate Hillary" link in a troll post but didn't follow the "hate Obama" link in the same post would be sufficient.
Re:Cancel (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That's quite a markup (Score:4, Insightful)
And who decides if the network is congested?
5gb is a joke. (Score:3, Insightful)
That service would be worth about $10 a month to me.
This idea is about as dumb as my companies limit of 100mb for email (as compared to 5gb to unlimited for each of all my free email accounts.) Someone sends me just about anything and I get a notice that my mailbox quota is exceeded.
Re:I think you're misquoting. (Score:3, Insightful)
For hours...
This wasn't a network test, this was script-kiddies pinging me for open ports. And if I have every computer in my house off and the cable modem disconnected from the router, these transactions still come in non-stop. They have been for months and are probably going to continue until the end of time.
How much are they using? I have no idea. Am I going to trust Comcast if they tell me I've overused my connection for the month? Hell no.
Maybe this traffic shaping thing should be used for good instead of evil. If they want to use it to lower my bandwidth usage, stop the script-kiddies from accessing my tubes!
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:1, Insightful)
Flat rates so that I can subsidize your family is how you would rip me off. I prefer metered access and lower bills (less than $10 for internet for myself - and more than I need).
Net Neutrality is the driver here, not bandwidth! (Score:3, Insightful)
Every time we're told that increased costs go to "infrastructure," we get the same crappy 6Mbps download speeds, downtime every Sunday night, no-show service calls, and human-unfriendly telephone support.
As a former owner of a dialup ISP, I completely understand the "5%" rule.
However, a 15-40GB limit is clearly not intended to curtail those users.
The "problem" users are up in the 200GB/mo region, not a measly 3-7 DVD ISOs.
This is nothing short of a preemptive attack against companies like NetFlix, Apple, Packet8, Vonage, etc. who offer DVD/HD downloads, VOIP, videoconferencing, and other services that compete with the incumbent's own services.
Note that the new bandwidth cap does NOT include the VOD or VOIP services you buy from TWC.
Again, I'm ok with fair and non-putative metering. I pay a larger water bill because my swimming pool has a leak. I pay a larger electric bill because I have an old house and I like it cool.
But my water company simply charges me based on usage. There are no caps and no punitive pricing brackets. And they aren't trying to sell me pool maintenance services that come with "free" pool re-fills.
Pay for usage creates theft (Score:2, Insightful)
What about unsuspecting rootkit victims? (Score:2, Insightful)
There are so many problems with this form of service delivery for the consumer, that far outweigh the benefits for the provider. Unfortunately, competition is limited (in most areas throughout the US) and consumers are really at the mercy of these corporations and their greedy business practices. If DSL and Cable Providers gang-up and gauge prices like this, then really, depending on where you live, you may have no choice.
End of VOIP (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be canceling my service if i got that sort of garbage.
Oh yeah, this will work well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The correct interpretation (Score:3, Insightful)