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."
I would take that deal (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmm, after a post like this I propably got to add a disclaimer that I am not assosciated with the company
Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
As a matter of fact most small ISPs around EU have been running this as a standard practice for ages with a considerable degree of success The approach is either a tiered system like this or a system where if you exceed your monthly quota your traffic gets the lowest possible priority on the network. There are also various variations on this using daily peak periods and so on. In any case, while introducing them at first has always caused a few grumbles on the overall, the users like them. As a result the network is not hogged by 5% who pay the same as the remaining 95% while using 99% of the capacity.
sponsorship (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:isn't this a breach of contract? (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as being sued goes - If I were an ISP, I would think this makes sense. It's easier to defend limits that are the same for everyone, vs. arbitrarily notifying subscribers who happen to piss off a network admin for interfering with their bittorrent download.
comparative prices (Score:2, Interesting)
b/c its like 49.99 or 54.99 (+/-) for unlimited 5mb through-put on charter and comcast
if the ISP companies want to role out metered bandwidth, and make it attractive then they are going to have to make it cheaper.
i switched from 3mb cable $54.99 to 1.5mb naked DSL for $42.00, when i called the cable company that i was dropping service (after they charged me $54.99 for a month (b/c my one year deal had lapsed)) they said they could give me 5mb for $29.99 for 6 months. i said they should have done that to KEEP ME AS A CUSTOMER before they charged me regular price rather than caring about me as a customer.
DSL has tiered service (768 / 1.5 / 3.0 [some places 6.0]) options, but there arent caps. and their prices (and latency) is much better than cables' massive speed. (and prices)
Where's the bottleneck? (Score:2, Interesting)
If that was the case though I would think they'd gain far more by seeking to give incentives for heavy users to download during off hours or some such.
Financial solution to downloading? (Score:4, Interesting)
With the added 'benefit' of them being able to effectively gouge movie downloaders.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Interesting)
If everyone in America knew what was happening there would be a hue and a cry to do something about it, just like with health care or gas prices.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Interesting)
We have ADSL lines with speed up to 28Mb DL (remove ATM overhead) for prices starting at 18â per month.
No cap, no bullshit, nothing.
Usually for a higher price (starting at 29â), you get unlimited phone calls to many countries (japan, us, europe, etc...) and video over IP (TV, video on demand, other funky services)
All this without even talking about fiber which is being deployed, and cable.
I cannot understand how the country where the internet was born is going this way
Looks like there is either no competition, or no incentive to upgrade the network.
This isn't cost recovery, it's profiteering. (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, my current web hosting provider [dreamhost.com] offers me 5 TERAbytes of transfer for six bucks a month. Now, it's possible they'd try to change the terms of the deal if I actually approached that level of usage, but still, it shows the cable company in TFA is charging more by roughly a factor of 1000.
I'm guessing that Dreamhost probably serves up roughly as many bytes as a cable company does in a large town or small city. Now, I totally agree that providing internet access to a bunch of houses spread out over square miles is going to cost more than providing it to a couple rows of rackmounted servers. But that's a *fixed* cost to provide access, regardless of bandwidth usage.
I'm okay with charging more for using more, but this is so out of proportion it's simply highway robbery.
Re:Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then? (Score:5, Interesting)
The situation in Belgium (Score:4, Interesting)
Recently however, a new company surfaced offering low prices (30 euros / month) for a 100 Gb / month limit and a normal price (50 euros / month) for an unlimited connection. This new ISP is limited to a very small region in Belgium though, the services they offer outside their home city is similar to the other ISP's (more max download/upload, less speed).
There is however no throttling, an almost 100% uptime (varying on location of course, but if you live anywhere near a city you can expect uptime of 100%
Most ISP's offer a nighttime discount too. Everything you download/upload between midnight and 10 AM only goes half towards the download limit.
Also, the default option if you cross your limit is not to make you pay extra per Gb, but to put you on "smallband" which is (if I remember correctly) 64Kbit Up/Down. In other words: hell compared to the 20Mbit / 2Mbit (Down/Up) we usually get. You can change that default option to paying extra for Gbs of course
Also I'd like to point out that Belgium is the only country in Europe where there is no viable option to choose for an ISP without transfer limit.
That's quite a markup (Score:4, Interesting)
1 megabit-month = 3600 sec per hr * 24 hrs * 30 days / 8 bits per byte = 324 gigabytes
I pay $20 per megabit-month on an OC-3., so that is a 1600% markup! Well, if the drug companies can do it, why not ISP's
Senate Bill 215 (Obama is a sponser) would prevent ISP's from interfering with content upload or download except in times of network congestion. This could lead to a 50% reduction in revenues since ISP's charge for uploading content such as webpages. The bill will also force them to buy ever increasing amounts of bandwidth at the same time, raising their expenses at the same time their revenue is decreasing. The bill will likely pass if it emerges from commitee. So IMHO, Time-Warner and other ISP's are testing the most likely economic model left to them should SB 215 pass.
If someone were to break this off as a separate topic, it would be interesting to see if
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:2, Interesting)
The moral of the story? You and a few neighbors get together (say 5 people in total) and buy two cable connections and a single T1. Then its just a matter of coming up with a good policing policy internally to split up the bandwidth. You get the outrageous speed of the cable modem for youtubing, etc and the sustained throughput and aggregate transfer of the T1 to keep from hitting the caps every month.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like there is either no competition, or no incentive to upgrade the network.
This has boosted us to the dizzying heights of... 16th in broadband penetration in the industrialized world.
And falling.
Back in the 90s, the telecom companies swore up and down if we just deregulated them and gave them all kinds of tax incentives, they'd wire the country like crazy. Actually promised us--get this--45 meg symmetric, not just download, to 80% of US households by (wait for it)...
2006
Of course, the deal was meant to be enforced by the FCC which under Bush said, "Whatever you want, we're taking a nap."
So we end up with situations like the one I'm in. I live in a small town outside the capitol of Texas where folks fleeing the city have been moving for some years so they could have an actual tree in their yard but it's not too long a commute into the city.
Fastest growing county in the entire state. Tons of people from the city with jobs and money. What's AT&T (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) done about DSL?
Nothing. Flat out nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a single upgrade to the CO in years, no build out, nothing.
It doesn't even make good business sense. But, there it is.
They do, however, spend tons on advertising. My landline is with them so every couple of months, I get marketed at about DSL. It's great! It's wonderful! It's fast! Get it! Get it now!
I always say, "Sure! Sign me up!"
The marketeer happily tippy taps his keyboard then slows down and finally says, "Um... you can't get DSL."
"No, really? Gee, maybe you ought to freaking think about building out in the, you know, fastest growing county in the entire blasted state BEFORE you call me again."
(slam phone)
Yeah, it's petty. But it makes me feel better.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:3, Interesting)
Taken for a Ride: Why Does America Have the Worst Public Transit in the Industrialized World, and the Most Freeways? [newday.com]
Who Killed the Electric Car? [sonyclassics.com]
Why are American gas prices lower? Is it because of lower taxes on gas? There's almost certainly a certain amount of economics of scale at work, which keeps the price lower in places that use a lot more gas than other places.
Contract Plans (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Interesting)
My WinXP (kept for gaming only, Linux for everything else) got infected with a spambot (hazards of having children), and I came home one day to find my service shut off. Several hours of calling around to various departments later they informed me that I would have to get my computer "professionally cleaned" before they would reconnect me. Like the "professionals" wouldn't do exactly the same things I did to fix the problem. A bit of social engineering, and accusing them of scanning my system without permission (they didn't, they were monitoring the quantity of outgoing emails) and I convinced them to turn it back on.
That being said, the US is horribly backwards in telcom because they corps know the average citizen has no idea how much they are being screwed. Paying for cell minutes and long distance, when it costs the company no more to route my call across the country than it does to the house next door? And now extra for bandwidth, when only 5% of their customers are using anywhere near the max? [quote from the radio on the way to work this morning]
If Time-Warner tries to implement this in my area, I'm finding another provider. I really don't feel like explaining to my son that he can't play Xbox Live because we "went over our minutes".
It's time Americans woke up and insisted that we stop being ripped off. Flat rates for phone service, flat rates for internet, and at reasonable prices. Either that, or stop claiming we are "more technologically advanced" than the rest of the world, because nonsense like this is proving on a daily basis that we are being left behind.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Interesting)
For example:
#1 - In my old apartment, I could only get DSL. DSL was only available through SBC. I could get phone service from any one of 5 phone providers, but SBC was the only one that could provide DSL, because SBC owned the lines and the DSL routers - and if I went with phone from one of the other phone companies, then I couldn't get DSL because SBC required an "active phone account" before providing the DSL service.
#2 - Where I live now, we can't get DSL (no router close enough). We can only get cable from Comcrap, because they have a monopoly on cable TV service in the area. When I called Verizon about FiOS, I was told - surprise surprise - that FiOS will ONLY ever be available in places where Verizon owns the phone line infrastructure. So, my options are now either (a) Comcrap cable modem or (b) shitty satellite service with >2000ms pings.
The kicker? I asked my elected representative why this is allowed, and they said that there is "national competition" between the phone companies... meanwhile, the gov't sits back and allows monopoly abuse by the data providers all over the fucking place.
In the big metropolitan area I live in, we get radio ads trying to get people to "switch" between cable modem and DSL all the time. Yet looking over the map, less than 10% of the people even exist in an area where DSL and cable modem services overlap. It's all a big fraud.
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
If the above quote is true, it apparently isn't ridiculous for the rest of the world, only here in the US is the infrastructure so ridiculously incapable to give everyone what they want (no competition or upgrade incentives - US ISP's are probably in collusion).
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The correct interpretation (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Use your giant size to buy up competition, er, "consolidate the inefficient vast market"
2. In markets where you are the only provider, raise rates.
3a. But just enough so it's not quite profitable for other companies to come in, especially with your threat to drop prices back down immediately.
3b. Or, in jurisdictions where goofballs of socialist bent rule the city council, start whining how "this town's only big enuf for one cable company" and look for politicians to grab onto that. After laws are passed restricting competition to you, "for efficiency's sake", raise rates and pay some of this to the politicians quitely, socialism working as intended as power and money gaining device, stripped of the public face. (What, is this new to you?)
4. PROFIT!
Re:I think you're misquoting. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's less easy to see who or what is using the bandwidth though.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:2, Interesting)
ANWR reserves will only provide enough oil for 2 years of current US consumption. facts here [wikipedia.org].
and that's the HIGH end of estimates.
Better to spend the money getting off of oil than to further the lining of big oil's profits, no?
You claim that big oil is only making 4% profit but offer no proof. The simple fact that prices are going up and their profits are at record levels consistently for multiple years says they are gouging.
Their REVENUE can go up without profits going up, that's what happens when your costs go up. But their PROFITS go up only when charging more than their paying for product.
Please explain how profits can go up wihtout them charging more then they are paying? we aren't buying significantly more oil then 5 years ago so the extra profit money isn't coming from increased sales...
Re:I think you're misquoting. (Score:1, Interesting)
We know that our infratructure will not be able to handle predicted loads in the near future[1].
We know that there are some users whose usage patterns are far higher than most users.
Currently, there is a one-size-fits-all model in most areas, where it is expected that all users can get the access they want. Unfortunately, those users who use a huge amount of bandwidth are preventing other users from getting good service at peak times.
The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is a scarce good (in an economic sense; we have quite a lot of it actually, but not enough to serve everyone at high usage).
So how de we ensure that bandwidth can be apportioned fairly across users? We can make sure that people pay for the bandwidth they use, by metered sale or by tiered pricing.
Pricing in this manner causes usage of bandwidth to be reduced, but also allows those that need a lot of bandwidth to get it -- if they pay for it.
As for the typical user not knowing how much bandwidth they are using -- that's an information problem that is solveable. Just because the average user doesn't have the tools available now, doesn't mean that as tiered pricing expands, the tools will not become commonplace. We went through this with cell phones ages ago. It's now very easy for any cell phone user to check and see how many minutes they have remaining.
In short, wait and see how this plays out. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised in the long run -- those who need lots of bandwidth will be able to pay for it; the rest of us will not be hampered by the high-volume users.
[1] I don't want to get into why our bandwidth capacity sucks, than an entirely different topic. But it's important to note that regardless of whose fault it is, we need to deal with current conditions, and we need to plan for future conditions (where demand for bandwidth will far exceed supply at current prices).
Where you are full of shit... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is a scarce good (in an economic sense; we have quite a lot of it actually, but not enough to serve everyone at high usage).
Actually, most people have no effing clue what bandwidth really is. You prove how clueless you are by calling it a "scare good."
So how de we ensure that bandwidth can be apportioned fairly across users?
Bandwidth is not a commodity as such. Unlike most commodities, it cannot be stored for future use. It is entirely a function of the momentary capability of the attached routing system. It's much like telephone systems in that regard; there are only a certain amount of circuits ("lines") that a particular neighborhood or area can have active at a given time.
We can make sure that people pay for the bandwidth they use, by metered sale or by tiered pricing.
And here is where it gets stupid. If you sell someone "X GB/month", then people will STILL get fucked over when they try to use the "bandwidth" (actually, absurd data capacity) they bought during a time when others are doing the same. Tiered plans are in place NOW for most providers, and the companies are lying to us about what they sold anyways - the "up to X kbits/second" tier usually isn't even doing as well as the next tier below.
And this says nothing of the off-period times when most sane people are at work or asleep. You're charging people the same price for the "scarce" times (similar to the daytime cell rates) as for the rates when the routers are just sitting more or less idle.
This is where the crackheads in corporate accounting offices and management start drooling - they can set up a complicated pricing scheme that the normal consumer barely understands, and get away with tagging in all sorts of hidden fees. I for one think the companies should be held responsible for upgrading their network and fulfilling the service they contracted for rather than trying to wiggle out of it after they overbooked.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:3, Interesting)
Suppose you have to pay for any traffic that goes to your IP. What happens and 50k computers start flood-pinging you? Sometimes it's not your fault...
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the car analogy here would be, "I want to drive my Mazda on roads as good as people with Porshes get to drive on."
The telecommunications infrastructure is a public good; companies were given local monopolies, property rights-of-way, and many other perks from governments in return for wiring us all up. Equality of access is a legitimate concern.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:3, Interesting)
Flat rate is another term for light users subsidizing heavy users. Is that more fair than being charged by the gigabyte?