Charter Cable Capping Usage Nationwide This Month 369
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from DSL Reports, with possible bad news for Charter customers who live outside the test areas for the bandwidth caps the company's been playing with: "Yesterday we cited an anonymous insider at Charter who informed us that the company would very soon be implementing new caps. Today, Charter's Eric Ketzer confirmed the plans, and informed us that Charter's new, $140 60Mbps tier will not have any limitations. Speeds of 15Mbps or slower will have a 100GB monthly cap, while 15-25Mbps speeds will have a 250GB monthly cap. 'In order to continue providing the best possible experience for our Internet customers, later this month we will be updating our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to establish monthly residential bandwidth consumption thresholds,' Ketzer confirms. 'More than 99% of our customers will not be affected by our updated policy, as they consume far less bandwidth than the threshold allows,' he says." But if they're lucky, customers will be able to hit that cap quickly.
Better service (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>hit the cap and pay double/month for the 60mb service without caps instead of the capped 25mb service
Precisely. If you want the "goods" then you should pay the piper. That's entirely fair. It's how everything from water usage to electric usage to gasoline usage works. The more you use, the more you pay. ----- As for myself, I'd be happy with a 100 Meg cap, since my traffic report says I only downloaded 55 Meg last month. Nowhere near the limit.
Looks like good news to me (Score:3, Interesting)
For those that want it, there is a price you get unlimited bandwidth use. What's wrong with that? As long as you are aware of what you are getting for the price you pay (as opposed to claims of unlimited that are not) I have no beef with the structure they are setting up.
Price (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm fine with it as long as they reduce the capped service fee to something close to the price of dialup.
One reason. (Score:4, Interesting)
Botnet Zombies (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I find it funny (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just a feeling that cell phone technology is somewhat self limiting in the "unlimited" space. People just aren't in too many situations where it will happen.
Of course, that data scenario probably does happen on occasion with road warriors.
Robber barons (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Bandwidth caps are stupid stupid stupid, as are the retarded attempts to defend them. This is a situation where the ISPs *don't* want to build new infrastructure and lower their margins, so they are attempting to socially engineer lower bandwidth consumption. If you're running out of space on your pipes, build bigger and more pipes. Don't try and coerce people to use *less* of your service.
WTF would Charter do if all of a sudden every single subscriber signed up for the 60Meg tier and maxed out their bandwidth 24/7. They'd be back in the same fucking boat they're in now.
Interesting posibilities... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was actually just thinking about this the other day. (as it happens to me now)
If you think about it, its kind of messed up. For example, the caps are based on a fictional date, that of your billing. Which in these instances, is monthly. While this may make sense for, "billing" it may not make sense, and have ramifications beyond for caps.
So for example I closely self monitor my cap. Which means at the beginning of the month I download like a whore. However nearing the end of the month, I might download a lot less, being aware that I am running out of cap. At the end of the month I might not download at all, because I have no cap space left at all.
What does this mean? Huge bandwidth demand all front loaded on any given month. Multiply that by many many users, and well you get the idea. Also odds are if you are not using your cap you are likely not using it much the whole month, pretty much constant with perhaps a random spike.
Now how about this as a business model. If ISP's wish to place caps, to me that says you are entitled to ALL of that bandwidth, as this is specifically what they are selling you. A given rate of speed for a given quantity. So what if you put in place a behind scenes an unobtrusive way to sell your unused bandwidth? Much like the stock market the price would go up and down with demand. Also you would make your cut of money by simply taking a small percentage off each sale, which when multiplied many many times over would equal Profit! I don't know how you would do it, or if it is technically feasible, or even legal, else I would do it right now and make my first million that way. Anyway an interesting idea eh?
It would also be the demise of "caps" as we know it. People might have a "soft" cap imposed by their ISP, however if they run out would be able to "buy" cap space from someone else if they so desire. Thus power users get what they pay for, and internet gets cheaper for those moderate or light users!
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
I have charter's 16/2 and was considering moving to fios for the 20mb+ packages offered. I also wanted to dump Charter copper phone, and go voip over fios to help defray total package costs (tv, phone, internet) with a better down/up speed."
Does Charter offer a 'business' account? If so, get those....if they're like Cox, they aren't that much more than a consumer connection, no caps, no blocked ports, you can run servers all you wish, etc.
And do you have a cell phone? If so...why bother with any type of landline? Just use the cell as your regular phone, save the landline fees. And with a business cable internet connection....enjoy all the internet you wish. Heck..maybe even make a little money OFF having it with a server or two hosting stuff for people.
And...with these connections...they can't really usually put a trap on the line..so, you can also get analog tv signals off them, and with something like a HDHomerun, you can scan the for the un-encrypted digital/hd stations. I mean, if you run this into a mythtv box...you are merely hooking another computer into your computer cable connection, nothing wrong with that, eh?
Talk about saving money.....
Re:Wow, they are lucky. (Score:3, Interesting)
Rogers may not be your only option. I was previously under the impression that either Bell or Rogers were my only options for internet. Then I found out about Teksavvy, and switched over to them. Significantly less bullshit, and WAY WAY WAY cheaper.
Before I was getting nailed with $70-$80 bills every month from Bell and they'd just put 'bandwidth usage' with the added cost of all the gigs I went over my 50 gig limit (not being terribly specific in that regard mind you). Plus the bastards were throttling my connection.
Nice thing with Teksavvy is they have an unlimited bandwidth option and it's cheaper than Rogers.
http://www.teksavvy.com/ [teksavvy.com]
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course people today are used to using unlimited service, even me. But there is always a limit, as no resource is infinite. The question usually is do we have to enforce that limit explicitly, or will the market tend to enforce it. For instance, in garbage collection I grew up with unlimited garbage collection. There were practical limits on what could be collected, and I suppose that sometime garbage would not be collected, and i would not call that fraud, but for the most part it worked rather well. But eventually people got lazy, greedy, and wasteful, and a formal limit had to be set. For most of us the limit was not a problem, and we were happy that the parasites who leeched off our taxes were contained.
I think that is what is going on here. I do not think that what amounts to a 142 MB limit per hour of every day is anything that most people would consider a limit. I do not think most services actually effectively feed more than 2 or 3 MB per minute, and least not every minute of day all year. I think that most people would be happy to know that cost are being contained so they are not forced to forced for some other persons p0rm habit. I think it would be more fraudulent to raise rates just to insure other people can run a cheap P2p service, not matter how noble such a service might be.
I also understand that many would say this is just anticompetitive behavior to prevent streaming TV and movies which are becoming more popular. To this I would say, how much tv do you watch? If you are talkiing about downloading extremely good quality movies, at 1 GB a piece, yes, that will eat up the limit, but if you are doing that I would think you would spring for the high speed unlimited service. Otherwise the stuff coming off, say netflix, seems pretty small and one would have to watch a hell of lot of TV to reach that limit. Again, i would not want to subsidize such use. On regular TV, the more you watch the more ads you see. On the web this is not the case.
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
In most cases you are NOT paying for the finite resource of water, you are paying for them to get the water to you. With electricity, there are two costs: generation and distribution. Generation is a finite resource. Distribution is getting the electricity to you. If you use more electricity, you pay more distribution cost. In other words, exactly the same as ISPs. Your Koolaid analogy makes no sense at all. If you stop using water, you stop paying. If you stop using your ISP, you stop paying. What were you trying to get at? The only real difference is that with water or electric you pay for your ACTUAL usage, which I assume the 'no bandwidth cap' crowd would really hate.
As for your 'what would Charter do' question: they would build more infrastructure, which they could afford to do because they would be collecting approx 3x the money.
The end of free wi-fi? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:100Gb/month = 40Kbps (Score:3, Interesting)
Or by some reckoning, you have a 40Kbps connection burstable to 15Mpbs.
Re:What happens at the end of the month? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or perhaps sell bandwidth based on Guaranteed/Burst rates.
Guaranteed = you can't over-sell this, and it has un-restricted use; 100% of your subscribers should be able to use this 100% of the time (and thus increasing this is expsensive, but most people don't need much).
Burst = any spare bandwidth is evenly allocated for burst use.
So your basic connection would have 256Kbit guaranteed and up to 20Mbit Burst.
A scheme like this would at least allow the constant-download/upload crowd to set appropriate traffic limits in their software. Unfortunately, most people probably wouldn't understand it.
Re:New 60Mbps service (Score:3, Interesting)
Does Charter offer their customers anyway to check on their bandwidth usage? If not, do they intend to release those tools?
Not that I'm aware of as a customer, and probably not.
Why should they? It would cost them money. It would also emphasize the caps in the publics' perceptions. They'll just slam the poor customer (like me, possibly, if my usage grows...having the bad luck to live where Charter is the local government-mandated monopoly) and/or simply cut them off.
They really don't want customers that actually use the connection anyway. They only want the "surf the web, get email" types. Like with the telcos back in the day, having a government-enforced monopoly means they can simply tell customers, as the famous line by Lily Tomlin in Laugh-Ins' "Telephone Operator Sketches" went; "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the s/Phone Company/ISP.".
Off-topic, sort of, but funny and rather prescient for the '60s considering recent privacy concerns re: ISPs/telecoms; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o [youtube.com]
Cheers!
Strat
Re:Last sentence is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
The limits kind of seem like bullshit. We pay more for all grades of connection than in (many) other countries, even in the cities where population density is highest, and get less for it. I might point out that we are seeing a re-consolidation of telcos back into Ma Bell (but this time with a Death Star twist) that can't possibly be good for consumers. And "oddly" the frequencies that were supposed to help solve this last mile problem are being held on to for another little slice of time so that more people can get their television converter box handouts.
Bingo (Score:3, Interesting)
You've hit the nail on the head. 250GB isn't that much data today, not really. And 3 years from now, it will seem like even less. This talk that "there's no way a 'normal' person could hit 250GB" reminds of when somebody said "640KB should be enough for anybody". The internet today isn't just surfing the web and checking email. That's a usage pattern from about 1997. Today, the internet is videos, streaming music, high bandwidth apps. I think it's odd that everybody assumes their internet pattern is the "normal" one.
Plus, it reminds me of 1996 when the internet got popular and all the ISP's complained that people were staying on so long, so they limited usage to 30-40 hours per month. Because a "normal" person didn't need to be on that long.
That seems silly and quaint today. And bandwidth caps are more of the same.
Re:Just like slashdot (Score:1, Interesting)
His hobby is working on something that is indistinguishable from numerous businesses doing the same thing. Just because you aren't getting paid for it doesn't make it "residential."
That describes just about anything on the internet. God damn you are stupid. I guess anyone uploading video of their cat to a website is also using their connection for business purposes.
Yeah, but you have to have some "average" number you are aiming for. If the users don't hit it, you can charge them more or cap them. Capping them affects fewer and results in the same profit.
Capping or charging more is a way to squeeze more profit out of customers. Remember the idea is that the higher load users are using the bandwidth the 100s of almost no-load users AREN'T using. That's the point. Capping or charging more is double dipping.
Would you prefer that prices increase for everyone to subsidize the heavy users?
The prices don't have to increase for anyone; the people paying for a connection they aren't using at all are already subsidizing the heavy users. Nice false dilemma.
Oh yeah, since you are a heavy user, you want the cheap connection they are losing money providing rather than having the heavy users pay a heavier cost.
Ass. I'm one that rarely uses my connection. I spend more time out of my house than I do in it. And for the record, if it's Comcast we're talking about, yea, I want them to bankrupt. I'm really glad my city came to it's senses and built its own fiber optic network, with reasonable prices for reasonable speed... instead of a crap business plan that purposefully oversells the bandwidth it has.