Time Warner Expanding Internet Transfer Caps To New Markets 394
Akido37 writes "Time Warner Cable is expanding its transfer capping program to new markets in Rochester, NY, Austin, TX, San Antonio, TX, and Greensboro, NC. It seems they have been testing plans with 5, 10, 20, or 40GB of data transfer per month, with prices ranging from $30 to $55 a month. BusinessWeek quotes Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt saying, 'We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business ... We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.' Ars Technica adds, 'The BusinessWeek article notes that only 14 percent of users in TWC's trial city of Beaumont, Texas even exceeded their caps at all. My own recent conversations with other major ISPs suggest that the average broadband user only pulls down 2-6GB of data per month as it is. One the one hand, this suggests that caps don't really bother most people; on the other, it indicates that low cap levels aren't needed to keep traffic 'reasonable' since it's actually quite low to begin with.'"
Re:5gb is just ridiculous (Score:4, Informative)
Re:5gb is just ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
Even 40 gb/month is ridiculous. Back at my old job, I could eat that up in a week using my MSDN subscription to set up a development workstation. Nowadays, I could churn through that in a month easily just playing around with FOSS, Hulu, YouTube, Skype, XBox Live/PSN downloads.
I really hope this doesn't become a trend. If all my ISP options switch to a cap, then my internet usage is going to take a dramatic hit. Of course, I'm sure that's what they want -- they'd rather me buy their cable TV and phone plans, rather than use IPTV and VOIP. And they'd rather have me entertain myself with their offerings rather than my XBox 360 or PS3.
Re:5gb is just ridiculous (Score:2, Informative)
I agree. Obviously those 86% probably don't even need a broadband Internet connection at all.
My cable line is capped at 40 GB/mo and I hate that damn thing. At 10 Mbps you can blow out the cap in less than half a day. And you're suppose to use it for the whole month?!
Other countries don't seem to have a problem wiring up nearly their whole population with 100 Mbps connections and such. The problem in the US just that companies are just plain stupid and wasteful (bad designs, poorly managed, wasting money, etc). That plus there is not enough competition. You got one, maybe two broadband/TV/phone companies in every area.
Re:Bait & Switch (Score:4, Informative)
1: Promise unrealistic, unlimited downloads and speeds that discourage all competition.
2: Once you have the monopoly and the consumer has nowhere else to go, bring in onerous download caps that actually reflect the basic capabilities of your pitiful system.
3: Buy off Washington so that you won't be punished for #1 and #2.
4: PROFIT!
The really Big Lie in all of this is that the argument for caps is that the system only has a very limited capability. Yet WITHOUT CHANGING OUT A SINGLE PIECE OF HARDWARE you can get a much higher cap simply by paying a much higher amount of money. Where did all that extra bandwidth come from? Clearly cable companies lie like rugs, and the public and regulatory agencies continue to buy into those lies as we're all being screwed over!
1) All ISP's do this. Most oversell bandwidth at a more ridiculous rate than they used to oversell modem ports.
2) Actually, they've done pretty good keeping prices low. If it were still only the bells running things we'd be lucky to have DSL.
3) Standard. All companies do this.
4) Not in the network division.
One of my friends works in TW Data. They've done checks and most people (read: over 95%) never break 15gb. Sucks to be high bandwidth users I guess, but if you're part of the minority, you're going to get charged more. As far as bait & switch, if you read your service agreement, they can change prices (et al.) at any time with notice. Now if you have a contract price, that will have to be honored through the end of the contract.
Mind you I'm not defending them 100% because I think the 5gb cap is low. 10gb would be far more reasonable for a mixed family (though I guess grandma and grandpa probably have a hard time breaking 2gb) situation. Gamers (especially consoles) and those downloading videos (incl. P2P) are the ones that are going to be hurt by this. I'd worry but my work pays for me to have a business line. Those are not being affected by this.
Re:Only 40Gb/month? (Score:5, Informative)
'We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business... We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.'
Lol what? Does he think we're fucking stupid?
Time Warner (aka Road Runner) started experimenting with cable modems in 1995, but didn't go big until 1997ish.
Is CEO Glenn Britt really saying that their business model hasn't been viable for over a decade?
More likely they've been overpromising for over a decade and it's only been recently that demand has caught up with the promises.
Re:5gb is just ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
Re:5GB/ MONTH? (Score:3, Informative)
While I agree with the general tone of your comment, your comparison is not really valid. TV signals are broadcast, all users get the same thing.
Not anymore. Read up on Switched Digital Video. It's not fun when you try to watch something in the evening or on the weekend, and you get a "try again later" error 'cause too many people on your segment are watching unique content.
Thankfully, FiOS came to my area and I sent Comcast packing.
Re:Only 40Gb/month? (Score:3, Informative)
40GB is enough for 90 hours of iPlayer video, or about three hours a day, which is a lot more than I'd want to watch. It's enough to listen to my favourite Internet radio stream for 16 hours a day. It's not an excessive amount, but it's probably more than most average users need; I'd be surprised if my mother used more than a fraction of that, and I know a couple of people who use HSPA broadband with 10GB/month caps for their home Internet connection.
By the way, 40GB is only enough to refresh this page once per minute every day, or three times per minute if you are caching all of the scripts, stylesheets and images.
Re:Only 40Gb/month? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only 40Gb/month? (Score:4, Informative)
Abusive? How? What if this guy, I don't know, watches movies on Hulu at 480P? Or Share's linux ISO's? Or watches stuff on youtube, or browses the web (since the whole goddamn thing is now flash laden and thus more bandwidth intensive)? Or plays non-pirated video games?
Really, the ways to use above 1GB are easy. For you to say you only use 1GB a month I can tell is a complete and total lie. You can burn through 1GB through websites and email alone easily. People burned through more than a gig on DIALUP. What you meant was "1GB a day", which is still pretty low and also a lie since people don't tend to use a constant amount of bandwidth.
A threat that won't work. (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to tell you this, but it won't work.
Aussie users made a similar threat when one of our biggest ISP's introduced download caps.
A spokesdroid for the ISP said (paraphrased) "50% of our bandwidth is consumed by 5% of our customers. If they take their business to one of our competitors, we'd be delighted"
Re:Only 40Gb/month? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here's my thoughts (Score:3, Informative)
I was making fun of a typo that happened when the article was originally posted. At the bottom of the post, it read:
"According to Ars Technica,"
This was corrected shortly after I posted my joke.
Re:Who can I switch to? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bait & Switch (Score:3, Informative)
One of my friends works in TW Data. They've done checks and most people (read: over 95%) never break 15gb.
There's a solid, unbiased, and verifiable piece of data for us all. As noted by a number of other posters, this means jack anyway since we are just on the cusp of real on-demand, Internet-delivered video, and usage will only go up in the future.
I'd worry but my work pays for me to have a business line. Those are not being affected by this.
And you don't have the faintest idea what the pain level would be, since you apparently do your personal Internet use on your company's dime. Never ceases to amaze me how people will defend giant corporations engaging in anti-consumer behavior based primarily on the argument that, hey, it doesn't affect me right now.
Here are some facts on Time Warner Cable as of end of 2008, courtesy Yahoo Finance.
Gross profit: $9 billion on revenue of $17 billion, or better than 50% gross margin. They did well enough to pay their CEO $8.82 million dollars last year. And you defend the necessity of these bandwidth penalties on what basis other than the fact that you don't have to pay for your Internet like the poor fools that have TWC? I don't have TWC, either, and I'm outraged by this, because (a) it is part of an industry-wide collusion to do the same thing, and (b) is a perfect example of the unbelievable corporate greed that caused this financial mess the world is in.
Re:Only 40Gb/month? (Score:2, Informative)
Usage based billing works well for finite, tangable things -- which the things you mentioned are. Bandwidth and bits, just don't work like that. A DS3 is always a DS3; it's always moving 45mbps of either packets or an idle pattern. Bits are transient, temporal creatures. They exist only when we use them. They cannot be stockpiled for a rainy day or a nuclear winter. The bandwidth of my DS3 that wasn't used today cannot be used tomorrow.
As I have said many places, if TW cared about network traffic, they would throttle connections above some "cap". Instead, it's as clear as a road flare, they want more money - period. And this is how they're going to get it. Most of their customers aren't exceeding the cap, so expect the caps to be lowered and bills to increase. This is stupid; their network cannot handle the demands of modern networking, so instead of spending anything to support the ever evolving networking demands, they want everyone to go back to the relative stoneage of dialup era limited use. They advertise faster and faster connections (to stay competitive) but don't have the infrastructure to support it, and won't spend the money to be able to. (the modern web ceased to be usable at dialup speeds many years ago.)