Time Warner To Offer Unlimited Bandwidth For $150 479
unr3a1 writes to tell us that Time Warner Cable has responded to the massive criticism of its new plan to cap user bandwidth with a new pricing model. Users will be given a grace period in which to assess their pricing tier. The "overages" will be noted on their bill, allowing them to change either their billing plan or their usage patterns. "On top of a 5, 10, 20, and 40-gigabyte (GB) caps, the company said this week that it would offer an additional 100GB tier for heavy users. Prices (so far) would range from $29.95 to $75.00 a month, with users charged an extra dollar for every GB more they download, although that charge is also capped at $75. An 'unlimited' bandwidth plan, therefore, tops out at $150."
Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
-Comment about lack of competition
-Comment about poor quality of US bandwidth relative to other countries
What did I miss?
Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there anyone who didn't see this coming?
First they whine that unlimited is not unlimited. Then they put a number on what 'unlimited' is, and change the contract that you had already signed. Then they decide that they can actually give you the service you originally signed up for, but only if you pay them $150 more.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I guess they finally figured out how to make pirates pay. And the artist still gets no money.
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory observation that having the perspective that someone happens to have it worse still doesn't change the fact that these guys suck.
Re:Oblig (Score:5, Insightful)
Oblig comment about how those $150 dollar/month heavy users will likely still be throttled anyway, regardless of any promises or assurances the company is going to make to the contrary.
Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A good first step (Score:4, Insightful)
But they won't. The bottom price will be what they pay now and everyone else will just pay more. Prices are never going to be reduced.
Re:I may not be reading this right, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a feeling when you reach $75 in overages, they simply cut you off and tell you if you want access again you either have to fork over the difference for the $150 plan or wait until your next billing cycle. Also I'd presume the $29.95 plan is at the lowest speed possible which might be low enough that to reach the $75 cap you'd need to run your connection at full speed for the entire month (although I doubt it, it's possible).
I wonder how long it's going to be before Comcast pulls this crap. Also now might be a good time to start securing your WiFi better, as the motivation to steal access just significantly increased.
And THIS time (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlimited, and this time, we mean it. Trust us.
Next step (Score:3, Insightful)
'Friends and family' websites. Get unlimited Gb to your 5 favorite websites. You can choose Google, /., Reddit, Engadget, LKML while little Suzie can choose MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, AmericanIdol.
This kind of bs shouldn't be allowed to happen.
Sham (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reason they want caps is because they know that the internet is starting to compete with their cable offerings. It has nothing to do with bandwidth. They are already upgrading their infrastructure to support huge amounts of bandwidth. The cost to do so is minimal for cable because the latest upgrade happens to occur at the head end and at the modem in the house. That is $40-$100 a home half of which is paid for by the consumer. That is nothing to charge or make back. What they really want to do is tier their pricing in a way that they cannot be out competed by internet TV. We need to break this MaBell up now.
Re:A good first step (Score:3, Insightful)
And what this translates into, is that use under-using people are STILL subsidizing just as much as you were before. The heavy users are just helping to line the pockets of the shareholders a bit more, because you know they won't stop and say "hey... if we have so many people hitting the caps, perhaps we should spend that extra cash and flush out our network better.". They'll do exactly what they did with the billions they were given in the past to build out the network and shower it on their investors.
Re:Not terribly surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:'Bandwidth' is a Misleading Term Here (Score:2, Insightful)
150 (GB / month) = 478.484324 kb / s
..says Google [google.com].
Re:Anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
They built out some infrastructure, put out some plans, then people starting signing on.
As the system fills up, they have two choices:
-build out more infrastructure, sign up more people
-jack up prices (and hope to keep signing people up)
The short-term plan is easier to "sell" to stockholders, most likely.
Re:WOW (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because every high-bandwidth downloader is a pirate. They cannot be, for example, users of Hulu or Netflix subscribers taking advantage of the watch instantly package to watch episodes of Mythbusters.
Re:Oblig (Score:4, Insightful)
Obilig note that 150gb is really 75gb DOWN and 75gb UP. During the fall when the bulk of the TV shows are released I think, downloading at "standard quality", not 720p, downloading the top tier of shows worth watching, plus whatever HBO and Showtime series are decent, will put you at about 80gb a month right there, not including any movies, music or online games you play. This has been my experience. I only watch perhaps 1-2 hours of "TV" during the busy fall season a day.
$150 a month would be nice, and not that much more expensive than paying for cable internet + cable TV, and it's about half the price of a T1 line in a residential neighborhood. The bonus is that you can now download and upload 720p TV shows without being throttled after X gigabytes a week (X = about 20gb a week for Time Warner in Dallas). Once you upgrade to a 22 or 24" monitor, there's a noticeable difference between "standard definition" pirated TV and 720p. I'm not sure if it's worth an extra $100 a month though.
DO NOT buy this (Score:3, Insightful)
Us damn geeks, we screw ourselves (well mainly because we live in parent's basement, et al) all the time with this garbage. See if we didn't slobber all over ourselves to wait in line for days to pay top dollar for shit then companies wouldn't rape us.
Calm down, eat a dorito, keep your current 14.4k/ISDN/DSL/CABLE/T# connection and IGNORE this. Please. If there is no interest they will LOWER the price of it, up the regular speed, or do away totally with the idea... all are GOOD things. By jumping in blindly in a rabid fervor all you do is ensure every internet provider will charge... wait for it... $150 for their unlimited service. Why wouldn't they? Ugh, for a group who is so collectively smart we sure are dumb. :)
You missed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory mention of 1996 Telecommunications Act that these fuckers still have yet to deliver upon, and it's past their deadline. What did we give out 200 billion for, again? To get screwed over?
This would be a perfect FML post from our citizens as a collective whole.
"Today, We paid $200 billion to the telecom companies to deliver bidirectional 45mbit internet and 500 channels to our houses. They told us to fuck off, capped our data rates, charged us more, and sold our asses out to the NSA. FML."
$1 per GB -- 4x the cost of DVD+stamp (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just insane. It makes it 10 times more expensive than to send a burnt DVD ($.5?) through the mail (~$1 I guess?).
That pricing scheme is about as out of touch as Dr Evil in that scene where he asks for a ridiculous $1 million ransom for not blowing up the planet.
You can get internet transit in a datacenter on the order of $6 per Mbps per month wholesale; peering is way below that.
That mean that for $6 you can transfer ~320GB a month; Warner is going to charge 50 times that.
Sure, it's not the same thing entirely obviously, but the main difference is that you have to build a line to the customer, and you're paying for that already whether you use it very little or a lot.
The only remaining difference therefore is the connection between local concentrators and the backbone; nothing special and particularly expensive about it.
Therefore this is a total rip-off, and most likely monopoly abuse.
Re:Not terribly surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is, residential phone networks were never designed to handle the uses many people make of them nowadays (particularly due to unlimited long-distance plans) - there are some heavy users who make hundreds of (sometimes of dubious legality) calls every month.. it is unreasonable for these people to pay the same price as someone who just pays their bills by phones and calls their grandchildren.
...or, we could recognize that (a) telecommunication companies were paid assloads of taxpayer money to develop a standard of internet broadband access and they should be bound to it, no matter how cost ineffective it seems in some areas and (b) the internet is becoming a utility where the should be a reasonable expectation of relatively-equal priced access to all, mostly regardless of usage, because people as a whole benefit from the consequence of so many people having access to those utilities.
The beneficial externalities of internet access are not easy to quantify, especially when many people seem to be using large quantities of it for illict ends. But, in the long term, the Googles of the world can't sustain the high infrastructure costs of the internet. Every person should be capable of starting a server without fear of being shut down for "excessive" uploads. That's the very foundation of lowering the barriers of entry to internet-based entrepreneurship. To that end, Time Warner's move to tiered pricing may be on the right track. But, its current cap on tiers are insanely too low. The first remedy to that would be in forcing Time Warner and others to actually offer what was already promised concerning basic broadband access. It is only after that point where tiered pricing should kick in.
PS - I say this all because the 40GB cap amounts to a 128Kbps substained rate over a month. The promised broadband was original 45000Kbps, but was later scaled back to 1600Kbps. Both are substantially more than 128Kbps. And before you think that the 1600Kbps was merely meant to be a peak, consider that the plan entailed streaming TV, and such obviously requires substantial substained data rates, even with today's much improved video compression.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
To these people, users of Hulu and Netflix aren't seen as so different from pirates. They believe that none of them are paying enough. And their outrage at having to actually reevaluate their business models is going to show itself in an orgy of price-gouging until they are prosecuted as monopolies and broken into a thousand little pieces.
Ok, I agree with some of your post, but in all seriousness they DID reevaluate their business model. Seriously, they looked at Netflix and Hulu and said decided to make money with their cable (wire to house) business.
The fact is that "if" everyone hates this as much as posted here on Slashdot (and I am not fond of it), then there is a great opportunity for someone to come along and develop a good alternative. The bar has been set at $150/month and now we can see what or if anyone can come in cheaper.
Re:Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you mean to tell me that things change? Holy I-Ching Batman! The providers are becoming more transparent and letting you know what you will get depending on what you pay. Up until a year or two ago, an "unlimited" connection really was unlimited. For most subscribers, it still is unlimited. Only the people out there on the cutting edge are bumping up against the caps. There is finally enough content available that people are able to tax their connections nearly full time. Being asked to pay $150 a month for truly unlimited internet access isn't that bad of a deal.
I'm only thirty, but I'm already having an old man moment here. I don't think a lot the people posting on Slashdot realize how far technology has come. I remember connecting to the internet at 14400. I remember connecting to BBSes at 2400 baud and being able to type faster than the connection could echo back the characters. Busy signals were a constant problem. Swapping 1.44MB worth of data took over an hour (at 2400 baud). If you dialed outside of your LATA, you had to pay toll charges. Compared to back then (get off my lawn!), we're in a totally different world. The amount of content that is available nearly instantenously is mind boggling. Until I discovered ways around things, I was spending hundreds of dollars a month in phone charges to get the same kind of software that I can get from the Pirate Bay... and that was in the mid-1990s.
The term "entitlement generation" has reached my ears from time to time, and discussions like this one serve to highlight the truth of the matter. Where the hell do you people think all of this capability comes from? Do you think that the cable company just plugs in a router, and all of a sudden "the Internet" just works? I wonder how many network engineers Time Warner employees. I wonder how much those guys make a year. How about field techs? Customer service operators? Sales reps? How much do they have to pay in property taxes and electricity to keep their CO's running?
Here's a dose of reality for everyone. If you don't like the prices, don't pay them. If you can do without, do without. If you can't, suck it up and deal with it. You don't need a 10mb+ pipe to get on the Internet. Spend $25 a month and get a DSL line and you won't have to worry about bandwidth caps. I was on a 3mb DSL line up until this year, and it worked just fine. It cost me $45 a month. I make far more than that in a couple of hours at work. Lets say you make $20 an hour, and given that this is Slashdot, I'd be surprised if anyone made any less than that. For one day's worth of work, you get unlimited, high speed internet access for a month. Now check your reality. Is one day worth of your labor worth an unfair trade for the labor of all of the people who have to labor for you to have an always on, available, high speed internet connection? Or is your labor so much more valuable to society that the one day of your labor is worth so much more than the labor of all the other people who give you 30+/-1 days a month worth of internet access?
Isn't it funny how those heavy users (Score:3, Insightful)
are not such a burden in countries with sufficient competition? ... or something.
It's fascinating how when there's only one broadband provider, somehow, people start downloading much more
Re:Anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the hate and spite. Setting that aside, 20 years ago was 1989. People were using, what 300 baud modems? 1200 baud modems if they were lucky? Try streaming video at 1200 baud. Now we have 10+mb to our house and we can stream video, while downloading torrents, while playing online games and having a voice conversation with five other people via Skype... all at the same time. How old are you? Were you even on the internet ten years ago? I was. It's ridiculous how different it is today compared to ten years ago... much less twenty.
As for the other countries paying less, they followed our lead, and leveraged technologies that... wait for it... we paid for the R&D on. Where was TCP/IP invented? Japan? Korea? Where is Cisco based? Thailand? How about Bell Labs? Oh yeah, America there again. Other countries got to leverage the economies of scale and reaped the benefit of being late adopters. You can't even compare Japan and South Korea to America. They are geographically different. They don't have a telecommunications infrastructure that stretches across 3000+ miles and reaches over 300 million people.
Re:Oblig (Score:3, Insightful)
Then quote that to the isp and enjoy the futuristic world of Australian business unlimited telephony.
Like 2 56k modems held together with duct tape
Re:Anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
I should leave this alone, but I re-read it and I just can't. How else am I supposed to compare things? We live in a society where we exchange a medium of currency that by and large, everyone earns by working. Our economy functions because a person can work doing one thing and not have to directly barter for what they need from someone else. Therefore comparing three hours of work to a month of internet access is perfectly valid.
You just serve to further illustrate what an entitled whiner acts like. Your parents spent money twenty years ago and you still want to reap the rewards of it? What have you done to contribute to bringing down the price of internet access other than whine about it? What entitles you to low cost access to the internet other than the virtue of having been born to parents who already paid some taxes to develop the infrastructure that you can now trade a couple of hours worth of work for every month to access?