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)
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Many many ISPs in many many countries operate this way. It's not as nice as "flat rate" in some folks eyes, but at least you get what you pay for (assuming no BT throttling, etc shenanigans).
Exactly. That is how every industry works. The rich have nicer cars, better food, and now better internet access. You could argue that the beauty of the internet is that everyone gets an equal share of the information online. I argue that all that knowledge will fit into a 5 GB/month plan. It is the entertainment that will not fit into those plans. I also download the occasional Linux distro, and a Fedora or Windows update can be over 200 MB. At 5 GB/month thatâ(TM)s 4% of oneâ(TM)s pipe. A large
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Informative)
In Australia the plans are usually for bandwidth/month, so you pay according to line speed, GB/month etc, but it's fairly uncommon (except for wireless broadband) to be charged for excess usage (they just drop the speed to something painful like 64kbps).
Many of the ISP's have unmetered content, such as local mirrors for major linux distro's, file repositories and some entertainment related stuff. So, for example, all the Ubuntu updates for our computers are not metered - in some circumstances that's VERY useful (eg: an office with 10 computers).
But Australia's internet is a horrible state of affairs generally - just putting in our experience here FWIW.
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Caching proxy server a better solution (Score:3, Informative)
> server so you only need to pull the data down your internet pipe once?
To mirror the entire Ubuntu update repository would probably be pretty wasteful unless his office is quite extraordinary. And just mirroring the files needed by one computer will not necessarily be OK for all the other ones, unless he's very careful to install packages only on an office-wide basis. I think a better solution for him would be to use a proxy (li
The correct interpretation (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Welcome to our world (Score:4, Informative)
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Uh, yeah. Except that Time Warner isn't likely to do things like host local mirrors for major Linux distros. As it stands now, if you run Linux, you are. officially at least, unsupported as they only officially support Windows and Macintosh. And they only added official Macintosh support in like 2001 or 2002 -- before that it was just Windows.
Have you written to them and complained? What's the address? I'll write to them, I make a point of writing to a different company asking for Linux support once a week.
Re:Welcome to our world (Score:4, Funny)
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As it stands now, if you run Linux, you are. officially at least, unsupported as they only officially support Windows and Macintosh.
But honestly, who cares about that. Nowadays the support of the ISP effectively ends at the router, if they supplied it (or it's a model they support). I know AOL had stupid software you had to install etc., but that's not the case in the vast majority.
Back in the days of dial-up internet where you had to set up your modem, your winsock application, proxies, etc...etc.. they had experts who knew how to do things for a specific OS (too bad if you had mac in those days - go to a apple-specific ISP!), but n
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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.
Re:I think you're misquoting. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's less easy to see who or what is using the bandwidth though.
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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
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.
sponsorship (Score:2, Interesting)
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Now, if you under utilize your connection, you're just giving the cable companies free money, since they're charging people who go over.
Also... rogers has been doing this in canada for several months.
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Bastards, every single one of them.
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.
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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.
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Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Funny)
It doesn't make sense for there to be a "hue and cry" as a reaction to something. Unless, perhaps, you imagine people are going to change color in anger.
But I'm guessing your interpretation is as though both words are verbs, like people are "hew"ing and crying in anger or something.
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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.
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Re:Welcome to our world (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a bold assumption to make...
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We may have different definitions of what "can't" means. Have you read your Terms Of Service recently? You probably should.
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: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: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:Welcome to our world (Score:4, Interesting)
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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: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.
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Flat rate is another term for light users subsidizing heavy users. Is that more fair than being charged by the gigabyte?
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.
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, 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:5, Funny)
I've been waiting for AT&T Uverse to become available in my neighborhood to provide some competition to Time/Warner. I got a flyer in the mail saying that Uverse was was now available to me. I logged onto the web site and tried to order it. It took me several tries to actually place an order because I followed the instructions that said that my driver's license expiration date had to be entered in mmyyyy format. The day before the install date, I had to reschedule due to a sick family member. No problem, the new installation date was verbally confirmed with me by the CSR on the phone. On the day of the install, I waited and waited. 30 minutes after the close of the 2 hour installation window, I called and was informed that I was scheduled for installation the NEXT day. The next day the install tech comes out and asks to look in my back yard. No problem. I've got both the cable and phone boxes in my yard for about 6 houses in my neighborhood. While the tech is standing there looking somewhat confused, I say, "If your looking for the network interface, there insn't one. We've never had a landline at this address." The tech then tells me that a different tech has to install the network interface and run the drop to it and asks if they could reschedule the install for Monday. I say that's fine, but Monday is a holiday, and asked if they really did installations on holidays. The tech said yes and told me that someone would be by after 19:00 that day to install the network interface and run the drop.
No tech shows up that day to install the network interface and run the drop, so the first thing Monday morning, I call AT&T and tell them that it wasn't installed and asked if it would be installed prior to the tech arriving to do the install. I was informed that they didn't do installs on holidays and they rescheduled my install for the next day and assured me that both the install tech would be there and the person to do the network interface installation and run the drop.
The next day, the install tech showed up and I asked him where the other tech was who was going to do the network interface installation and run the drop. He got a funny look on his face and went outside to make a phone call. He returned and said that the other tech was on the way. While we waited for the other tech, I showed im the 2 TVs that needed set top boxes and where I wanted their router installed to connect into my network wiring. The other tech arrived and they started working. About 15 minutes later, they had the network interface installed and the drop run and then things got REAL quiet for about 15 minutes and suddenly a third AT&T person showed up. It turns out that Uverse has a max length of 3,000 feet from their box in the subdivision to the house and we were 3,400 feet away.
Our subdivision is less than 5 years old, so I asked who decided to lay out their cable in such a manner that almost everyone on my street would be unable to have Uverse service and they admitted it was one of their engineers.
So, the end result is that most of the people on my street in the subdivision can't have Uverse service and AT&T spent who knows how much money figuring it out. Oh, and I'm still getting solicitations for Uverse. Maybe I should order it again. Maybe I should order it every time I get a solicitation until they stop sending me solicitations.
isn't this a breach of contract? (Score:2)
someone's getting sued.
Someone has to challenge the legality of the "terms subject to change without notice" clause. This essentially is not a contract if its terms can change.
Re:isn't this a breach of contract? (Score:5, Informative)
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didn't those subscribers sign up for unlimited usage? someone's getting sued. ...
For service contracts with the 'terms may change clause' when the terms change, you are typically free to leave the service without penalty.
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.
About time too (Score:5, Insightful)
Far better this approach than one which says "Eat what you like, so long as you're reasonable."
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So stupid.. (Score:2)
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual
Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then? (Score:5, Funny)
Quite the contrary. Comcast will soon be introducing a "Promotional Materials Viewing Fee", since after all you are watching their Intellectual Property. They plan on charging you a very modest 55 cents per commercial per view. Of course for $10 a month you can view all their ads an unlimited number of times per month.
Re:Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you watching metered TV? (Score:2)
Is your TV metered? No? That's why. You don't get charged if you exceed your "TV allowance" as there is no "TV allowance".
I think GP's question is perfectly legitimate.
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Call me a content-thief; I don't care. I try never to purchase anything advertised on TV or the web.
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If you choose not to do that, why shouldn't your ISP charge you for the traffic? They still have the cost of carrying it, and on third-party sites don't get any cash directly from the advertisers.
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.
What comes around . . . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
So, whats the news? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Prior to that I was with 2 independent ISPs for nearly 7 years. In both cases I had 50G caps with off-peak periods and free upload. I used on average 3-5G a month at most even while running off-site backups for several friends. If we take the off-site backup out my usage (unless it was a Debian release month) was under 1G. So 40G is not particularly bad.
In my humble opinion ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Next Month's Headline: (Score:5, Funny)
$slashdot_user writes: "Time-Warner today was served with a class-action lawsuit from nearly every single subscriber to its metered internet service, launched in June. The suit claims that Time-Warner willingly and complicitly installed spyware onto its subscribers' computers to run up bandwidth charges. The program, which affected primarily Windows-based computers, repeatedly downloaded and uploaded a 1.5 MB file of random, uncompressable data up to a thousand times per hour each way, causing subscribers' caps of 5 GB to be reached within hours. Further GB of bandwidth was charged at $1 each, with some subscribers receiving 'overage' bills stretching upwards of $700. Representatives for Time-Warner were unavailable for comment."
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 $29.99 for 6 months. i said
Where's the bottleneck? (Score:2, Interesting)
If that was the case though I would think they'd gain far more by seeking to give incentives for heavy users to download during off hours or some such.
Getting closer to the right answer (Score:2)
Canada too... (Score:2)
Here it comes (Score:3, Insightful)
What Time-Warner is doing probably has less to do with consumption and more to do with figuring out a way to nickel and dime you for every trivial service they can think of. First it'll be quotas, then they'll be a BitTorrent surcharge, then there'll be a 'speed-up' charge for port X. Before you know it your ISP bill will look like your phone bill.
Financial solution to downloading? (Score:4, Interesting)
With the added 'benefit' of them being able to effectively gouge movie downloaders.
How-to measure? (Score:2)
There is only two providers here, AT&T and Cox. Everybody knows that AT&T is already disrupting Bit Torrents and metering is coming next. I would like to get an idea on my usage. My guess is about around 300k a day on podcasts and the web but it is only a guess.
Any tools you know of would help me get a handle on it, thanks.
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Cancel (Score:5, Insightful)
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Would you like to pay for a T1 connection for me? I think not.
Did they announce a free trial period? (Score:2)
40 gig a month?!?!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
time to start looking for another ISP
Eve on the low end, even wireless carriers beat th (Score:2)
Tmobiles = 30$/month unlimited edege.
In the meantime, why did some random town in Texas get chosen to test this?
Why didn't they try somewhere that there are enough people who will voice their opinions that the idea is garbage and just a money extraction?
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A little unfair hosters vs providers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A little unfair hosters vs providers (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Holding out on us (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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?
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:That's quite a markup (Score:4, Insightful)
And who decides if the network is congested?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
End of VOIP (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be canceling my service if i got that sort of garbage.
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: (Score:2)
There simply is not enough infrastructure to allow everyone to consume whatever they want, whenever they want, without making them pay for it.
This is not the consumer's problem, but the provider, and to put the onus back on the consumer for using what was advertised to them is just wrong. Don't sell me 1.5Mbps DSL if you intend to throttle me down to 128Kbps on certain transactions. I am paying for 1.5Mbps. That IS my bandwidth and I am paying for it. Metering is just another way of adding complexity for the consumer and money for the telecoms.
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?
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 m
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:VOD? (Score:5, Informative)