Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use

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."

About time too

Let's have some honesty here. If we're going to have limits then let them be clear and open ones, where customers can make decisions about which limits they want, and how much they're prepared to pay for them.

Far better this approach than one which says "Eat what you like, so long as you're reasonable."

What comes around . . . . .

I could have swore we already fought this battle. As I recall, my first internet provider in 92 had caps and limits and due to popular demand eventually even the mighty AOL dropped them. Do the people that run these large corporations not understand Internet history??

So, whats the news?

Providers of pay-per-GB-transferred internet exists since forever, at least here in Europe and especially for mobile access. It was never popular among users and never will be, because people don't like to think about amount of data transferred all the time. Plus, there are programs like Skype and Windows malware that transfer data all the time when computer is on. However, 40GB cap sounds much more reasonable then anything I saw here ...

Next Month's Headline:

Time-Warner Sued By A Bazillion Customers Over Bandwidth Charges

$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." .....seriously, I don't think TWC would be stupid enough to deliberately install spyware on its subscribers' computers, but this will fail as soon as hundreds of thousands of clueless Windows users running zombie botnet boxes start cancelling their service en masse "because they jacked up the price". This is not the way to either fix broadband usage policy nor to stop botnets.

Cancel

Cancel your service immediately. Please. Its the only way to let them know that you don't accept their new terms. Stop the experiment in Beaumont.

A little unfair hosters vs providers

I'm paying $90/month for a dedicated server, 24/7 amazing tech support and 1.2TB bandwidth per month. How is $60/month for no dedicated server, crappy tech support and 40GB/month (0.04TB) any where near a reasonable offer?

This isn't cost recovery, it's profiteering.

I've got no problem with heavy users paying more, light users paying less. But $1/gigabyte is so far in excess of the "going rate" for bandwidth that it's not even funny.

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.

Holding out on us

I talked to a TimeWarner rep when I lived in San Antonio last summer and he told me that they've had the infrastructure for 15mbps connections in place for a year or two, but cap the speeds between 5-10 on purpose. The "purpose", I see now, is that they want to try and milk every penny out of us for something that wouldn't cost them any more to deliver. I imagine it actually costs them money to cap our bandwidth anyway, so this is pretty dumb...especially now that I live in a market with another major provider (AT&T) for competition.

The bad old days of CI$

Oh, misery. Been there, done that, got the phone bill. Let's hope this trial balloon blows up like the Hindenburg before anyone else gets any ideas.

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?

Re:isn't this a breach of contract?

No it isn't (yet). You obviously didn't read the short article as it states this trial is only running with new subscribers and not existing ones.

Re:Good

Not necessarily. It's not easier to argue that it's your bandwidth, because it's not. It's still their bandwidth, and they will still want to QoS it however they please.

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:Good

Which cable company do you work for?

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?

Re:Welcome to our world

...assuming no BT throttling, etc shenanigans.

That's a bold assumption to make...

Re:Welcome to our world

Seen from the country I live in, all this is just unbelieveable.
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

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

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.

Competition is so 20th century. In the Bush era, we've learned that the purpose of government is to give corporations whatever they want.

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

I also download the occasional Linux distro, and a Fedora or Windows update can be over 200 MB

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.

I think you're misquoting.

It's "may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their genitals."

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:Welcome to our world

Actually, the reason there will BT throttling and other restrictions on using the PC as a media device is because almost NO ONE in America knows it. Try discussing these issues with anyone who's not a regular on /. and watch the glassy stares they give back to you.

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

They can and SHOULD charge you for zombie traffic. Matter of fact, they should charge you double for it once they notify you of said traffic coming from your setup.

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

I live in Texas and use Time-Warner. They don't charge you for zombie traffic, they disconnect you.

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.

Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then?

because one problem I have is the trend towards FLV ads. If I am getting metered internet I want any ad server filtered out from the charge or I should have the option of having it filterd out at the ISP.

Re:Why do I have to pay for someone's ads then?

Good question, why doesn't Comcast add up all the time in the commercials I watch and subtract that percentage of time from my bill

      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?

Slashdot really needs a +1 Scary, because I laughed at first, then thought you were serious and realized that Comcast might actually do some sort of shit like this.

Re:VOD?

At least (for now) most people have several ISP's to choose from.

Bzzt. Wrong. Most areas have local-government-mandated sole cable ISPs. Ie, this neighborhood is given to TWC, this neighborhood is given to Cablevision, this neighborhood is given to comcast. Sometimes it's more like towns instead of neighborhoods, but the concept remains the same. Your basic choice is: Cable for decent speeds, DSL for shitty speeds. And if you're very, very lucky you can opt for FiOS.