Time Warner Shelves Plans For Tiered Pricing 210
The FNP writes "Time Warner has postponed their plans to test tiered data caps in Greensboro NC, Rochester NY, San Antonio TX, and Austin TX. This announcement comes shortly after the media started reporting on Eric Massa's opposition and protests planned for this Saturday outside of Time Warner's offices in Greensboro and Rochester." There's also a good piece at Ars on the fall of the current tiered-pricing plans.
Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's exactly like normal hell; but your nose also itches.
Re:Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:5, Funny)
It's exactly like normal hell; but your nose also itches.
Fuzzyfungus, this generation's Dante :)
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Anybody who tries to screw over their customers, gets called on it, and then says that they are defering until customers can be "educated"(no doubt with an expression of injured innocence) has a one way trip to the special hell waiting for them. It's exactly like normal hell; but your nose also itches.
I believe China had special camps for that sort of "education" once.
Re:Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mealy-mouthed bastards. (Score:4, Funny)
>>>they then burn down your house.
And I load-up my rifle and track-down the CEO and every regional manager. "What matter a few deaths in a century? From time to time the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party
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It will be back (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It will be back (Score:5, Interesting)
From their recently filed 10-K report:
"Technological advancements, such as video on demand, new video formats and Internet streaming and downloading, have increased the number of media and entertainment choices available to consumers and intensified the challenges posed by audience fragmentation.
The increasing number of choices available to audiences could negatively impact not only consumer demand for the Companyâ(TM)s products and services, but also advertisersâ(TM) willingness to purchase advertising from the Companyâ(TM)s businesses.
If the Company does not respond appropriately to further increases in the leisure and entertainment choices available to consumers, the Companyâ(TM)s competitive position could deteriorate, and its financial results could suffer."
Full Document Here:
http://ir.timewarner.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=950144-09-1481 [timewarner.com]
Re:It will be back (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but screwing your customers because you can't (or won't) adapt has never been a good business model.
Re:It will be back (Score:4, Insightful)
It usually is when you have a monopoly. Until/unless a good substitute for Cable/DSL for the last mile comes along, they can get away with screwing us over because we don't have any real choice in the matter.
Re:It will be back (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>it's evident that SOMEONE is going to end up regulating the market
You forgot the third option of giving customers 3 or 4 internet companies to choose from, and let the customer have the power to choose.
Re:It will be back (Score:4, Interesting)
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other hand theres a heck of a lot of difference between NetZero, Time-Warner, Generic local ISP (which are a rarity these days), and Comcast.
No, there isn't. There are different tiers, but the internet you get from Time Warner, NetZero, AT&T, Comcast, or any others is the SAME INTERNET.
And if you think the power grid doesn't have the same market variety that the internet has, you've never held a job.
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Trust me the internet I get from NetZero is *not* the same internet I get from Verizon DSL or Comcast Internet. Netzero can't even stream video since it's so slow. And Comcast customers don't get access to disneyconnection.com or espn360com, while Verizon customers do.
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Utilities are regulated monopolies because of logisitical and physical limits. Imagine a world where you have 6 water companies all burying 16" mains in the right-of-way infront of your house. Or 12 power companies stringing lines all over the place. There's only so much room for water lines, gas lines, power lines, phone lines, sewers, etc. The more stuff hung from the poles or stuffed in the ground, the harder it is to keep track of it all to prevent them interfering with each other -- and eventually,
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If they can't find a way to make the market competitive then I agree, but I think it would be much better if they had to compete like cell phone companies compete. Then instead of trying to invent ways to avoid upgrading infrastructure and rape their customers, they would actually have to provide decent service at competitive prices.
But until someone figures out how to bypass the need to "share" infrastructure, like phone wires that were paid for by the local phone company monopoly, I don't see how that can
Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
The ISP's usual quote of "Its only 5% of our customers using 40% of traffic" argument flew in the face of the "So we're going to cap things so low everybody will hit it" response they kept trying to ram through.
If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit. Doesn't DirecTV's internet access do this already?
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Well not to mention the "we would have to spend some of our $billions of profit on infrastructure if everyone uses their connection fully wah wah!" argument only applies to prime-time, yet the plan they put forward in no way targeted peak usage hours. Download from 2am - 6am, you'd still hit the cap even though the cost to them for providing that bandwidth is marginal enough to be effectively zero.
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Thats exactly right.. freaking rate limit them to 128k/s Painful, slow, horrible, but still able to pay their bills online if they need to, or send an email.. painful enough that they won't do it again...
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If it's spelled out in the contract they can limit it however they wish. DirecTV's satellite connection already basically does this. You get 200MB per day on their basic plan at full speed (and unlimited from 3am to 6am). If you exceed your 200MB limit, then you get scaled back to essentially dial-up speeds for the rest of the day until you get your 200MB back for the next day. It's written into the contracts, so legally it's fine. It's a little too limited for my tastes, but if it was truly down to be
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I think the issue is bigger than that. When you start hearing reports that the cost of upgrading the infrastructure ends up only being $75-$100 to handle it, what is the consumer left thinking? We're getting screwed. But now, I'm not satisfied with them merely walking away from their cock-eyed ideas for caps. Where's my infrastructure upgrade? Can I pay the one time $100 upgrade fee to get the 20Mb service? (I know it doesn't work that way, but come on!)
I think they got more than they bargained for by
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See, we just set up a router in our room with the correct settings, then when one port hit its limit, we switched to another port. 3 ports per room, and 3 rooms jumped on this bandwagon. The downloaders could download, the laptops users could sit anywhere, and nobody could bitch.
You shoulda seen how we wired it though....each wall jack had a cable run to a 16 port hub, then the hub ran to a linksys router running dd-wrt with a few scripts to auto-switch the port it was using once a bandwidth limit was appro
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>>>16 port hub, then the hub ran to a linksys router running dd-wrt
Yeah genius, but wouldn't it be cheaper to just BUY whatever TV shows or movies you're stealing? That's what has always been in the back of my mind. I torrent because it's cheap ($15/month) but if the expense went too high, then I'd just buy the legal DVDs instead.
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If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit. Doesn't DirecTV's internet access do this already?
Better yet, get congress to give them a large sum of money to get better tubes. Pretty good idea isn't it? I wonder why no one has thought of it yet.
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They've already got it, they just don't want to spend it.
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Yeah, I know. I should have made the sarcasm a little more obvious.
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So, then everybody pays for effectively the same thing, through their tax money.
I find that idea just as pukey.
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What? You mean the government doesn't have its own money? It has to swipe it out of my wallet to pay for these "free" services? Gosh. /end Average_American_Idiot mode
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It doesn't have to be gov't owned (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the wires should be owned by a regulated entity that doesn't play favorites with interconnection carriers and data providers.
If ACME Wire Company owned all the wires and local switching stations, and they invited all comers to install Internet, telephone, and cable switches in their switching centers, and they invited all data providers who could afford to do so to colocate at those centers, and they charged everyone - consumers, transport providers, and data providers - reasonable and presumably regulated rates, this would leave the telcos, cable companies, ISP providers, and data providers an opportunity to compete based on price, product, service, etc.
Re:It doesn't have to be gov't owned (Score:4, Interesting)
However, the wires should be owned by a regulated entity that doesn't play favorites with interconnection carriers and data providers.
That won't happen. Every regulatory body will play favorites, heck, just look at MS basically buying out ISO, an international standards body. Congress is supposed to be in the favor of the people, that doesn't happen. The truth is, regulatory bodies don't do anything good. In fact, I'd rather be screwed by a company that I have a power (no matter how limited) to get into the market and make a better product then to be screwed by the regulatory bodies where I have zero control over them.
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regulatory bodies don't do anything good. In fact, I'd rather be screwed by a company that I have a power (no matter how limited) to get into the market and make a better product then to be screwed by the regulatory bodies where I have zero control over them.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
As long as the wires need to cross multiple properties, the only way they will ever get emplaced is via local government. You've got more chance of voting in a new regulatory board than you do of competing with a telco monopolist. In fact, you probably have more chance of being personally elected to such a board than you do have of competing with a telco monopolist.
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>>>You've got more chance of voting in a new regulatory board
So young. So naive. Like voting makes any difference when the same politicians keep their jobs for 30-40 years. They don't listen to the voter. At least with a private company, if they piss me off, I can simply cancel my service. Good luck trying to cancel a government service - they just keep sucking the money from your wallet, or else throw you in jail. (Or worse, draft you and send you off to die in some godforsaken country.)
Cor
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Maybe. But it's definitely stupid not to.
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If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit.
Why? Why must the heaviest users per se be punished for using what they bought?
You'll always have some asymmetry in the use of bandwidth. Why not just charge people what the Internet actually costs*, and let them use it as much as they care to pay for?
(* plus a reasonable profit)
Oh right, I know the answer: the company exists not to fulfill societal needs and wants, but to move money from customers to shareholders.
Someone should set up a non-profit ISP; in general, non-profit companies rule: you pay less
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Because that is more than the average person would be willing to pay. If an OC-3 costs $5000, then someone with 1 Mbps should be paying $32 for Internet, plus access fees, overhead and profit. That would be closer to, say, $100. Now that's per megabit. So if you wanted a 10 Mbps link, you'd be paying $1000 for it. And there are people out there with more than that for less than the $100 n
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If it's only 5%, set the cap just below where they are and only punish the *actual* problem children...or better yet, don't 'cap' but rate limit. Doesn't DirecTV's internet access do this already?
Verizon's FIOS is essentially that.
It varies a little bit by location, but they've got three rates:
5mbps
20mbps
50mbps
Each one costs more than the other. So, if you really need to suck down a lot of data, you can pay the premium for it. I know a few people who are happy to pay the ~$150/month for the full-speed 50mbps option vs ~$60/month for 20mbps.
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes tiered pricing is in place from a number of vendors, even cable vendors. The issue here is when your sum total amount of downloaded bits goes over a fixed limit you can't download AT ALL without incurring fees regardless of what speed plan you've signed up for.
I'm too lazy to do the math, but given predicted monthly caps could it be determined what the *effective* download speed over the month could be? my guess it would be pretty friggin slow.
Kinda like giving you a set amount of gas with your choice of cars: Yugo, Mustang, Ferrari. You can go different speeds but the faster you go the less time you have available.
It's unfair (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be more understanding of the situation of metered billing and usage if I was under the impression that they were doing all they could with the money they had and physically couldn't do anymore, but that's not the case here.
It's not a problem with any technology, it's not prohibitively expensive, it's greed and nothing else. And until they can prove to me and the rest of the people that it really isn't about greed then we aren't going to stand for them ripping us off.
It hasn't been unlimited for years (Score:2)
It's unfair to sell and offer the service as "unlimited", which they did years ago when the idea of "unlimited" was big for dial-up companies, and then turn around and tell people they're going to limit them.
Can't we put this to rest? If they advertised their service as unlimited years ago, then they can't change it now? Things change.
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Quite a few of us have had the service since they were offering it as unlimited. So yes, when we entered the contract with them for "unlimited service", that's what we bought into. If they break that it is a breach of contract.
It is illegal, it is wrong. And if I had enough money to fight off their lawyers I would take them to court over it.
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In that case, you should have read the part of the contract (which has always been there) stating that they may change the contract at any time. They probably also have a section stating that if you don't agree to the contract your only choice is to cancel service.
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Secondly, keep in mind that these companies generally charge you a fee to cancel service prior to the contract expiration (which is usually 1 or 2 years). So in some cases it makes it prohibitive in actually reasonably cancel the contract.
They can change the contract any time they want without reason an
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Not quite gone. (Score:5, Insightful)
eh heh (Score:4, Informative)
Back in the mid 90's, Japanese telecoms decided that they would charge for a piece of each 'type' of phone action...one rate for voice, another for data, etc., while billing was based on quantity (metered.
This was while it was trivial to find service in North America that was flat rate, but still unique per type.
It didn't take much to find ways around the J billing hassles, such as dial-back for international LD. And it only took a few years for the J telcos to wake up to what they were not getting and alter their methods to at least keep them in the game.
Metered use is just an example of the free reign that domestic telcos have - they can dig into the client's pockets....so they will. Rather than build it so they will come, they cling to business models that are increasingly going out-of-date. And with no one to stop them, the domestic phone market will once again become a killing field of grand proportion, with the victim, as usual, being the consumer.
Wha? (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh.. well cool.
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No, having to commit seppuku would indicate that they have some honor to save in the first place. This was a straight-up attempt at fleecing that fell apart when the word got out. The honorable thing to do would've been to upgrade their network when they were supposed, and failing that to offer a fair pricing plan.
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
More like they tried to pull a fast one on their service areas and got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. If anything, this should make you more alert to sudden changes in their pricing structure - not more confident in them.
Thank god... (Score:2, Interesting)
Pay-for-use makes sense only if you lower prices (Score:5, Insightful)
In the NPR piece about this, one TW representative compared the current scheme to someone buying a salad and someone else buying an expensive lobster dinner, and the two of them splitting the cost 50-50. In other words, the heavy user is subsidized by the light user. But if this is their rationale, then making the heavy user pay for his/her fair share would mean that the light users would no longer have to subsidize the heavy users and that the light users should see lower prices.
But that was nowhere in TW's plan, which is why this all seemed disingenuous. I, for one, think it's fair for people who use more to pay more. But not when that is used as an excuse for price gouging. It seems much more likely that TW is just trying to protect their content delivery services from people getting movies digital competitors like Netflix's download service, which would been an abuse of market powers.
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I think its equally unfair for the price to jump when the customer exceeds an invisible threshold, requiring customers to constantly check -- using more bandwidth -- what their current usage is to make sure they don't go over. This is the problem with cell phon
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Re:Pay-for-use makes sense only if you lower price (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's break down this salad dinner analogy a bit more.
The analogy REALLY works like this.
Two people walk into a restaurant and buy dinners. One buys a lobster dinner, and one buys the salad dinner. Though all the dinner prices are advertised at the same price, in this case, it's advertised at the price of the lobster dinner.
Eventually, everyone starts coming in to the restaurant and starts buying the lobster dinner. The owner of the restaurant realizes that the cost of feeding everyone the lobster dinner is too high because they assumed that very few people actually wanted lobster and most would stand for the salad. Eventually, they start running out of lobster to feed everyone and start telling people you all can't have your lobster dinner. We assumed that most people just wanted salad and offered lobster as a bonus, we didn't expect everyone to jump on to the bandwagon and start buying the best thing we offered.
Rather than find another supplier of lobster and expanding their business, rather than overhauling their operation realizing that people really don't care for salad as much and want the lobster--they start placing the blame on the people that eat lobster. They tell the people eating salad that the people eating lobster are keeping all of their dinner costs high, and that the business owner isn't to blame for the high prices but the people eating the lobster that they offered are.
Meanwhile, the owner is walking away complaining about money when he's got a few million bucks in his bank account ripping off the people buying salad by charging them for lobster, and telling the people eating lobster that they can't have as much of it and need to start eating salad.
If my entire analogy sounds completely absurd, because it does to me, then you get an idea of how absurd this entire fucking scheme is from these cable companies.
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TW has no interest in doing this. They're already cramming more and more HD channels into their service faster than they're upgrading infrastructure; as a result, HD channels are over-compressed and looking pretty crappy.
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They can't? Then why is Comcast promising 50+mbps by the end of the year in many metropolitan areas?
That's a poor analogy. In fact, it's a straw man. That is not what is going on here, You're saying business service with that analogy, but Comcast, Cox, TW, etc. run t
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DOCSIS 3.0 does pretty much -precisely- that, at a per home passed cost of between 20 and 100 (depending on the source you read).
So, umm, yeah. In this case, it actually DOES work that way.
Amazing.
What the...? (Score:2, Funny)
The customers raised a big stink, and the company listened?
The system actually works?!?!?
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For now... It ain't over. I am sure it will be back later.
Still Voice your Opinion (Score:2)
They are just shelving it, not putting it to sleep. We still need to convince them that that "educating" us is stupid. We need to put this issue to rest. Continue to send emails and sign petitions, and join a boycott.
Time Warner Petition/Boycott [appspot.com]
Sir, we're seeing a rapid increase in cancellation (Score:3, Funny)
"Look, the cancellation rate is dipping....oh, no it isn't. Doh!"
Excellent news (Score:2)
It ain't over yet... (Score:2)
Just as with nearly all other "unpopular ideas" they will find a way to sneak this in secretly or quietly. They WANT to do this and it doesn't matter to them that some people oppose it. They believe it will bring in more money and they are obliged to do it somehow...right? People can either keep watching for it or we can get with someone or some organization to finally get ISPs regulated as a utility.
Good idea, bad implementation (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm torn on this one. Personally I think that metered bandwidth is the most equitable way charge customers, but I think that the way TWC went about it was a shameless money-grab.
We're already accustomed to consumption-based pricing. We see it all the time: electicity, water, gas, food, etc. Same should go for internet access. And in fact, metered bandwidth is the pricing model that many ISP's use for hosting companies and other ISP's.
But here's the catch, if TWC went to a per-GB model with the aim to keep their revenues the same as when they had per-month pricing, 95% of their customers would pay less. A LOT LESS.
But that's not what they were proposing. They wanted that 95% of customers' costs to stay the same, and have 5% of high-usage customers to pay more. Under that scenario, TWC would make TONS MORE MONEY. Essentially they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
If somebody wants to do metered pricing right, here's what they gotta do. Send each of your customers a letter saying "based on your monthly usage, we predict that your bill would be $AMOUNT under our new pricing model". However, seeing as how the cable companies have totally pissed away consumer trust, I doubt anyone would believe them.
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Agreed. Tiered pricing is the way to go. Unfortunately, Time Warner's bad-faith approach to this is going to make it tougher for companies to do legitimate consumption-based billing without getting knee-jerk backlash from users.
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"Based on our estimation of your internet usage, the cost of your internet service would go down by X amount."
Then on the bill...
Cost of Internet Service: $15.83
Internet Delivery Fee: $4.99
Line Maintenance Fee: $2.99
Cable TV Service: $49.99
Cable TV Delivery Fee: $4.99
Cable TV maintenance Fee: $2.99
YOU CAN NOW PAY YOUR BILL ONLINE FOR ONLY A $2.99 PROCESSING FEE!
You may not do A, B, C, or D with your service. We reserve the right to cancel your service at any time. Early
Equitable? (Score:2, Insightful)
How is metered bandwidth equitable? We are charged per unit for electricity, water, etc. because they are resources that get consumed. But if no one is using the Internet, those wires just sit there.
Bandwidth isn't a scarce resource except at peak hours -- and then, bandwidth caps don't do jack to solve the problem. Quality-of-service pricing would. Metered pricing with off-peak discounts would. But just plain metering would not.
-- 77IM
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So change the price as a function of traffic.
That's exactly how they do they pay lanes here in Calfornia (and elsewhere, I imagine).
Pay-per-bit is not equitable (or sensible) (Score:5, Insightful)
You pay for water by volume and electricity by Watt-hour because when you use either of them, the utility has to treat/create and provide more. They have a bunch of static equipment and pipes/wires that are capable of providing a fixed maximum flow/power, but they also have real incremental costs for every unit consumed.
Bits aren't like that. The ISP buys a bunch of routers and switches and fiber capable of providing some amount of bandwidth, but if that bandwidth isn't capped then whether you use the pipe or not makes very little difference. The next bit costs the same amount to send regardless of whether or not you used the bit before. At the link level, bits are being sent back and forth regardless of whether or not any valid application data packets are contained therein. Peering arrangements are based on outbound traffic, so your downloads don't cost them anything that way. So outside of the tiny amount of extra electricity needed to process a packet which wouldn't even be worth charging for, the number of bits you consume has no effect on their costs.
In short, bandwidth costs lots of money, but once you have it, each bit of data costs virtually nothing. Therefore charging for bits makes no sense.
The only way in which your usage of the existing bandwidth costs them more money is if that bandwidth is saturated such that they cannot provide their customers with decent service, or accept new customers, and they have to buy more equipment/pipes etc. The only time that's going to come close to happening is during Internet Prime Time. Outside of that, and you can peg your bandwidth all you want and it's not going to saturate your ISP's link.
A person who downloads 2 TB of data a month, but does it all in the middle of the night, is much less likely to cause any problems than a person who downloads 20GB a month, but does it all at 8pm. It's the latter one who is going to force the ISP to go buy more equipment.
That's part of why this scheme was so transparent -- it didn't even attempt to address the peak usage issue.
You want equitable? Here's equitable: You pay for bandwidth, however you want, at a per-month rate. You can use your bandwidth as much as you want. However, during peak hours if the ISP is saturated they throttle everyone's connection speeds proportionally to their purchased bandwidth. Then, heavy users have an incentive to download off-peak for better download speeds, and light users who are under-utilizing their bandwidth don't even notice except that their ISP is no longer gagging.
Oh and if this happens too much, the ISP goes out and uses some of their profits to buy more equipment like any business trying to serve expanding customer needs. :P
But instead we get some BS about how it's the number of bits you download that is the problem. Which it is, of course, from their scheming perspective. If you download lots of large files, and those large files happen to be TV shows and movies, then you might not need your $60-100/mo cable TV. That is the "cost" that they're worried about wrt large downloaders.
What's the Problem? (Score:4, Funny)
"Yes" said the Time Warner representative, The $55 Lobster dinner was subsidized by the $5 Salad eater when they both equally split the bill at $30 each.
Now, under our new pricing plan, the Lobster diner will pay $95, their fair share after we total their usage and the Salad eater will continue to pay $30. Well actually they'll pay $35 after our proposed price increase. That seems fair to us. Why would any consumer have a problem when we level the playing field so everyone is treated equally? Currently only one consumer, the Salad diner, is getting screwed. With our new pricing plan both the Lobster diner and the Salad diner will be treated equally.
That makes sense to me.
Translation (Score:2)
Not that the company believes anything about the plan was fundamentally misguided; as CEO Glenn Britt put it today, "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing."
Standing in front of the smashed shop window at 2:00 A.M. Glenn Britt, wearing a mask and holding a pry bar, exclaimed to police "It's all just a big mis-understanding"
Schumer announced his own opposition to the plan, then spoke with Britt about the "overwhelming opposition" to the caps. Citizens of Rochester, New York were furious about the caps about to be imposed on them, with Schumer's office describing the reaction as "outrage." The company relented.
Noticing that the half-dozen officers had drawn their weapons, Britt voluntarily dropped the pry bar and raised his hands in surrender.
Britt says that he eagerly awaits his opportunity to explain to the judge that it was his evil twin, he was home in bed sick, out of town, in a meeting, and that he was actually breaking in so he could stand g
Secret Conversation (Score:5, Interesting)
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Sure been tough lately being a Democratic member of Congress.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Tell me about it. Tea parties. Fox News.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I know a way you can get real popular.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Go on...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): People hate Congress and are afraid we're spending too much. I mean we're just rewarding our constituents after 8 long dry years but...
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Yeah, I know.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): But there's someone even less popular than we are.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Lawyers?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Call that one a tie. Think even worse.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Uhhh...where's my teleprompter? Oh yeah, loaned it to Barrack. Wait, I got it!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Right, the cable television companies that we're supposed to be regulating to the benefit of the consumer.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Ha ha ha ha ha...
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Well Time-Warner just decided to screw over their customers even worse than before, and they're starting it in our own great state of New York.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What are they doing?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Their costs are dropping and their profits are up.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Profits are up? Aren't we taxing them enough yet?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Probably not, but that's not the point.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): But raising taxes on other people and spending the money on pork is about all I know how to do - except to blame Bush for everything, that is.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): This is easy. I'm just a small member of the House and they're not listening to me, but you're the senior Senator from a powerful state. They can't ignore your voice.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): What exactly are they doing.
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They imposing caps that will raise the average user's bill by at least 66% while calling them pigs for using the Internet connections they actually paid for.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): God Forbid! We can't have that - unless they need the money for more campaign contributions [wink][wink][nudge][nudge].
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): I think they need new private jets.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): So what do I need to do?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Tell them to cut it out, or else - and you'll be a hero to millions.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): That easy?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): That easy!
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): And if I don't, what's the downside?
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): They'll be protesting in the streets this weekend.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): We can't have any more of that. Except for NBC who is already in our pocket, I don't think we can shut down the rest of the news organizations a second time so soon. Not after the ratings Fox News got out of those tea parties!
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY): Then we've got a deal? You'll remember who brought this to you?
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Of course, kid. The check's in the mail.
<bling> what? (Score:2)
For a moment there, I read that headline as:
Time Warner Plans Pricing For Tiered Shelves
Ve are not defeated. Ve are only resting... (Score:2)
Threatened protests are the least of the story. As soon as the economy picks up a bit, these douchebags will be back with their caps and artificially-complex pricing plans and their fuck-the-consumer mentality. Right now, they're scared that customers will just quit, or a lot of very bright people without a lot of spare cash will come up with a way to render them as obsolete as the record companies.
Then it will just be a case of seeing how much damage the old dinosaur will do before its brain finally f
Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:5, Insightful)
I never knew how "good" Time Warner was until they sold out, in our area, to Comcast!
Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:5, Funny)
OMG!
Time Warner was near the top of my list of crap customer service companies already.
I have no direct experience with Comcast, but have read various customer reviews over the years, so all I can say is:
Looks like you had a crap sandwich and now you get a crap sandwich with a side of crap. :/
Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:5, Funny)
TWC CEO: Well, there's crap egg sausage and crap, that's not got much crap in it.
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Comcast sucks, but Verizon is worse. :(
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DNS outages lasting hours at a time
The other complaints are more than valid, but OpenDNS [opendns.com] works very well for me, as an alternative to Comcast's DNS servers.
Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:4, Informative)
I've had Comcast in three different cities. They were great in one, and sucked unbelievably in the two others. I finally had to cancel where I am now because they couldn't get me a static-free picture or more than 128 kbps Internet. They sent 7 technicians out, none of whom were authorized to actually fix anything. I have Verizon FIOS now and I'm relatively happy, other than their pact with satan (i.e. MPAA / RIAA) and the three strikes policy.
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I have Verizon FIOS now and I'm relatively happy, other than their pact with satan (i.e. MPAA / RIAA) and the three strikes policy.
Verizon was one of the few ISP who stood up with the RIAA, and I don't believe they have a three strike policy. I might be wrong about that though, but a quick google search turns up nothing.
could be worse... (Score:2)
We had Insight (who now flaunts the "fastest ISP in the US!" label) for years, and then Comcast bought them out in Indiana. Now all of our cable channels signal quality has degraded to Comcast's usual fuzziness, and our bill has risen 4 times in 1 year, all the while Comcast has been bombarding us with "Bill will not change!" commercials.
Re:Don't pick on Time Warner! (Score:4, Informative)
A better analogy would be for GP to build his own on-ramp to the interstate, because the local roads and the only existing on-ramp are all owned by companies that demand a fee for their usage. ISPs do form part of the backbone, but they also plug into a central internet exchange.
The problem is that a private on-ramp simply costs too much for only a couple of users, so you'd need to band together to make it worthwhile. In effect, set up your own community ISP. You'd also need to come up with a good plan to hook up all the homes to the on-ramp though.
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It's not actually. That's texas, this is new york.
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Why don't they just charge a simple fixed rate? This way you only pay for what you use. They could also have a limit above which you will be charged extra. This is how all the other utilities work; why should internet access be any different?
Many people are not against the idea of tiered pricing or even metered pricing although those who are against it are against it for good reason because it goes against the advertised "unlimited" usage. But it is the way that TWC has gone about setting the prices that is making people mad. Basically for many people their cost will go up because they would use more than the low tiers that TWC wanted to set. If the true problem is a top % of users hogging the bandwidth then they shouldn't be structuring the ti
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Sure. Sounds great. Like my other utilities, let's go ahead and heavily regulate them and reduce profits (or deregulate them and let Time Warner's lines be a free-for-all). I'd be happy to pay about $0.07/GB. which is approximately what my hosting provider charges me for bandwidth. This was part of the problem. $5/GB is a tad high for me. $150/GB for what I currently get for $50 is ludicrous.
So sure, let them charge like utilities, and we'll regulate them like utilities. That will lead to massive price drop
Rational cost estimates (Score:2)
It costs a lot more to deliver bandwidth to homes than to a data center. The extra cost is due to the cost of constructing and maintaining the distribution network. The per connection cost needs to be excluded to make a serious rate comparison. Electrical wholesale rates are about 1/3 of retail rates, and the cost of the distribution network is the major part of the difference. Of course if the electric company was allowed to use a rational pricing policy and charge customers about thirty dollars a month
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These are good points. And you'll notice that people think current prices are expensive, but the $50/month is something they're willing to pay. Based on your formula that would be $50/100GB. Which actually seems like a somewhat decent price.
The problem is that me watching an extra 2 hours of TV is not an extra $20 on my electrical bill. Me watching an extra 2 hours of TV using Time Warner would be. I think ultimately what's freaking people out is that this makes cable broadband unaffordable. Perhaps the sol
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While I might be willing to agree that we should be charged like utilities. The charge needs to be in the pennies per megabyte range. That's what my hosting provider charges. Why exactly is Time Warner different? I'd say it's because they have no real competition.
10GB a day is not ludicrous. If I watch one HD movie, and two hours of HD television I've crushed that. If I and everyone in my family were average Americans and shifted to watching all of our television online, we would need hundreds of GB per day
Wishful thinking (Score:2)
The practical service limits are not numbers you can just pull out of thin air. It depends on the economics and technical capacity of the distribution network, how much it costs to expand that capacity, how long before the equipment is obsolete, and so on.
More to the point, the current cable television distribution network is hundreds if not thousands of times more efficient than ordinary internet television. The reason is because the cable television network delivers a fixed number of channels on a fixed
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I understand what you're saying, but I don't think Time Warner should be in the position to make these decisions. They have a monopoly position and have an incentive to keep us locked into the old (albeit efficient) model. I'd be more sympathetic if they didn't also own channels and essentially have an extreme incentive to make sure that Netflix, iTunes, and YouTube fail. Spin off the broadband divison and let's see what you think is best for the consumer.
The problem is that all the innovations in video nee
Regulated Monopolies (Score:2)
I agree that all metro level cable and telecom distribution networks should be regulated monopolies, with open access required at reasonable rates where feasible. Competition in many areas is nonexistent (where service is available at all) due to cherry picking, often down to the level of individual cul-de-sacs.
A reasonable rate for a service that requires a network buildout, of course, includes sufficient price to cover the risk and cost to the distribution network provider of building out the network in
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"Did you mean pennies per GB?"
Yes. That was a silly typo.
I agree that I'd prefer that we were charged as you proposed. That's basically the way a utility works. Most businesses work by figuring out the maximum the market will bear and then charge it. As we know from Time Warner's securities filings, they should be reducing prices since their costs are down and their profits are up. But instead they are attempting to raise prices. Which is why their customers are revolting.
Re:This war is not over yet! (Score:4, Interesting)
AT&T is metering Beaumont now? OMFG! Why do I have to live in the one place in the entire motherfucking country that has metered 'bandwidth' on every ISP available? And why has no one else on Slashdot pointed out that there is a city in the United States where TWO major corporate ISPs are capping their internet services? Why isn't Beaumont the internet's net neutrality battleground instead of these other cities?
It was bad enough when Time Warner started doing it, but now AT&T has done it, and quietly for sure. I simply had no idea, and it was not announced in any way. I thought AT&T's trial was in Reno only. This is a fucking outrage, and I think I will spend my day off tomorrow contacting my representatives in federal, state, and local government. Seriously, this is BAD. I was shopping for DSL as recently as LAST WEEK to try to get away from paying Time Warner anything, even though I am (quite luckily) still grandfathered in to their unmetered plan. I thought I had no options because DSL isn't even available where I live, but now I quite literally have NO FUCKING OPTIONS, they have all been stripped away. It's only a matter of time before they start billing me the metered rate, so I have to act quickly. Does anyone else here live in Beaumont? We need to protest!
Here's [lightreading.com] another article I found on the Beaumont caps.