Time Warner Expands Capped Broadband Plans
from the good-luck-with-that dept
Time Warner has been testing broadband plans with traffic caps for several months, and apparently it likes what it's seen, as it plans to soon expand the caps into four more markets. The company alleges it has to switch to capped plans in order to "support the infrastructure of the broadband business," even though the supposed bandwidth crunch ISPs cite when talking about these plans is little more than a myth. As the company's CEO notes, getting the cat back in the bag by getting consumers to switch from unlimited to capped plans is going to be very difficult. Previous studies have found that even light internet users would look to take their business elsewhere if their ISP introduced caps, mainly because they have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth they're consuming. That's a good thing, because the absence of mental transaction costs helped wired broadband take off, and laid the groundwork for all sorts of innovative internet services -- not to mention lots of revenues for ISPs. Compare this to the mobile world, where per-KB or per-MB pricing helped stymie the growth of data services.
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Filed Under: broadband, caps
Companies: time warner cable
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pissed off customer
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Re: pissed off customer
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Re: pissed off customer
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A HUGE STEP BACKWARDS
The folks running the show at TW are not stupid, they are going to do anything and everything to avoid becoming a dumb pipe. Even if it means f$ck over the whole nature of the internet and its users. Net neutrality 2.0
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Re: A HUGE STEP BACKWARDS
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Perhaps you can leave the P2P program off for a while? ;)
Seriously you have to wonder, considering this story:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090401/1902564346.shtml
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I also do a lot of data analysis for several biology projects, mainly recording data from about 300 individual sensors, those take up around 10 gig a month.
so for me it is really easy to rack up astronomical charges on data.
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Take a freaking statistics class or something.
Your precious sample sizes of one and two don't mean shit to the rest of the world. The world doesn't revolve around you. GROW UP.
Try visiting YouTube for just an hour a night and watch your bandwidth usage soar.
I am sorry that you have no friends other than this forum with which to communicate. Chatting a couple nights a week can up your usage too.
Or perhaps play some video games. See the one poster who plays simply text based games? Well there are many of us internet users who play graphic video games. Like Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty (insert game version number here), Team Fortress 2. And those are just a couple first person shooters. How about the millions upon millions of WoW addicts? Their bandwidth is probably high.
If you ask me, anything less than the 250gb "cap" that Comcast has is simply a greedy money grabbing move. And even that will be tiny as soon as more content services move online to try to reach their fans in a way the fans want. See Netflix.
Please stop being an idiot. Please. I know its a lot to ask from somebody like you, but I really mean it.
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Try Australia
Then you get the limited plans where as soon as you hit your quota excess charges apply - normally about $0.02/Meg, so people on the 'cheap' limited plans can end up paying $200-300 per month because they exceeded their cap.
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Oh no they di'ant
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Eagerly awaiting the fabled broadband cap of death.
I won't tell you how it will play out, but the ingredients are highspeed internet, Some no-name VOIP-based phone service, and a 9-1-1 call that just can't go through.
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Quality Customer Service
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40gb?
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Subtract ad BW ?
If not, given that they are now looking towards targeted ads - it would make sense that they would want to increase the BW consumption of the ads they send your way.
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40gb?
In any case, what drugs are these people on? When I bridge my DSL Lines, I can download 3 MB/s - that's MegaBytes - not Megabits per second. Theoretically, I could bust that cap, in five hours. Oh, what to do with the other 715 hours in the month?
Let me tell you why TWC is doing this - Hulu/Boxee vs OnDemand, Netflix online (whatever they call their streaming video service) vs OnDemand. BD Live Vs OnDemand, etc, etc.
This isn't about piracy, this isn't even about running out of bandwidth, this is about competition from the internet, plain and simple.
I don't use Netflix, but I am sure their prices are much lower than the 3.99 TWC charges for their pay-per-view movies. They got tired of subsidizing their competition and said... Enough.
From the article: Time Warner Cable has 8.4 million broadband customers.
I wonder how many they will have after this plan goes into effect?
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Re: 40gb?
I wonder how many they will have after this plan goes into effect?
If the numbers hold like they always do, they will lose not much more than 5% of users - the top 5% of users are the real bandwidth busters.
So, answer: about 8 million - or probably 8.4 million with a few people bitching.
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Does Time Warner want you to Complain?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/time-warner-cable-please-complain-about -our-usage-caps.ars
To #11: You made me LOL!
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Wireless internet
I am mad at this news to. Depending on how it effects my bill (I use 50gb per month), I will gladly give up my 7000/512 metered cable internet and go with the 512/512 poky wireless service offered by GVEC: http://gvec.net/services.asp
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I switched to DSL long ago...
Time Warner has purposely raised their max speed caps without improving the infrastructure so they could complain about the "P2P" users taking up most of the bandwidth causing "your" service to be slower. They've essentially tried to create the "they're the reason we have to do this" excuse hoping to smokescreen the real reason for these bandwidth moves.
The reality is Media Conglomerate companies like Time Warner are slowly being replaced by smaller Internet upstarts who are giving customers the same products at a much lower cost.
These Bandwidth Caps are desperate acts of a major Media company trying to keep control of the media consumption power it has held for 30+ years.
When Time Warner decided to test market Beaumont Texas for the Capped service was when I decided I had enough with their crap service and made the switch to Verizon DSL. I have never been happier. Sure, it's not as fast. However, it's always running at full speed and the latency for games never wavers. You don't need huge pipelines to run Internet media effectively. 3 megabits is more than enough for what you need.
I will not give another penny to a company that is more interested in controlling how I get information than providing me with an essential service.
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Elsewhere
You mean the few lucky enough to have a choice.
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it's not just TW
However, they stated that all Cogeco VOIP traffic would be excempt from billing !!!!!!!
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cogeco-Drops-Metered-Billing-On-Users-101682
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I'm Done
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Ridiculous caps
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Research suggests that the "average" user spends three hours a day on the internet.
((3 hrs*60 min*60 sec)*30 days) = 324,000 sec
(40,000/324,000)= .1234567 MB/s
.1234567*8 (MB->Mb) = .987654 Mb/s
So, one can use about 1Mb/s average bandwidth during your daily three hours on the computer. Great for e-mail, not great for streaming or larger downloads, legal or otherwise. Especially with multiple users simultaneously at the same access point.
If you move down to one hour of use a daily you can up it to 3Mb/s, which makes streaming manageable.
My roommate and I enjoy Hulu, Steam, and Netflix (which scales quality to bandwidth, something I imagine will become more common). All are legal ways to acquire my media and games, but still bandwidth intensive.
Time Warner Austin currently sells me 15Mb/s with 22Mb/s burst. But just for fun lets go with 10Mb/s.
Running the same math again, keeping bandwidth available and cap constant, time becomes the only variable (and it requires us to carefully monitor our own usage). To utilize a 10Mb/s connection I can spend 20 min a day online. To utilize my current connection (which usually actually hovers at a constant 20 Mb/s) I can have a whole 10 min online daily! That is, of course, assuming maximum usage. But still, even dropping it down to 5Mb/s I get only 40 min.
If we "remove" the data cap by me not paying attention and using three hours a day, but still utilize 10Mb/s speed watching Netflix or gaming via Steam, that comes out to 405 GB per month.
Less the 40 GB I paid $50 for, plus $1 per GB extra: $415 bill. Lets knock off another 200GB just to make it even more reasonable usage: 5Mb/s, 3 hours a day. $212.5 bill.
Reasonable usage, reasonable bill?
If they didn't expect people to be using so much bandwidth or have the capacity to support it, why would they offer such high speeds? If the "average" person really does only need 1 Mbps connectivity max, why even push 5 or 6, much less 10,15,22?
This doesn't even cover the math for the lower caps. It gets silly: 5 GB cap translates to 128 Kbps, three hour usage daily. Which, yes, is all some people may need. But those people also probably don't know about everything available online and I would imagine would constitute a smaller and smaller minority if they knew what Hulu or YouTube was. Also, that whole progression of technology thing, where we don't want to stay at the same speeds we were coaxing out of phone lines 5 years ago...
...I mean, I know you love your ISDN line and all...
Feel free to point out if anything here is unreasonable. I tried to scale it more or less realistically, and would appreciate the feedback.
I could easily point out that 20Mb/s, 3 hours a day would be $820, or 20Mb/s for 8 hours a day (if you work at home) is $2,170. Even 8 hours a day at 10Mb/s would be $1,090. At 5Mb/s it would be $550. But while some of that may be somewhat reasonable, seeking out the largest possible bill only makes my argument as weak as TW's. (22Mb/s and 24 hours/day = $7,138, but who downloads/streams 7 TB a month?)
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On the highway, 50 miles an hour doesn't mean you can go 50 miles as fast as you want as long as you stop at the 50th mile.
High speed internet is really designed so you can download something, and enjoy it locally (like a webpage) without having to wait long for it to arrive.
If you are going to use your internet to replace or supplement your cable / sat TV, you should expect to pay a little more than someone who is just browsing the web.
Speed has nothing to do with it - consumption is the key.
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That was the sound of his point going right over your head.
If they sell that bandwidth, they should be supporting it.
Period.
If they can't, don't sell it.
The car analogy is nice, but even fails to make your point.
Do you understand his numbers at all?
He completely removed the burst factor.
So what he would be left with is a 50mph highway, where he can go 50mph forever. Except the company is saying they are going to charge him for anything over 10mph on the 50mph road.
Does that make sense for you or is it still too complicated?
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You are assuming that there is no link between speed and consumption when I would argue that there is a large one.
The average consumer has a given consumption bundle that they want to achieve. Lets say that they want 100 M&M's per day.
If I give them one M&M a day, they will never reach that point, but will unhappily learn to live with it. If I increase the speed to one M&M an hour, the same thing happens but they will get closer to that level of consumption and therefore be happier. If I increase it to one a minute, not only is that level of consumption reached very quickly but there is now an abundance of M&Ms. This allows them to then increase their consumption bundle and therefore their utility. Speed very much affects consumption.
If TW were to reduce the speed of your connection below 128 Kbps, it would be impossible to exceed a cap of 40 GB. Lets say they lower it to a max bandwidth of 100 Kbps. If you are downloading a 40 GB file at max speed (i.e. utilizing all your bandwidth), 24 hours a day for 30 days, you could only receive 32.4 GB. The limited bandwidth limits the speed at which data can be transferred, which in turn limits consumption.
((30*24*60*60)*.0001)/8= 32.4 GB
While I recognize that speed is technically dependent on not just available bandwidth but also latency, it really doesn't matter that much in this case. They can be two technically different things, but be so closely linked that for the purposes of my argument can be treated as one and the same.
As far as the highway example, a download is like driving a set distance. The speed limit does dictate how fast you get from point A to point B. If you want to go 100 miles and the speed limit is 50, it takes as little as two hours. If it's raised to 100, you can make the drive in a minimum of one hour. If you are a law abiding citizen, 50 miles per hour is your max bandwidth, and your speed must fall within that range.
Therefore, when assuming that you are getting the maximum speed possible allowed by bandwidth (i.e. driving 50 mph out of a maximum 50 mph), the two terms are functionally indistinguishable because they are equal.
A better counter would have been to say that just because the speed limit is 50 mph doesn't mean you are always traveling that fast. This I agree with; which is why I pointed out in my argument that lower usage, such as 5 or 10 Mbps out of 22 Mbps max, still results in ridiculous billing.
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We have Grande, which is awesome, but very limited in availability as TW is so entrenched that most buildings are exclusively theirs and they fight tooth and nail to retain the sole rights. So, there really is no competition to drive the caps up, which in turn allows them to perform a "successful" trial run on a larger city.
Sneaky.
And with AT&T doing trial runs with U-Verse in Beaumont as well, I'm sure they will come up with similar results, negating their competitive aspect, despite what game theory may dictate.
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Refund for unwanted traffic
Sorry, but as long as they ISP can claim "its internet" as the catch-all excuse for why stuff isn't working they shouldn't be allow to cap anything.
Perhaps they should start providing REAL COMPENSATION for right-of-way access.
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Broadband caps
It is excellent, though occasionally (apparently some teen who doesn't even know what he/she is doing) hogs the network with some excessive downloads (in one case, the person, I am told, "just wanted to see if they could block everyone else").
Google spends a lot of time and money keeping the network usable without caps - personally, I wish they could put caps on usage, and I could have my fair share of the network (which is never large enough to come close to a cap).
I realize they can't, because the illiterati would think; "It are a limit - I is agin limits!"
Wish you could be more balanced in your reporting.
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Why does everyone assume if you are downloading more than 40GB/month you are running P2P?!
This is 2009. Putting a cap on bandwidth is really a step backwards in evolution. Although if an ISP can make a buck off of it, do they really care? NO! Companies like TIme Warner are already making a ton of money off it's customer base. Why make our experience on the internet less enjoyable? If they want to save a bit of bandwidth, how about cutting down on their spamming?
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Bandwidth?
Anyways, when did bandwidth all of a sudden change to total bits data downloaded or even as some people have used it to refer to the actual data rate at any given time?
Come on people lets get our terms correct.
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