Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use

[AkumaTX]

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080602/tec_time_warner_cable_internet.html?.v=4


Time Warner Cable starts customer trial with metered Internet access in Texas

NEW YORK (AP) -- You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

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, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology.

Just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.

"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Leddy said.

Metered usage is common overseas, and other U.S. cable providers are looking at ways to rein in heavy users. Most have download caps, but some keep the caps secret so as not to alarm the majority of users, who come nowhere close to the limits. Time Warner Cable appears to be the first major ISP to charge for going over the limit: Other companies warn, then suspend, those who go over.

Phone companies are less concerned about congestion and are unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers, because their networks are structured differently.

Time Warner Cable had said in January that it was planning to conduct the trial in Beaumont, but did not give any details. On Monday, Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 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.

A possible stumbling block for Time Warner Cable is that customers have had little reason so far to pay attention to how much they download from the Internet, or know much traffic makes up a gigabyte. That uncertainty could scare off new subscribers.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail have little reason to pay attention to the traffic caps: a gigabyte is about 3,000 Web pages, or 15,000 e-mails without attachments. But those who download movies or TV shows will want to pay attention. A standard-definition movie can take up 1.5 gigabytes, and a high-definition movie can be 6 to 8 gigabytes.

Time Warner Cable subscribers will be able to check out their data consumption on a "gas gauge" on the company's Web page.

The company won't apply the gigabyte surcharges for the first two months. It has 90,000 customers in the trial area, but only new subscribers will be part of the trial.

Billing by the hour was common for dial-up service in the U.S. until AOL introduced an unlimited-usage plan in 1996. Flat-rate, unlimited-usage plans have been credited with encouraging consumer Internet use by making billing easy to understand.

"The metered Internet has been tried and tested and rejected by the consumers overwhelmingly since the days of AOL," information-technology consultant George Ou told the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing on ISP practices in April.

Metered billing could also put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video for as little as $8.99 per month.

Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month. Bend Cable Communications in Bend, Ore., used to have multitier bandwidth allowances, like the ones Time Warner Cable will test, but it abandoned them in favor of an across-the-board 100-gigabyte cap. Bend charges $1.50 per extra gigabyte consumed in a month.

http://www.timewarnercable.com

http://www.bendcable.com

40 gigs a month cap?

OH well good thing im an sbc customer paying 1/4 of the price of time warner for speeds close to what they offer.

I can already see some hefty bills for some folks.

[fishjie]

fux0rz

[Septimus Prime]

I think I posted this a while back.

[Serpent]

lol, yeah AOL did SO well with that back in the 90s! Obviously this idea is the wave of the FUTURE!

[samB]

Booo shit. Looks like I'll DL from school if it affects me

[AdverseSolutions]

Kill It

Kill It Now

[FighterX]

If you're paying $55 a month in cable, you shouldn't be capped at 40gigs. That's crazy.

[fishjie]

at the end of the day they're in the business of making money. if its not net neutrality its metering the interwebs. although i can stomach the internet metering more than net neutrality. they're charging based on usage. makes sense from a business standpoint.

[Saotome Kaneda]

which is why telcos are gonna run all over these motherfuckers now

DSL/fiber ftw





until telcos get greedy(again)

[L.one H.iryu S.aga]

What utter bullshit. If this goes into effect they can kiss my business goodbye. It's bad enough my bill is already close to $50 for REGULAR Roadrunner which isn't even that fast, but this would put the final nail in the coffin. Jesus.

[fishjie]

which is why telcos are gonna run all over these motherfuckers now

DSL/fiber ftw





until telcos get greedy(again)

dsl sucks

and until they can figure out how to bend fiber optic cables its gonna be slow rolling it out. at least where i live, very few places have fiber. god i want it bad though.

[coffeerox]

crime warner cable as some like to call it. I hate this company with a passion. Not only do they not care about their customers, but they don't give a damn about their employees either. I didn't work directly under TWC, but under a company that was contracted to work for TWC. Lets just say I got terminated for simply talking about their Navigator (something thats freely available to any and everybody, and about functions that are very common). It was so bad that the VP himself sent the order to terminate me. Thats how ruthless and cutthroat these corporations are.

With a move like this it shows that they don't give a shit about their customers. They have all users pay the 50 bucks for internet, but only the heavy users pay out the ass. That doesn't sound fair. Why not have a lower priced package (like Cox does) just for the light users and then have a premium package for their heavy users (again, Cox offers 59.95 15mbps down). They are actually offering this to many Roadrunner users but it looks like they are trying to capitalize. These fuckers are just out for more money and thats all they ever think about.

[AkumaTX]

dsl sucks

and until they can figure out how to bend fiber optic cables its gonna be slow rolling it out. at least where i live, very few places have fiber. god i want it bad though.
dsl is sorry if you are looking for super ubber speeds, but its up time, reliabilty, and speeds are more than suffiecient enough that what most people even hard core users like me need them for. Another note with dsl, you get to play around with the contract and they sometimes offer incentives to keep you going like lowerign your bill etc etc. Seriously the argument against dsl is that its slower than cable, but even i rather be paying 15 bucks a month for speeds in which i can download on average @ 450kbs - 500kbs per second. Im only gaming and used to download a lot of apps and games back then till i started just buying them, so no dsl does not suck.

[Serpent]

dsl is sorry if you are looking for super ubber speeds, but its up time, reliabilty, and speeds are more than suffiecient enough that what most people even hard core users like me need them for. Another note with dsl, you get to play around with the contract and they sometimes offer incentives to keep you going like lowerign your bill etc etc. Seriously the argument against dsl is that its slower than cable, but even i rather be paying 15 bucks a month for speeds in which i can download on average @ 450kbs - 500kbs per second. Im only gaming and used to download a lot of apps and games back then till i started just buying them, so no dsl does not suck.

The argument isn't solely against the speed, the argument is also the reliability. Hands down, DSL is the worst "high speed" option in terms of reliability. Cable is pretty much never down, but DSL runs on inferior technology so it's always at a risk. I've had both, and DSL simply can not compete, and if you know anything about the technology behind it, you wouldn't even bother mentioning it.

[coffeerox]

dsl is sorry if you are looking for super ubber speeds, but its up time, reliabilty, and speeds are more than suffiecient enough that what most people even hard core users like me need them for. Another note with dsl, you get to play around with the contract and they sometimes offer incentives to keep you going like lowerign your bill etc etc. Seriously the argument against dsl is that its slower than cable, but even i rather be paying 15 bucks a month for speeds in which i can download on average @ 450kbs - 500kbs per second. Im only gaming and used to download a lot of apps and games back then till i started just buying them, so no dsl does not suck.

let me tell you why I think DSL sucks. Everytime they advertise on the TV, I see awesome prices, like 29.99 and shit. Then everytime I go check for availability, it always returns an error message. Thats why that shit sucks. Also last time I had it, (i technically wasnt even supposed to be able to get it) Earthlink gave me 30kb down/60kb up for 49.99 a month. With shitty connect too (so that means everytime I restart its hell to get back online) due to weak signal.

On my cable connection, it rarely ever goes down and I can download at 3.0 megabytes (yes megabytes, not bits or anything) a second and upload at 68kbps and I only pay 40.11 a month for it. Therefore cable > dsl. But I feel sorry for people who have to subscribe to Roadrunner/TWC.

[Dirt Mc Girt]

too bad a lot of people don't have fios

5000 k/s download, 1500 k/s upload

all for $29.99 month for 2 years (then 39.99)

[Carpet Lint]

Rogers and Bell have already capped it at 60 GB/month up here.

[YellowS4]

Gotta love monopolies, faggot canadian companies.

I need FIOS up north. I'm on unlimited 5MB dsl for 50 flat though... still, I'd prefer something better.

[Saotome Kaneda]

Actually, I was going off my experience in japan for ADSL. DSL in the states is pretty lame.

[dereklearnslow]

"06/01/2008 - Every significant Internet provider around the globe is currently in talks with access and content providers to transform the internet into a television-like medium: no more freedom, you pay for a small commercial package of sites you can visit and you'll have to pay for seperate subscriptions for every site that's not in the package.

Almost all smaller websites/services will disappear over time and multinationals who are used to using big budgets to brute force their content into every media outlet will finally be able to approach the internet in the same way."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2XPiqhN_Ns

[xcfrisco]

this is pretty fucking wack. but i guess this is just how things go.

why is radio free? cause it sucks?

[King9999]

Rogers and Bell have already capped it at 60 GB/month up here.
Oh, so Bell does cap their services? I thought they didn't. I work for Rogers, BTW.

[Mr.Noodle]

At one point Bell did give unlimited bandwidth. I think they changed that recently.

[YellowS4]

If you're on Bell's old old old unlimited plans and didn't change anything, it should remain that way... I'm not too sure if they're forcing the cap on everyone though like Rogers.

Rogers on the other hand, will get everyone that goes over their cap starting this month.

[Alzarath]

I wonder if this will actually play out.

[AzN_Skater]

I'm with Shaw and they're pretty good.

[King9999]

Seems like everyone is capping their services, eh?

[The Chief]

Themes like 3 or 4 threads up that can basically be combined to one.

This thread
The slow US speed thread
US Cheapyfied thread
The tax thread

... all this stuff is linked to the same thing. Companies are struggling to maintain their profits, so seeing these kind of changes should not be a surprise as long as the recession continues. Since the stimulus checks the government sent out isn't working as well as they should have, companies like Time Warner (who don't really benefit from those funds in the first place) will seek other means to maintain their numbers.

The cost of day to day needs rise while the cost of not-so-needed items fall. US companies are all about profits (which isn't a bad thing if the economy is stable) and this is an example of why the US has slow speeds. They want your money. They would like to charge you $2+ per megabit if they could find a way to do it and it looks like they found a starting point. To my knowledge this cap is only regional, but if the recession continues, look for it to spread to more areas.

[Nagata Lock II]

Bell Canada DSL caps at 60GB unless you're grandfathered (raises hand) in which case you can download/upload all you want and they don't charge you anything extra. I'm not sure if Rogers does the same thing for their older customers.

Jay; where's that pic of the rape cable bill ypu posted before?

[YellowS4]

Bell Canada DSL caps at 60GB unless you're grandfathered (raises hand) in which case you can download/upload all you want and they don't charge you anything extra. I'm not sure if Rogers does the same thing for their older customers.

Jay; where's that pic of the rape cable bill ypu posted before?

Pretty sure Rogers is capping everyone.

Here's the pic: http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/6786/96539177wx4.jpg

[AdverseSolutions]

raaaape

[Chaotic Blue]

wow. i like how they try to make it 'fair' by charging by the useage. If they really wanted to make it fair you'd start at 0 so if you used the internet just sparingly your bill could be 5 bucks a month. They just charge extra for ppl who use most. So stupid. Where is fios.

[coffeerox]

I just found out today that Cox caps people too. 60GB for premier (I was grandfathered from this one) 40gb for preferred and 20 and 5 for the value and economy. Its weird though because while I was living at my friends I still was a heavy downloader and I never got an error message on anything. Over here, I've never been capped but Cox does forge TCP Resets on about half my outgoing connections yet they don't restrict download speed at all.

[AdverseSolutions]

TCP resets huh? I think even I get those occasionally here in internet heaven land Japan.
I can never determine if it's on the server side or my side though...

[BaSiK_TeKniK]

that's so pringles :shake:

[Dios <-X->]

I pay 29.99 and get 6 mps dl and 55kps upl from my sbc dsl and im pretty satisfied with it. Doesnt random disconnect me * if i lose connection, i know its because of my shitty modem im too cheap to replace with, it wont even connect with wireless routers, im so lazy *

[xcfrisco]

I just found out today that Cox caps people too. 60GB for premier (I was grandfathered from this one) 40gb for preferred and 20 and 5 for the value and economy. Its weird though because while I was living at my friends I still was a heavy downloader and I never got an error message on anything. Over here, I've never been capped but Cox does forge TCP Resets on about half my outgoing connections yet they don't restrict download speed at all.

wtf? where do you live? i checked my cox cable bill just to make sure and i didn't see anything about caps.

[Higher-Jin]

I live about a 2 blocks away from a dsl company building, so mine works pretty good and it is pretty cheap.

Still these caps are bullshit. With any luck a smart upstart company will offer better service with unlimited dl/ul. I've had a cell phone bill that has gone over and trust me it's bull shit when you have to pay 6 times as much as you normally do because a few people in your plan went over their usual minutes at the same time.

It's fucking high way robbery. I will never sign any contract with any company that limits minutes or has a cap. No effin way. They'd have to charge me at least half as much as the competitors, and be pretty adequate with the amount of service I'm allowed to use.

Also notice how there's no upper cap on how much they can charge you. They can probably charge you hundreds if not thousands of dollars if your PC gets hacked and used as a irc bot. Companies like these are just trying to fleece the average joe blow customer who are too new to the computer game to realize they're being rammed. All I can hope is that the market will speak for itself and reject their business plan in the only place that matters to them - their profit margin.

[BIGWORM]

Fuck. From what Dirt's saying, I'm getting ripped off HARDCORE.

I'm poppin down ~$55 a month for 16/2. No contract though (but I've love to be in a contract if I was paying that less).

[coffeerox]

wtf? where do you live? i checked my cox cable bill just to make sure and i didn't see anything about caps.

Phoenix, Arizona. Here's the link to the caps

http://www.cox.com/policy/limitations.asp

I went and checked my local site and all that and I couldn't find this policy so I thought it might be a general one to all Cox customers.

[AKUMA2000]

If you're paying $55 a month in cable, you shouldn't be capped at 40gigs. That's crazy.

nuff said.

[Tomahawk]

With all these companies doing this stupid shit in terms of plans and all, I think we need to make a list of companies with policies and prices. Easier to navigate than just googling it. I know personally that I am about to leave time warner, too many problems in not being up in addition to a terrible sin of first not hooking up the phone line that my family wanted when our old comapny RCN left (they were good as hell), but they also lost our house phone number that we kept with us for over 20 muvafukin years:annoy:. And then saying that this number belongs to thte state so we are not going to give it back. Then said they would charge us extra money to "hunt down" the number. Does anyone have any recomendations for internet companies in LA that have decent service.

[Jedi W.]

If this dumb shit happens in Austin, I'm switching to DSL.

--jedi\/\/.

[King9999]

Pretty sure Rogers is capping everyone.

Here's the pic: http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/6786/96539177wx4.jpg

If you have a grandfathered Ultra Lite account, your cap stays at 60GB. Otherwise, you get a 2GB cap. Rogers always employed a cap on their internet service, it just wasn't really enforced.

EDIT: Some info about bandwidth caps for the uninformed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_cap

[thurst]

the vast majority of people that need to worry about bandwidth caps are downloading pirated shit anyway. that said i have no idea how much bandwidth i use for legal activity, but i doubt it comes anywhere close to this limit.