Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use
 

we're already metered here in Vancouver ..different plans for different usages ... you do have to go quit a bit over to actually get a rise in your bill but they do monitor usage all the time ..

let them do it, i'll cancel my service and get a broadband wireless package from any number of competitors to them.

people will simply start stealing their neighbors connections etc.

it didn't work for AOL....it was shown that it was a bad idea

it will not work again.....give it a year & they will switch back

What a bunch of asshats lol

It was interesting how 5% use the bulk of the bw.What you figure the avg webmaster uses,marketing and updating sites?

most people who work over the internet fall under that 5% rule

this will only stifle creativity & business.....and eventually the market will correct itself

there are no bandwidth problems, its bullshit

this is all about making $...because they know people will pay for it ...they have to...or go outta business

I used to be on a small local (but kick ass) cable system. They've always had bandwidth overage charges. I moved and am on Cox now. They claim to have overage charges but I have never been hit with any yet but it's in their ToS.

Personally I think it's fair. There's no reason for someone who uses the internet a few times a week to pay the same rate as I do.

Your right my folks check email like maybe twice a week but pay for cable access.

its all tied to oil.. i know a lot of people just cant seem to comprehend this. before people get all wild, this is what i mean by the above statement; think about it, time warner is a very large provider. how many trucks do you think they have on the road doing installs, repairs, etc..?

when a corporation looks at their bottom line, they dont look at the whole, they look line by line. if they cant find ways to cut costs, they need to find ways to charge more..

so, while the issue at hand may have little to do with usage, its an excuse to raise prices.

as long as oil continues to rise in price, i would expect to see price increases in most consumer services...

I didnt think of that good point.

a lot of these companies say that 5% or 10% use 90% of their resources so they think it would actually be cheaper if they could eliminate those customers or charge those customers more. In my opinion, however, what they fail to realize is that it is this group of 'power users' that influences what broadband service all the other users use. If the 'power users' start saying internet service provider 'x' sucks the non power users will eventually switch and cost internet service provider 'x' a great deal of money. This is true even though the terms/rules/regulations/limits/etc that the internet service provider imposed on the power users have absolutely no relavence to the average user.

In summary - keep the geeks happy and your service will do well even if it looks at first glance to not make financial sense.

the point is...the light users will still be paying $49.95 a month or there abouts

but the heavy users are going to end up spending $300 a month

this is fucking web 2.0 & soon 3.0....people are going to be using much more on a daily basis!

people are going to be watching their television over the net....i mean fuck

how could you not see the problems with this bro?

If I use more water than my neighbor, I pay more. If I use more electricity, I pay more. It's just about paying for what is used. Would people be upset if they had been paying a flat rate for their water bill and now they had to pay for what was used?

Bandwidth isn't an infinite resource. It's not too hard to burn all of the available bandwidth on a shared coax cable like is hanging on the phone pole in your alley or is buried underground. That cable is shared with everyone in your neighborhood. Once it hits a fiber node it's shared with everyone on that node.

Your internet bill won't go up to $300. Mine hasn't and I have blown over 100GB in a month before (60 GB over my limit at the time). Here's a link to my old cable company. They have a fair policy for overages. http://www.sunflowerbroadband.com/internet/

That's the way my folks are. They check email Mom orders books on Amazon and Dad orders Corvette bullshit. Their average usage is 3-4 GB/mo. I see no reason why they should have to pay the same rate as I do when I easily burn 10X the bandwidth they do.

Ok the difference is, this is LIGHT....not water.

And contrary to what you think you know.....there is a tremendous amount of bandwidth available on a simple cable line buried out back. Enough to take us into the next century bandwidth wise. This is just another case of capitalism gone wild....so go right ahead & cheer them on...its our funeral.

How you think you're going to sell HD PORN to your customer a year from now in 1080p if they have to first pay the subscription fee & then an extra bill on their cable line for there wife to bitch about?

You just aren't thinking ahead. This is chess & you need to think 5 moves ahead bro.

IT IS GOING TO STIFLE NEW HIGH BANDWIDTH TECHNOLOGY

PERIOD

why would any company invest $ in researching any technology involving using the full ability of someones connection, if they know the consumer won't be able to cost effectively use that service?

it's like trying to sell a Hummer right now with the gas prices....its so simple to see this if you really look ahead man

You're arguing with the wrong person. :1orglaugh

I worked for that small local cable company. We were one of the first in the nation to set up internet service through cable. We were second only to Boulder CO. I had a cable modem in my house before most people had ever heard of a cable modem.

You most likely don't have fiber running to your house. You have a little coax drop that connects to a tap which allows subscribers to connect to the little half-inch, aluminum shielded coax cable called a feeder. That signal has to travel to and from your cable modem down the drop and feeder until it reaches a fiber node. Then it travels back to the cable system's head end where it hits a massive fiber pipe that most of us only fantasize about and begins its trek on the internet.

It is 100% possible to burn more bandwidth than is available on that coax feeder and even on the fiber going to the cable system. Newer cable systems shouldn't have that problem for a while but aging cable systems have quality of service issues every night about the time people get home from work and jump online to play games, surf porn or do whatever it is they do online. Lots of people complain about slow service during peak hours. The problem isn't with the internet backbone. That's just fine for the time being.

In NY between Optimun and Verizon FIOS and Time Warner there is so much compeetition they aint limiting anything..... Opt Online awhile upped th BW for no charge and offers "Boost" for extra 10 bucks.....

I am lucky they are fighting so hard over market share here that they are offering pretty much no limit on BW

I gotta agree with pr0 on this one.

This shit sucks.

I'm a Time Warner cable customer and if they do this shit to me I'll switch providers for sure. I have their TV, internet, and phone service... all of which can all be easily replaced.

I don't see that lasting

i use like 2 TB's alone per month just ion downloading porn for my personal use!!!!!!!!

will spread more word of mouth bad publicity for them and those that are casually shopping for internet might hear bad things and choose otherwise

also, there are many surprisingly high bandwidth uses that even the average "non-geek" goes through, online poker is one that surprised me, the programming must be very wasteful but just playing online burns alot of bandwidth... then there is youtube etc for the average person, not to mention families with teens probably eat up alot

and like pr0 said, more and more 'television' will be watched on the internet as we go along, it is a bad precedent to subscribe with companies that have metered usage plans

It's not going to stifle anything. ISP's bandwidth limits are going to increase as necessary. Our cable company used to have a 5GB bandwidth limit. It's gradually gone up over the years. There's absolutely no reason that the top 2% of bandwidth users shouldn't have to pay a premium. It's not that expensive and I don't mind.

From the link I posted "98.9% of users had less than 40 Gigs of bandwidth usage, 86.98% of used less than 10 Gigs, 49.46% of used less than 1 Gig of bandwidth usage per month."

No need to give me the lesson on transit....I was in the top of my class in networking technologies (of course thats not saying much). Suffice it to say...I know quite a bit about networks (not related to college) :1orglaugh

Lets just agree to disagree...no big deal...you're just a bandwidth nazi :thumbsup

You're opening a Pandora's box to bandwidth & connection hijacking.

Hackers could write a simple script to reload a youtube video every 2 minutes & install it on someones computer....next thing you know you got customers with $500,000 bills.

Apparently you weren't around during the AOL $2 per hour days. It caused severe corruption :1orglaugh

Bandwidth issues should lead to new innovation & infrastructure. It should not lead to charges which are only a temporary solution to a growing problem.

This will stifle new technologies & EVERYONE outside of the ISP's agree with this principle. I listened to a hearing on CSPAN radio for 3 hours in traffic the other day. The only supporters of tiered charges were related to the telecom industry.

And see....here you are...a telecom employee & promoting a tiered program. Go figure.

I haven't worked for a telecom company for well over 10 years. I left the cable company to go to work for Motorola, then quit when I started making more money with my kick ass sites I built in frontpage. :1orglaugh

Front Page 98?

Ah man so fucking sexy....

I dropped out of my "kick ass" perfect 4.0gpa in networking technologies...& all the pussy that went with it for Frontpage as well :pimp

No way. I had a useless but smoking hot girlfriend to support, a car payment and a house payment. I didn't have the money to spend on what I figured was a stupid hobby. I was using FP express that came with IE. Before that all I had was notepad.

Will not work. They will lose tons of customers.

Funny they are allowed to oversell their networks but consumers can't over use.

This will never fucking work, there will always be a provider who will offer unlimited usage.

TW caps are as low as 5 GB a month even their 15 Mbps tier is only 40 GB.

And the amount TW will lose when you leave is MANY times more than they would lose by not capping you or at least having REASONABLE caps. At least when Comcast is talking about doing this their cap is in 250 GB range.

GatorB

comcast's cap is 400gb, if you go over it they shut you off until you call

if you go over it 2x they shut you off for a year

i know for a fact :)

I pay for the fastest service available here, $99 a month for 18mbit down, maxes out just under 2,200k/s. I feel like I'm in Sweden :)

The cap is 95gb, and if I go over there's a $25 max fee. $1.25 per gb over, to a $25 maximum more per month.

Not so bad. If you go over too much I'm sure they slap you down or something, haven't had any warnings. They do call my cellphone with a robot and tell me when I hit 75% though, and also do a single browser-steal when you hit 75% too.. You go to any webpage, and bang you're at Rogers. :)

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about this. Try keeping up.

"A Comcast insider tells me the company is considering implementing very clear monthly caps, and may begin charging overage fees for customers who cross them. While still in the early stages of development, the plan -- as it stands now -- would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap. Users would get one free "slip up" in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has "a lot of momentum behind it," and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two."

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...age-Fees-94185

it's no big deal really, anyone using the internet as a business should have some kind of a business plan from their provider... imagine only being able to upload 40GB a month? wtf? our HD scenes use up about 2GB EACH a day in uploads, not to mention all the stuff like hi-res pics and everything else.

oh well, people will start connecting their laptop to open connections & burning 250gb until they have no customers left :2 cents:

should be mad funny

how can you figure how much you use a day?

I haven't read all the posts but there could be a Positive Outcome over this for membership sites.

Maybe surfers will quit wasting their usage with free shit and go ahead and buy what they really gets them off.

My orginal point is that 250 GB is reasonable, TW's 40 GB is NOT reasonable.

Well TW will provide a bandwidth meter. If you like to know right now I like DU Meter they have a 30 free trial.

I'm an ISP's worst nightmare, I have a fairly decent download limit (80GB this month, moving to 150GB next billing period) but I download near that exact amount every month.

You guys think $1 per gig overage on your $30/mo account is bad... I'm paying around $USD250 a month and just under $5 per gig overage