Time Warner Field Testing Metered Internet Plans; 5GB Min/40GB Max Cap, Overage Charges

Beaumont, TX???? FUCKING REALLY? Beaumont, fucking TX???? Of all the god forsaken places, Beaumont, motherfuckin Texas????????? Reallllllly???? I am beside myself. wow. Fucking nice. And just tonight, I couldn't watch the Houston/Portland game, even though I pay for NBA TV. It was fucking blacked out. And the fucking game was in Portland. I'm so pissed at Time Warner.

Netflix stream + 4 computers in the house + 3 XBox 360s and 1 PS3...

40GB ain't spit.

People nowadays stream music, watch trailers online, play video games. As a professional in the media field, I upload spots, watch tutorials and stream all types of videos online, from work as well as from home. I can do 40GB in a heartbeat.

5% my ass... it's a lot higher than that. They just want to make you think its less so they can actually implement the plan then reap the overages.

If TW in my area goes that way, then I'm on DSL or something else.

So for the price I'm paying now, I'll have a connection speed that is 10 TIMES SLOWER and have a bandwidth limit added? No thanks.

It's amazing how everybody goes crazy over this. While I think this plan may be somewhat imbalanced, I do believe the concept is fair. If 5 percent of people are using 50% of the resources then they should be supporting the system more. It's that 5 percent who causes the providers to constantly spend loads of money upgrading their systems to handle the load, so shouldn't they foot more of that bill than the other people who just check their email?
And the argument for people who are using bandwidth for "legitimate" purposes is bullox. Bandwidth is bandwidth, it doesn't matter what you are doing, it still require resources. As for the downloadable movies etc that is starting to become more mainstream, maybe it would be possible to setup a free bandwidth to those servers. Basically Apple or Microsoft have an agreement for bulk discount prices for bandwidth to their servers where they subsidize the provider thus at the very least minimizing the price the consumer pays for purchased content bandwidth.
If you lived on a street with 100 people, and 5 people drove monster trucks with metal studs over it every day from work causing your street to buy a new road every year, I think the 95 people driving Hondas would be very pissed if the bill was split equally.

In other news, 5% of all ISP subscribers feel threatened that they may have to put the keyboard down and actually go outside. Most people are overreacting for nothing, and the others have a deep fear that their hermit / recluse lifestyles are in danger!

Hope you're reading forums and checking email Time Warner. The day you clamp down your already less-than-ideal cable service is the day you lose me (and thousands of others) as customers.

They need something for those of us who do legitimately use a lot of bandwidth.
40Gb is just an wholly unrealistic number for some of us. Even 80Gb could be a big issue depending on how connected you are to some services.

Game patches are sometimes reaching into 500Mb or higher. Game demos traditionally start at around 1Gb now. This doesn't include all the actual bandwidth of playing games online, especially if more than one person does it at a time.

This is how cable is here in Lawrence. I was paying out the ass ($2 GB over 40) and it sucked, but guess what? you can get DSL and not worry about it. sure the up speed sucks but for downloading and playing games it's not that bad.

Welcome to what Australia has.

Honestly it will not be bad at all *IF* they do what many ISPs (Internode here does this) and has "free bandwidth" zones where they cache files on their network (so you're not hitting the internet). Other ISPs also have free peering agreements, meaning that if you're on time warner, and I'm on time warner, and I send you a file (through a direct transfer) and it doesn't hit the public internet then it doesn't count.


Things they MUST put on a local cache:
-Windows Updates
-ALL MMO updates
-XBox Live Updates
-PSN Updates
-Linux Updates
-Steam content server

Internode does 2/3 of those and thus I don't get charged against my bandwidth (40gb/month) except for ACTUAL "downloads" (web browsing, email, movies, etc).

A local ITunes server would mean I might even get an appleTV

Some quick and dirty math.

40 GB = 41943040 KB

30 days = 2592000 seconds

To hit that rate you have about 16.18 KB/s for every second of the month. 1.33 GB per day.

When I was in college my upload limit was 2 GB per 24 hour period. If I hit it my IP was banned for 72 hours. However I learned from someone in IT that it's the specific IP in the DHCP so I can release the IP and not renew it for an hour or two and then get an unblocked IP.

Wow this is nothing new to Australians at all. Fuckin' Telstra.

40 Gigs in days where some off-the-shelf PCs come with half-terabyte HDD sizes? Once again not only in music but also in digital media distribution the big production and distribution companies are far behind. About 10 years ago, everyone would have said 40 gigs is no problem at all. Nowadays this is just a joke. Music and movie industry are too sluggish for the fast paced IT / digital media / gaming industry.

Also this will mean that more than the 5% of the users will be aware of and strive to fully use their "right" of 40 GB transfers - downloading much move movies/music/files/pr0n than ever before. Grats TW!

Unintended consequence #1 - Overall bandwidth usage will INCREASE.

I refer you to the book "Freakonomics", chapter one. In brief, a day care center had an issue with a few of the parents being late to pick up their children. This forced the center to pay employees extra money to stay late waiting for these few parents to show up. So the day care center had an idea; impose a fine on the late parents.

The week after the fine system was in place, the number of late parents increased dramatically.
The week after, the numbers grew even larger. And parents were showing up later and later.

The problem was that the day care center had established a monitory value for being late to pick up a child. Previously, parents showed up on time out of common courtesy. Common courtesy went out the door when a cold, hard dollar amount was in place.

What now exists with the vast majority of ISPs is "unlimited" bandwidth. There may be "soft" limits spelled out deep within the service contract, but those are rather nebulous, and rarely enforced. What TW offers here is a "hard" cap, spelled out specifically in the advertisements for this service. This will set a specific monetary value for the GB offered. Establishing a cold, hard dollar amount for bandwidth.

TW will HAVE to offer a "current bandwidth used" applet or web page. So everyone will know how much bandwidth they have left. And people will use as much of it as they can.

FIGHT THE POWER

Australia waves hi! Welcome to teh futurez of the interwebs!

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

what does this even meaaaaaaaaaaaannnnn

like i said in an earlier thread: as long as it stays in beaumont, it's fine by me :P

I Downloaded 5 gigs of porn just this morning....... now what am i gonna do for the other 29 days of the month...

Goodbye, game patches. Goodbye updates to Operating System. Who needs that right? Why would one actually want to USE the Internet. Time Warner can choke on it, 40GB is pathetic.

The main reason I don't buy many games off Steam is my ISP's 25GB/month cap. I only bought Orange box and Dreamfall so far. And yes I'm from Australia :D

Few scattershot comments on this

All you that think digital downloads are the wave for games/software which will replace retail purchases well sucks to be you enjoy repaying for that d/l and cry some more

All you that think you need p2p to d/l ripped content, sucks to be you.

Not really new really, signed up with shitty cox cable 5 years ago and found they had monthly caps at the time but buried in their sub info. Dropped that account inside of 2 days since whats the point of high speed if your back to the days of dialup monitoring your bandwidth?

It's a cable connection it's crap to start with..

Seeing as I've currently had my connection shaped at home for having the gall to the the internet, this gives me a nice little tingle of schadenfreude.

Seriously, I pay 50 bucks a month for 10 gigs, uploads inclusive. :(

I really need to switch, what's good in AU?

Heheh Telstra here has a good account for you guys :-D

20000/1000 kbps
$59.95 per month
600 MB quota

Uploads count to quota.
Additional usage charged at $150/GB.

No, seriously I am not kidding, weeeeee!
http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansandoffers/default.jsp

Fuck you, Time Warner.

Fucking douchebags.

Wow that is pretty fucking sad! I live on a fucking island in the Caribbean with 3 Mb broadband and there is no cap or even plans for one. It's pretty sad/shitty when US companies make excuses about bandwidth costs when tiny little 3rd world islands can easily keep up. I wonder if they have metered charges in countries like South Korea or Japan? Corporate greed in the US can never be quenched.

Time Warner is just wanting to put a dollar amount on data transfer. From what I've read, they believe 1GB of data is worth $1. This is a horrible idea; however, the average customer could probably care less about this right now.

Thing change. If you haven't noticed, more and more people are making use of the Internet every day. Netflix, iTunes, Microsoft Marketplace, etc. etc. Why drive to Blockbuster when you can stream the movie in a matter of seconds? Not only is it an instant gratification but you save money as well. How much gas would you use to get to the store? Time Warner has decided to be the new gas bill of the virtual drive to Blockbuster. They've put a price on the byte and it's $1 for every 1,073,741,824 bytes. What a deal you say? That's a lot you say? Well, Bill Gates once said, "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Will they make change to the value of the byte once more people make use of the Internet? How often do you see gas prices go down and how often do you see them go up?

I hope you understand what I am trying to say. If Time Warner makes this change, there is no doubt that companies will follow. Who wouldn't? It's more money for them! Furthermore, I'm sure online based companies are upset about this as well. I'm sure they'll have to make changes if this takes effect nation wide. Will Netflix reduce the price per movie to help ease the extra $1 the customer must now pay their ISP for downloading it?

I'll stop there... although I have plenty more to say. I only hope those in Texas take action right away. Call - COMPLAIN! It's your American duty. Don't let them rape you so that they can rape the rest of us. Although, there really isn't much else you can do. Greed is a powerful thing.

Anyone who plays an MMORPG better just cancel their subscription now.

awesome so while all the other countries move FORWARD with broadband speeds and caps the US goes fucking backwards in time. Hey maybe one day we can go back to paying by the hour like the good ol AOL days.

5GB is fine for grandma and maybe my mom (even she goes to YouTube and uses iTunes though).
40GB is probably good for my sister and her friends with all their fancy video, music, and other downloads.

Where's the gamer or serious user tier though? Just having to redownload my Steam library knocks me out of 40GB already. Just downloading some movies from iTunes pushes it higher. Games Demos, random movies. Why no higher tier?

oh boy

Comcast Beginning 'Net Neutrality' Testing

...those very few disproportionately heavy users, who are doing things like conducting numerous or continuous large file transfers, may experience slightly longer response times for some online activities, until the period of network congestion ends."

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/comcast-beginni.html

So, they're going to ensure they receive the same overall revenue for the same amount of service provided, right? I mean, they'll charge the same *total* amount to all their customers combined for the amount of bandwidth they're currently providing, right? Which means that the group using half the bandwidth will foot 50% of the bill. Since they're footing 95% of the bill now, they'll see a reduction in their monthly bill of nearly half, right?

I mean... This *is* an effort to ensure subscription fees accurately reflect costs, and not some cheapass plan to increase revenue, right? Right?!

... (sighs) Gawd dammit.

Rogers in Canada has a 2GB cap for their lowest tier with their highest tier at 95GB. $2 / GB once you're above your limit.

Here's a helpful chart that tells you what exactly is a GB: http://www.hispeed.rogers.com/bband/content/keepingpace/howbigisagig.html

GUN

Bandwidth is crazy cheap too. Those fuckers

Fileshack... noooooooooooooooooo..

This is the gayest thing since gay moved to gaytown.

This unfortunatly will probably be the wave of the future. Say goodbye to the golden age of the internet... Unless you really feel like fighting it http://www.savetheinternet.com. F--ck tiered internet speeds. It' seems like the ultimate barrier for digital distribution to have this kind of system. Who the hell would really support this bullshit.

I bet if I redownloaded my Steam games I'd hit that 40gb number easy.

40GB is ridiculous. Pretty soon these fuckers are going to move to a cell phone pricing structure. :(

"Leddy, who noted that 5 percent of Time Warner subscribers use up 50 percent of the company's available bandwidth."

Right 5 percent use 50%$...sure.
I would like to see the region that was tapped from as well as the age demographics involved.

"5 percent of Time Warner subscribers use up 50 percent of the company's available bandwidth" do you think they mabey would want to target them first???