Time Warner puts on its Thinking Caps

[minus-sign]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2344345,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2250259,00.asp

Time Warner joins AT&T and Comcast with an unlimited limited internet. They're trying a tiered apporach. Anyone who goes over their limit pays more. Tests will range from 5-40 Gigs.

[PrntRhd]

You mean they are trying capped internet with small caps.

[minus-sign]

Yeah. Really small...

[Variable]

This is inevitable. Burst bandwidth was always touted for Sales by the ISP's... like 6Mbps is "faster" than 4Mbps. But the real cost is aggregate throughput. Bandwidth is actually charged like your water bill. You can have "X" gallons per minute but the real cost is calculated by total gallons per month.

[mr soft]

Bandwidth is actually charged like your water bill. You can have "X" gallons per minute but the real cost is calculated by total gallons per month. :D

Good way to put it .

Caps are a pain and expensive.
As the demand for traffic grows, I imagine more companies will have to look toward this type of billing.

[123456]

I didn't even know Time Warner had "thinking caps!"

[PrntRhd]

I didn't even know Time Warner had "thinking caps!"
They don't, they bought AOL didn't they?

[jlreich]

I think it is inevitable. And I don't have an issue with it as long as they make the caps and overage cost reasonable.

I use between 20-30GB a month. 50GB would be enough me right now and for most users for a long time to come, but over the next few years usage is going to increase quite a bit.

I already pay $50 a month for service and have toyed with paying the extra $10 to move up to the 22Mbp/s from my current 7Mbp/s standard service, I don't want to have to shell out even more for extra bandwidth.

I would rather drop the CATV service than compromise on my internet connection. So they would shoot themselves in the foot by charging me more for internet but losing out on the other end. ;) Honestly if it weren't for my kids I probably would have gotten rid of CATV over a year ago since I really don't watch it much. My oldest is in college and my youngest is halfway through high school, so in a couple more years if they want to crank up the costs I will drop CATV and they will get less money from me in the long run. :p

[123456]

They don't, they bought AOL didn't they?

Exactly what I referred to. Or at least tried to. :p

[PrntRhd]

What this is really all about is protecting their Cable TV vested interests in providing pay movies and programming, and blocking companies like Netflix from providing movies over the Web. You won't have much room to download Netflix movies if it counts against the cap.

[Variable]

What this is really all about is protecting their Cable TV vested interests in providing pay movies and programming, and blocking companies like Netflix from providing movies over the Web.

No, most people do not watch movies on their computer or have an HTPC. It is simply that more and more people are using the internet and more and more people are using a lot of bandwidth. Netflix is not causing a huge surge in bandwidth. Access to all the stuff on the internet ahs to offer, coupled with a Sales pitch that you need more speed, is causing the use of bandwidth. Illegal file sharing and porn are the biggest hogs.

Bandwidth works both ways, up and down, your typical user is really only concerned with download speed. There is no understanding how it is all calculated and paid for upstream. File sharing gives you a double wammy, you can max both up and download. To a router (and the people who buy them) it is just bandwidth, so if your downloading 6mbps and uploading 2mbps your causing 8 mbps of bandwidth to be used.

[PrntRhd]

Variable,
I guess we will disagree this time. Broadband companies see application vendors getting wealthy while the carrier revenue stays flat and they are jealous of someone using their data channels to get rich, yet they get little in return.
Increasing capacity does cost, but the amount is not that much when compared to the revenue already being collected.

Current Internet usage is not the issue I was posting about, there are several upcoming innovations that will require some significant updates to capacity and TW is trying to get every one of those application vendors to pay TW for any future costs without TW investing anything on its own PLUS TW wants to have an increase in revenue on top of that:
1) Cloud Computing. Google is putting office software applications on their servers so users can access and use them via the Internet instead of having to buy MS Office and the like.
Adobe is doing the same with certain Photoshop applications.
2) Video Entertainment. Netflix is already moving from order fulfillment/DVD movie delivery to a much cheaper delivery system of downloads over the Internet. Netflix's Internet delivery cost may be as little as $0.50 per movie not counting their royalties. TW wants increased revenue to carry this stream.
3) VOIP service will be really dominant in less than 5 years, TW wants a significant cut of this revenue vs just carrying more data traffic for today's price.
40 Music downloads. Apple Store makes a mint on the downloads, TW makes nothing on the connection.

The problem is the size of the TW caps.

Japan has caps but it is one Terabyte per month.
Comcast cap-250GB is one fourth that of Japan, but better than any other US carrier.
TW's first test was 150GB, but the new proposed 5GB/10GB/25GB caps are so small that the overage charges will be extremely expensive, even punitive.
The only current alternative was ATT ADSL/Uverse but ATT is looking at caps of their own.

[mjc]

Several years ago, the entire state of WV had tens of thousands of miles worth of fiber optical cable installed, all across the state.

Who paid for it?

Not Verizon, their contribution was a small fraction of the cost. According to the signs posted at each major construction site for the project, the vast majority of the money came from various FEDERAL sources...that's right, every tax payer in the US helped fund the R. C. B. (Robert C Byrd) fiber optic network.

And guess what...for the first several years of its existence, most of the local telco offices weren't even connected, and those that were, most often were in/near locations that housed call-centers for the telemarketing industry. Even today, the actual capacity of the lines put in is very under utilized.

So don't give me 'capacity is maxed out'...it isn't and it won't be and even if it comes close, the piggy-bank known as Congress will come up with another bailout/subsidy/grant/other creative financing to cover most if not all the costs. (And most cable companies have an even sweeter deal...they get the city/town to front most of the cost, get grants to cover most of the rest and then pass what isn't covered directly on to the subscribers.)

[Variable]

PrintRhd, I'm not sure you understand the real cost of bandwidth, nor the amount of aggregate bandwidth services require. You could be right that there are TW execs with "service" envy, but I don't think the correlation between bandwidth and services is strong. While I agree any business will seek to maximize profits, the crux of this argument is whether you believe TW asking for monthly rate charges is warranted or not. But I would figure out what is average/normal first and question their pricing second. Since price per usage fees are already standard for every other service that comes to your home, I'm not sure your overall argument will work. If their cost structure is too restrictive, whatever the time frame, the market should come up with alternatives. If it does not, Gub'ment can come in and fix prices I suppose. I will say that bandwidth prices have gone DOWN for tier 2 providers recently.

There are several really interesting diverging points here (to me anyway) but I don't think most people would understand it all so I won't go in to them.

As for your examples 1-4.

I agree that bandwidth usage will go up over time obviously - your examples though, are not good ones. I'm not going to pick them apart, but I will say they only real bandwidth hog for the average law abiding home user would be streaming HD content. I don't see that going main stream any time soon. For proof, I give you the Over-the-Air conversion to digital.


MJC, the status of fiber optic cables in West Virginia is not a good example to base an argument about the current capacity for bandwidth in the US. In fact, your statement makes the opposite point, at least, for WV. Why would carriers not utilize the fiber optic lines? hmm? A whole nest of interesting things in that... You also sound like you believe the main cost to bandwidth is the line? I won't go in to details, but I am intimately familiar with this subject matter locally. I will say, it is mind boggling how ignorant and naive local government and academics are.

It is easy to make general statements about big corporations/government screwing the tax payer. I think were both of the same mind set fiscally. I would never argue that West "By God" Virginia hasn't screwed the US out of an unfair (and completely unwarranted) amount of Federal spending - fiber optics is just the tip of the iceberg. I won't argue with a general populist statement about this or that either.

For the most part, IT infrastructure across the spectrum is based on cost/benefits and is more democratically and fiscally grounded than any other endeavor that I know of.

[PrntRhd]

You have to already know that cable internet has always been subsidized by the Cable TV subscriber, that was how the plant/facilities were built in the first place. HSI came along to get more revenue out of the existing plant using different channels available already, and voice service came along adding even more revenue. These improvements were relatively cheap as new plant was not required, just some equipment in the office and adding some fiber optics lines to supply the office.

Fiber has interesting features, you can put much more data down the fiber than Ma Bell ever thought possible by using modern multiplexers/decoders on each end of the fiber, it does not require old time pairing so it does not have any hard limit to how much data can be pushed down the fiber until the physical laser power limits are reached and safety limits are reached (to avoid technician injury when troubleshooting).
TW thinks they can raise revenue by restricting use and may get away with it if they have no local competition, and in most cases they do not have competition on speed or price. There are very few markets where there has been overbuilding of service meaning more than one cable provider.
The government in the US has never regulated cable Internet price, capacity, or speed, nor is likely to even in the current climate.

Cost of bandwidth? Routers do cost, email servers do cost. ATT is buying a bunch of Juniper's new high speed routers to support upticks in data use by Apple's iPhone next generation. Why does TW scream about cost but ATT does not?

[Variable]

Cost of bandwidth? Routers do cost, email servers do cost. ATT is buying a bunch of Juniper's new high speed routers to support upticks in data use by Apple's iPhone next generation. Why does TW scream about cost but ATT does not?


OK, your spreading out on subject matter that I have no direct knowledge of so I will see if I can give you Big Picture stuff. Cell technology and IP technology are not the same thing. Certainly they share hardware at some point or can at least. High end routers use cards or blades and you can add any type of card/blade for whatever media type your using. I have no clue what model they are buying. TW has many times the number of ISP clients that ATT does. Probably a great deal more and each client has much more bandwidth potential than a DSL line.

Your not seeing the entire picture. Let me 'splain a bit more.

The backbone links are already in place. Your big costs come at the "last mile." Each router has a certain capacity, it is measured in packets per second and also total throughput, lets say mbps. Traffic in/out is aggregated, to keep it simple, this means a 100 mbps backplane could support a theoretical 50bmps in one link and 50 mbps out one link at the same time. Higher speed assumes you are not inspecting the packet much if at all - simply forwarding it on. Depending on the network, you may need to hop through several "LAN" routers before you jump to another line carrier. You will see this on a trace route. If you run a trace route to www.google.com over time and the first 4 routers never change, then the 5th router is like your home networks Gateway. The first 4 would be akin to a LAN. That make sense?

As you build a network you will need to push traffic to your big trunks, your big pipes to the internet. That would be the afore mentioned 5th router. Again, assume load increases as we move up hops to each segment. Your first router may need 1 GPBS but your 4th may need several times that.

Now say you have 1000 clients. You sell them all 8mbps down/2mbps up. As an ISP, you probably dont have that much bandwidth for this group. If all clients were at max speed they would need 1000X10mbps throughput or 10,000 mbps. It gets even more complex because of packet size and the method used for the routing. You also need link aggregators (switches) to combine pockets of clients and consolidate cabling. These also have backplanes. The media itself may be FAR more capable than the hardware that connects these devices together.

This is why I mentioned scaling and used an example of a LAN.

Imagine you purchase a cable router for your house and it is capable of 10mbps out to the internet and 4 incoming from the internet. It has a backplane of 12 mbps. You already have a potential problem. You could theoretically use 14 mbps, but your router can only handle 12.

Now imagine you have 6 children and each child has a computer in his room. Your PC's all have 100/1000 mbps ethernet cards. You ran brand new CAT5E cable to all rooms and installed a nice 10gig backplane switch.

Everyone can surf the internet and do email just fine on the link. Each child can send large files to each other with little issue. Now one child discovers that he can download torrents and starts pulling down album collections from the 80's and 90's. No big deal, you have plenty of bandwidth. This particular child tells his brother about torrents and he starts downoading movies. You like to stream hulu videos and listen to streaming bluegrass music and start to notice occasional glitches in the streaming quality but it still works well enough. You add one more child online at the same time doing any kind of web traffic and your streaming experience becomes terrible. You need more bandwidth and a better router or .....fewer kids.

No matter what amount of bandwidth you start out with; you still are limited to what your capacity is at that time. Those limits are found in every device connected in the chain your packets take to the service, web site, person you are connecting to. The problem is far more likely to be your devices rather than the media connecting them.

It gets even worse if you try to look at the contents of a packet. When you start to look in to the packet your slowing things down. Speed comes from shuttling the packets off with just a glance. This is VERY important. It is because of this behaviour that we have so many of the problems on the internet. This is another topic though and I'm sure most people stopped reading a long time ago. :)

[minus-sign]

You also sound like you believe the main cost to bandwidth is the line? I won't go in to details, but I am intimately familiar with this subject matter locally. I will say, it is mind boggling how ignorant and naive local government and academics are. Then by all means, go into a few details, please. This forum is for information exchange, and I posted the OP to get feedback as well as good intel.

If you are an expert, by all means, enlighten me. And while you do, please tell me who under God and sunny Jesus is going to want to pay for a connection speed that they can max the cap on in a few hours?

EDIT: Reading...

[minus-sign]

Variable: Your reply (#16) doesn't seem to say any more than we already know. More people using more internet will use more bandwidth. I think the solution is fairly simple, and can be seen in a post mjc made (#13). When bandwidth requirments became too much for POTs cable to handle, federal sources stepped in to supply more.

How is that upgrade any different than the one that would be required to let everyone stream?

[PrntRhd]

Variable,
I always read your posts.
My ATT reference was about data service on their wireless system, which is TCP/IP based. They are running into capacity/response issues and decided to install faster routers to alleviate the problem.
The people who supply network equipment do arrange ways to spread the cost over a period of time so the capital expenditure is not due and payable immediately, TW could raise the price of the internet service minimally and it would service the debt/expenditure. Unless TW has trashed their credit-worthiness.

The alternative to upgrades would be to limit maximum bandwidth loads.
1) By tier service speed restrictions-if you make the "pipes" not as fast they will not drain the available bandwidth as fast.
or
2) By capacity restrictions/tier capacity restrictions.
or
3) By time of day/peak time restrictions- which makes more sense if it was actually peak loads that they are trying to control.
4) By restricting the types of allowed use by modifying their TOS

It is clear that they wish to restrict HD Video (exempts their own), and Bit Torrents:
http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/digitalsavant/entries/2009/04/01/twcroad_runner.html
They also may want to restrict retransmission by Slingbox services as well.

If Japan has 1TB caps and Comcast can do 250GB caps why can't TW get near that figure?

[Variable]

If Japan has 1TB caps and Comcast can do 250GB caps why can't TW get near that figure?

Japan is special and not very large. I believe I read somewhere that they have fiber everywhere. If you had fiber fabrics from the outset there is no bandwidth issue right now. US is large, spread out and service providers are not homogenous. Japan is techno centric and governmentally centralized in a way the US is not. I have fiber lines right outside my home, I found that out during a fence install. Doesn't mean I can do anything meaningful with the line. Does mean my power auger can get me in trouble.

I don't disagree that 5, 10, 20 Gb per month seems low. It sounds low to me... But I do not understand their scale nor their average. From what I read, this is a test market. So I would hold off condemnation until it goes main stream. You should pay no less than the local market pays for bandwidth. Find out what 20Gb per month cost for local datacenter hosting. If TW is way over that then there is certainly an issue.

It is interesting in that, I think we had a similar discussion some time ago about ISP's limiting certain ports, you mentioned that a company was using a device to inspect traffic and rate limit ports. Now, some time later, large ISP's are also talking about rate limits for all ports. Why? Do you think it is possible that their lawyers are getting all excited about arbitrary port limits...i.e. no way to say the behavior is bad and therefore possibly actionable in the legal sense? I know these peoples mind set. They are very CYA oriented. It is SOOO much better to impose limits across the board. Think about the upside, you charge everyone the same ( your butt is covered legally), you gain a way of holding off your upgrade expense until the cost structure finds middle ground with what people will pay, while at the same time you have the possibility ( if done correctly) of increasing revenue in the short term. Big huge wins all around right? The devil is in how you do it without incurring wrath from the Government. To me this is the far more likely scenario than jealousy over some service provider like Google, Itunes, etc. That is just my opinion though.


Then by all means, go into a few details, please. This forum is for information exchange, and I posted the OP to get feedback as well as good intel.

I feel you, I know anyone on the internet can say anything they want. I did type something up and then I thought better of it. I do IT for a living, I have 4 kids and the economy is really tight here brother. You never know who is reading this. You believe me or don't. Read my pasts posts and decide whether I am full of it or not. I really don't care what you think either way to be honest. But I understand your point and I agree you have a point. That fair?

When bandwidth requirments became too much for POTs cable to handle, federal sources stepped in to supply more.

How is that upgrade any different than the one that would be required to let everyone stream?
Today 07:42 PM


I am not sure I understand your point. The discussion of bandwidth services has moved beyond PoTS lines. I thought I made it clear that line charges for ground installation is not the deciding factor in what costs are for broadband over time. It is part of the equation. That is it. Be specific and I may be able to respond better. You say phone line costs, I say cell phone tower cost. You need a better question.

[minus-sign]

If you're worried about disclosing something that you are contractually obligated not to, that is not my intention in questioning your statements. I ask you to provide information because--as you point out--I need better questions.

My POTs example was chosen because it was the biggest, best known example of a major overhaul of internet infrastructure in my lifetime. I know the bandwidth limitations of telephone cable, and I know that because there is no way to load picture heavy webpages and other--newer--content on a 56k connection, that the POTs structure was in large part replaced by better, higher bandwidth capable equipment.

What i have not seen from my experience is that the actual running of that better cable is considerably more expensive after it is installed. My network experience is limited to local area and MAN. I've configured my own LANs at home and school, and I've worked on MANs at work.

What I have not seen is what you seem to be describing: a factor where costs for high bandwidth usage dramatically increases the cost of maintaining CAT5 or CAT6 cable systems. Or fiber. My electrical bill did/does not surge when i do a lot of filesharing between computers at home (and i do a lot of filesharing between my computers at home) nor have I seen management complain about the cost of replacing equipment because patrons wore it out.

The biggest chunk of money I have spent on my network was installing it. The biggest cost I have paid to maintain that network was replacing a router that (I think) got hit by lightning.

Where is the relationship between bandwidth usage and cost/profit?

[PrntRhd]

I don't disagree that 5, 10, 20 Gb per month seems low. It sounds low to me... But I do not understand their scale nor their average. From what I read, this is a test market. So I would hold off condemnation until it goes main stream. You should pay no less than the local market pays for bandwidth. Find out what 20Gb per month cost for local datacenter hosting. If TW is way over that then there is certainly an issue.

It is interesting in that, I think we had a similar discussion some time ago about ISP's limiting certain ports, you mentioned that a company was using a device to inspect traffic and rate limit ports. Now, some time later, large ISP's are also talking about rate limits for all ports. Why? Do you think it is possible that their lawyers are getting all excited about arbitrary port limits...i.e. no way to say the behavior is bad and therefore possibly actionable in the legal sense? I know these peoples mind set. They are very CYA oriented. It is SOOO much better to impose limits across the board. Think about the upside, you charge everyone the same ( your butt is covered legally), you gain a way of holding off your upgrade expense until the cost structure finds middle ground with what people will pay, while at the same time you have the possibility ( if done correctly) of increasing revenue in the short term. Big huge wins all around right? The devil is in how you do it without incurring wrath from the Government. To me this is the far more likely scenario than jealousy over some service provider like Google, Itunes, etc. That is just my opinion though.
I also cannot post anything that would cause issues with my employer, I do understand that.
I read a quote from a TW rep that the average TW user is currently running 6 GB per month. Their proposed caps might easily put them into overage even now, and will likely do that if applications create more traffic.

I am not even going to start asking about government deep packet inspection.

[Variable]

What I have not seen is what you seem to be describing: a factor where costs for high bandwidth usage dramatically increases the cost of maintaining CAT5 or CAT6 cable systems. Or fiber.

I never said that. I was trying point out the exact opposite. Perhaps I wasn't clear. The biggest issue with high bandwidth use is not neccessarily the line at all. It is the hardware upgrades, installation, maintenance of said hardware and the associated new hires to support them of course :)

Obviously, upgrades have a cascade effect when your talking about increasing backplane. You may have one router in your LAN... again, this is an object lesson in SCALE. They have more than 8 million client routers. So take your LAN with one router and scale it up to 8 million. Not 8 million PC's, 8 million first hop routers.

Have fun subnetting the class A's

Don't forget switching or hot standby, DHCP and route routers, your fast switching routers for second hop and up and up to you get to your trunk. Lets not forget UPS for 3-5 minutes until the genny kicks in for everything.

Taking care of a metro area of say 125 thousand users would be a lot of equipment spread all over the place. Fun fun.

Be nice and and say you calculate average load 5% per customer with a peak of 30% of their 8 Mbps load. You'll have to plan for at least double that for worse case.
Start looking at routers backplanes to get an idea of the number youll need. Factor in some big waste for standardizing and don't forget you need spares.





:)

[minus-sign]

What I have not seen is what you seem to be describing: a factor where costs for high bandwidth usage dramatically increases the cost of maintaining CAT5 or CAT6 cable systems. Or fiber.
I never said that.

Actually, you did.

This is inevitable. Burst bandwidth was always touted for Sales by the ISP's... like 6Mbps is "faster" than 4Mbps. But the real cost is aggregate throughput. Bandwidth is actually charged like your water bill. You can have "X" gallons per minute but the real cost is calculated by total gallons per month.

I know upgrades will cost money to lines and equipment. My county just had a town meeting not terribly long ago and one of the things on the agenda was to talk about the distribution of more DSL lines to rural areas...culminating in an explanation of why my taxes are going up.

I've read your arguments but remain unconvinced. I still think as PrintRhd put it: that service providers are seeing application vendors get rich while "the carrier revenue stays flat". This isn't about some kind of impending bandwidth drought coming with Cloud or Hulu as the cause. Its greed. Any company proposing a 5 Gig cap on bandwidth, test or not...its greed.

[PrntRhd]

TW's COO actually posted that consumers WANT Caps:
http://a.longreply.com/101892

Some accounts have even characterized our plans as punitive. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The surveys in the study area say otherwise. As in 81% stating they do NOT WANT caps.

I think that such pricing options are not only fair, but also will actually encourage more use of broadband overall.
By raising prices?
this is bulls***,
Users who use little will not get a price break, users who use a lot will not get a price break either.

[minus-sign]

Makes me wish they'd stayed the heck out of NC.

I was wrong. This isn't about caps. TW is trying to turn internet payment structures into cell phone minutes.

[jlreich]

TW is trying to turn internet payment structures into cell phone minutes.
That's a very good way of looking at it. ;) Pick your plan, if you go over it cost you big time. :( They are even pushing the two year contract now like cell providers do. Which I have refused to do even though I have been a customer for many years.

At first I was a little confused reading through all this, but at the same time they gave us "power boost". Power Boost gives you a rather large boost of speed for the initial part of the download, then it shortly tapers off to your standard tier speeds. My standard package is 7Mb down, if I do a speed test I get anywhere from 16Mbp/s to 25Mbp/s. But if I download a file it starts off at really high speeds and goes down to 7Mb for the remainder of the download.

Thinking about it it kind of makes sense. Most people do smaller downloads and will be finished really quick. This gets them in and out, so to speak, and they are done and bandwidth is freed up. At the same time people are thinking "WOW! That was really fast, I just download at over 3MBp/s! My 30MB file took less than 10 seconds to download.". Clever. ;)

[PrntRhd]

It looks like I am not the only one to question the TW pricing:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/the-price-gouging-premiums-of-time-warner-cables-data-caps.ars

ATT DSL lowest plan=$0.09 per GB NO CAP, assumes continuous downloading for 30 days
Verizon 10GB plan=$0.11 per GB NO CAP
Comcast= $0.17 per GB w 250GB cap

TW metered base plan=$6.00 per GB+$2.00 per GB overage
TW most generous plan+ $1.38 per GB+ $1.00 per GB overage over 100GB/month

[Variable]

:)

Originally Posted by minus-sign
What I have not seen is what you seem to be describing: a factor where costs for high bandwidth usage dramatically increases the cost of maintaining CAT5 or CAT6 cable systems. Or fiber.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Variable
I never said that.

Actually, you did.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Variable
This is inevitable. Burst bandwidth was always touted for Sales by the ISP's... like 6Mbps is "faster" than 4Mbps. But the real cost is aggregate throughput. Bandwidth is actually charged like your water bill. You can have "X" gallons per minute but the real cost is calculated by total gallons per month.


I realize this is complex but saying I said one thing when I didn't - just makes me think your a moron and not want to say anything more.

Let me see if I can make this as simple as possible. The cost of increasing bandwidth useage by clients is not necessarily dependent on the cable the data runs through.

[PrntRhd]

Actually their costs went DOWN:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/time-warner-cab.html

[minus-sign]

Variable...:)

Interesting read PrintRhd; especially this part:

"Saul Hansell at the New York Times put its COO Landel Hobbs on the defensive, getting him to admit that highly active customers pose no risk of increasing its broadband service costs. At the same time, Hobbs refused to back down from the proposition that bandwidth caps are necessary in the long term to rein in bandwidth hogs."

And yet its the steak/salad argument that TW totes as their primary reason for instituting caps in the first place.

NYTimes Tech Blog (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/time-warner-cable-profits-on-broadband-are-great-and-will-grow-because-of-caps/)

[minus-sign]

Another interesting story from NYTimes:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/the-cost-to-offer-the-worlds-fastest-broadband-20-per-home/?scp=3&sq=docsis&st=Search

It seems that to bump the current cable system up to Japanese standards wouldn't cost more than $100 per home.

[minus-sign]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10218431-94.html

Last week, Time Warner Cable, the nation's second largest cable operator, said that it plans to expand its test of using bandwidth caps for its broadband data service. Last year, the company began testing broadband services in Beaumont, Texas that allowed 5 to 40 gigabytes of uploading and downloading a month. Now the company is planning to expand the test to other cities this year including Austin, San Antonio, Rochester, NY and Greensboro, NC. The company also has plans to increase the caps to between 10 GB to 60 GB a month with prices ranging from $25 to $65 per month, depending on the region.

Time Warner also said that it would introduce a new plan that offers 100 GB of downloads for $75 a month. Additional downloads would be charged $1 a GB with a cap of $75 on the extra fee, essentially making an unlimited plan cost $150 per month.

By comparison, Comcast's service, which costs $43 a month, has a bandwidth cap of about 250 GB per month. And Verizon Communications' cheapest broadband package with its fiber-to-the home Fios service costs $45 a month and has no download limit.So they're "capping" the cap. You can get unlimited downloading for $150.

Someone remind me: how much is the savings for their bundled plan? You know, the 3-in-1 deals TW used to get all these people hooked on roadrunner in the first place.

[PrntRhd]

TWC finally relented to the obvious plan rejection from outraged consumers and decided metered billing should be moved off the table. Ironic that they might have gotten other ISPs to follow their lead had they not overreached on the pricing.
That and some powerful politicians lining up to stop their plans with legislation...
Now that they poisoned the well, other ISPs are less likely to try to use this path.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/theyre-gone-after-outcry-time-warner-uncaps-the-tubes.ars

[jlreich]

That's what they get for being too greedy. ;)

[PrntRhd]

Of course they had to say they were postponing this to work on "educating their customers" of the benefits of their metered billing plans. Customers were pretty smart about what the plan was going to mean, so TWC really has its work cut out for it if/when they ever try this again. Consumers now associate "metered billing" with "price gouging".

Consumers in TWC monopoly areas are lobbying hard for additional competition from FIOS now that TWC tipped their hand.
FIOS would kill TWC in head to head competition on both performance and price.

[minus-sign]

Greensboro is too close to my back yard for comfort. they can work on "educating" their customers all they want. So will I. And a lot of others will too I think. If they ever try this again--when the next monopoly does try this again--I can only hope they will be in for an unpleasant surprise as to how many educated customers they have. If there is one good thing to come out of all this it should be that. More people need to know how the interwebz werk. Not should; people need to.

Worst of all this is--and I'm not too ashamed to admit it now--that from a personal perspective I used to endorse TW for their cable/internet packages. I know others who did too. it was a deal around here. The deal around here for high speed internet users. The way they tried this has destroyed any trust I had in the company.

All in all, its been a sobering experience about monopolization in general.

[jlreich]

Worst of all this is--and I'm not too ashamed to admit it now--that from a personal perspective I used to endorse TW for their cable/internet packages. I know others who did too. it was a deal around here. The deal around here for high speed internet users. The way they tried this has destroyed any trust I had in the company.
TW is the best internet around my area hands down. The fastest and most reliable. Hopefully Verizon will make Fios available in my area before too long and change this.

But until they get some real competition in my area they are it. If you are a general internet user DSL will do fine, but I have been a RR customer since it has been available and I couldn't deal with anything less.

You know they were good to us customers for the first few years. Started out with 1.5Mbps, then shortly they bumped us up to 3Mbps, then not much longer they bumped us to 5Mbps. Then for almost three years nothing. We were stuck at 5Mbps while everyone else is reporting 8-10Mbps. :confused: It wasn't until about 6-8 months ago they finally bumped us up to 8Mbps, and just recently I discovered they gave us power boost. Three years was a long time to sit at 5Mbps.

They started getting greedy. ;) They wanted people to start buying the turbo package if they wanted more speed. So they held out for a long time giving us the bump in speed hoping to promote it. Greed. Didn't work did it TW? ;)

[minus-sign]

We've got some OK local ISPs that offer DSL, but no cable providers other than TW around here. Reminds me of that story about the guy playing a crooked game of poker, losing his shirt. The one that ends by him saying "it's the only game in town."

[PrntRhd]

Well TWC cannot hide it, their "non-viable" flat rate billing caused operating revenue to increase by 13%, so they just have to go to metered billing:
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/TWC/299130548x0x290734/4e925b06-841e-47d8-bcc6-bc8f52f1973a/290734.pdf