Time Warner bandwidth caps arrive (updated)

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: Anubis
Alke there are no other options in my area for high speed internet, its TWC or Dialup

most places in the US do not have a choice of who their provider is

That is starting to change with wireless, though. Most of the US has 1xRTT (which, to be fair, is barely better than dialup), but EVDO penetration is increasing rapidly. Alltel especially seems to be pretty awesome about rolling out EVDO to less populated areas, giving rural users a viable alternative to dialup. For example, I think they have essentially statewide EVDO rev. 0 coverage for Kansas, whereas most of the other wireless providers focus on providing high-speed data in dense urban areas and rural development seems to be second priority (which a person can't fault them for, dense population areas obviously offer the best bang for your buck).

Within 10 years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if a very large portion of the US had WiMax coverage.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Originally posted by: Turin39789
how many hundreds of billions of dollars of upgrades did we pay for through our taxes that never happened?

They are all going on something useful (like a war...) [/sarcasm]

 

[tw1164]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: Genx87
This does pose an interesting situation.

Movie download services are likely to get hit with this issue more than anybody else. Especially when HD movies become available and are 5+GB a pop. You will run through that cap very fast.

The cable companies all have VOD services. I see a conspiracy here

We have a winner! :laugh:

You can purchase all your content through VOD and not go against your cap, or keep it up and we'll soak you for the extra GBs. That's exactly what the intent is.

Now I should point out that in general I agree with fair use -- if there's a hog using 500GB+ of bandwidth, he should be paying more for it than Joe Blow who doesn't use a gig or two all month long.

The same would be true for VOIP. If you use TW VOIP service it's unlikely to be counted in the usage, but using a service like Vonage it would.

 

[Xavier434]

It's really starting to become apparent how much of the problem is related to these ISPs providing their service in rural areas so much. I knew it was always a problem but I didn't know it was this big of a problem. Those of us who live in dense areas will be floating the bills which is bullshit. We will all also be paying more money every month for our internet connections despite whether we are pirating or not which is also retarded. This will be especially true for the users who are not abusing the connection but happen to make use of the latest and greatest online services often.

Other posters are also mentioning how much these caps will poorly effect legal digital downloads for entertainment. I smell a bunch of lawsuits in the future over this issue. It is not going to be pretty at all.

In the end, this is all I really want. What I want is a package which feels like unlimited bandwidth despite any cap, I want rollover bandwidth which can never expire, and I do not see any reason why my bill should increase that much. If I jump from $50 per month to $89.99 just so I can keep my same LEGAL habits without being in great fear of paying tons of overages then that is not acceptable to me.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Anubis
no no you cant, hell our summer place untill 2 year ago couldent even get dialup because the lines were so old

yes, yes, yes you can. Just call up a telco or ISP and they'll be more than happy to dig/bury fiber all the way out to where ever you want to provide you service. But you'll pay for it.

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Anubis
no no you cant, hell our summer place untill 2 year ago couldent even get dialup because the lines were so old

yes, yes, yes you can. Just call up a telco or ISP and they'll be more than happy to dig/bury fiber all the way out to where ever you want to provide you service. But you'll pay for it.

That doesn't make it a viable option...

Just because it exists doesn't mean that you can classify these people as having a choice in the sense of what having a choice means regarding business competition that benefits the consumer.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Xavier434

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Anubis
no no you cant, hell our summer place untill 2 year ago couldent even get dialup because the lines were so old

yes, yes, yes you can. Just call up a telco or ISP and they'll be more than happy to dig/bury fiber all the way out to where ever you want to provide you service. But you'll pay for it.

That doesn't make it a viable option...

Just because it exists doesn't mean that you can classify these people as having a choice in the sense of what having a choice means regarding business competition that benefits the consumer.

Sure it's a viable option, it's just not one that most folks would want to pay for.

But it's well known that the majority of consumer broadband internet have a choice and it's normally telco or cable.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Anubis
no no you cant, hell our summer place untill 2 year ago couldent even get dialup because the lines were so old

yes, yes, yes you can. Just call up a telco or ISP and they'll be more than happy to dig/bury fiber all the way out to where ever you want to provide you service. But you'll pay for it.

no you are still wrong,

for examply a friend of mine lives less then 50 yards from where the cable line turns off and goes down a different road, he has called TWC about 50 times saying he will pay for them to run a line to his house. they keep saying no

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Anubis
no no you cant, hell our summer place untill 2 year ago couldent even get dialup because the lines were so old

yes, yes, yes you can. Just call up a telco or ISP and they'll be more than happy to dig/bury fiber all the way out to where ever you want to provide you service. But you'll pay for it.

no you are still wrong,

for examply a friend of mine lives less then 50 yards from where the cable line turns off and goes down a different road, he has called TWC about 50 times saying he will pay for them to run a line to his house. they keep saying no

You didn't read my post. Call the telco and have them run a T1/T3 or optical connection. Heck you may be able to get a T1 on a 3 year contract for a few hundred a month.

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Sure it's a viable option, it's just not one that most folks would want to pay for.

But it's well known that the majority of consumer broadband internet have a choice and it's normally telco or cable.

I don't think you understand. When it comes to the existence of having a choice in the business world to the point where it impacts competition it needs to be an affordable choice by most of the consumers. What you are suggesting is not affordable by the vast majority of consumers and is therefore not a viable option which effects market competition. You claim to understand this business very well. Why is it that you do not understand that concept? Of all things having been discussed in this topic so far, that one is by far the most cut and dry.

If it were this simple and widely affordable then we would see it much more often but we don't.

 

[Foxery]

Originally posted by: frostedflakes
Within 10 years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if a very large portion of the US had WiMax coverage.

Maybe. But I've been hearing the promise of WiMax for years already, and it's taking its sweet time. EVDO service through cell providers is also downright terrible so far.

Originally posted by: Anubis
a friend of mine lives less then 50 yards from where the cable line turns off and goes down a different road, he has called TWC about 50 times saying he will pay for them to run a line to his house. they keep saying no

Wait, what? Time Warner happily took my $800 to extend the line a hundred yards or so down the street to me. With no chance of any DSL flavor and no local EVDO, I paid it and now have flawless 10mbit service. Tell your friend that TW normally covers part of the cost, and to try to reach the actual department that handles "new builds" and work out a deal if they're holding back because of the cost being borderline.

edit: I see you're in upstate NY... I'm in Syracuse. They're slow and lazy, but they did it.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: Foxery

Originally posted by: frostedflakes
Within 10 years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if a very large portion of the US had WiMax coverage.

Maybe. But I've been hearing the promise of WiMax for years already, and it's taking its sweet time. EVDO service through cell providers is also downright terrible so far.

Originally posted by: Anubis
a friend of mine lives less then 50 yards from where the cable line turns off and goes down a different road, he has called TWC about 50 times saying he will pay for them to run a line to his house. they keep saying no

Wait, what? Time Warner happily took my $800 to extend the line a hundred yards or so down the street to me. With no chance of any DSL flavor and no local EVDO, I paid it and now have flawless 10mbit service. Tell your friend that TW normally covers part of the cost, and to try to reach the actual department that handles "new builds" and work out a deal if they're holding back because of the cost being borderline.

edit: I see you're in upstate NY... I'm in Syracuse. They're slow and lazy, but they did it.

i think he just gave up he tried hard for like 6 months, he cant get DSL because hes too far away from the hub, fuck i cant get it and i like like 50 feet from the Hub

here a pic
Black = Roads
Red = Path cable internet/TV takes
Green Block is his house

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/TheEvil1/cablepath.JPG

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Anubis
no no you cant, hell our summer place untill 2 year ago couldent even get dialup because the lines were so old

yes, yes, yes you can. Just call up a telco or ISP and they'll be more than happy to dig/bury fiber all the way out to where ever you want to provide you service. But you'll pay for it.

no you are still wrong,

for examply a friend of mine lives less then 50 yards from where the cable line turns off and goes down a different road, he has called TWC about 50 times saying he will pay for them to run a line to his house. they keep saying no

You didn't read my post. Call the telco and have them run a T1/T3 or optical connection. Heck you may be able to get a T1 on a 3 year contract for a few hundred a month.

Loop costs can be ridiculous as well, in some cases many times more than the actual T1 plan. I looked into it at one point in time, and between running the actual line and monthly fees, it would cost a small fortune to get a T1 run to a rural location.

Originally posted by: Foxery

Originally posted by: frostedflakes
Within 10 years or so, I wouldn't be surprised if a very large portion of the US had WiMax coverage.

Maybe. But I've been hearing the promise of WiMax for years already, and it's taking its sweet time. EVDO service through cell providers is also downright terrible so far.

Originally posted by: Anubis
a friend of mine lives less then 50 yards from where the cable line turns off and goes down a different road, he has called TWC about 50 times saying he will pay for them to run a line to his house. they keep saying no

Wait, what? Time Warner happily took my $800 to extend the line a hundred yards or so down the street to me. With no chance of any DSL flavor and no local EVDO, I paid it and now have flawless 10mbit service. Tell your friend that TW normally covers part of the cost, and to try to reach the actual department that handles "new builds" and work out a deal if they're holding back because of the cost being borderline.

edit: I see you're in upstate NY... I'm in Syracuse. They're slow and lazy, but they did it.

The 5GB caps for Sprint and Verizon definitely make the service less attractive, but hopefully as network capacity increases, more reasonable caps will be imposed. I use Alltel EVDO rev. 0 as my main connection and have been pretty pleased with it. Most of the day I can do at least 1.5Mbps down, and I've seen as high as 2.1Mbps. Definitely doesn't hold a candle to high-speed cable, DSL, or FTTP, but considering our other options, we've been pretty happy with it. Upload and ping are pretty poor, but the upcoming rev. A rollout should help with those issues. The unlimited tethering plan is only $25/mo, by the way.

 

[cpmer]

This is ridiculous imo. There's not enough competition in bandwidth providers like level3 and cogent. If their were more competition then I doubt we would be having this discussion. Basically in 10 years now of having roadrunner they have done very little improve upon what they offer. The upload speed sucked in the beginning and still stucks. While in that time period other countries have made vast improvements to their networks. It boils down to companies just being greedy and it happens when they're isn't sufficient competition out there.

 

[Finalnight]

I have custom firmware on my router that lets me monitor total network bandwith consumption and I rarely hit over 25 GB/mo with WoW usage and downloading anime.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: mrSHEiK124

Originally posted by: MrDudeMan
Most people don't use nearly 40gb per month.

40gb per month is 133mb per hour for 10 hours a day every day. I played WoW last night for 5 hours while watching YouTube videos on my other monitor basically the entire time and I still didn't use 100mb.

I hope every ISP does this so the assholes who are using all the bandwith can start paying for it. I haven't even come close to 40gb in a month even when I was pirating software frequently. I haven't downloaded anything in the last year other than free map packs or updates and I still barely hit 5gb per month.

Are you fucking serious? You have a 1 Mb[it]ps connection or something? I can easily pull 1 MB[yte] per SECOND with my connection, that would send me over your 133 MB hourly limit in a little over two minutes.

A little dense are we? It's an average and assumed that you are constantly doing it for 10 hours a day, every day. The whoosh sound you heard was you missing the point.

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: MrDudeMan

Originally posted by: QueBert

Originally posted by: MrDudeMan
Most people don't use nearly 40gb per month.

SNIP

88.11 MB

88.11Mb / 16 hours = 5.5Mb per hour, which seems to be what everyone else is observing.

Therefore, your claim of 650-700Mb is flat out wrong.

MrDudeMan

Last night i played wow for 4 hours
in that time period i downloaded almost 6 gigs of stuff from filefront. mostly wow related, (i really hate muru now), youtube may have been a bad example but anyone who streams/DL HD video (netflix nad the like) will absoutly destroy a 40GB cap in a matter of weeks

as i said way back on page 1, i average ~65Gb a month doing 100% legal things with my internet,

streaming on demand video has been talked about as the wave of things to come, and it is comming, and we are going to get punished for useing it which is just awsome :roll:

I raided Kara last night for 5 hours and used 50mb of bandwith as per my router. That includes whatever my wife was doing online and the nightly TiVo update that happens at 3AM, which was inside the window of when I was playing.

I use tons of mods and was also talking on Vent and still only used 50mb.

 

[Vette73]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Chiropteran

Originally posted by: spidey07
More proof also that the all you can eat residential pricing model is going to end. The heavy users kill any profit. If you really need that much bandwidth/capacity then just pay for it.

Except unused bandwidth doesn't benefit anyone. This isn't gas or electricity or water where unused portions can be saved for other customers in the future. If it's not being used, it's just lost.

Hypothetical situation.

ISP has 95 users who use 5gb/month, and 5 users who use 50gb/month. All users currently charged $10/month.

Currently, the ISP makes $1000/month from 100 users.

ISP decides to set a 10GB bandwidth cap, and charge $1 for each GB over cap. The 50gb/month users all quit, and 15 of the "regular" users also quit just because they don't like thei dea of being charged the same amount of money for a limited service that was previously unlimited.

Now the ISP makes $800/month from 80 users, and has a bandwidth surplus. But WTF good does the bandwidth surplus do? The ISP can't save it, or package it, or resell it. The actual result is a loss of 20 customers and zero real gain.

The stupid ISPs will try caps, and fail. The smart ones will gain a lot of market share.

I know it's confusing to people, but read the article earlier. It does a much better job of explaining it than I can. You can't try to think of it in such terms. You can make the simple calculations as you did but the model and costs/expense are the same of all ISPs.

The SMART ISPs will try caps and succeed. I don't know how to make this any more clearer. I build ISPs/networks for a living for the past 15 years. Dr. Pizza already summed it up pretty well in very clear terms that folks can understand.

If one doesn't agree with this approach then go get a business loan, build your ISP and stick it to those evil ISPs. I'm serious - if your model is so much better then go do it. Make your business plan, get the funding and go do it.

Problem is all your "friendly" and "helpful" ISP providers usually have contracts, read monopolys, in areas and do what ever they can to block others from coming in.
It not until others come in, difficult, do service goes up and price comes down.

But I guess this is how the SMART ISPs operate... right?

 

[Brovane]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: Brovane
Has anybody actually measured how much they D/L over a month?

yes many people i suggest reading the thread

The people that seem to post accurate numbers on the thread have monthly usage far below 50GB. The rest of the people throw out wild numbers like 100GB+ I don't think they have ever sat down and actually tracked there monthly usage. I see a lot of guess work and little hard numbers.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: Brovane

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: Brovane
Has anybody actually measured how much they D/L over a month?

yes many people i suggest reading the thread

The people that seem to post accurate numbers on the thread have monthly usage far below 50GB. The rest of the people throw out wild numbers like 100GB+ I don't think they have ever sat down and actually tracked there monthly usage. I see a lot of guess work and little hard numbers.

my numbers wernt guess work, and i know some of the 100+GB people and their numbers also are not guesses


anyone who downloads heavily legally or illigally will but a 40GB cap eaisily, i have at other times i me life pulled 40 gig in a weekend

 

[Foxery]

Ironically, I use *less* bandwidth downloading XviD TV shows than high def streams straight from the TV networks. Unfortunately for anyone at Time Warner who is riding a high moral horse, I consistently stay below 40GB/month by using pirate sources instead of legit ones! (Slightly lower res, stereo instead of surround sound, and better codec/compression)

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: Brovane

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: Brovane
Has anybody actually measured how much they D/L over a month?

yes many people i suggest reading the thread

The people that seem to post accurate numbers on the thread have monthly usage far below 50GB. The rest of the people throw out wild numbers like 100GB+ I don't think they have ever sat down and actually tracked there monthly usage. I see a lot of guess work and little hard numbers.

You'd be surprised, depending on what you do, it probably isn't that tough to hit 100GB. High def movies and game demos on XBL are around 5GB each IIRC. For one person 100GB may be a tough mark to hit, but if you have a family or a few college students on one connection, I'd think it would be much easier to reach.

Also, my phone logs data usage, so no guessing needs to be done. According to it, 675GB of data has been transferred through the phone during external data sessions. We've had the service for 17 months, so that comes out to approx. 40GB/mo.

 

[Foxery]

Comcast has a far more intelligent solution today:
Another link at ArsTechnica

Sounds like what some Universities do now; when you go over a certain # of GB, your speed is throttled down for a while, but you can keep working. Overall, this manages abusers better and hurts normal customers less. And, no extra charges involved!

 

[vi edit]

You'd be surprised, depending on what you do, it probably isn't that tough to hit 100GB. High def movies and game demos on XBL are around 5GB each IIRC. For one person 100GB may be a tough mark to hit, but if you have a family or a few college students on one connection, I'd think it would be much easier to reach

Largest demo I've ever seen on XBL is around 1.6gb. Most of them are between 500 and 800mb.

No clue on high def downloads though.

 

[Fingolfin269]

Originally posted by: Foxery
Comcast has a far more intelligent solution today:
Another link at ArsTechnica

Sounds like what some Universities do now; when you go over a certain # of GB, your speed is throttled down for a while, but you can keep working. Overall, this manages abusers better and hurts normal customers less. And, no extra charges involved!

I have no problem with Comcast's plan at all. It will still allow me to download HD movies to my 360 without the fear of hitting some cap but knowing that it may take a little longer than normal dependant upon the time of day. Other than that I generally just do some online gaming, ventrilo, and general web surfing but based on my HD downloads from 360 am sure I would hit a 40GB cap in some months.

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: vi edit

You'd be surprised, depending on what you do, it probably isn't that tough to hit 100GB. High def movies and game demos on XBL are around 5GB each IIRC. For one person 100GB may be a tough mark to hit, but if you have a family or a few college students on one connection, I'd think it would be much easier to reach

Largest demo I've ever seen on XBL is around 1.6gb. Most of them are between 500 and 800mb.

No clue on high def downloads though.

My bad, it's been a while since I've logged onto XBL. I'm pretty sure 720p movies are in the 5GB area, though.