Time Warner Cable cancels usage caps

[Eos]

Originally posted by: EarthwormJim

Originally posted by: FeuerFrei

I'm guessing the low caps are because Time Warner runs a cable business as well. You know they're scared of broadband TV viewing slashing their cable subscriptions. Those caps keep your internet tv viewing habits in check.

I don't understand why they don't get into the streaming internet tv business then too. They already have the content, what more could they need?

As long as they are getting ad revenue, why do they care if I get the same content through my cable box or cable modem.

That's the deal right there. Something is unique about delivery through the internet that is not "good" for them.

These companies are not stupid. They may be slow to react and do things overall, but I doubt anything is really done in haste.

 

[EGGO]

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/1847/picture1pwh.png Even my website hosts gives me 800GB a month to use as I wish, and I pay only $7 a month.

Seeing how much I use hulu and netflix instant watch, I can only imagine how much I'd go over. And I don't consider myself such a heavy user too. Did they not put all of these new developments the net has been having into consideration?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: EarthwormJim

Originally posted by: FeuerFrei

I'm guessing the low caps are because Time Warner runs a cable business as well. You know they're scared of broadband TV viewing slashing their cable subscriptions. Those caps keep your internet tv viewing habits in check.

I don't understand why they don't get into the streaming internet tv business then too. They already have the content, what more could they need?

As long as they are getting ad revenue, why do they care if I get the same content through my cable box or cable modem.

Many providers are starting to offer on demand IPvideo for their customers and if they aren't they're building it. That's why the conspiracy theory doesn't hold water.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Originally posted by: EGGO
Did they not put all of these new developments the net has been having into consideration?

Of course they did. That's why they set the caps so low, to make more $$$ when you go over their ridiculously low limit.

 

[cpmer]

Seriously don't listen to spidey07's crap. I worked for twc as a tech for many years. I remember sitting through the meetings and having to hear about how the huge profits twc was making every quarter. TWC is a company that spends the absolute minimal amount of money they possibly can on employees and maintaining their equipment. All the profits go right to the very very top of the company. In my cable system we have tons of 40 year old feeder lines still up that are squirrel chewed and have been needed to replaced for the last 20 years now. Some of it is so bad we cant even offer hsd/phone service to those customers. Yet twc refuses to replace it because they don't wanna spend the money. TWC is an extremely profitable company. They are just adding these caps in so they can suck more money out of customers wallets.

 

[cpmer]

Also wanted to point out something as well. This isn't going to help out the old lady who uses less that 100mb a month in bandwidth or anyone who uses small amount of bandwidth. TWC has always offered cheaper internet through RR lite. I was the installer and I know that the sales people don't even mention this to customers when they call up and even if they do they give them every reason in the book why not to get it. All the reason you see here about 5 or 10 gigs not being enough is the same reasons the sales people at twc will give to potential customers why they should avoid these tiers and go for the more expensive 55 dollar 40 gig package. 99% of the customers are clueless about internet so they believe what they are told. This is a huge scam by twc and won't help out the people who use very little bandwidth right now.

 

[Homerboy]

Originally posted by: cpmer
Seriously don't listen to spidey07's crap. I worked for twc as a tech for many years. I remember sitting through the meetings and having to hear about how the huge profits twc was making every quarter. TWC is a company that spends the absolute minimal amount of money they possibly can on employees and maintaining their equipment. All the profits go right to the very very top of the company. In my cable system we have tons of 40 year old feeder lines still up that are squirrel chewed and have been needed to replaced for the last 20 years now. Some of it is so bad we cant even offer hsd/phone service to those customers. Yet twc refuses to replace it because they don't wanna spend the money. TWC is an extremely profitable company. They are just adding these caps in so they can suck more money out of customers wallets.

Ah an installer that knows how the internet works... great! It has very little to do with the last mile in these cases. It has to do with the backbone itself. And yes... it has to do with sucking "more money out of customers wallets" That is what companies, especially publicly held ones do.

 

[Old Hippie]

I always expected this to happen.

But Damn, those are some low caps! :thumbsdown:

I think they are the only option for me.

 

[kevnich2]

I personally have no problem with caps but they have to be reasonable. 40gb/monthly cap on the high tier is NOT reasonable. The other thing people aren't taking into count here is that 40gb/month includes BOTH download and upload. If I count both of these for me, I'm around the 100gb/month and I do a lot of web browsing, occasional downloading (testing out a few linus iso's every month) and I also do a lot of netflix streaming. The netflix streaming contains about 90% of my monthly bandwidth. Luckily, I'm in an area that has multiple ISP options and I have FIOS and a redundant RR cable connection. I doubt RR is going to put caps in my area simply because we do have other ISP options in my area.

I can see how a company needs to put in caps to control the top bandwidth users. I know people that consume, 500-900gb/month of bandwidth, those people should be paying more. However, the 40gb/month is almost criminally low and not only that, the price you pay for going over is also too high. Sorry, bandwidth does not cost that much and they really shouldn't be charging that much for it. I used to work for an ISP and knew very well how much are backbone cost every month and while we did get it for a flat price for capacity, if a user was using too much, it would have required us to either throttle or upgrade to higher capacity lines but again, 40gb/month is very low for a cap.

250gb would be appropriate for a higher tier service and I also think they should have even higher tiers that cost even more money, say 500gb for $65-70/month and even 1tb/monthly for say $90-100/month. If you use this much you should be paying more but come on, make the prices reasonable

 

[Sqube]

There's nothing inherently wrong with caps, although high bandwidth users (obviously) aren't going to like them. 40 gigs is just some spiteful shit.

 

[kevnich2]

Not only that but TWC is also charging $1/gig of overage bandwidth. Sorry but that should be criminal

 

[DVDdude]

I live in an area affected by the forthcoming caps. They are now saying they will have a "super 100GB tier". The cost for this tier will be "significantly higher" than the 40gb tier.

I just want to know what I can do. The ONLY other provider in my area is DSL through the phone company which has a 3 megabit connection - nothing higher.

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: kevnich2
Not only that but TWC is also charging $1/gig of overage bandwidth. Sorry but that should be criminal

You should look into how much cellular providers charge for mobile data (hint: rates are usually per kB or MB, not GB). *That's* criminal.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: AnonymouseUser
OMG, Japanese telco institues caps!

30GB!








UPLOAD CAP








PER DAY







NO DOWNLOAD CAP!

bastard isps holding us back

lets see if the dems just let them rape us.

 

[God Mode]

bastard isps holding us back

lets see if the dems just let them rape us.

They probably will. I wish I lived in a large housing community with like-minded folks so we can set up a massive and free wan/lan. A major portion of the internet nowadays is purely a advertising medium anyway.

Any company that relies on the internet to do business, gain customers and advertise needs to immediately fight this or watch their business suffer. Small businesses will experience this first as they watch their audience dissipate.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: God Mode

bastard isps holding us back

lets see if the dems just let them rape us.

They probably will. I wish I lived in a large housing community with like-minded folks so we can set up a massive and free wan/lan. A major portion of the internet nowadays is purely a advertising medium anyway.

Any company that relies on the internet to do business, gain customers and advertise needs to immediately fight this or watch their business suffer. Small businesses will experience this first as they watch their audience dissipate.

What are you talking about? Business class internet never has any caps or limits, you are free to max it out 24x7 every day, all day. But of course you have to pay for that capacity with 1000s or tens of thousands of dollars every month.

 

[God Mode]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: God Mode

bastard isps holding us back

lets see if the dems just let them rape us.

They probably will. I wish I lived in a large housing community with like-minded folks so we can set up a massive and free wan/lan. A major portion of the internet nowadays is purely a advertising medium anyway.

Any company that relies on the internet to do business, gain customers and advertise needs to immediately fight this or watch their business suffer. Small businesses will experience this first as they watch their audience dissipate.

What are you talking about? Business class internet never has any caps or limits, you are free to max it out 24x7 every day, all day. But of course you have to pay for that capacity with 1000s or tens of thousands of dollars every month.

You completely misunderstood my point.

 

[boomhower]

Like others, I have no problem with a reasonable cap, 250GB is reasonable. I work odd hours and watch a good bit of hulu and my wife watches a lot of netflix on the 360. I don't pirate a bunch of movies and games but still use a good amount of bandwidth. The reasoning for the 40GB cap is obvious, to limit such uses. They would much rather you buy their on demand crap. With a cap that low it has nothing to do with network congestion or any other reasonable logic. It is pure greed. I would have no problem with usage based billing, say $.20/GB, but this will never happen as they would end up losing in the end as grandma checking her email isn't going to be using crap. The number of people on the low end in likely going to far outweigh the number on the highend. Basically their logic of the overusers would work against them by billing everyone fairly. Instead of ripping of grandma and getting stuck by the abusers they will get the best of both worlds, get rid of the abusers and continue to rip off grandma. The second they implement it here I will be moving on to Direct TV/ATT DSL/Vonage. Yeah, my $160 may not mean much but hopefully others will vote with their wallets as well.

 

[DVDdude]

Apparently the city of Greensboro can't do anything to stop Time Warner :

http://www.news-record.com/con...tration_at_time_warner

But MAYBE AT&T's U-verse service will come to Wintson/Greensboro :

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008...p-in-winston-salem-nc/

 

[ja1484]

Something people need to be aware of:

http://www.earthlink.net/access/cable.faces

Earthlink offers high speed cable internet. The interesting part about this is that they use Time Warner's cable lines. As of yet, I am unaware of any effect on Earthlink's service or pricing from Time Warner's switch to metered. Earthlink cable is available pretty much anywhere TWC is. Check your area for availability on their website - this may be a way to sneak out from under TWC on their own network.

 

[ultimatebob]

The good news is that this will eventually stimulate competition between the providers once people start hitting these obscenely low usage caps and getting billed. I'm imagining next year's ISP commercials now...

"Tired of getting excessive usage bills from Time Warner? Switch to AT&T U-Verse/Verizon FIOS/Insert ISP here today! We offer up to 4 times the capacity of Time Warner, so you can watch as much Hulu and Netflix as you want without extra charges! Download games and music at blazing speeds without worrying about bandwidth fees! Order now, and get a free..."

You get the idea.

 

[Saga]

You'd think that Microsoft, Hulu, Netflix, etc would be fighting this on their front since this cuts into their profit directly. I know I watch a TON of movies on Hulu - it replaced my TV long ago. HD stream from Hulu to my TV via 360 is 2.2MB of bandwith which averages out to about 2GB an hour. A 40GB cap a month would basically be limiting me to 20 movies a month, and I tend to watch a LOT of Hulu and XBox live content during the week when work has downtime.

 

[Special K]

I wonder how TWC will be able to justify their Road Runner Turbo w/speedboost package once these caps are in place. Seriously, what's the point of paying for more speed if you get capped at 40GB/month like everyone else?

 

[Phokus]

Capitalism. Heh.

 

[ChaoZ]

Originally posted by: DVDdude
Apparently the city of Greensboro can't do anything to stop Time Warner :

http://www.news-record.com/con...tration_at_time_warner

But MAYBE AT&T's U-verse service will come to Wintson/Greensboro :

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008...p-in-winston-salem-nc/

?But some of it, I?m sure, is just that people don?t like change. I?m sure that the first people to buy early cars were angry when they introduced speed limits, too.?

Cars don't put a limit to how much you can drive. They really need to come up with better analogies for this. I really hope they get some good competition and get bit on their ass.