Time Warner Cable ready to test metered Net use
Some customers of Time Warner Cable in Beaumont, Texas, may soon end up paying more for their Internet access than other customers.
In a test of metered Internet access that's set to begin Thursday, subscribers who go over their limit for uploading and downloading material will be charged $1 per gigabyte, according to an Associated Press story, citing a Time Warner Cable executive.
The trial run for the metered Web use was expected. The company had said in January that it would test the new pricing model in Beaumont as a way to limit the use of peer-to-peer applications on its network. Cable companies and P2P services have long clashed over bandwidth demands, especially for the transfer of large video files.
The tiered pricing will work this way, for the Internet portion of subscription packages that also include phone or video use: At the low end, users will pay $29.95 per month for service at a speed of 768 kilobits per second, with a 5GB monthly cap. At the high end, users will pay $54.90 per month for service at 15 megabits per second, with a 40GB cap.
"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology, said in Monday's AP story. He said that just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines.
Time Warner Cable has 90,000 customers in the trial area, but the test pricing structure will affect only new subscribers. The gigabyte surcharges go into effect after the first two months of service.
Reaction to the start of the test was swift--and often harsh.
"Is Time Warner Cable crazy?" writes Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm, who says she is a customer of the company. "(H)ere's where I question Time Warner Cable's sanity: By offering tiered service at 15 Mbps it's promising me faster speeds that I will have limited opportunity to use, potentially driving me into the arms of another provider. Additionally, the cable guys are in a fight to the death with the telephone companies, who are unlikely to resort to such plans because they don't have the same limitations when delivering last-mile services."

May to Much Advertizement In all of The Worlds Web Pages !
They will Control Content , what's Next - Charge for E-mail
( Drop Dead ) Time Warner !
I Just Canceled My Acct. with Them - They are Pissing People Off ! BYE-BYE
I'm glad we're finally getting FIOS. I don't expect the service to be at all better (remember, Verizon is the phone company), but I expect the competition to at least lower prices.
I'll be happy to be free of these jokers when WiMax comes out.
An alternative solution is to block certain protocols or applications. Sound familiar? Yep, it's a terrible idea, but it lets the marketing dweebs say "unlimited use" as long as it's within the bounds of the allowable applications. What TWC is doing is consistent with neutrality principles. Do whatever the hell you want with the packets, but if you use too many, you pay for them. The majority of users will not pay for extra usage.
I moved back to Bowling Green, Ohio, where only Time Warner is, and the cost of cable TV is more than twice what I paid, and the internet service is 40% more, and slower.
If they pull a stunt like this in BG, I'm dropping them, and their cable service, getting a dish and DSL, even if its slower.
I play MMO games, use open source projects, I download, upload, and have web project. I won't pay for this kind of highway robbery.
This solution is myopic because it attempts to solve a small problem (i.e., P2P bandwidth "abuse") by assuming all customers are guilty of creating the problem. It fails to see that other "legitimate" bandwidth uses are YouTube videos, Web broadcasts, Amazon.com media downloads, as well as even Netflix (and others) on-demand movies. Perhaps it is a political move to herd audiences to more of Time-Warner's non-Web media, but what it will ultimately do if this is enacted nationally is create a mass migration of their customer base to other ISPs that provide unlimited bandwidth.
Just like usability studies for Web sites and customer service studies for support, if something becomes too much of a hassle and too limiting to use by its customer-base, it will become extinct from a lack of use.
We switched to DSL not because of the price, but because our $45/mo cable modem was so unreliable. There were outages at least monthly, and horrible slow-downs at least weekly (browsing felt worse than over dial-up.) Granted, that was Comcast and not TWC, but with DSL my speeds are basically always at least 700kbps, and there are outages that I notice (besides my own router needing to be rebooted,) once or twice a year.
In the meantime their customers will HATE THEM FOR THIS!!!!!!
While I believe in a "datatricity" utility model I'd have to say that the ifrastucture isn't there to make it really useful. I'm thinking something along the lines of 10 cents per gigabet with a flat access fee of $20 bucks to start. As the bandwidth grows it inevitably drops to a nickel or less per GB.
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by TomMariner
June 3, 2008 10:09 AM PDT
- Naw -- Let's go the other way! Cable was originally supposed to offset the fact that we were getting charged for television viewing that used to be free by no comercials. Now the cable operators are some of the richest families and companies in the nation because they are getting it from both ends -- money from advertisements and cable rates that are ten times the original Oh, and the no-commercial television, like movies -- that is yet another fee on top of the fee!
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See all 43 Comments >>So, OK, charge me per usage and keep my speeds below that of third world countries, but stop charging me for the television. Just zero out that part of my bill and let us keep the $trillions we are now charged for broadcast television. And before long we will be back to 19.2 k baud unless we give you our first born, half or our pay before taxes and a promise to bow to you guys when we see you pass. And you can revel in the fact that you got to be some of the richest folks in the world by helping our country get leapfrogged by everyone including Robert Mugabe.