Comments on: Time Warner faces backlash on broadband caps

Consumers and lawmakers have expressed anger and concern over Time Warner Cable's plans to expand trials of service that caps bandwidth usage.

[mrcjacobs]

Time Warner seems to be determined to shoot itself in the foot. I say we should hand 'em a gun and a box of bullets. Lol. I live in NY and I can assure you that I'll hop on over to Verizon Fios as soon as time Warner institutes this lovely policy. My bandwith consumption is less than 20 gigs a month but I can see there being a time when I use more. The cable companies and telecos were granted large tax breaks and subsidies to build out their systems and they haven't done it. Now they want to screw us for their incompetence.

[Idyot]

*grammer check* Could you please tell us what Rep. Eric Massa of New York is promising to introduce in Congress?

[mrorie]

Do you want a grammer check or a grammar check?

[Idyot]

that was deliberate ;)

[BeamerMT]

I think its interesting that any ISP would put caps on service. Now I understand it costs money to create, upgrade, and maintain networks, but there is TONS of talk about how TV and Internet will one day be combined and yadda yadda. Now how would a cap effect that? Streaming HD alone for a week would probably cut off your tv watching for the rest of the month! I think as the world gets more and more online, we need to find other ways to recoup costs for building new infrastructures.

[jbcahill]

You will notice that the ISP's that are wanting to institute broadband caps are the cable companies. The are afraid of exactly what you are talking about. They are deathly afraid of people dumping their lucrative (for the cable company) cable services for high speed internet only. I have recently done this. I dumped my Cox cable and kept the high speed broadband. Between Hulu, ESPN360, Video podcasts, and my Netflix rentals, I no longer need to pay those expensive cable service fees and have cut them off.

[RideMan]

(actually replying to jbcahill...)
So why is it that the CATV providers are the ones who are wanting to cap service? Most of them give their best rates if you bundle the broadband with the CATV service. Why would they necessarily care which of their services you're streaming through their pipe?

Perhaps the bigger issue is that they are running into capacity problems because they want to carry more and more of their VOD CATV service in the same pipe that their customers want to use for everybody else's VOD Internet service?

[Spartan_458]

I'm wondering how Comcast can "afford" it, then.

[jrzshor]

corporate buggery

[dadsgravy]

Will people actually do something about it or just grumble? The only way to do something about it is to cancel your service. Even if Time Warner is your only provider. I will. Will you? I bet not.

[MadLyb]

If they were the only provider?

No, I would not cancel my service as my job requires constant high speed access to the Net. What I would do is scream to my local municipality that sanctioned this crap and to my state and federal congress members until something gave.

Fortunately, Verizon is sitting here waiting with a decent DSL solution and FIOS on the way. It was just easier to get TV and Broadband from one place. That will change if they implement unreasonable caps.

[wolivere]

Although I agree its not great, but when did it become our right to have high speed un capped broad band at a low price? Is this not a consumer capitalist market? If you don't like it select your other options, use dial up ISDN, DSL, Satelite.

Are governments at various levels now part of this telling companies what they should charge?

In the older days, if you had dial up, you had cap's on transfers, ISDN, T1 same thing.

But, if a company offers unlimited and you signed up for unlimited, then they should stick to it, and leverage in there agreements how much time they need to give you before your existing contract is null.

This is not the world of free everything. Looking at the housing market we can see what happens when we think we should get everything for free or low low prices.

[oldtroll57]

Might as well get used to people.. Just as soon as the powers that be, get everyone believing that they can't live without their computers and the internet. They start tugging on your wallet and because we " can't live without them", they have us paying more and more. Everything in the world is unlimited, if you are willing to pay the price to get it.

[rudyrichter]

they really need to stop calling them tests, they are clearly doing a phased rollout of their new billing plans.

[als]

Time Warner needs to move its headquarters to the coast of Somalia. They would fit right in.

[daimajinbuu]

Then we, as a collective, need to SHOUT our displeasure.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

Time Warner Cable in my opinion is the Packard Bell of broadband providers

[dilipjivan]

TW has a broadband monopoly in my area and I am not in favor of anything TW is trying to pull.

I don't understand how Europeans and Asians can get faster unlimited service at a cheaper price than we do ? In Japan, one cable ISP provides 160Mb/s for US$60.00/month. It cost that company $20.00 per household to build the infrastructure. Why is TW so inefficient that it can't do the same ?

Everytime TW introduces some tier structure, TV or internet, they make money, we get screwed. As soon as a choice arrives in my neighborhood, I'm gone.

[jbcahill]

For Asia, Japan and South Korea particularly, you have to look at land mass and the population density compared to the United States. For those two countries you are talking about a significantly small land mass and the people there in general are "rack, packed, and stacked" in very dense housing and apartments. So if the internet providers costs to run cable is 1/10th that of the U.S. to reach 1000 times more people, their cost per person is significantly lower. That and the government ran/heavily subsidized telco's don't hurt either.

[nouser]

I've already sent them a registered letter and made it clear that the day they institute this cap, I'm switching to another provider. If they want my business, I'll dictate how I will accept it or I'm gone to a competitor.

I encourage everyone to write TW and let their collective voice be heard loud and clear.

[Maccess]

I think data traffic fees are where the future is going. Without data traffic fees, there will be those that will abus the Internet - streaming HD TV for example, over other people's networks.

24/7 connectivity is what everyone needs, and the price of that is too high because of the bandwidth hogs.

The best is if 24/7, high speed, data traffic limited, is very cheap or almost free (e.g. City Wi-Fi), but with higher fees as data traffic increases. That's not even a new idea, it's how web hosting plans are priced, it's how SMS charges are billed.

To give one example, many don't mind having an open Wi-Fi connection with neighbors occassionally using it to surf the web and check email, but most would mind i they notice a neighbor logging in and downloading huge files.

[Stormspace]

Data fees are a bad idea. First, adding fees for traffic will completely kill the ad revenue market as people find ways to streamline their usage to avoid ads altogether. Fewer ads seen means fewer services available on the net. Eberything will shift to a paid model where you will have to pay for the data and the priviledge to view it. Second, any services that rely on a heavy bandwidth model will fail as people move to cable sponsored services.

Frankly, this is just a power grab by the cable companies to prevent people from using competing video services.

[MTGrizzly]

"Is this not a consumer capitalist market?"

Charging more for the same amount of product because you are the only provider or the largest provider isn't 'consumer capitalism.' This is why the government files anti-trust lawsuits.

"If you don't like it select your other options, use dial up ISDN, DSL, Satelite."

The ISPs need to be realistic. Internet usage isn't what it once was. I upload, probably in the neighborhood of 20gb of photographs per month, sometimes per week. Going back to relying on dial up isn't realistic. The ISPs sold us unlimited broadband access and now that we have it - and now that people's livelihoods are dependent on Internet access - they think they are in a position to raise rates as high as they want. This, too, is a violation of anti-trust laws.

"Packard Bell of broadband providers"

Love it! I wonder how many people remember Packard Bell...

[stevicus]

Which ISP is this? Over coaxial? Gigabit fiber connections in Japan tend to run about $70/month. Setting up the fiber used to be free to encourage buildup of infrastructure, but runs about $300 - more if you live above the 3rd floor.

[tacitust]

This is more about milking larger and larger amounts of money from TW customers than it is concerns over not being able to keep up with demand.

I was an early adopter of RoadRunner here in Austin, TX, and was perfectly happy with the 4Mbps download speeds I was getting. A couple of years ago, it the maximum speed was raised to 6Mbps, and since last year my download speeds top out at sustained 8Mbps.

Quite frankly, it's fantastic service. I can download a hour's worth of standard definition digital video in 10 minutes flat, and it doesn't matter what time of the day or night it is. The service is so good and so fast it's no surprise that more and more users are downloading hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. There certainly doesn't seem to be any bandwidth capacity problem at all--not even close--certainly not at the moment.

I admit that I am a heavy user of RoadRunner, but I never asked for 8Mbps sustained download speed. Why do I even need to download a 500MB hour-long video file in 10 minutes when it takes me an hour to watch it? Sure it's convenient, but I would be perfectly happy if I could stream it at 2Mbps -- at a quarter of the bandwidth that I have today. The same goes for all my downloads. Unless I am wanting to stream high-definition video from the web, then I don't need a higher bandwidth at all.

Thus Time Warner could easily throttle back the bandwidth being consumed by its customers with minimal impact to their daily use of the Internet simply by reducing the maximum download speeds to 2-4MBps instead of the current 8Mbps, and offer higher bandwidths for higher prices, as they do today.

But, of course, that doesn't bring in any extra revenue, and adding strict monthly download limits (in this age of digital video) they are essentially performing a bait and switch. They have ramped up the download speeds over the past couple of years and now that their customers have become accustomed to the lightning fast speeds, TW is hoping that they will continue to download massive amounts of digital content and reap the rewards through sticking their heavy users with massive overage fees. I don't know for sure, but I am probably one of those people who could be paying between $100 - $150 per month if I continued to use the internet as I do today.

But that's not the only problem. Imposing strict caps is a tax on all the new digital download services that are coming online now and in the near future. Why would I want to continue using Netflix's high definition download service when I have to pay an extra $4 per movie because I have used up my bandwidth for the month? Online gamers may not feel too much of a pinch at the moment, but the amount of downloaded content and streaming of data will only rise in future, and they will eventually begin to blow through the caps before the month is over.

What about cafes and restaurants that offer free online access as a lure to attract more customers to their establishments? Free internet access in those places will instantly become a thing of the past since they will not longer be able to afford to pay for the heavy traffic the surfers will cause.

And while TW says they can't throttle back specific types of internet usage like peer-to-peer services, by its very nature, P2P is going to be hit twice as hard as other forms of use. P2P can only truly be effective when there as many people uploading as there are downloading, and that takes twice the bandwidth as a service based on more traditional downloading techniques.

So assuming rather than penalizing users by throttling back the P2P download speeds, TW is simply penalizing P2P users another way -- by forcing them to use up their monthly bandwidth allowance at twice the rate of other users. I fail to see how this is an improvement.

The most aggravating thing about all this is that Americans are already paying more for their digital services -- phone, internet, and cable -- than many other countries in the world, like France and Britain. My parents in England pay about $35/month for their phone service (including free phone calls to the USA!) and unmetered 4MBps DSL service. I already pay about twice that amount for the same thing, and it would be even more if I bought the ridiculously expensive internet phone service from TW. Next year, if TW has their way, I will be paying up to five times as much for the same service.

Shameful.

[gertruded]

Welcome to the corporate state, where corporations control the government and the regulatory bodies. Our health care also costs us twice as much due to obsene corporate profits.

[bellewitch]

www.stopthecap.com

[clynx]

Call this what it really is. Modern day CENSORSHIP.

[bjnovack]

I think there's more to it than is brought up here. Companies like Comcast and Time Warner don't just supply the pipes, they also supply the content in some cases. And they get some of their content from the MPAA and the RIAA members, two organizations who have been losing their "war against piracy" which is actually a fight to save a dying business model. Putting caps on discourages heavy downloaders of all sorts. So it's anticompetitive in more ways than may readily meet the eye. It's just that ol' corporate quid pro quo-- something like "you pinch the pipes and we'll keep your fees for using our content low . . . " And much as I love our new President, not all the noises he's making are the right ones, when it comes to the Internet. And we should NEVER lose sight of the fact that he's staffed the DOJ with RIAA shills.

I think we all have to make a whole lotta noise at the FCC level. And don't expect Congress to get it done, there are too many congresscritters beholden to the Lobbyists representing these industries. Yes, there have been a few feelgood bits of legislation, like for broadband mapping, but if Connected Nation ends up being the mapper of choice, we've not gained a thing, since Connected Nation is funded by the Telcos.

Time for Voters to Impose some Term Limits . . .

[bearwalker01]

Watch out, all you Facebook posters!