Time Warner’s plans to meter its cable internet are taking shape. The short of it: $1 for every gigabyte over the plan’s standard allowance, which will be 5 GB for a $30 plan and 40GB for a $60 plan. This compares to Comcast, which has secret limits somewhere north of 250GB, and Bend Cable, which has a 100GB cap.
Of those two plans, only the latter is of any use to anyone who does more than check email and IM: 5GB is what you get with cellphone data plans right now. Even 40GB is crummy: compare to Comcast, derided by geeks for its secret caps, with its 250GB-ish allowance. If you used that much bandwidth in one of Time Warner’s test markets, you’d be getting a $270 internet bill.
$1 per GB is nearly $5 for a single DVD’s worth of data–after a cap you could reach by downloading only eight linux distributions, video games or movies (assuming each occupied a single DVD). Amazon’s file storage service charges about a quarter per Terabyte of bandwidth.
I thought metered bandwidth was a way of heading off regulatory action over that “unlimited” silliness. This convinces me that it’s a way to get us used to paying for it by the byte now, before bandwidth becomes so cheap they’d never get away with it.
The good side of metering is getting rid of secret limits and the deceptive marketing of “unlimited” plans. The bad side is, well, $1 a GB.
One images a cheap router slung from the pole at the end of your street, its routing table exploding with torrent-related garbage. Your fault, or the cable company’s?
Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use [AP via Slashdot]
BBC just put up this broadband speed test. I don’t know how accurate it is.
I live in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and our resident gate keeper to the internet and all its apparantly gold plated and diamond encrusted wares is Northwestel Cable.
What do they charge for these wonderful packets of bytes you ask… $0.01 cents per MB over your alloted plan, that works out to $10 per GB.
Of course that shouldnt’t be a problem considering they offer totally reasonable plans starting at $40 for 2 GB per month and capping at $80 for 20 GB.
As an Australian broadband subscriber, allow me to shed a tear for you all.
By the way, in case other people haven’t done the math. 5 Gigabytes per month = 15 kilobits per second. So, they’re selling you a peak rate of 768kbps, but an average rate of 15 kbps if you don’t want extra charges. I could get about twice that with an unlimited plan on a 56k modem.
@15 – exactly, they’re basically trying to raise the prices higher than they were 10 years ago when we were all using dialup. People will fall for it too, because they think of gigabytes as great big enormous things.
“Lol, 5 whole gigabytes? What does that mean? Of course I don’t use that much. All I do on the internet is watch Youtube and iTunes…”
I live in an urban area with two complete cable networks competing (not renting lines from each other!) and a half-dozen or more DSL providers. I have Time Warner right now; it’s cheap and fast. Good luck pushing your metered crap here, TW. Good luck.
Antinous: It’s Flash based, so it should be fine for standard home cable/DSL connections. If you’re trying to test a fiber connection or a T1 (anything above 20Mb) it probably won’t give you very accurate results because Flash will be reliant on your PC preformance/specs. Anybody that needs to test for higher speeds should use a java-based test.
Wow, that’s really nasty. Play a MMORPG or use Netflix’s instant watching service, and you’ll hit that within a couple days, I bet.
http://www.broadbandspeedtest.net/
Hey so im a noob, i get that the internet is a bunch of tubes, and that these tubes have limits of how much internets they can move. But are we running out of internet? Why would we have to pay more, what do we gain? What are they losing that they need more money from us?
As far as the tests, why cant they test the speed they are selling us accurately? It seems that the burden is on them to maintain the product they sell to us.
This feels like the current state of gas, ever increasing, gouging the consumer. Gas we are running out of though, internets? I thought we (humans) were making the grid? The grid seems like it will provide tons of bandwidth at very little cost.
I get that they can charge whatever the hell they want for their product but I dont get why.
I had no idea how much bandwidth I was using until recently.
I think their plan is to trap people who have no idea how much they’re actually using in exploitative plans.
My internet is, I’m pretty sure, throttled to hell by Bell right now and much slower than it should be. I’m still using over 50GB/month (up and down combined) yet paying around $30. This is… not as fast as I’d like, but probably OK for the bandwidth.
Install NetLimiter Monitor or some other bandwidth monitor and see how much you’re using before you agree to anything.
There’d better be full disclosure of actual usage curves before they put rates like that in place. $30/5 GB is ridiculous. $10/first 5GB and $.50/GB after that might be reasonable. That would reward people for keeping their usage low while still covering costs. (I have no way of knowing what providers pay for bandwidth, but my best guess is less than 10 cents/GB. Add to that a certain amount of per-customer cost.)
Bandwidth is cheap (my web host as well as others give 5TB/month and more on $9.95 plans), so as I see it the only reason for capping subscribers is to cram more of them onto the ISPs local infrastructure without having to spend anything upgrading its capacity.
I’m a comcast broadband subscriber.
Does anyone know how to see what your actual usage is? I have no idea how much data I’m pulling down to be able to see if I should start getting worried.
One funny comcast customer service story:
They started sending out notices we can get tiered service, faster speeds the more you pay. We were automatically in the middle tier. I called and asked how to tell if I was getting that level of service. Their answer: you are, but you can’t test it. Too many variables, but we promise you are getting that speed. I know it is slow when all the neighbors are home but luckily I’m a shift worker and have our street all to myself during the day.
wow here in australia, the providers call anything over 20gig unlimited and generally charge about $70, and if you breach the limit either slow your connection down to like 24k or charge by the Megabyte at about 10c a mg.
As a result open wi-fi is extremely uncommon.
sucks to hear that they are making things worse not better in your part of the world, as it certainly does bode well for us.
wait so clarify this for me. if i download 5gbs of data, and then keep downloading, they are going to make me pay by the gb for everything after 5?
I am also a Comcast subscriber. I rarely get even close to what I pay for which is 8Mb/768Kb. Usually It’s more like 2Mb/384Kb. I call them constantly and complain about it, they always tell me that internet speed tests do not accurately test speed because they’re put up by competing ISPs to lure customers into using their service. I tell them that The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility isn’t interested in being my ISP, and that’s the speed test I usually use. I then scream “Tier 2!!” “Tier 2!!!” Into the phone until I get a supervisor, who apologizes, says they’ll look into it, and my speeds improve for the next month or so. I’ve been doing this for the last two years.
I just checked the jlabs speed test I linked to above, and it seems they’ve taken it down.
I’ll have to find a disinterested 3rd party American-based speed test to use to harass Comcast. Any ideas?
Also, Broadband reports just posted more on the Comcast’s “Protocol Agnostic” Network Management and the 250GB cap a little while ago if anyone is interested…
Ugh, Verizon roll out FiOS here already, I don’t need Comcast in my life anymore!!!
i currently have time warner.
i guess i can live without the internet for a little while.
Yeah Australia really does have some of the crappiest Internet options of the world.
When I last visited my brother in Spain he apologised for only having a 4mb connection. I asked what it was capped at and how much he paid.
It wasn’t capped and I can’t remember how much he paid, simply that it was a cheaper than my crappy 512mb, 30Gig Plan.
The only upside is we never get capped because downloading 30gb a month on a 512mb connection is difficult. Especially as it never ever runs at 512mb speeds! Oh and whenever someone needs to actually browse the internet all downloads must be paused or every 2nd page times out.