In the case of Time Warner Cable, customers will be charged from $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan’s cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB. A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing. “To put it mildly,” says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, “the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior.”
Photo: Traffik
Update: Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communications at Time Warner Cable writes:
1) We’re also developing a “super-tier” at roughly 100GB. Haven’t figured out the pricing yet, but it’s in the works. For some reason the BW article left this out.
2) We’ll be giving our customers a “gas gauge” that sits on their Roadrunner.com dashboard that will allow them to track their usage. Customers are free to change their plan upwards or downwards at any time into the one that’s right for them.
3) Customers in our trial markets will have three full months from the time they get a formal announcement from us — to come in the early summer, depending on markets — to track their usage, get used to the meter, and register feedback with us. We don’t want anyone getting any nasty surprises on their bill.
4) Bills for bandwidth tiers will start appearing in September, roughly — again, varies slightly by market, but all customers will have three months’ grace period. Because this is a *trial*, these caps are subject to change. If they don’t work — or the whole project doesn’t work — we’ll make changes or try something else.What will send us the best, and most useful message is if customers go through the grace period, interact with the “gas gauge,” and send in feedback. There’s plenty of time to switch providers before bills hit if that’s something that you think is right for you. Part of the trial is seeing how this actually works before bills hit and getting feedback. If you want to let us know your thoughts, we’ve set up an e-mail address at realideas@twcable.com to centralize thoughts and criticism.
5) These caps don’t apply to our business-class customers, or customers under an existing contract.
Welcome to my world…
I only wish I could get a 40gb limit. With Hughsnet Satellite I’m limited to 420mb in a 24 hour period, and they shut you down if you go over.. none of this pay extra stuff.
Time to switch to FiOS (or move to where FiOS is available)?
(With my 20Mbps symmetric connection, I transfer about 5.5 terabytes every month.)
Or else, propose to your municipal government that a bond be floated to build a local loop fibre network, ala UTOPIA. I’d guess there’s even Federal subsidies for such a thing under the rubric of infrastructure.
20Mbps for $70/month with FiOS is still ridiculously bad compared to other regions of the world where 100Mbps for $15/month is the norm.
It’s official…they suck!
I don’t have a problem with being charged by usage… Otherwise I would’ve installed an electrical generator and dug a well long ago.
What I do have an issue with is these companies trying to have it both ways. It stinks, and sadly most consumers don’t know or care enough to see how they’re being screwed.
Sigh… I’ve got Time Warner at home and I can tell you that the minute they put bandwidth caps in Ohio, I’m flipping the switch off. I probably wouldn’t exceed the 40gb very many months, but it’s an unreasonably low cap and the costs are too high for overages.
It’s like Anon4 says – if they solely charged for usage, at a reasonable rate, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Like say a few cents per gig or something. It costs tons of money to build the infrastructure but almost nothing to maintain it. It costs something to upgrade it if people use more than you expected, but not much on an amortized basis. It’s just not reasonable to charge $1 per gigabyte when moving a gigabyte costs fractions of a cent.
I need to get off my butt and send them a note. It’s unlikely to make a difference, but who knows.
They’re really asking for it. The blowback on this will be colossal once those 2X and 3X typical bills start hitting mailboxes. Protests, hearings, boycotts, etc. They’ll have to walk this decision back and eat crow.
@#4:
The difference between being off-grid and this idiocy is you have that choice.
In many, if not most, areas of the US the only way to get cable/internet service is by way of the local monopoly.
These caps are arbitrary and are being put in place as a means of placating groups like the RIAA and MPAA who claim that anyone who uses “too much internet” must be a pirate.
My work means I transfer 2-3gb of data a day. All my own creations. Guess I’m a pirate.
In the UK we’ve had caps of ~30 gigs and below for quite some time as standard. Even ‘unlimited’ over here is actually ~30-40 gigs/mo with 99% of plans, thanks to a wonderful thing called a ‘fair usage policy’ which gives your ISP carte blanche to screw you over.
Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to care or, if they care, they can’t change to anyone else. Hooray for the BT monopoly.
http://droptimewarnercable.com/ & http://stoptwc.info/ have more info, TWC contacts, and such.
Whew — we used to have TWC, thankfully our area was taken over by Bright House.
Not gonna happen here. SBCGLOBAL/ATT and the cable co compete vigorously for the internet business. Capping or sanctioning usage would be suicide for either.
“the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior.”
The only “consumer behavior” I see coming out of this, is a whole bunch of people dropping this ISP. Time Warner + Bandwidth Cap = CRITICAL FAIL
Another thought; do you guys thing that Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s Uverse will provide any sort of check to this sort of pricing scheme? It just seems like terrible timing on TW’s part that they’ve got an in-place, likely fully amortized infrastructure and are placing limits and raising prices on using it when their two biggest competitors are rolling out new, modern, faster infrastructure that could eat them alive.
Austin has both Uverse and FiOS availability, San Antonio just has FiOS. But it seems like anyone in those markets would just switch to the better, faster provider as soon as they knew about the caps.
It feels like a short-sighted, immediate revenue jump in exchange for a lot of long term ill will and loss of customers. Time Warner’s shareholders should be concerned.
I get 20GB/month with a $7/GB overage charge. Yay Canada! I think the real reason all those TV and movie streaming services aren’t available here is because then everyone would realize how much we’re getting screwed by our ISPs.
…What needs to happen is that a Class Action suit needs to be filed against *any* ISP who set up bandwidth caps, while at the same time begin pestering the hell out of your so-called representatives and senators in Congress to pass laws to make bandwidth caps illegal. As was proven during the days of PC Pursuit, there’s no cost difference between 10 seconds of data transfer and 20 hours. It’s all an artificial and totally bogus way to charge extra for doing absolutely nothing extra.
Bottom Line: Bandwidth is not electricity or gas. Trying to charge for it along those lines is outright theft.
Couple of things – I don’t buy the bandwidth shortage spin. There was a huge amount of fiber laid in the go-go 90′s and a significant portion is still unlit. Go and try to lease dark fiber. No one will rent it. In addition to all the dark fiber try to lease a strand of lit fiber. No more. They’ll lease you a frequency using WDM or LWDM. The fiber management algorithms get more and more sophisticated.
What has changed then?
More and more people watching video content online that competes directly with Comcast and Time Warner cable offerings. They get no money if you watch online, a show that they carry via cable whether it’s Big Love, Dexter, or live sports. It’s direct competition and a conflict of interest. So they are moving to make the competition financially non-competitive with their bundled services. I have a hard time seeing how this would survive a well constructed court challenge, particularly given the recent press about cable companies restricting online viewing of certain content to cable subscribers and Disney’s response warning against it.
Ack, missed a bit.
There was press this week about cable companies wanting to restrict access to certain online content to current cable subscribers. Disney (and by extension ABC) responded publicly warning against it.
Want to bet that if it goes forward – watching a “cable subscriber only” movie will not count against your bandwidth cap while streaming the exact same content from Netflix will?
That’s the kind of behavior I don’t see surviving an anti-competitive business practice claim in the post Bush Justice department.
Some article links about online walling proposals and Disney’s response
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/02/AR2009040201660.html
http://www.multichannel.com/article/191210-Cable_Show_2009_Bewkes_Touts_Online_Subscription_Model.php
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cotown-cable3-2009apr03,0,2006382.story
I back up my computer online, using Mozy. Right now my backups (which include very large audio and video files — my own work) are about 150 GB in size.
If Cablevision, my ISP, adopts these kinds of limits, then I’ll certainly stop using Mozy. A lot of other people probably will too.
well, here’s to hoping they change their minds. I’ve been very happy with my service from them in the past
I wonder what the definition of “don’t work” is.
Wow.. I just read Jeff’s reply..
Talk about missing the point. The very fact that this even *exists* is our problem, and none of that crap really helps. They’re merely adding a little lube to the dildo before they cram it in the ass.
I am now extremely glad I’ve cancelled my service with this company.
I don’t understand why people are under the impression that bandwidth is free.
Yes, and undersubscribed pipe costs as much to run as a pipe running at 100%. But pipes don’t run at 100% without congestion- so it’s necessary to add additional bandwidth. And for an HA network, you’re going to have to double that capacity, which means new hardware, new fiber, extra management… there’s a tangible cost involved.
If everybody on a network decided that they were going to run full-bore 100% of the time, the natural congestion points would be absolutely destroyed.
Bittorrent and such are totally turning the business on its ear. Telecoms were built under the assumption that people weren’t going to be on the phone 100% of the time. Oversubscription and the very pricing models were built upon this. (keep in mind that your monthly costs don’t include just the line from your house to the CO- you’re also paying for a chunk of the internal infrastructure beyond that.) I know people don’t feel pity for the telecoms or cablecompanies, and I’m not necessarily defending their behaviors- but seriously, this stuff does cost money.
I personally think the best way to manage the problem is with QoS- I don’t mind if somebody starts pushing/pulling a metric ton of traffic- if I can deliver it. But when I have to choose between customer traffic, I have to have some baseline as to judge which traffic is ‘more important’ than others.
I’d probably start with a scavenger class, rather than just raw price-increases or throttling- but it’s difficult to get a QoS policy for heavy downloaders. Perhaps remarking uploads at the user levels would be enough to help a little bit. But managing the customer that’s downloading 3 movies from netflix a day is a problem. You can’t just cap netflix. And the management headache of writing a per-flow policer that scales out over the course of a month for a userbase as big as a large ISP is… difficult. But possible, if there’s enough money involved. And there is.
Warning: bad words (forgive me once?)
That’s it. FUCK these assholes. FUCK THEM. Human piles of steaming SHIT. Fuck their company, and everyone there. I hope someone torches their offices.
After we paid off 200 BILLION back in the 1990s to American ISPs to upgrade infrastructure in America, and they STILL haven’t done it- they ripped us off. They are a monopoly, the US gov PAID them to upgrade our infrastructure, and they STILL HAVEN’T.
And now we’re about to sign into law another 44 BILLION in this bullshit “stimulus” package to give them for the SAME THING? They never gave us the first batch!
And now this??? Charging for internet like a utility is wrong- once you build the pipes, they don’t suffer from more traffic- they can handle it, because that’s what they are FOR. They transfer signal, not water or gas! It’s a one time upgrade for very long life cable.
This is THEFT. That’s all it is, and it’s in our face, just like WallStreet. As soon as I get home, I am cancelling my entire family’s service if they use Time Warner Cable.
FUCK THEM.
Styrofoam, people say that bandwidth is free because it basically is. How much does a new switch cost? $100,000? If you’ve got a quarter million subscribers in a given market area, what the hell is $100,000, or even $1,000,000, to you? Nothing. The tens of millions that you make every month from your subscribers should be more than enough to constantly be upgrading your infrastructure and data center equipment. The idea that bit torrent is some sort of sudden out-of-the-blue development is laughable. Downloads began the moment there was a single point-to-point data connection and they’ve grown rapidly but predictably since. The problem comes in when ISPs want to sit on their ass and collect checks for providing the exact same level of service, forever. Well guess what? Data needs go up and new equipment capacity goes up. Keep up your back haul and you’ll keep up with your customers.
The market proof of that is Verizon FiOS providing dramatically higher speeds at similar cost to Time Warner. Same with AT&T Uverse.
BastardNamban, I’m certainly not offended by your language, but the point could have been made much better without it. For example, I’m really curious about the $200b from the 90′s and would love more info on it.
OM@15: The one thing PC Pursuit proved was that there *was* (or at least could be, and nearly always was) a major difference between the cost of providing 10 seconds of data transfer and the cost of providing 20 hours. Almost from the moment the service went live, PC Pursuit users effectively reshaped Telenet’s traffic patterns to the extent that a number of analysis systems had to be modified to exclude PCP-related traffic to avoid having network sizing and trunk planning be driven primarily by these least-paying of customers.
PC Pursuit was to Telenet’s engineering practices what BitTorrent has been to those of many of today’s ISPs. In the mid-80s the typical Telenet business customer operated in either of two modes: Occasional low-volume transaction-oriented data exchange throughout the business day, or very occasional high-volume batch data transfer, sometimes daily but more usually once a week. Into this environment suddenly came hordes of online hobbyists, typically keeping all PC Pursuit outdial ports busy every evening and weekend minute the service was available — and not only busy, but (thanks to such windowing and ACK-less protocols as Zmodem) often running at close to 100% of capacity. Considering the vast majority of backbone trunks in those days were at 9600 baud, it didn’t take all that many PCPers dialed in at 2400 baud to fill the pipes.
Dculberson@24: I’m afraid Styrofoam is right: Most ISP networks were designed, deployed, and priced based on projected traffic patterns and rates very different from the ones they find themselves having to support today. The grief this causes is primarily at a neighborhood or community level and *not* along the backbone, where all that dark fiber and those big honking megaswitches might actually do you some good.
This is a much better solution than using deep packet inspection to shape traffic.
The granny down the street who uses the internet to check her email isn’t going to subsidise your torrent habit any more? Oh boo hoo.
Here in Australia, we’ve had capped connections since forever. I don’t understand why this hasn’t happened before in the US, or why people are screaming bloody murder at the thought of a system where you pay for the bandwidth you use.
Normal cost per month (in AU $) is around $30/10G, $40/20G, $50/40G, $60/80G etc. If you go over this speed is limited (but you pay nothing over your monthly fee), or you can pay extra $ (about $4-20/GB) to go back to full speed. A family who watches an hour or two of streaming video per day gets around 10-15GB/month.
(offtopic: had to enter “sister’s Fannie” for the recaptca for this…)
@#13 – San Antonio does not have FiOS yet, but it does have Uverse. As soon as Uverse was available for me I dropped Time Warner and never looked back. Uverse is very nice.
A bit late to this party, but we posted an article about net neutrality law and policy at The Legality a few weeks ago. It’s still relevant background for this conversation, especially in light of Jafi’s comments@17. You can read more here:
I own the internet and I’ll charge what I want!
I will be happy to pay Time Warner consumption-based fees just as soon as they will accept consumption-based payment for television too. I only watch PBS and Comedy Central, so that should bring my monthly cable TV bill down to a couple of bucks.
I won’t have to subsidize my neighbors who watch ESPN!
personally, time warner doesn’t care about blowbacks. according to FCC insiders, the goal is to make internet inaffordable so that the average person will be cut of the limitless access to knowledge. It’s a war against information and technology so that poor people with plenty of time cannot learn from others; meanwhile, rich people that are in the rat race have no clue as to using the proper technology to advance mankind.
either way. someone wins, so I’m excited to see how society would coexist and how people, as a whole, evolve over time.
Hi, well i can say this if this hits Kansas city they can shove it i will shut the crap down and play with the kids outside more than gaming with them.
What are they trying to do wreck the healing economy? I will NOT accept this from any company or i WILL NOT game or use internet anymore,plain and simple.
I think everyone should have the same view as me on this.This is a HUGE step backwards for the worlds internet.maybe those in the tested citys should stand together and have a ”netout” and not use internet at all for the time its being tested.
Its like a united voice screaming DO THIS AND YOU FAIL!!