Time Warner Unveils 40 GB Bandwidth Cap

[sp0ck1701]

How much bandwidth do you use?

Use this to find out. Useful plugin for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5917


It will show you (1) your actual bandwidth used [keep in mind you may get 10+Mbits, most servers serve far below that], and (2) most importantly cumulative totals for the amount you download which is what TW wants to bill on.

I use is for web development/testing and as of this news I've been using for the past couple days as I surf normally, just to see what kind of usage things like youtube, etc really take on a daily basis.

FYI, my total is ~100Mb to 250Mb per day, x 30 days....that doesn't count the rest of my family or updates or e-mail etc, just browser.

Thought I'd share

 

[Mizoguchi]

I live in Rochester and I'm very pissed off about this. Everyone in my Computer Science class is switching to another service provider.

 

[kamkal]

40GB?? FLOP

All TW customers should just all cancel at the same time, that will send a msg to these tards

everyone call in on the same day, cancel all services, the douchebags will be squirming

 

[shawn808]

there is a protest being organized in Rochester NY to express the outrage of this EXTORTION of the residents of Rochester. Its allmost laughable as i look at the flier i received last summer on the new POWERBOOST, whats the point.... oh wait lets hit those caps FASTER.... id rather have a cap free dedicated 1 mbit line than having a rationed out 10mbit line I can hit my cap on in less than 24 hours with a few movie downloads i purchased

 

[shawn808]

Saturday, April 18, 2009
Time:
11:00am - 5:00pm
Location:
Rochester Cable Store (Main Office)
Street:
71 Mt. Hope Avenue
City/Town:
Rochester, NY

 

[joex444]

Firstly, is this for new customers or for all customers? If I were a customer, I would feel this is breaking their own TOS which is a legally-binding contract. The only logical outcomes of this are a) they uphold their contract, giving said customer unmetered usage, b) change the TOS and alienate said customer or b) cancel without any cancellation fee.

Anyways, 40GB (gigabytes, probably 10^9 bytes instead of 1024^3), consider that most households include multiple users. This implies that your average user must be using no more than 10-15GB per month.

The cable ISPs got themselves a bunch of idiots who don't understand what the Internet is capable of. People who simply browse the web and check email... they use no data. This is pure profit for the cable ISP. If this is their target audience, then they will never have a reason to upgrade their infrastructure.

Basically this comes down to the same thing Comcast did. They don't want to spend money upgrading the infrastructure that they NEED to, if they want to sustain an unlimited fast Internet for their customers. Instead, they realize that by scaring customers into not using their service so much that they can provide that fast access while NOT SPENDING. It's just corporate bullshit.

Even worse is that the US Gov't has given these UNETHICAL and GREEDY corporations a LEGAL MONOPOLY! So if you don't like it, you can either go with dialup (fat chance), DSL (slower, but potentially unmetered) or Satellite (again, fat chance, probably metered as well). Wireless broadband is generally capped at 6GB/mo, so is not a viable option either.

--Currently with Comcast, stay under 250GB/mo but I'll move to FiOS when I move closer to Boston in the summer. Don't care if I won't use more than 250GB/mo or not, atleast they're not treating their customers like criminals and aren't afraid to spend money on a good infrastructure.

 

[Guest]

Wow. This just gives Verizon more money. Everyone would want to switch to Verizon FIOS now.

 

[m3nphls]

I had TWC Road Runner + $10 more to boost ur speed to 16mbps/768kbps and would not get 10% of the speed every freaking night...kept on calling them and they wouldn't know what the heck was going on.

Ever since I switched to FiOS 20/20 I will never look back at cable companies....

I hope this companies die for practices like this....instead of Broadband going forward US Broadband is going backwards....just look at speeds Europe are getting now....Gbps connections!!!

 

[veszerin]

Hey Time Warner! Enjoy your bankruptcy!

 

[ricin]

I'm glad I switched to U-Verse.

 

[p05esto]

WOW Time Warner Cable SUCKS big time, what a bunch of morons - let's boycott them now and flood the internet expressing our opinions about their bad company. Stay away from the horrible Time Warner Cable service - bad news for anyone dealing with this company.

 

[trevorvdw]

So glad I ditched these crooks last year. Getting better service now for only 2/3 the price they were charging me.

 

[scryer_360]

Well, its a good thing I'm moving to an area with Verizon FIOS. No bandwidth cap. I'd like to hear Time Warner trying to make the case for new customers of their service over FiOS now.

 

[jsloan]

[citation][nom]scryer_360[/nom]Well, its a good thing I'm moving to an area with Verizon FIOS. No bandwidth cap. I'd like to hear Time Warner trying to make the case for new customers of their service over FiOS now.[/citation]

i fear verizon will oneday have caps too. the way i figure it is that businesses, including verizon are in it to make money, the maximum amount that they can. so right now they are being nice while we'all sign up, but when they get a certain market size that they cant reasonably increase they look for other ways to increase their profits, aka caps. i think unless some law is passed that we will all end up paying either very high prices for unlimited plan and stuck with ever restrictive caps. now i dont think that will happen overnight, first they have to make sure anyone that plans to offer unlimited service is put out of business, by not being able to make any kind of profit, in other words they will undercut their competition and then when there is no competition they will turn the screws. see what is happening with isp vs cities that would like to offer reasonably priced wifi to it's citizens, the isps are going to the government, giving them political contributions, aka bribes, and those nice elected officials are turnging out laws making it outright unlawful or practically impossible for them to offer their citizens wifi service...

 

[Mitrovarr]

Savvy users who have an alternative will quit upon hearing this notice. Unsavvy users have probably already been hacked and turned into spambots or are serving as wireless access points for their neighbors, and will quite upon seeing their first bill.

How this will not completely ruin their business in any place they have an uncapped alternative, I do not know.

 

[sp0ck1701]

Mitrovarr raises a good point

Problem:
"What's a Gig?" "I think my system is 1.2Gigs or is it 2Gigs" "5 or 40 sounds like a lot."No, wait, I think I have 60Gigs".
- The other 99% of the people I know ;-)....who don't know where this is going.

Best Answer I've got:
We need to educate anyone/everyone we know about the impacts of this so they understand why under this new pricing system Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, or even their iPod or Vonage could kill them without warning... example: I got a great deal from Netflix-- But my TW bill was $90 this month!

 

[sp0ck1701]

Also this should cause concern.

Just popped into my head from history & economics class on the 1800s/1900s when monopolies & oligopolies prevailed with railroads and telcom of the day....

This so called "trail" is really price discrimination, which is illegal with many precedents. Unless they go nation wide with it QUICKLY (like in < 1 yr). So expect it to expand in scope...this is just the beginning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

 

[Maxor127]

If most people don't use that much data, then Time Warner wouldn't need to put cap it, would they? Nice BS. I think anyone between the ages of 12-40 who use the internet in any normal capacity would easily exceed 5 GB. And that's just figuring in one individual. Families will have an even tougher time. Anyone who uses Time Warner with that cap is a chump. That's why competition is awesome. You can just ditch them for someone else, and then when they lose customers, they'll change their attitude. 5 GB may have been acceptable 10 years ago, but not now. This sounds like a late April Fool's joke.

 

[hexploit]

I will no longer support time warner even in the cities where they don't do this. This will help drive them into the ground. Oh well.

 

[crisisavatar]

this has a horrible monopoly smell and I hope the day where i pay 40 dollars a month to check my @mail never comes.

 

[rantarave]

my dad was totally right

now that nobody is buying consumer goods anymore

the corporations are just sucking us dry on essential services such as

internet, fuel, electricity

 

[Guest]

Well, when TW turns on the cap here in Hawaii, I will either switch to DSL(FIOS when they get it in my area) or get unlimited 3G on my phone plan and use my phone as a modem. When/if the cap gets turned on in Hawaii I will cancel immediately.

 

[shawn808]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/the-cost-to-offer-the-worlds-fastest-broadband-20-per-home/

 

[engrpiman]

Last month I used 20.51 GB for my house. I used about a 1-2 GB / day when I am active and less then that most of the weak. I still think the cap is to low even though I will not hit it on an average month.

I am on Cableone internet and they throttle. If I use more the 1.2 GB/hour then my bandwidth get cut in half for the rest of the day. That works great.

 

[m3nphls]

[citation][nom]73534[/nom]Well, when TW turns on the cap here in Hawaii, I will either switch to DSL(FIOS when they get it in my area) or get unlimited 3G on my phone plan and use my phone as a modem. When/if the cap gets turned on in Hawaii I will cancel immediately.[/citation]

cellphone broadband have 5GB cap =P