Time Warner Unveils 40 GB Bandwidth Cap

[foxyg]

Good I dont use TW here, I am not going to put up with this BS.

 

[truehighroller]

Looks to me like TW just pissed off a lot of customers / customers that could have been. Good Job PR people, your fired..

 

[jacobdrj]

Anyone who is a customer of Time Warner should complain to their local Public Service Comission, and the Federal Trade Comission. If you actualy log your complaints, things might get done. Also, talk with your AG of your state. You might be suprised at just how eager they are to help you.

 

[Guest]

"Basing its claims from a trial of 100,000 customers in Beaumont, TX about 14 percent exceeded their cap and had to pay about $19 in overages."

100,000 x 14% = 14,000 customers x $19 average in overages = $266,000 in TWC's pocket just in that market for just one month.

This is nothing but a money grab. If they continue to average 14% and $19 overage per month across other markets, think how profitable this would be in a market with 1 million customers.... over $2.5 million in one month.

What a load of crap.

My advice to you all.... But TWC stock... NOW. LOL.

 

[dark_lord69]

Wow, Bandwith Caps = Lame ISP.

 

[rockerrb]

The simple solution to this is to just cancel the service and get DSL.

 

[Guest]

Many comments here have raised the point that the imposition of monthly caps are intrinsically unfriendly to the legal and legitimate use of one's internet connection to watch streaming movies and television shows, download / play flicks on Xbox360, etc. Some have complained that TW has failed to recognize that plenty of people use large amounts of bandwidth for these legal activities and that basing a cap purely on the usage averages of users at the lowest end of the spectrum (the occasional email + online bill pay crowd) is somehow based on a misunderstanding of how customers use the internet.

I would submit to you that the TW's approach has taken PRECISE account of such usage.

Surprisingly, not a one of the comments I've read has bothered to link Time Warner's CABLE BUSINESS with the company's decision to impose bandwidth caps on their internet service. Folks, this is THE SOURCE of the problem - not "network costs" or whatever other strawman TW may advance as the cause. Simply put, every movie or TV show you get or watch over the internet is money and time you're not spending on Time Warner's offerings, such as OnDemand movies / TV episodes, or upgrading to the DVR service which carries a monthly fee. If you watch your shows from Hulu, you're not watching commercials from TW's advertisers. If you pay for a movie rental through iTunes or Xbox Marketplace, you're not ordering that video from TW's OnDemand / PPV service.

 

[deathblooms2k1]

[citation][nom]cmdetzel[/nom]Many comments here have raised the point that the imposition of monthly caps are intrinsically unfriendly to the legal and legitimate use of one's internet connection to watch streaming movies and television shows, download / play flicks on Xbox360, etc. Some have complained that TW has failed to recognize that plenty of people use large amounts of bandwidth for these legal activities and that basing a cap purely on the usage averages of users at the lowest end of the spectrum (the occasional email + online bill pay crowd) is somehow based on a misunderstanding of how customers use the internet. I would submit to you that the TW's approach has taken PRECISE account of such usage.Surprisingly, not a one of the comments I've read has bothered to link Time Warner's CABLE BUSINESS with the company's decision to impose bandwidth caps on their internet service. Folks, this is THE SOURCE of the problem - not "network costs" or whatever other strawman TW may advance as the cause. Simply put, every movie or TV show you get or watch over the internet is money and time you're not spending on Time Warner's offerings, such as OnDemand movies / TV episodes, or upgrading to the DVR service which carries a monthly fee. If you watch your shows from Hulu, you're not watching commercials from TW's advertisers. If you pay for a movie rental through iTunes or Xbox Marketplace, you're not ordering that video from TW's OnDemand / PPV service.[/citation]

Understood, however if I wasn't using those services I would have no need for TW's services in the first place. So they should be glad that people are using hulu / microsoft market place, etc. if not for those services people might just settle with a slower DSL. And if the pidgin hole us into using their own services at a premium price then people WILL resort to changing providers.

 

[dan555smith]

anyone realize that we are going backwards? What is it with these companies? I wrote to an email on TW site locally as soon as I heard it (4/2). They responded with this:
Dear Dan,

TRACKING NUMBER: 179607
Inquirylease forward to whomever this needs to go to.
http://www.news-record.com/content/2009/04/02/article/time_warner_cable_will_track_charge_by_internet_usage
I subscribe to TV + Internet. If you put cap limits on my service, 5,10 GB a month, I won't continue my service. I would rather throw the money away than give you more for less. With all the new services, what you should be doing is building up your infrastructure so that you can offer better service, not worse. It is bad enough that you don't guarantee bandwidth, but you price it with that. What good service do you actually offer that doesn't have any hitches?
My cable box has to be rebooted weekly because of pixelation I have to reboot the modem because of slow speeds on at least a weekly basis, No matter what your CSR's are told, it isn't the cable from my house to the line, it is your over allocation of resources. I know it, you know it, just admit it.
Your unloyal customer,
Dan Smith
Submitted: by dan
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Response:
Thank you for contacting us. Time Warner Cable understands and embraces the current evolution in the way people are using the Internet for things like video, music, and more. We continue to manage our network to ensure that our all of our subscribers have a terrific user experience. We also recognize that the Internet was not designed to handle the mass amounts of video that are now being consumed, therefore there is a risk that service speeds could slow to a complete crawl unless proper investments are made. We are taking a multi-pronged approach that we feel will be to the benefit of our customers. As we are in the early stages of planning, we want to keep you informed of what we are doing to ensure our subscribers continue to enjoy all of the content available on the Internet today.

Our goal is to provide the best possible Internet experience for ALL of our customers, not to let the minority affect the majority. The vast majority of our customers will see no difference in their monthly bill. The challenge is to find an equitable way to charge customers so that we can pay for necessary infrastructure upgrades. We are looking to create a business model that will allow customers to choose the speed and consumption package that makes sense for their household Internet usage. With a consumption based billing plan, all customers will have access to a ''gas gauge'' that will enable them to track their consumption against their plan. A customer will have three months to get comfortable with the gauge before the bill hits. We don't want our customers to have any unpleasant surprises. Some of our customers may actually save money by ''right-sizing'' to a plan that meets their needs. We are happy to help them do that. Included in the extended trial is Greensboro, NC. Preliminary communications regarding specifics will begin in August 2009 in Greensboro, NC. Billing will follow these communications after a three month grace period. If you would like to speak with a live agent regarding this matter, please either visit your local Time Warner Cable office, or call your local Time Warner Cable Customer Care Center at 1-800-892-2253 or 1-866-874-2389.




Please let us know if we can be of any additional assistance.

Thank you for using Time Warner Cable.
Elena
Time Warner Cable Support
Raleigh, NC
919-595-4892
1-866-489-2669

 

[dan555smith]

2nd thing here is I am not seeking another ISP here, I'm seeking another country. anyone take refugees from the US? I'm kidding, but what happened to Moore's Law? Does it not apply in Cable? What happens if all these Shoddy ISP's start doing this? they already don't guarantee bandwidth even though they sell it at a specific rate, could they really do worse? Make technology suck? I am contacting my congressmen, AG and whomever will listen.

All this is going to boil down to is

 

[jacobdrj]

Americans vote with their pocketbook. Americans do the exact same thing with phone service. I never understood it. It was often cheaper for me to use a pre-paid service like Tracaphone's Net10. When Boost Mobile came out with their unlimited plan, I grabbed it. It just makes sense. Unlimited and affordable. When data companies charge for data transmitted rather than bandwidth used, IMHO it is an atrocity.

 

[quietstorm]

This is nonsense! Why do the bandwidth speeds keep increasing, yet they now want to impose a cap on the services? No point in paying for the extra bandwidth if this is the case - you'll reach your cap even quicker! (Perhaps that is the plan - faster browsing, more pages served, quicker downloads = over limit fees). People signed up because of the promise of these higher speeds, but without restrictions. It's pointless to give someone a Ferrari to drive, and then tell them they can't leave the grocery store parking lot. Having 3 net-savvy people in our household, we are probably online more than we watch television - I download a lot of beta games (averaging 2GB for setup files easily) and different programs to kick around, and push the 40GB in two weeks' time by myself.

NOTE: TW has obviously learned NOTHING from AOL. Remember when AOL charged for their online services back in the mid 90's (and for a dialup line at that)? The justification for the service charges was for their 'exclusive content,' stuff you couldn't get anywhere else but from AOL. When they discovered that people were just using them strictly as a portal to the web, they finally saw the light and made their service unlimited (thank goodness, my AOL bills were close to $200). In broadband terms, TW has nothing to offer us but a portal to the web; the ‘exclusive content’ is in itself their cable TV programming. They are going to double dip their customers that already have their cable TV service. (If I’m not mistaken, the customers that only have one TW product pay more per month for the same service than someone that already uses one of TW’s services) We are still billed for cable TV regardless of how many shows we actually watch, and now we have to watch TW act like some troll under the bridge trying to extort more of our money because we're spending more time on the computer and NOT watching their cable content? Most of us have already paid for BOTH services, so what’s the big deal about how we spend our free time? It's not our fault that they have opted not to better prepare their network for the increased traffic/faster speeds - they shouldn't have overextended themselves until they had the proper groundwork in place, and there's no sense in giving us 'less for more' to fund those changes.

 

[wiseadam]

My two cents, if Dallas, Plano, and Richardson TX would stop zone whoring to one of three larger companies, then this would be fine, because the people that hit the cap could choose to go to another company and drive progression through competition. I hate hate hate the way the cable/dish, broadband companies in this aread are so restricted. I have had AT&T DSL, Verizon FIOS, and TWC in the past three years in two different locations, not even 3 miles away from each other. Now I'm stuck in a place where my only option is 6mb down, and 768kb up DSL from AT&T...$35 a month, not bad. Except I previously had 20mb down and 20mb up FIOS and I'd kill to have that back. Sad thing is, when I buy a house, I'm looking for a house with FIOS. F*(& the rest if they can't hang with speeds, f'em all!

 

[jimmysmitty]

I am guessing that this will become the final nail in the coffin for Time Warner. Verizons FIoS has killed it in NYC and this would push ppl over to Verizon since Verizon has no plans of a bandwidth cap (I know as I work for them).

This to me is the dumbest thing. I hope the government makes them stop it. I myself use about 20GB/week (2PCs and tons of downloads a week). So that would be 80GB/ month.

 

[jawshoeaw]

40 gigabytes is more than enough. 40 gigabits is another story. My brother works in IT and is a heavy internet user. He has a wimax plan capped at 2GB. He almost never goes over. 40 sounds like more than enough for most users. For those who want more, pay more.

 

[jawshoeaw]

[citation][nom]deathblooms2k1[/nom]Slicky, I don't pirate at all. I pay for netflix and watch instant play through my xbox live service. In addition I play games online. My girlfriend downloads I-tunes and we both surf the web frequently. It's not uncommon for friends to send us youtube links. I'm certain we easily breach 40 GB / Month.You call us spoiled. I think that's is an ignorant statement. It's not our fault you decided to live out in the middle of no where in a town with a measly population of 650. It's no surprise your options are limited it's simply not profitable to build infrastructure for a town of just 650 people. On the bright side I'm sure it's much more quiet and peaceful where you are. So be happy about that. In the meantime I would be careful, browsing toms is gonna kill your 4GB limit pretty quick.[/citation]
If you watched a netflix movie every day, you might get to 40GB, on their "high quality". Youtube and iTunes don't add up to much. Everyone knows this is about punishing pirates and other heavy legitimate users (a tiny minority). But if they are only charging $1/GB above the limit, that seems fair - that's only $1 per netflix movie, as cheap or cheaper than renting.

 

[SAL-e]

[citation][nom]jawshoeaw[/nom]If you watched a netflix movie every day, you might get to 40GB, on their "high quality". Youtube and iTunes don't add up to much. Everyone knows this is about punishing pirates and other heavy legitimate users (a tiny minority). But if they are only charging $1/GB above the limit, that seems fair - that's only $1 per netflix movie, as cheap or cheaper than renting.[/citation]
Wow, you have been really brain washed by Media companies. All that crap about piracy. Look I don't have subscription for Netflix, or bit-torrent servers and I am boycotting the music industry since 1999 no MP3 downloads ether. And I still brake 40GB traffic on regular basis. Here is my network usage stats for last 3 months:
Jan '09 - 50354MB
Feb '09 - 39778MB
Mar '09 - 39970MB
Apr '09 - 6056MB and going up.
All that in bad economy. As many people already commented that it is expensive to build a bandwidth. After that the price is the same if you going to transfer 1kB or 1GB. What TW is trying to do is to make internet users to pay for their failing entertainment business. So go ahead and blame the pirates for everything bad. Still the current entertainment industry will fail any way. Because as usually all problems starts from inside out.
But you really need to ask you self two questions:
1. Why you thing is fare to "punish" any minority?
2. How you going to feel if you are minority and get "punished" for that?

 

[neiroatopelcc]

Let me start by saying, I'm glad I live in Denmark! We've got between 2 and 100mbit internet options depending on where you live (higher for companies ofc), and I'm aware of very few consumer solutions that are based on usage rather than flatrate, and aware of none that has a cap on it.

Anyway, something else in the news startled me! "For the sake of comparison, the average American household spends 60 hours per week watching TV."
Is that really true? Do americans spend almost twice as much time watching tv as they do work ? I mean, sure I spend serveral hours every day (average) just playing computer games. But that's perhaps 20-30 a week including a weekend without getting out..... and I'd hardly be able to add another 30 to those - and I use the computer where people with families would predictably use a telly for socializing and stuff.
an average of 60 hours a week just seems like A FU

 

[savartart]

I think they are doing it to prevent competition with their cable tv service and pay per view. They don't want you downloading movies or streaming movies from competitors such as netflix. Or watching tv shows on the computer, they want you to pay for their cable television

 

[Guest]

I love this quote, "Basing its claims from a trial of 100,000 customers in Beaumont, TX".

According to the Census Bureau in 2006 there was only a population of 109,856 in Beaumont. That's seems like the most ideal place to construct a trial to me. How many out of the almost 110k people in Beaumont even have a Internet connection let alone a high speed connection?

Absolutely asinine, but that's why I'm on Verizon FIOS.

Here is the link to the Census Bureau where I got the number.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/4807000.html

Regards

 

[enforcer22]

[citation][nom]jawshoeaw[/nom]If you watched a netflix movie every day, you might get to 40GB, on their "high quality". Youtube and iTunes don't add up to much. Everyone knows this is about punishing pirates and other heavy legitimate users (a tiny minority). But if they are only charging $1/GB above the limit, that seems fair - that's only $1 per netflix movie, as cheap or cheaper than renting.[/citation]

Your insane. Some games i download are upwords of the 20 gig mark. high def movies are about 10gigs and i mean real high def not that high def your talking about. Ya know some people dont care about packaging that comes with the things they buy. I personaly rather whip out a card and download it instead of get some usless box im going to throw away anyways. you apperantly dont use the internet much for anything. I used that 40 gig cap in a single day almost. 3 computers downloading the same 10 to 20 gig game o yeah there goes the cap. and no even 40GB isnt enough 40gb would be totaly fatal.

 

[Dave K]

[citation][nom]jawshoeaw[/nom]If you watched a netflix movie every day, you might get to 40GB, on their "high quality". Youtube and iTunes don't add up to much. Everyone knows this is about punishing pirates and other heavy legitimate users (a tiny minority). But if they are only charging $1/GB above the limit, that seems fair - that's only $1 per netflix movie, as cheap or cheaper than renting.[/citation]

Our house has averaged 65gb per month over the last 6 months. Zero pirating, zero torrent. We stream Netflix, watch Hulu & Youtube, play online games. We also buy most of our PC games online (which accounts for 10+ gb/month all by itself) and have a 360 and PS3 that the kids get downloaded content for all the time. Also... I've got 2 2008 servers, 3 Vista systems, 1 XP MCE system, and 1 Debian box that all have to keep themselves updated. One of the servers runs a website that sees 1-2GB a month up upstream traffic.

I think the Comcast limit (200GB or something like that) is targeted at torrents and pirating... TW's 40GB limit is targeted at mainstream users, and the earlier suggestion that it's to dissuade people from using online streaming media could very well be a big part of it.

 

[Dave K]

Right off my router:
Date Down Up Total
Mar 2009 65.65 GB 4.31 GB 69.97 GB
Feb 2009 103.35 GB 3.85 GB 107.20 GB
Jan 2009 72.12 GB 2.65 GB 74.78 GB
Dec 2008 82.15 GB 3.38 GB 85.53 GB
Nov 2008 65.39 GB 3.04 GB 68.43 GB

That all without a bit of pirating (or without much since my kids would have to be doing it and they don't have admin to be able to install anything).

 

[Guest]

If we could all unify for about 4 months and get through without service, that would be a huge blow financially for them. Just to watch them suffer and have huge 3rd quarter company losses would encourage me to pay for movies at blockbuster and use other free wifi connections. I would love to see an effort all across rochester that they could not ignore.

 

[compulsionnra]

If they do this in Columbus they have immediately lost a customer that pays for their cable and powerboosted internet.