I think it's rather harsh at 40GB, but it can be workable. I do a rather decent amount of Netflix streaming, gaming, downloading and more and cash in at about 30 to 35GB per month. So it's hard to say how it will affect people.

If you're on a metered line there needs to be a solid, concrete way to measure you cap. And it needs to be on the ISP's end, not via a downloadable app (which are not always accurate).

I think this potentially has more impact on households with kids than it does single users. When you have 3 to 4 users sharing the same pipe it can add up quickly.

40GB?!? Hrm... just a shade smaller than say... a High Def movie download!

Wonder how they came up with that number?

@warf0x0r:
Good point on that. HD movie downloads over services like Xbox Live cash it at 5 to 6GB on average. That could seriously affect those kinds of services, and quick.

Where is your digital distribution god now? WHERE!?!

/kidding
//kinda

I always think, what's the point of having broadband when you're going to be limited by it anyways with bandwidth caps. 40 gb is nothing to some people. Oh well, when that time comes where the bandwidth cap gets even lower I just won't use the net, or at least not at my place.

This will fly, because most people won't hit the cap and so therefore won't ever see a change in a bill or pay a single increased fee. No net effect = no big deal.

Personally, I'd leave Verizon in a heartbeat if they pulled this on me. It's the equivalent of having years and years of unlimited phone service, and then suddenly being limited to a couple hundred phone calls a month. This is a major change to the contract you signed up for, one that greatly benefits the provider since you get significantly less for the same price. But, if people don't get pissed, that's the sign that it's OK, right?

When "net neutrality" goes away it will be exactly like this. Suddenly you'll be told you have unlimited access, but only to the Tier 1 websites - pay more if you want all of the internet...

They've had metered internet here in Australia for as long as I can remember - but most ISP's are nice enough not to count uploads in the running total.

And yeah - families will feel the pinch hardest. If $SON is playing on XBox Live, $DAUGHTER is downloading music off iTunes and $PARENT goes and downloads the latest TV Episodes - you'll run through your cap before you know it. Will be interesting to see how this turns out.

40 GB? 40 GB?

Gosh darn, I can suck up 3 GB in a day. Of course I like my p_rn so maybe that explains my usage.

If the excess bandwidth was a reasonable charge and the base monthly charge was dropped, I wouldn't mind. And reasonable overage would have to be under 50 cents a gig.

My local ISP does metered service, and I've had no problem with it. There are three tiers, with the lowest tier having a speed of 768 kbps and a 1 GB cap, and the highest at about 3 Mbps and 40 GB. I'm on the lowest tier, pay $14.95/mo, and only went over once. Going over is $2.00/GB. They have an easy way to monitor usage on their website, and you can pre-buy extra download/upload capacity at $1 /GB.

It all depends on the implementation.

The question is what happens even the cable companies conspire to put caps in?

*Check that. Hightst tier is 21 Mbps.

It'd be tough on me. I'm a Braves fan living in Minnesota - I stream video of the games on MLB.tv. I haven't bothered looking at how much bandwidth it takes up (never needed to) but I'm sure if I average 15 games a month, I'd already be over 40 gigs...

Based on what my torrent sites tell me, I'm averaging over 60GB upload and 30GB in download each month. Add to that the YouTube videos that everyone in my house watches, the occasional online gaming I do, and I'd break the 40GB cap in 2 weeks, tops.

Screw that. Seriously. There were days I did 30GB alone off Verizon's newsgroup servers. 500GB months weren't uncommon.

No, this will never fly. If my ISP did this I'd cancel my account that day. I'm not a "hog", by the way, but I refuse to go back to the old days of metered service. Having to pay close attention or risk huge surcharges is bullshit. Tolerable with a cellular phone, but Internet access? No way.

I wonder, will they credit you all the bandwidth wasted by script kiddies pounding your router? Fact is, users don't necessarily have control over their bandwidth. How many non-computer literate people are going to get big fat bills after getting some worm they know nothing about? How do you explain to your grandmother that her $500 Internet bill for the month was the result of some hacker on the other side of the country? Do you think people will put up with this shit? I don't.

I and millions of others will drop TWC and go with DSL if this happens in my area. There will ALWAYS be an alternative to cable.

@Coles_Law, a bottom tier of $14.95/month actually sounds reasonable and I wouldn't mind that. If someone just does email and checks some websites, that is a great price-point.

TW's proposed $30/month basic is way over-priced, IMHO. They probably think that by narrowing the gap between the two, combined with the current price probably being around (more likely over) the $50/month mark, they can get people to select the higher tier plan with the addition of the limits. So basically you'd be getting the same thing as you normally would but with limits and surcharges for exceeding them. I like the idea in theory, but in reality I fear it will end up modeling the cell companys' methods of extracting every last penny from our pockets.

it's going to be a serious problem in my house, I have 3 kids that download movies, music, games. Plus mine and my husband usage must be in the 40GB a day.

Ahhhhh....reminds me of the old AOL days.....

I have to concur with acasto.....what about script kiddies and if your pc gets hit with a zombie.....or some other virus that is constantly sending data out? What about someone hitting you with a DDOS? Some things you can't control. I see alot of fighting between tv, youtube, and some of the VOIP companies if tiers come into play in a big way. The ISP's will be hindering the growth of so many other technologies......

I'd hate to say this but I'd rather Comcast/Time Warner cut off the bandwidth hogs as they have been doing to give me cheaper service (not that this would result in cheaper service).

I see no problem with this if at least 20% of the providers dont have this price scheme. If there is competition we can go elsewhere.

On the bright side, if you do get hit up with a huge overage because of a worm or such on your PC, then be glad that's all you got. Perhaps this could be a bit of an "early detection" feature. ;)

Our household is a Time Warner internet user. We're also avid videogame players, media consumers, and one of us is a hobbyist photographer, so he does a lot of uploading. We're easily over the 40gb mark every month.

Needless to say, if TW does this in Los Angeles, we'll be switching ISPs.

It's less misleading than marketing your connection as limited, but the cat's already out of the bag as far as bandwidth use goes. If you try to put a cap on it now and not have it be somewhere in the 100gb+ range, you are in for a world of hurt.

I'd be screwed. I download alot of video online whether it be via netflix, xbox live or just trailers for games and movies. I also download demo's for pc, 360 and ps3 and when the mood hits ill download a full game.

I'd say I average about 80 gigs a month and thats from legal downloading.

@acasto: Agreed. If you are going to limit downloads then you need to have your lowest tier of broadband access priced at like $10 a month for people who rarely use the connection for things other then email and a couple websites a day.

In fact lets be 100% fair here and just charge by the kilobyte. That way the lowest common denominator doesnt get screwed.

If my ISP started doing this I would switch in an instant, even if it meant a slower connection.

40GB? Damn, I'd be done in a one or two weeks if that.

just set it up so that additional gigs are like $1-2, and there's email alerts when you hit 10% left and then another alert when you cross over into additional charges.

It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material.

the people clogging the tubes should be the ones responsible for upgrading the plumbing.

Ah, how I suddenly weep that Time Warner is the only broadband provider in my area... I'll be praying to whatever gods exist that this testing fails miserably. I have no idea who it is they plan to market to with this, but it certainly is not the advancing technological future, whose members enjoy multiple streams of data almost constantly. Just when we have evolving services that offer to put our broadband connections to real use, we might get hit with ridunculous caps that will certainly a) handicap those who know what they're doing, and b) wreak havoc on those who don't.

I can't imagine this working out to their business advantage.

Oh yeah, this'll go over like a fart in a car. These media companies keep pushing online distribution, online TV episodes, online music, blah,blah,blah, then they say we can't actually use it? Oh wait, no, we can use it, but be prepared to pay extra. No thanks.

I think this is a have your cake and eat it too mindset on the part of Time Warner. They want you to pay additional dollars if you go over these caps set in place for the cable portion of Time Warner. But then the content portion of Time Warner wants to sell you their content with the internet being a method of delivery. So unless you have enough money that you can afford to pay penalty fees for overusage and pay for the content you are probably going to give them money for neither. And to be honest, if someone has that kind of money they probably aren't going to be browsing the net or watching too many shows and movies anyway. They can afford to be out doing other things.

The major problem is while there are lots of providers, many places only have one game in that town - so you're screwed.

And 40 gb is nothing - I burn through that in a week, if not less, just streaming and downloading legitimate content, nevermind anything illegal that I of COURSE don't get.

No. No way. Do not want.
Between a house full of internet addicts, video viewing & downloading, online gaming and having high speed internet here at the house as mandatory for work this would be a real mess. We would switch and keep switching providers until we ran out of options. At that point we would probably try to buy a T-1 because it might actually be cheaper at $150-$300 a month. We use our ISP for connection only. We don't look at their web portal site, use their email or anything else like that and never will. We already pay about $150 a month for broadband and digital TV and have been toying with a big dish set up to get rid of cable TV. We could probably make our money back on the T1 by setting up our own wireless ISP in the neighborhood and charging neighbors for access.

I don't have a problem paying more if I am really costing them a ton of money to have me as a subscriber. In fact, if they nicely sent me a note asking me to cut down usage at certain hours, etc I would probably help them out, but 40 gb is much too low for $55 a month. Put it at 100gb or even a bit higher and you weed out the high distributors on torrents and stuff.

Is the 40gb total upload and download or just download?

I think I've done 40gb in a day without torrents.....

IMHO, TW is pushing the low data cap so they can maximize on the overage amounts. 40GB doesn't target the "top 5%" .. it targets into the average user base as well.

Even Comcast who screws with packets is smart enough to be looking at 250GB/mo limits before overage fees kick in .. [www.dslreports.com]

What's the point of having a super fast 15Mbps+ connection if you can't take advantage of it? I don't need a connection that fast unless I'm downloading a lot of media, which is becoming a big part of the internet. Downloading a decent amount of video content from iTunes, streaming high-bandwidth internet radio, and downloading PS3 and Xbox360 content would use up a 40GB cap in a week or two.

If you have to set caps, set them high enough for the average *rich media* user to stay within (100GB?), and charge a nominal fee for overages (with a warning when you hit the cap).

Or just don't put in a cap. It's not my problem that the ISP can't handle the connection they've sold me. It's up to them to provide the bandwidth they're advertising.

A good way to go out of business (or at least lose the market).
For photographers, programmers, businessmen, and many other professions this would be completely unacceptable.

Do not forget the Deaf/Hard of Hearing users. They rely the internet on video phone to communicate with other deaf/hard of hearing users and to communicate through video phone relay service to Hearings as well.

I checked my usages and I have went over 60 GB a month.

Is it reasonable for deaf/hard of hearing users to be punished to use such bandwidth for communication purpose?

Would this happen if we (deaf/hard of hearing) users went over the cap and Time Warner decides to cap it and disable the internet, what would be the implication be if we had to make a E-911 call for emergency purpose?

This is why I am having a hard time knowing that a cap is reasonable. I hope Time Warner has a policy for such thing.

Whom can we contact in order to lobby for increased regulation in the cable industry? This makes me recall the consumerist post from a while back comparing the inflation rate with the price increases in the cable industry.

40GB is outragous. I hope the citizens in that town consider petitioning their local francise authority as well in order to put some pressure on Time-Warner.

I think all the cable companies are in a hurry to blame super users in order to put the squash on companies like netflix and hulu. If you control the pipes, you control the content distribution. The last thing these cable companies want is to provide internet access while the consumer goes to the open market to download content such as movies and programs.

I think that metered internet is the fairest pricing model, however, Time Warner's execution of it could be better. I think the low-end option could be a bit cheaper

That said, I think this model is step in the right direction and way, way, better than the scary direction that other ISP's are leaning towards: pricing based on where you surf instead of how much you surf.

At least they are being upfront about it. I wouldn't have any problem at all IF there was true competition among internet providers. Unfortunately, most of us have just one or 2 providers to chose from. The Government has granted these companies a monopoly by regulating who can run cable/phone in the streets. Until we have true competition, we'll all continue to be screwed by Comcast/Time-Warner, etc. If you don't like it, talk to your local regulatory agency and tell them you want more choices.

If TW implements this widely, they will have customers leaving in droves in areas where they have a choice of ISP's.

@BPorche: That is a bit of a strawman argument. Most deaf people use TTY/TTD services, instant messaging and email for communication, not video chat.

Besides, the bandwidth for videophone communication is (usually) pretty narrow, like 50k/sec, since you're constrained by the upload speed of all parties in the call. You'd have to log hundreds of hours of video chat before you hit your limit.

i bet this could hurt services like netflix and other sites that provide streaming media. I guess they have no recourse in which to sue cable companies for loss of revenue. I know, depending on price, that i'd probably cut out netflix streaming rather if that's all i had to cut to stay in a lower bracket.

@BPorche: Also, keep in mind that "cap" doesn't mean that they cut off your internet after you've reached your 40GB cap. It just means that they start charging $1 for each additional GB that you go over.

This just goes to show how deregulation has allowed the telecommunications industry to take advantage of us all. In every other industrialized country broadband is getting cheaper as it gets faster. In the US they're tightening the noose. Soon the internet will be so controlled by the ISPs that we'll only look at the sites they want us to see at the speeds they want us to see them at.