Time Warner Cable is running a pilot program in Texas where they’re metering your bandwidth usage and charging extra if you exceed your monthly allotment. This also gives them the opportunity to create a tiered system where you pay more for more bandwidth. Richard is a TWC Texas customer, and his story is a good example of how things work in a tiered, metered system like this. The bottom line: if metered broadband comes to your area, get used to paying extra to take advantage of things like Hulu (which is free) or Netflix video streaming (which you already pay for).
I am a concerned consumer in the Golden Triangle region where Time Warner (The cable monopoly of Southeast TX) has decided to launch testing for overage charges on unrealistic caps made for their service.
Recently I have tried to stop relying on more costly services such as VOD so I have turned to NetFlix and Hulu which both have online viewing services. These changes soon put me over the 20 GB cap for my internet plan placed in our area. I am aware Comcast is taking a similar route but their limits are set substantially higher @ 250gb. I am not trying to do anything illegal here mind you. I am just trying to find cheaper alternatives to enjoy television. I was hit with a $10 charge ($1 per GB over) and this is what prompted a phone call to them and made me aware of this new billing process they are running only in my direct service area. I was told by a rep that streaming content like NetFlix creates a “bottleneck” type situation and makes other customers suffer. I find this hard to believe since other companies who do not use this method make out just fine. 20GB a month just seems far to low for someone who uses legal online resources like myself.
To Time Warner’s credit I was credited back the $10 as a “one time courtesy” w/ the option of paying more ($10) for their Road Runner Turbo which has a 40gb cap which is still far from reasonable, or be discouraged from using my Netflix/Hulu. Additionally they gave me the signin to an online resource showing the amount of bandwidth coming from my modem each month.(their math also perplexes me in the attached picture). I am not upset with my speed as it is @ 7 MB/sec but to pay more just for more bandwidth seems ludicrous! As a matter of fact this practice could also discourage users from OTHER VOIP providers like Vonage. It seems TWC is trying to further discourage competition in an area where they are already a monopoly! If not then why didn’t they start it in someplace where there are other cable providers for competition?
Since I have no alternatives to switch since I have no use for phone and Dry Loop DSL is not available in my area I am apparently over a barrell up a creek!
Richard
P.S. I have attached a picture showing you also how their tool shows a bit of strange math on how they calculated my overages! Mind you the calculater is my exact calculations which seems very simple math! (100 (for percent) divided by 20 (gb) times the 27.56(gb) i went over. Which should give me my percentage (137.8% not 147). If I am missing something please tell me!
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If a company is going to do this – They need to do is for EVERYONE.
What I mean is if someone only uses 5% of the “internet cap”, then they should be paying LESS then the person who uses 95% of the “internet cap”
But what these companies what to do is still charge everyone the same high price, but also charge extra for those who use the most.
FAIL
@coan_net: Profit=WIN
I don’t believe TWC can do this to me for some time as I’m currently contracted with them for another 18 months. However if they do try and impose this cap on me I’m switching immediately to whatever else is available.
Times are different TWC, learn to change with them.
And I hope my electric company has fiber optic in by then.
Road Runner “Turbo,” eh? So, turbines are supercharging the service? I see.
Although comcast is starting at 250 gb, how long until they steadily start dropping that to 200, 100, 50…, then implementing tiers.
Pretty sad though, on one hand Obama wants to implement better high speed internet for America, and on the other hand, you have the ISP’s crushing new technology like Hulu, online gaming, etc, in order to reap a better profit. Honestly, if I was hit with such low tiers, I’d probably do without.
@ Saboth
You and me both. Honestly I know it sounds silly, but I’d rather do without than have all this self-serving bullshit foisted on me.
Why the hell hasn’t someone come along and asked these folks why they don’t see fit to increase the pipelines? We’re stuck in the past, and nobody seems to question it, or be bothered by it.
@Cyberxion101: i would expect that time (when people start becoming noticeably bothered by it) will be coming real soon if this becomes the norm.
it’s the usual comfort = complacence routine. so long as companies can marginalize their critics, most people will be unaffected, & therefore, uncaring.
here’s something to think about: why is it that cable cos. have no problem piping 300 stations into every room in your house uninterrupted, on demand, 24/7, but you do a little casual surfing on ONE computer & you’re exceeding your allotment of media? something’s not right here.
This is the problem with the streaming model of intellectual property protection–you need to overload the pipes during primetime to watch TV.
If it were possible to download the shows instead of streaming them, I’d happily set up my laptop to do it at 3 AM. Hell, I’d even accept variable pricing and work with my utility to put me in a queue and let me set up the downloads for when the pipes were least busy.
But nope, you have MORONS refusing to innovate and protecting outdated business models. And, of course, they just lose in the end as people figure out ways past those outdated models.
So Stupid.
@theboomboomcars: Okay, that makes sense, thanks.
But what about charging for going over monthly bandwidth limits? If the line can only take so much traffic at a given time (not monthly, but at a particular instant), the overage charges are just profit, no?
Is it better to look at it as a penalty, as opposed to “you’re buying more bandwidth”?
I find it funny – Dial-up started up with metered usage based on the amount of time you spent online and eventually went to an unlimited usage for a flat fee per month. Telephone service also eventually went this way. When broadband companies offered the unlimited internet usage for a flat monthly rate, I thought they’d actually learned a lesson from these other businesses.
I guess, if cable companies were to keep the current pricing for the 250GB per month “unlimited” account, I’d be okay with them offering lower tiers for less money. This would encourage cable companies to upgrade their overall infrastructure because they’d be adding many more broadband users and there would be far greater broadband market penetration. Unfortunately, I know that’s not the case.
Seeing as I’m out of range for DSL, I guess I’ll just switch to subscribing to an unlimited data plan on my cellphone and get a 3g wireless card for my laptop. Or order an analog phone line from another provider and go back to dial-up.
I am not too young to remember Dial-up, ThinkerTDM. I am not too young to remember BBSing, either, which I used.
And yeah, it does cover bandwidth, since I’m paying for my service.
“When your ISP starts charging by the gig, don’t be writing here like a little bitch”
Are you kidding me? Can we get this jerk banned? You’re realling calling me a bitch? Wow.
Bet they don’t try that garbage in markets with fiber service. . .
Charter implemented a cap of 100 GB in my area, effective February 2009. Charter did not send prior notice of this change, just a note buried in the March bill to go online to check for changes in the TOS. No explanation of what changed. Since I have been following the “Tale of Caps” on DSLReports I knew where to look, but most folks would just be lost.
The “Regulators” are in bed with the cable and phone companies, so we can scream and cry fowl with righteous indignation, but don’t expect the “Regulators” to side with us consumers.
It is included if you have something like Vonage, but it’s not a big deal – voice is a very small bitrate product. Even using the phone 24/7 for a whole month would only use about 2Gbytes of bandwith.
@mac-phisto
Last year, they invested more than 3/4 of their profits in their network.
@JustThatGuy3: considering they had a $7 billion loss last year, does that mean they actual removed some of their network? XD
i can’t find any substantial information to back up this claim. they did a speed upgrade not too long ago & acquired adelphia to increase their market base, but i can’t find any information that they were increasing the number of network nodes or reducing the number of subscribers/node.
What greatly disturbs me about this sort of thing, aside from the general obfuscated greed and idiocy, is the asphyxiating affect bandwidth caps like this will have on those of us who are Free software users, and IT professionals, who are currently assumed to use their home internet. Employer-paid ISP plans to match the cell phones, anyone?
Last time the subject came up, I built a basic gaming box at Newegg: 300MB or so. Read some tech news sites: 150MB or so.
Then, let’s say you want the whole of Debian Stable, or SuSE: you’ll blow through that 20GB cap in one night (been there, done that, discovered that Cox did not enforce that 2GB/day cap that I’d just gone over by 10+ times). My desktop and notebook can each chew up multiple GB per month in OS updates.
Will ibiblio, kernel.org, gatech.edu, etc., be included free? In all poetic justice (IE, they are graciously giving away bandwidth), I doubt it.
I’m not saying that’s the only way to use a lot of bandwidth (pr0n!), but a cap at 20GB would destroy my ability to get work done. I would sure be dropping any ISP that tried to pull this kind of stunt.
Now, if they want to make it $20/month for 10GB (IE, base plan pricing) and charge a some cents for each GB, I’ll bite. GB/mo will likely correlate pretty well to bandwidth costs during prime hours, and I’m not against heavier users paying more–as long as it is appropriately more. Even a quarter per GB is way too much, though. $1/GB is a, “if only we could get rid of customers, but still get paid,” strategy.
The issue is that they significantly oversell what they have, they may buy a 10Gbps connection, and sell 10,000 10Mbps connections on it, assuming the users on average use 10% of their bandwidth (which is average, 95% of people use less than that), they can do it. The problem is some people want to use what they are sold, 5% might use 100% of what they are sold, but if they do then that means the they will use 50% of the bandwidth available, which the ISP can’t handle. So they are going after the top 5% of people to kick them off or make them pay, because with the current pricing scheme those people do not pay for what they use.
In the server marked they do charge by the byte, just like this, and there is the option of unmetered, and its easily twice as expensive as a home connection at the same speed, and they don’t have a huge infrastructure of thousands of miles of wires to support (like cable does), server companies only run the wires across a room
The big trouble is, all of the ISP providers would love to go to a model like this. Broadband connections *are* similar to electricity in that TWC, Comcast, AT&T or whoever do pay a charge to their backbone providers based on how much traffic they are carrying. More customers using higher bandwidth equates to higher charges for their wholesale backbone use. Being cable or DSL or satellite doesn’t really matter – it’s more about who owns a backbone or gets better rates there. This is really no different than cell phone companies selling different tiers of service with a fixed set of minutes and charging more for going over that limit. Businesses passing the costs of business along to the customer shouldn’t be anything new to readers here.
That all being said, 20 GB seems really low, especially since they apparently only offer one higher “tier” of service.
We live in interesting times. Companies constantly researching ways to alienate their customers and put themselves out of business, all for the sake of making money.
I also don’t see how you’re cap is 20gb, you use 27.56gb, but you’re over 9.59gb.
27.56 – 20 = 9.59?
I’ve been a TWC customer since it acquired Comcast’s market in the DFW Metroplex. For years I’ve never had a problem doing things I love most: streaming internet radio, watching television online, gaming, etc.
However, in the last few months I’ve been repeatedly disconnected for “abuse” by using “too much bandwidth.” I should note that I’ve been paying for a 10 megabit download connection and rarely do I use the full bandwidth, however there is often at least some bandwidth going (usually from the internet radio).
Let me give some numbers. The first time I talked to the abuse department, they told me that the average TWC customer uses 40gb a month. Today, the woman tells me that the average TWC customer uses 32gb a year. I don’t believe any of these numbers. On top of that, when I told the woman that one of the things I’ve done for the past month is stream internet radio at 192kbps, which totals to approximately 55gb in four weeks, she told me I was wrong and that it barely uses any bandwidth.
I’m moving in May to an area served by Verizon FIOS. Fuck TWC.
Welcome to Canada…
We’ve had two companies running the entire market over here that decided to both enact caps over us since 2000.
Back in 2000 though when they didn’t have the software to accurately monitor and charge they used to just send you letters telling you to leave.
Here’s my usage report so far for the month (ours looks a little less ominous than yours since ours is green lol).
[i44.tinypic.com]
I would highly recommend emailing or calling your congressman and complain of price fixing! The government made the phone companies give equal access to other companies to sell their service at a reduced price! Sqeaky wheel gets the grease!!
obama and the dems better stop this kind of thing else they aren’t worth squat. metering something that costs less each year to offer is a load of nonsense, its not water or electricity. they’d just rather keep the cash than continue to upgrade their offerings. they’d rather we fall even further behind other countries in broadband.
@martinmark
I think our U.S. internet providers would be taking a cue from our cell phone companies and not have a charge cap. We can expect to see Consumerist articles of people getting hammered with thousand dollar bills.
Is unlimited usage your current monthly bill + $25 (the fee cap)?
@mac-phisto
reply’s not working correctly, for some reason.
wasn’t talking about net income, it’s a bs metric anyway – cash is what matters. they generated, after taxes and interest, about $4.5 billion in cash last year. they put $3.5 billion into capital expenditures (network upgrades, new digital boxes, and so on).
Well they are causing problems, the number of actual connections has little to do with it (they can work without knowledge of connections, even for TCP). The ISP makes their money by overselling a service, you think you are getting it because the burst speed is what you paid for, and they bet that you only use a tiny amount of that. the video and bittorent sites are hard on them because those applications do not do bursts of small amounts of data, instead they are high speed and high amounts of data, and suck a significant amount of bandwidth from their uplink, since they are overselling the service a relativity small amount of people with their modems maxed can max out the ISP, bittorrent and video are the popular applications that max modems for a significant amount time (meaning a higher probability of multiple users having their modems maxed at that moment)
@edman007: If you can max the modem, they probably aren’t trying to screw you. 42mb/s would be nice. That said, my cable is advertised 9mb, and I’ve now broken 21mb in early morning hours (GA Tech, Virginia Tech, and kernel.org at the same time), and keep several mb during prime hours.
Invest in the network, keep customers happy, AND STILL OVERSELL. Brilliant, amiright?
It makes me glad I have a 10mb Metro Ethernet Internet connection in my home office. While much more expensive than DSL or Cable broadband all the silly ISP jack-up charges and metered crap have no effect on me. Best of all I can ramp it to 40mb by making one phone call, anything over that and they (phone company) has to run fiber to me. Being your own ISP/site hosting has it’s advantages.
@Nighthawke: Might want to double check that… I was on one of those supposedly “grandfathered” unlimited plans from Sprint and just got my first warning letter for going way over my new 5gb cap…
20gb a month is crazy talk for home internet!!
I use up at least 60gb+ with online gameing, Hulu, Netflix and games I buy online from Steam. I think Comcast did the right thing with its 250gb cap and Cox was thinking about a 100gb cap, should be 150gb at the least. Sucks hard for this guy.
If Cox dares to put a pay-as-you-play thing such as this they will immediately no longer have me as a customer.
@justaguy3: i know (about the reply function). notice how i was able to reply before, but not now. ben told me to ask these guys, so i started a topic…maybe if enough of us get together on this, we can get it fixed: [getsatisfaction.com]
anyway, i looked at their financials & read thru a big portion of their annual report (slow work day)…i didn’t see anything that explicitly said “we increased bandwidth allocation on our existing network”. hey, maybe they did. i’m not so optimistic. generally, companies don’t like to invest in capital simply to retain existing customers – they want to subscribe new ones.
here’s an interesting article about “node overload”. it’s a little dated, but still relevant, imo (which is not, in any way, that of an expert) –> [www.birds-eye.net]
It’s interesting that the pilot is being done in Texas. I probably have a prejudiced impression of the area, but I imagine that the region has a lower percentage of households with multiple computers, media servers, etc., which gives the pilot a greater chance of success than if it were done in the Northeast.
This really bothers me. Why? I pay for Road Runner High Speed (not Turbo and not Lite). I’m supposed to get up to 7.5MB of download…but it turns out the key word here is “up to”. It is acceptable for me to only receive as low as 2.5MB of download. Do they send me money back if I don’t reach optimal rates? No. Do they fix the problem if I don’t get 7.5MB of download? No.
@Pylon
Why do I hate every comment you make? Probably because they’re all reek of douche…
1) If a company is doing it for a reason other than making a profit, perhaps they should detail how much their overhead costs are and what not to prove to the consumer that it isn’t purely profit driven before they lose every single customer.
2) As you very well know, satellite ISPs charge out the ass and are outrageously capped.
3) Sure, you could go dialup, but that really isn’t an option for about 95% of people who want to, you know, actually browse websites such as this one.
4) Several of the options you listed aren’t even available in the OPs area. True wireless? WTF does that even mean? City-wide? Stealing someone elses connection? http://www.truewireless.com which is an enterprise solution?
Your “solutions” are about as handy as a DIY dentistry kit. Sure, you don’t have to pay for the only dentist in town, this pair of rusty pliers does the same exact job.
Where the heck is the local public utility commission on this let alone the FCC .
The old regional Bell operating companies (RBOC) were regulated into getting Joe the farmer dail tone miles away from everyone else at little or no extra cost.So what’s the difference between this modern version of the RBOC called the local cable operator -none as far as I am concerned as should be regulated as such .
It’s one thing to charge for different services but since this ‘ business ‘ is being conducted over public right of ways so the public and/or subscribers should have a say on the corporate pricing .
If Time Warner doesn’t have the bandwidth for their customer base then don’t sell it .If this was a physical store the company might be charged with bait and switch -they bait you in with a subscription rate and switch you to a ala carte pricing scheme .
20GB cap? That ridiculous. How are you to watch all that streaming video they talk about in the ads?
@CyberSkull: by watching only their own streaming video. Seems to me this flies in the face of net neutrality, due to that.
This is monopolistic, anti-competitive bull$#!+. They’re obviously pissed at Hulu, Netflix, Vonage, etc, and this effectively kills them all in one fell swoop. Goodbye iTunes, hello crappy on-demand TWC video? Goodbye on-demand cable-a-la-carte Hulu, hello bazillion channels I don’t want for waaay to much $$$$?
Ugh. This is what will force me (sigh) back to Verizon for Dry Loop DSL.
Why can’t the FCC take note that this is pretty skeezy when it comes to keeping the market competitive and free? Is there some initiative that’ll fire off faxes to congress about this?
I currently get my internet + TV through TWC. They pull this crap in my area my account will be canceled.
Not only is tiered internet stupid, on top of that 20GB?!
As a TWC subscriber, this really pisses me off. But, if or when this does go into effect, I’ll just switch to Verizon.
My cable company (Wave Broadband) started doing this a couple months ago. In order to get everyone to switch over to one of the new metered plans (so you couldn’t be grandfathered), they capped EVERYONE at 2 GB/day. Once you hit 2GB/day, your connection pretty much went to dial up speed. They didn’t even bother to tell everyone that they were doing this. We were just left scratching our heads when every day our Internet connection went down. At first they denied anything was wrong, then after several weeks they finally admitted to what they were doing. Then it took another month before they had their new metered plans in place to get rid of the 2 GB/day cap. Unbelievable.
Moral of the story….watch out because I’m sure Wave isn’t the only cable company with this bright idea.
So TWC penalizes people for using more than thier allotted bandwidth, but I suspect they don’t give refunds to people who use less.
It’s just like the cell carriers…charge the crap out of people who use more network resources while also skimming the gravy off of people who pay full price for a monthly contract and hardly ever use the phone at all. If it was true “metering” then broadband should be practically free for people who only use it to check thier e-mail.
It must be nice to have your cake and eat it too.
You guys know that with “universal broadband,” this will be much, much worse?
fortunately, Uverse just came online in my area.
i dont plan on switching, but if TWC pulls this on me, im out!
I wonder how long before this cancer appears on other cable systems owned by Time Warner (like their BrightHouse Networks in Florida).
Just a backup of my company’s website (NOT internal server) runs about 1GB and that’s just PDFs. A 20GB limit is just pathetic. Just about what I’d expect from Time Wanker actually.
@FLConsumer
Time Warner doesn’t own BrightHouse – it’s a separate company (has been for ~5 years).
What’s missing here is just how much the OP’s paying for his 20Gb limit, and how fast that service is. 20Gb is heinously low and I would not accept such a limit unless the service was something like $9.99 a month or less. Truly shitty.
@mariospants: 20GB should be free, at least if you have cable TV.
You could always order cheap phone service and DSL. You don’t have to hook up the phone… phone service without making any calls is only about $10/month… sucks to pay for something you don’t use, but if your alternative is paying an extra $10/month for bandwidth…
I still don’t understand how they are able to get away with putting a limit on your service when you are paying for their “Unlimited” internet. Its like paying more for eating more at an all you can eat buffet.
@Synthesis: There are regularly stories of people getting kicked out of buffets for eating too much. Really doesn’t matter, because they’ll just stop using the word “unlimited”
Couple o’ things:
1. It’s most likely being trialled in the Golden Triangle division of TWC because it was someone like that division’s GM that wanted to do it. As a former TWC employee, I can tell you that the divisions basically do what they want and have very little corporate guidance. So if a division says, “We want to try making all users type with bananas on their hands,” they can do that. But it doesn’t mean that all divisions will be following suit.
2. TWC is constantly upgrading their network, but as has been pointed out, they still oversell what they’re maximally capable of. Torrents do flood the network, it’s as simple as that. So let’s say they oversell the network by 200% based on metrics of what normal usage is. 100 users could each use .5% of the network, leaving 50% wide open. But, if one user appropriates 50% of the network you’ve got a problem. Should a business build their infrastructure to support the 99th percentile of their users? Probably not, but they should consider moving them into a different service plan.
3. Someone said that the price for this technology goes down. Well, yes and no. Have you looked at the prices of computers lately? The top-of-the-line models are still at roughly the same price point as ten years ago! That’s the problem the ISPs face as well. Yes, the higher end stuff performs better, but the costs remain about the same and the technology demands increase with the performance. (Try running an old DOS video game on a modern computer to see what I’m talking about.)
4. The most reasonable approach would be to simply charge customers a flat rate per bit, but that’s not going to happen, unfortunately. Numerous business reasons, and not all of them are that smart, in my opinion.
5. Usage demands have changed, and everyone’s got to deal that. Torrents and videos have gone from being the purview of the computer elite to being something that many people are doing thanks to NetFlix, Hulu, and the like. We’re reaching a point where there’s more content available than can be reasonably accommodated.
6. As far as the paranoiac rants about providers doing this so you only see “their” content, it’s just simply untrue. There is no workable model that makes TWC a true content provider, nor do they have an intention to be one, as far as I know.