The days of metered internet went out in the mid-90s, man! I feel that if TW deems this trial a success, it will spread to more locals. The worst part is that there are many places that only have one provider for high-speed internet, and these people will get fucked.
The price for the higher speed/cap is about what I pay now from Comcast, but I have NO limit on the amount I can download or upload, and that’s how I like it. Will the average user need more than 40 GB? Probably not, but the thing is, more and more “average” users are using more bandwidth then just a few years ago. People are downloading TV shows from iTunes, streaming movies from Netflix, sharing massive amounts of photos with friends and family. I see a lot of people just assuming that they don’t use a lot, going with the lower tiered option, and getting royally fucked by a sudden decrease in speed, and a HUGE monthly bill when they find out that it doesn’t take much to go over 5 GB in a month.
Actually, there is a limit, Comcast just doesn’t admit it. Last I heard, it was 200GB when they finally admitted it. But, that was a year or two ago, so things could have changed.
Sounds good to me. Why should people who only browse the web and check email pay for those who download a 7GB DVD rip every night? People who use more of the service should pay more.
I mean, yeah, it’s kind of cool if you’re the guy downloading the DVDs - but under the current model, everyone else is subsidizing him.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. When you have a small percentage of users uses a large percentage of your services, others are subsidizing their use.
How it gets implemented is where TWC can fuck it up.
The users being targeted are not the average MMORPG players. The users being targeted are the file sharers, or businesses that count on unlimited bandwith being subsidized by other users. Perhaps the 12 hour/day player may run afoul of usage limits. I’m sure that line people at TWC have crunched the data, determined who was using the bandwith and how they were doing so, and communicated it up the line so that management can more effectively charge users for they’re real use.
I’m sure management will screw it up. I can guarantee, putting $500,000 Doper bucks on the line, that prices will not go down for low/moderate use, which would make lots of sense.
I know many users don’t like the idea, but to me, it is the same as charging every family sedan owner $50/week for gas, regardless of their actual usage. I would be paying for someone elses driving.
Edit: Thanks Absolut, for jumping the queue. I need to type faster…
This is a bad analogy though since gas gets used up and more has to be made. Once the fiber is run and the switches/routers installed, the actual cost of keeping that bandwidth live is minimal.
Why don’t they charge people who make lots of local calls extra? Same argument.
It could also be slow because cable is a shared connection. If his next-door neighbor has a lot of torrents going, or runs a server, it would cut into his bandwidth.
And while I don’t doubt that market researchers figured out what the two “prime” GB usages are for low-level and mid-level users, I’m guessing that the management made those caps just below those levels, ensuring that eleven months of out twelve, you’ll go over by a few gigabytes.
Although I am actually impressed that they stated the cap in GB, and not Gb, since Gb would be eight times as big and sound more impressive to people that aren’t computer-savvy enough to know the difference. I mean, the DL and UL speeds are almost always quoted in Mbps, not MBps.
Up to the point where the network becomes congested, this is true. If TWC is having congestion problems, they have to deal with it somehow, or else anyone trying to use a latency-sensitive application like streaming media, VoIP or online gaming will see unacceptable performance.
Because the usage patterns of people’s phone use doesn’t include a small subset of customers tying up a majority of the lines for 12+ hours per day. If bandwidth usage followed phone service usage then life would be very easy for ISPs.
But congestion is not a function of the amount downloaded. It’s a function of the speed at which it’s downloaded. Saying that you can only download X over Y time (when the bandwidth you’re paying for theoretically allows 10X over Y time) basically means that they aren’t selling you the bandwidth they say they are.
