Time Warner is about to fuck you the fuck up

[counsel_wolf]

@Musicat

My complaint about the new billing concept is this: I am promised a level of service for a certain price because the ISP doesn’t expect everyone to need 100% of the service 100% of the time. But if I actually use it as promised, the ISP says, “We didn’t really mean YOU and we didn’t expect you to take us up on our offer – you are abusing the system.”

As I said it’s not a new concept, this debate has been ongoing for a very very long time. I personally regard the current status quo of unmetered access to likely be a temporary abberation.

Also, if you do use your connection 100% all the time, expect to get dropped by your provider once your current billing period is up, if you’re taking up 10x as much resources as other customers and paying the same, why should they persist with the business relationship? This is pretty standard practise in the industry.

[counsel_wolf]

@Musicat

You are using the fixed-width pipe to send data at the same time as the test? And you’re surprised that one affects the other? How else would it work?

No speed test is valid if other things are running at the same time.

To expand on this answer, even a download is effectively a 2 way process, Your machine is constantly sending ‘yeah I got that bit’ messages back to the server that is sending you the download. If you have an upload running, these replies can get delayed or even lost, causing the download to pause or to resend packets many times (because it thinks you didn’t get them). Many home PC products that talk over the network do not play particularly nice with others and attempt to use all available resources (P2P programs usually have a setting allowing you to adjust how much of your bandwidth it will use).

[counsel_wolf]

@bouv

From what I know, they are still raking in profits. Once the infrastructure is set-up (which it is,) then the costs if keeping the bandwidth isn’t hard. Whether you personally use your connection at it’s maximum 24/7, or use it once a day to check email, the cost difference to TWC isn’t much.

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, though.

Can’t quote chapter and verse on this but I have talked to quite a lot of people in the industry about it. There is some concern that the standard user profile is moving away from ‘read email and maybe look at some porn’ to ‘download 5 TV shows, watch youtube for 2 hours and leave the p2p downloads on all the time’ and there just isn’t the capacity for every single user to do that. They could lay down more fiber, but that’s very expensive.

To address some other points raised by other posters of course the companies will try make more money than they should. Ideally nobody should have a choice of only one ISP, and any cartels on pricing should be punished severely so that the market sorts it out. Bandwidth is as people have pointed out a cheap commodity, it should be charged as such.

[neutron_star]

@pulykamell

Actually, I do have one factual question here. I just checked my throughput speeds, and I’ve got 13,374/Kbps download and 361/Kbps upload. Is this normal? First of all, I didn’t think my download speeds are supposed to be that high

If you’re using Comcast, they have a thing called PowerBoost that bumps your speed up to 12Mbps (or higher - I get about 18-19Mbps on those speed tests) for the first sixty seconds of your download.

This has multiple benefits: it lets you download relatively small files exceptionally quickly. It fools speed tests into thinking you have a kickass connection when you really don’t. And, probably the main reason for it, they get to put SPEEDS UP TO 12Mbps* in their ads.

[Rysto]

@Musicat

My complaint about the new billing concept is this: I am promised a level of service for a certain price because the ISP doesn’t expect everyone to need 100% of the service 100% of the time. But if I actually use it as promised, the ISP says, “We didn’t really mean YOU and we didn’t expect you to take us up on our offer – you are abusing the system.”

Look, the simple fact is that ISPs have a business models that is predicated on assumptions about consumer behaviour. If those assumptions become invalid, the business model must change. I don’t see what’s so hard to understand here.

[Evil_Captor]

@Princhester

Legitimate, sure, but you can’t expect to have that kind of usage and expect to pay the same as someone who just gets email and browses the SDMB for too much longer, I suspect.

Sure, here’s what’ll happen. They’ll raise Fugazi’s prices to cover his usage and keep charging everyone else like they’re subsidizing Fugazi’s usage (and others like him) and pocket the difference. You can bet on it.

[Musicat]

@counsel wolf

To expand on this answer, even a download is effectively a 2 way process, Your machine is constantly sending ‘yeah I got that bit’ messages back to the server that is sending you the download. If you have an upload running, these replies can get delayed or even lost, causing the download to pause or to resend packets many times (because it thinks you didn’t get them). Many home PC products that talk over the network do not play particularly nice with others and attempt to use all available resources (P2P programs usually have a setting allowing you to adjust how much of your bandwidth it will use).

Not apliccable to me. I upload large (>100MB) video files daily. I download large files frequently, like tonight, I watched a 2 hour, full-motion, DVD-quality movie over the Internet. I don’t know what “home PC products” are.

During the last 4 hours, number of packets lost: 0.

@counsel wolf

As I said it’s not a new concept, this debate has been ongoing for a very very long time. I personally regard the current status quo of unmetered access to likely be a temporary abberation.

And I regard metered access as an anacronism. I remember once getting a monthly bill from AOL, ca 1994, for $75 for the metered time spent online at 14.4K. The unlimited plan came not long after and revolutionized the industry, not to mention simplifying the billing.

Also, if you do use your connection 100% all the time, expect to get dropped by your provider once your current billing period is up, if you’re taking up 10x as much resources as other customers and paying the same, why should they persist with the business relationship? This is pretty standard practise in the industry.

I am probably taking up 1000x of the resources of my neighbor, but according to a recent conversation with Charter, they have no problem with my usage. I have been doing this for about 3 years and they love me, as I have assisted over 20 neighbors with new Charter connections (and AT&T has lost more than 20 customers). Basically, I encourage my clients to call me first, as Charter’s tech support is lacking, and I can usually fix their problem faster and cheaper. The way I look at it, ISPs should praise hackers and reduce their costs, not increase them. Charter owes me big time, and so far, we’re both pretty happy.

@Rysto

Look, the simple fact is that ISPs have a business models that is predicated on assumptions about consumer behaviour. If those assumptions become invalid, the business model must change. I don’t see what’s so hard to understand here.

But it doesn’t mean I have to like it or roll over and accept it without a fight.

[pulykamell]

@Musicat

You are using the fixed-width pipe to send data at the same time as the test? And you’re surprised that one affects the other? How else would it work?

I’m not surprised it affects the other. I’m surprised at how much it effects the other. Look at my numbers again:

Baseline: 13,000 Kbps download, 361 Kbps upload

While uploading a file (presumably at the same upload speed as above), my download speed went from 13,000 Kbps to 200 Kbps. That’s a mighty huge difference, considering the uploading is only taking up 361 Kbps.

[Little_Plastic_Ninja]

I doubt this Intarweb thing would have such wide popularity if the costs were still metered. I highly doubt the technology would be as wide-reaching as it is now, at least – we wouldn’t have YouTube or iTunes, especially iTunes movies, just to start.

To the complaints of subsidizing: I hear this an awful lot. People always say they only want to be charged for hours, weeks, days, months, etc that they actually play – not that they have access to do so. I’m against this with my own company, and here’s why:

Currently we have a single amount everyone gets charged for the same product. You play every hour of every day for a month, you get billed the same as someone who didn’t play at all. If we changed this to pay as you go, some people would pay next to nothing, it’s true. Some people would be paying us hundreds a month.

That’s fair, you say. The little guy shouldn’t subsidize the big guy. Fine. So now we’ve created a random scale. Let’s say we charge a quarter an hour. Assuming eight hours of sleep per night and the other sixteen on the game (Ah, to be unemployed) we’ve just upped someone’s bill from $15/month to $120/month. I suppose this gives parents a nice metric to determine how much time Little Timmy spends on the game. They will then call me and yell at me because we’re corrupting their son. Little Timmy will call and say he wasn’t playing on Saturday really, he just left the game idle and his cousin played so we shouldn’t charge him. Then Bobby will call and say someone hacked his account and left it on for six days while he was in Tahiti, charging his credit card extra and overdrawing his account and forcing him to fail to make his house payment.

Most of this stuff happens anyway to a lesser extent, but now it will happen more and constantly and without straightforward ways of combating it. What’s more, people are now paying for last month, not next month. I like charging them for next month. Once they’ve canceled payment they’re done, gone, we don’t have to talk to them again.

[Merkwurdigliebe]

I’m of two minds on this one…

An example:
When I lived in Europe, both in Germany and Denmark, both cell-phone plans were really cheap. There were no “minutes” nothing of the sort. If you want a fancy phone, then you pay a minimum each month. It was similar to minutes, but you could opt out with a cheap phone. I paid about 30 bucks a month. That was a minimum and functioned similar to the way minutes work here. But when I went over? Nothing. It was a modest per-minute rate.

Contrast that to here in the US where they will fuck you and your entire family for going one minute over your plan.

We seem to be accustomed to getting fucked by telecoms in the US with difficult to understand plans and severe penalties. So what we have is a system where the ultra-careful probably pay less, and the people who routinely go over their minutes pay a lot. Either that, or you don’t completely use your minutes which means you waste money. In no other business do we tolerate such bullshit. Incidentally, it’s why I think rollover minutes are bullshit. If I can’t use the minutes this month, what makes you think I will be able to use them next month? I don’t see anything that I couldn’t plan for requiring me to use more minutes than I do? Can anyone here seriously see a reason? I bet nobody uses them at all.

What is useful is free mobile-to-mobile. Okay, but back to the point.

I don’t have a problem with any kind of pay-as-you-go system. It’d be great if we all payed what it costs, plus whatever else TWC wants to put on top for their troubles. I have no problem with that. I understand companies need to make a profit. Just don’t fuck me over! I don’t mind paying by the GB. But let’s get real, folks. 5 GB is nothing for a month. I have used .39 GB today only surfing the web. My connection costs I think 35 dollars a month. It is (tested) 10Mbps / 350 Kbps. What they’re trying to sell for 30 dollars is so far shittier than what I have now, it’s ridiculous.

Anyway, Time Warner has pretty garbage service. I don’t know if this is normal for cable, but the upload speeds are horrendus. Who in their right mind thinks that 350kbs is good enough these days? I can’t videoconference because it is garbage. The service sucks from time to time (a common cable problem I hear).

Shit, I’m not going anywhere because I can only get cable. I tried every avenue for internet other than TWC, and it was simply the only gig in my neighborhood. So if they implement this, I guess I’m screwed. Although I have heard that some resellers won’t do this. I use Earthlink in that case. I’m not quite sure how that even works though.

But fuck TWC. They should be investing in their goddamned network like Verizon instead of this horseshit. And they have the gall to put out ads saying, “We’ve been using fiber for 15 years!” Yes I realize that you guys use fiber on your backbone, along with everyone else. The big deal about Fios is that it is actually fiber to the premises. That’s new and awesome. Plus couldn’t fios theoretically get faster on the same infrastructure? I’m not sure, so if you know the answer…

[mhendo]

@bouv

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.

@Merijeek

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.

@Fugazi

Luckily, I have Comcast not Time Warner. If Comcast goes to this plan, I’ll drop them like a hot potato.

It looks like Comcast is on its way to adopting a new penalty system for heavy users. It’s slightly different from the Time Warner system because instead of imposing hard caps, it throttles the bandwidth of heavy users during busy periods.

The new Internet traffic method will put the online traffic of ordinary Internet users ahead of heavy users at certain times to maintain overall Internet speeds, Douglas said. Thus, the Internet experience for heavy users - so-called Internet hogs - could slow during periods of Internet congestion.

Link

They start trials this month, and plan system-wide implementation by the end of the year.

[brickbacon]

Won’t this plan just introduce a whole new wave of people stealing wi-fi like the phishers used to steal AOL account info?

[Crocodiles_And_Boulevards]

Another question relevant to these pricing plans:

Do policies and legislation keep pace at all with advancing technology?

In other words, by the time some ruleset is agreed upon, used, tested, billed, etc. could the standards and limits and costs not already have heavily shifted? If so, how do you keep people honest in such a situation?

[Fugazi]

@mhendo

It looks like Comcast is on its way to adopting a new penalty system for heavy users. It’s slightly different from the Time Warner system because instead of imposing hard caps, it throttles the bandwidth of heavy users during busy periods

If the network truely is conjested during peak times, it only makes sense to throttle back the really heavy users. But the article doesn’t say how often they are conjested, or by how much, or what they consider a heavy user, and how much would a heavy user get throttled. If your 10 Meg drops to 5 Meg during peak times, that’d be fine. But if it suddenly drops to 100K, that would suck.

[neutron_star]

@Merkwurdigliebe

I don’t know if this is normal for cable, but the upload speeds are horrendus.

That’s normal for all residential connections - DSL, cable, whatever. The upstream is often more than an order of magnitude slower than the downstream. You’ll get that even with FiOS.

[mks57]

Any similarity between the pricing of quasi-monopoly services like high-speed Internet and rational pricing models is purely coincidental. Costs are largely irrelevant, they will charge whatever rates that they think will maximize their profits. They aren’t selling a commodity, they are selling a service with largely usage-insensitive costs. If you look at the history of the telephone system in the United States, network costs were largely driven by the goal of providing a certain quality of service during peak usage periods, not by how many minutes a subscriber used his telephone.

[Evil_Captor]

If only one large provider were to stay with unlimited bandwidth at reasonable prices, they would soon have everybody’s business. I don’t see this happening. I see industry-wide collusion to create the highest possible prices. That’s the way it tends to work in the t elecom industry.

[Musicat]

@pulykamell

I’m not surprised it affects the other. I’m surprised at how much it effects the other. Look at my numbers again:

Baseline: 13,000 Kbps download, 361 Kbps upload

While uploading a file (presumably at the same upload speed as above), my download speed went from 13,000 Kbps to 200 Kbps. That’s a mighty huge difference, considering the uploading is only taking up 361 Kbps.

I understand your surprise…the figs don’t seem to add up.

My WAG is that overhead is the culprit. When doing several things at once, the switching time must be taken into account. If the task switching procedure is inefficient, the switching overhead time can become greater than the central task time.

Not knowing the internal code for whatever’s going on in your machine, I couldn’t suggest more than just this in theory. But as an example, consider the overall difference between an algorithm that transfers a single byte, then switches to another task, then back, compared to one that transfers a large data block before switching.

And I have found that CPU speed in PCs can become a significant factor when data transfer speeds increase. I have an old PC that seems to max out at about 30% of my 10mb/sec download rate, where a newer one can reach about 80%, other factors being roughly equal.

[Princhester]

@Evil Captor

If only one large provider were to stay with unlimited bandwidth at reasonable prices, they would soon have everybody’s business.

And just after that their systems would fall over because every single heavy user would flock to them, swamping their capacity, and they’d have no money for infrastructure upgrades.

[Evil_Captor]

@Princhester

And just after that their systems would fall over because every single heavy user would flock to them, swamping their capacity, and they’d have no money for infrastructure upgrades.

Ah, yes. Too much business. The bane of every company’s existence.