Time Warner begins metered internet usage

I read about this and beleive this is total crap. I have the 15/2 connection and they are saying there capping it 40gigs a month. and then a dollar over per gig This is ludicrous I thought with the higher bandwidth they expect people to be able to use this.

Im in a price lock gaurentee right now this better not effect me or the better let me out of my contract. Since its not what I signed up for.

40GB seems pretty low for a 15Mbps line.

IMO this is SO wrong in so many ways....

DGK

Well hopefully people will flock away from them and they abandon it or raise the caps about 10 fold.

The reality is this is a dumb way to deal with people who abuse the system. Though they may be forced to take such measures as I believe the FCC ruled comcast cant packet shape traffic on their network.

from the article:

"Just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution."

I think they have to do something to address this

A bigger problem will be if they try to control video downloads: lets say you have Comcast internet service and want to watch a new movie on VOD as a download...and lets assume DirecTv, Apple TV, and Comcast all offer it for the same price....Comcast will want to sell you the VOD because you are going to download it over their bandwidth in any case...and they may eventually take steps to dissuade you from using their bandwidth (which you do pay for) for their direct competitors benefit

I'm all for a metered and tiered service approach. I'd happily pay 29.95 a month rather than the $45 I'm being gouged for right now. We only use the internet for mundane tasks.

(I'm stuck with TW b/c we don't have a phone line in our house.)

I'm on comcast, but I see mostly cons.

Perhaps lower cost for "normal" users, although honestly, I have no idea how much I use a month. I often work from home so I'm connected to the network at the office quite a bit. I also do a lot of online gaming, and I'm not sure how much bandwidth that sucks up. Plus downloading demos and videos from XBox Marketplace....ugh.

Plus anything like Netflix WatchNow or AppleTV (or even DirecTV's OnDemand) would suck through 5GB pretty fast.

On a pro side, all these people who have had their machine hijacked by spammers/spyware/adware, etc would see high monthly bills and maybe actually clean off their systems (yeah right, sure they will).

Are they providing a way for you to monitor your monthly usage, or are they just going to hit you with a bill?

Verizon will eat their breakfast.


Churn will be horrible (if the cap turns out to be a problem with consumers).

http://www.freepress.net/node/38199

That is a very strange pricing scheme.

15 mbps equals about (15 * 60 * 60 / (8 * 1000) = 6.75 GB per hour. So if you started downloading video on the first day of the month at the advertised speed you would use up your entire months quota in the first 6 hours.

- Tom

That's a TOTAL ripoff and they're likely to lose ALOT of buisness.If Comcast EVER does this i'll drop them like a hot rock and bring my buisness AND money elsewhere.

If Comcast did this, I don't really have an alternative....at least until FIOS gets here but I'm sure they'll implement the same thing.

What they should do is exclude people who are using "legit" services and impose these limits on people who are connected to Torrent sites 24/7.

On a side note though, does anyone have a rough estimate of how much bandwidth online gaming takes up? I know it would depend on the game and how long, etc, but is kilobytes of data, megabytes, or can it push up into gigabyte area?

Also, 5 gig limit isn't that much. I'm just about ready to download 2 gigs of game demos from XBOX live. Ouch.

Online gaming is usually really low as the client does the work and only the positional and action data gets transfered (except for patch days where they will avarage 5 - 30 mb). Far less than watching youtube would use.

For those in the MN area, comcast has already semi-announced a cap for cable modem users. 250Gb/mo (probably because they're offering 50/5 services).

http://www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/

And the guy who thinks patches are 5-30mb, you're in 2001... My last PS3 update was over 200mb, last wii update was 50-60mb, hell, my last windows XP update was over 200mb (SP3)... Not to mention those who use digital content exclusively (think iTunes, netflix downloads, et al)... Hell, BD trailers on my PS3 are upwards of 100+mb for 30 seconds.


Time to start looking at DSL providers?