Posted on 01/17/2008 3:58:27 PM PST by ShadowDancer
Time Warner Cable Tests Data-Usage Rate Structure
Thursday, January 17, 2008
NEW YORK — Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.
The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.
Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads.
Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Time Warner is trying to make up revenue, lost when people get a chance to rid themselves of the TW monopoly.
Verizon laid fiber optic lines, and almost everybody in my neighborhood is switching from TW cable, to FIOS.
And it is NOT mainly about technology. It IS mainly because Time Warner (remember AOL Time Warner) is such a lousy company to deal with.
It is a classic example of what goes around, comes around.
My internet is more reliable than TW, but the same speed. My phone is unchanged, but the TV is way better.
But when they use them to shed load off their overloaded network and punish high volume users, that doesn't sell so well, especially to high volume users ;).
Even worse, though, is what Comcast was doing to me in California. If I started uploading over my so called 2 mbit down, 256 kbit up line at any rate faster than about 60 kbits, within ** twenty (20) ** seconds they would cut my upload rate available from the so called 256 kbit down to about 30 kbits (worse than an old modem;). A few minutes after the upload ceased, I would get my nominal upload rate back.
When Comcast started doing that to me, I was in the delightful position of using two, simultaneous, internet providers, with Comcast over the cable coax, and Speakeasy DSL over my twisted pair phone line. So I had the great pleasure of calling up Comcast and telling them to shove it, forthwith. I canceled my Comcast internet on the spot, running off just the DSL line until a bit later, when I moved to Texas and FIOS.
You don’t like Santa?
Santa has the good sense to dress properly.
Metered rates? Ha.
Using their logic, I should be paying according the the percentage of my [purchased] rated bandwidth I am receiving.
I’m paying my cable net provider (not TW) for 6 megs down. I should be able to get 85% of that. For two months my throughput has dropped to .75-1.5 megs EVERY night from approximately 7: to 10:45. Right at quarter to 11 it jumps right back up to 5.3 megs. And they just can’t figure it out (major sarcasm).
Thus TW should charge a customer based on their real throughput, not on their “rated” throughput, if one were to make a logical extension of their reasoning.
In reality, logic has nothing to do with it. They will get what the market will bear, if there is competition, or what their monopoly permits if they have greased the right palms.
I could have that all fired up at once still download enough porn in 60 seconds to make you go blind...Ain't technology fun?
Coax copper does have bandwidth limitations especially if distance is involved.
The reason your bandwidth drops in the evening is because thats when EVERYONE gets home from work or school and fires up the computers. Your neighborhood cable network is shared bandwidth. When everyone jumps on you have less. If you had a dedicated T1 it would be all yours all the time. But thats only 1.54 Mbps up and down.
What ChildOfThe60s reports sounds more like an intentional throttling, presumably done in an effort to avoid the more painful affects of excess contention for limited resources, such as crashing switches and extreme delays for even low bandwidth traffic.
It’s not a simple case of higher use on a shared node. For one thing I never had this until 2 months ago. The first thing I accused them of was overselling bandwidth, thus being unable to provide what I was paying them for. I was assured that there was no reason for that to happen, that there was more than enough to go around at peak hours.
Besides, it’s way too precise every single evening.
Another reason I say that is the provider has a speed test on their own server. I live in a town with 15,000 people and a 2.5 mile radius. Regardless of with the internet in general is doing at a given time, I should be able to pull most of my throughput anytime when I am a couple of miles from the server.
My ISP shares some lines with the city government, which is the major cable TV provider and much of the cable internet here. Yeah, the gummmerment.
Interestingly, my ISP says they have higher speed lines and capacity than the city, so logically the problem is somewhere on city hardware. They also are telling me that they can’t get the city to return their calls. Think government run health care folks.
My next step is to tell my ISP that I am going to pay for 1.5 meg service since that is what I am getting.
Unfortunately, my only other option is ATT DSL.
Actually the WRT350N. It has a storage link.
I understand your logic, but Time Warner isn’t talking about lowering the price for people who download less, just raising it for people who download more. It’s just another scam. BTW, I switched off of Roadrunner to AT&T (will change again if they follow through with the data inspection deal, cut my bill in half and speeded up my internet.
The quasi-monopoly that ISP's have in this country, as opposed to other industrialized nations, allows for more such abuse, higher charges and lower service.
Last Result:
Download Speed: 15595 kbps (1949.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1245 kbps (155.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
What's next? Charging per show watched? Hey, those rabbit ears will soon come in handy! (And they don't effect global warming!)
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