Hey... don't bogart the net, dude.

[cashflyer]

Monday June 2
By Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer
Time Warner Cable starts customer trial with metered Internet access in Texas

NEW YORK (AP) -- You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology.

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.

"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Leddy said.

More to the story HERE: Link

*****

There have been stories for years about Comcast harassing it's unlimited usage customers for .... using too much bandwidth. Apparently, their limit is a moving target based on the aggregate whole. Then they terminate your service once you fall into the upper 1/10th of 1% for bandwidth usage among all customers.

Which sucks if you are a subscriber to online movies, player of WoW, etc.

[berettafan]

Geez were back to the xxx per minute bull*****?

If a cable exec, an oil exec and Hillary were in a car accident and the car was ready to explode i swear i'd give serious thought to pulling Hillary out first.

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by berettafan

...If a cable exec, an oil exec and Hillary were in a car accident and the car was ready to explode i swear i'd give serious thought to pulling Hillary out first.

I'd consider siphoning the remaining gas first...it would be less risky and more valuable imo

[cashflyer]

You know... I'm sitting here thinking about all the bandwidth usages:
VoIP
Movie Downloads
Online games (x-box live, WoW, etc)
Game update downloads (how many gigs is that latest WoW update?)
email (not so much text, but file attachments)
Porn and Pelican
... etc

How convenient that they advertise all the wonderful things we can do with broadband, and then punish us with fees if we actually do those things.

Reminds me of cell phone companies.

[masraum]

Guys, I'm betting that the problem isn't most of us that do normal stuff, even with porn and video streaming. I'm betting that the biggest problem is people that host servers out of their house, or use various software to download movies, music, porn, and apps off of the internet 24x7. There are geeks and kids out there that use apps to download ENORMOUS amounts of data. Most of us may download 100mb-1gig a day at times, but I bet there are people that are downloading 10x or even 20x that amount or possibly more. Those are the folks that'll get hit hard.

I suspect it's kind of like putting a box of flyers out someplace and putting "free" on the box. Most folks probably take 1, maybe 2 or 3 or 5, but then there will always be someone that comes along and takes the whole box.

[Hawktel]

This will affect you all eventually.

First it will be something that is setup that affects on the top 2-5% who have things they are doing. Like, my house. 4 guys all with computers. all downloading p0rn and other things. Prolly mostly P0rn.

Then cable exec 1 figures out if they just do it to the top 10% how much money they will all make. And eventually all 100% is getting charged.

[HardDrive]

Dude, that is so bogue!!!!!

[cashflyer]

I don't consider myself a bandwidth hog, but then again, I download a movie each week. As mentioned in the article, that amounts to between 1.5 to 8 gigs PER movie.

From the article, one of the two tiers they propose is $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap.

That leaves no bandwidth for pr0n!!!



Now, let's look at this another way... follow the money, so to speak.
Time-Warner had a revenue sharing agreement with Blockbuster and was their online distributor for Blockbuster Video-On-Demand. I don't know if they still have the agreement or not, but I do have this recent data from Video Business (6/07) "Time Warner Cable has 14.7 million subscribers and claims the largest VOD penetration in the nation’s largest media markets."

I know cable VOD is not the same as online VOD - but my point is that T-W has a very strong revenue generator when they charge for the video stream, and charge for the bandwidth to stream it. They're double dipping!!

[onewhippedpuppy]

Anyone gotten a busy signal on the internet? All circuits busy right now? I didn't think so. It's just another money-maker for those crooks at the cable company.