Comments on: Video Killed the Broadband Buffet

By: Bandwidth Barons Want More Money for Fewer Bytes - GigaOM

Bandwidth Barons Want More Money for Fewer Bytes - GigaOM — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:36:20 +0000

[...] bytes you send and/or receive from the Internet on a monthly basis. Time Warner has suggested that usage-based pricing will be tier-based, with tiers at 5, 10, 20 and 40 gigabytes and overage charges applied for bytes that exceed [...]

By: Time Warner Cable Broadband Tiers Lead to Fears - GigaOM

Time Warner Cable Broadband Tiers Lead to Fears - GigaOM — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:37 +0000

[...] provider’s tiered levels of service, I can’t help but wonder that. Earlier this year, the company said it would experiment with tiered pricing in Beaumont, Texas, and now has set up a pricing plan that ranges from $29.95 a month for something [...]

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:06:14 +0000

Oh…and since over 70% of the resources are being used by corporations……so called “Power Users” those statistics should be seperated from the home users for fairness.

But be warned…if I have to start paying per MB…I will demand better service than I get now…low speeds…going as low as 732Kbps when testing….I WILL get what I pay for.

By: Michaael

Michaael — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:01:03 +0000

Just another excuse by an oversized corporate structure to stick it to consumers. The pure fact is…if its a bandwidth issue..limit bandwidth speeds. I have tested my speeds a hundred times and have never gotten above 1.2Mbps…DSL goes faster. Ive heard “Its Your end” so dang often that it sickens me…Its not my computer(s). All 3 have been tested with the other two turned off…still no change.
So stop making excuse TW and just own up…”We are switching so we can charge You higher prices per month for less.Our CEO and other corporate officers want new cars this year…their current ones are two years old now.”

By: - The End of Cheap Broadband

- The End of Cheap Broadband — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:57:32 +0000

[...] for free or $10 a month); paying for capacity, on the other hand, is anathema to most netizens. But Time Warner is implementing the idea in Beaumont, Texas, with per-byte overage [...]

By: The End of Cheap Broadband - GigaOM

The End of Cheap Broadband - GigaOM — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:39:54 +0000

[...] for free or $10 a month); paying for capacity, on the other hand, is anathema to most netizens. But Time Warner is implementing the idea in Beaumont, Texas, with per-byte overage [...]

By: Micah

Micah — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:33:53 +0000

It’s not video that’s killing broadband, it’s greed and mismanagement.

By: Europe’s Example: Metered Access and Video Don’t Mix « NewTeeVee

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:41:19 +0000

[...] Example: Metered Access and Video Don’t Mix Time Warner recently said it plans to test metered Internet access in Beaumont, Texas, and is looking at Bell Canada’s DSL plans as inspiration for pricing. [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:43:51 +0000

I’m not the first person to say that the cable companies are some of the most disoriented, consumer-averse in the country. They take full advantage of their tight control over the market to screw over everyone.

By: HBO’s Baffling Broadband Plan « NewTeeVee

HBO’s Baffling Broadband Plan « NewTeeVee — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:31:43 +0000

[...] To subscribe, you must already have HBO and you must be a Time Warner Cable subscriber (Time Warner Cable, don’t forget, is considering charging for broadband based on usage). [...]

By: Fazal Majid

Fazal Majid — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:49:46 +0000

Douglas, if anything the French power elite is even more clueless than US ones, and the French government had a vested interest against change as it was the majority owner of France Telecom. Circa 1998, the telecom regulator refused to even consider the possibility of unbundling.

And now my friends there are being offered 100Mbps down/25Mbps up for the same price I pay for my 8Mbps down/512Mbps up "premium" DSL connection in San Francisco, and I hear the telco/cableco oligopolies shedding crocodile tears about how evil P2P users are taking the money from their children's mouths unless they are allowed to gouge even more than today.

Comparisons to electricity or water are fallacious. A better comparison would be local phone calls, which manage to be unlimited in the US, despite having a sub-population of users who talk their ears off.

By: VOIPreseller.us » Blog Archive » Bye Bye Unlimited Flat-Rate Internet

VOIPreseller.us » Blog Archive » Bye Bye Unlimited Flat-Rate Internet — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:54:10 +0000

[...] Gigaom has more. [...]

By: The Metered Internet: Another Artificial Scarcity Bad Idea « SmoothSpan Blog

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:43:19 +0000

[...] is that a new generation of routers may be needed to take us to the next level. I agree with Stacey Higginbothom who says this is really a symptom of the duopoly or poor number of choices among broadband providers that [...]

By: Douglas Frank

Douglas Frank — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:51:40 +0000

Fazal, regarding the U.S. adopting new policies, you used the phrase “simply adopt the same policies,” which is perfectly ironic, as our policies are anything but simple to sway, even IF there were large lobbyists behind the issue. The government treads lightly these days regarding private corporation interference, and has a “hands off” private industry attitude. That attitude is an incredibly sharp double-edged sword.

It also doesn’t help that the people in power (for the most part) haven’t yet rotated out, giving a more tech-savvy generation power.

By: Douglas Frank

Douglas Frank — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:41:41 +0000

Several comments and questions for the readers here:

Has anyone seen any recent (2007) monetary loss studies or figures from the BB providers? We could have a much more robust discussion if we knew at what average vendor-promised customer bandwidth (CIR/Committed Information Rate) the providers start seeing losses. In other words, by how much have they "oversold" their pipes?
Q dub, I don't fully agree with your Public Utility metaphor. If a telco has a fiber network deployed, upgrades to handle higher usage are fixed-cost. Granted, for some areas and telcos that's a BIG "if," which is why they're griping; They don't want, or can't afford line upgrades at the moment.
In any service-oriented market, the natural market pattern progression is to START with a usage-based structure to defray costs until economies-of-scale are realized, at which point they announce fixed-fee services, customers cheer and migrate to the first vendor to make the announcement. In this case, several vendors had already undergone this process in 2004-2005, but now are forced to regress.

Ultimately if all major telcos move to metered rates, ultimately the first one to perform major upgrades and revert to fixed-cost will gain a HUGE marketing advantage. The real question, and it's a technical one, is WHEN endpoint and infrastructure technology will again hurdle consumer requirements, P2P included.

Doug Frank

By: Dimitrios Matsoulis

Dimitrios Matsoulis — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 12:40:36 +0000

The trend of reversing the current situation will be very hard to enforce. Business users are more likely to pay for extra broadband use. Non-business users are more likely to migrate to ISPs that have no usage limits. Now if ISPs all enforce volume measures I think the internet will stop being the medium of freedom it is now.
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