Comments on: Time Warner Talks Last Mile & Bandwidth Caps

By: Sports Will Drive 3-D Adoption and Broadband Upgrades: Video «

Sports Will Drive 3-D Adoption and Broadband Upgrades: Video « — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:23:14 +0000

[...] But for the network provider, that love of streaming or even watching 3-D sports via a pay-TV channel on Comcast or Verizon comes at a price. Comcast delivered its 3-D Masters stream using the equivalent of one HD channel, which requires about 18.75 Mbps. Most cable providers can fit two HD channels, each into a limited number of slots — a constraint dictated by the spectrum each cable plant has (see here for a video on how a cable plant works). [...]

By: Does Anyone Understand The Internet? | techlobbyist

Does Anyone Understand The Internet? | techlobbyist — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:41:00 +0000

[...] TWC reports that their users in the Austin, TX area averaged 5-6 gig a month. A benefit of metered service is that if a user falls into this category, there is no reason for them to be spending $50-$75 a month for unlimited access. This is similar to a cell phone plan, in that if you don’t talk 3,000 minutes a month, purchasing the 3,000 minute or unlimited plan would be a major waste of money when you could get a lower plan for far cheaper. TWC was proposing lower-priced tiers combined with higher fees for heavy users. A relatively basic plan would have offered 5 GB a month for $29, and a more robust tier would have offered 15 GB a month for $40, all the way up to unlimited plans for $150. [...]

By: Stop the Cap! » Blog Archive » Suddenly Caps? Suddenlink Introduces Usage Measuring Tool to “Help Customers”

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:10:12 +0000

[...] Time Warner Cable Austin: ‘Users download between 5-6GB per month on average.’ — Scott Young, senior director of digital systems 10/2008 [...]

By: Does Anyone Understand The Internet? | OpenMarket.org

Does Anyone Understand The Internet? | OpenMarket.org — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:53:06 +0000

By: John

John — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:38:43 +0000

Dennis,

I’m aware of that, but that isn’t the only problem. Most of those companies own the entire telecom infrastructure, and built it from the ground up in the last 20 years.

Both the last mile problems (local loop) and national backbone problems, make it a much more difficult problem in the US. Our network is largely 30-60 years old, and replacing it today with fiber and high bandwidth cable, is much more expensive, than consumers or tax payers are likely to step up to today.

See the longer discussion about this in the base article here: http://gigaom.com/2009/04/16/time-warner-cable-backs-off-metered-broadband-trials-in-rochester/#comments

By: Dennis

Dennis — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:24:20 +0000

John-

There is something to be said about treating internet access as a public good. After all, various levels of government have subsidized the development of internet access in numerous ways. In fact, countries like Japan and Korea have vastly superior internet access, at a better price, because their governments invested a lot of cash into the infrastructure and took ownership interest back.

The companies in those nations can compete on an equal footing, because they all have to pay the government the same amount for use of the networks. In our country, we subsidize, but still allow the corporations to “own” the network, and set their own terms (or none at all) for sharing with competitors.

By: John

John — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:15:03 +0000

Somebody needs to get real here … bandwidth just ain’t free. They might as well outlaw metered electric service as well … it makes just as much sense. After all coal is free, natural gas is free, wind is free, and solar is free … they are just in the ground or air, and available everywhere.

We have been running a small internet cooperative with several T1′s that cost $450/mo …. over subscribed to bring the members share of the costs down to something affordable. Any law that say’s we have to allow bandwidth hogs to saturate our network back to slower than dialup is just socialist crap.

When you oversubscribe your network to get customer costs down to market, each customers “fair share” is that over subscription fraction … in our case we over subscribe a T1 30:1 … each share is 50-64kbps … more or less. Any jerk that fires up a P2P server with 100 connections, sends all the other customer available bandwidth down into dialup speeds …. and bye bye customers.

When the government goes back into building and providing the internet backbone and local last mile service, then we can have “free internet” after paying for it with our increased taxes.

By: Time Warner Expands Metered Broadband Rollout

Time Warner Expands Metered Broadband Rollout — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:16:07 +0000

[...] In an earlier interview with a local Time Warner Cable engineer, he noted that the average Austin TWC customer downloads 6 GB per month. Given that Time Warner’s tiers range from 5 GB per month at $29.95 on the low end to 40 GB per month for $54.90 at its peak, with 10 GB and 20 GB tiers falling somewhere in between, it sounds like the average Austin resident will have to pay around $40 a month for 7 Mbps down. Plus $1 per GB in overage fees. Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to it. [...]

By: Globally, Now 400M Broadband Subscribers - GigaOM

Globally, Now 400M Broadband Subscribers - GigaOM — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:03:17 +0000

[...] But it’s all coming under threat, thanks to the backward-looking policies of companies like Time Warner Cable, Comcast and AT&T, all of which want to put a meter on bandwidth — and with it, [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:29:05 +0000

And so it begins a 250gb cap can’t wait to see this number get smaller and smaller over the years, that’s like having unlimited minutes on your cell phone and your cell phone provider telling you that they are going to charge you the same amount but now you’ll only have 250 minutes of talk time…and here is just another way the U.S. dollar is losing its value, at least on the consumers side