“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,” The Associated Press reports.
“On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download,” AP reports. “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,” AP reports.
“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,” AP reports.
“Time Warner Cable appears to be the first major ISP to charge for going over the limit: Other companies warn, then suspend, those who go over,” AP reports. “Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.”
“Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail have little reason to pay attention to the traffic caps: a gigabyte is about 3,000 Web pages, or 15,000 e-mails without attachments. But those who download movies or TV shows will want to pay attention. A standard-definition movie can take up 1.5 gigabytes, and a high-definition movie can be 6 to 8 gigabytes,” AP reports.
Full article here.
Will you be willing to pay extra if not just your home computer, but your Apple TV as well, goes over Time Warner Cable’s Internet allowance?
Short answer- No
Long answer- Goodbye
Translation – Use your Digital Cable box for content, not the interweb or Apple – OR THEY DOC YA. Well played, Time Warner.
Oh, to live in a land where such a move causes a stir. Here in Oz BigPond charges 15c a MEGABYTE if you go over the limit.
Would you be willing to pay extra if the windows box you are using is so infected with spyware that phones home that it uses up all your bandwidth while you are asleep?
and the award for stupidity goes to ….. drum roll….. Time Warner
In Australia, all ISPs charge for plans that have a gigabyte limit. Ranging from 1gig, 3gig, 5gig etc up 10gig, 15, 25 gig etc. Some are “unlimited” but transfer rate is slowed to dial-up speed once your upload/download limit is reached. (Telstra’ s 12gig “unlimited” costs about $59/month). Others are unlimited but very expensive. (Over $75/month). There are others that don’t slow the download/upload speed, but charge exhorbitant rates like 25c per MB for excess usage!
Seems only fair that heavy bandwidth users pay for their usage thus hopefully making it cheaper for the low users of the world.
I don’t hear them offering lower starting price points or any discounts for people who use less than average… So, F that then.
$55 for only 40 GB/mo!? Even Rogers here in Canada doesn’t bend me over that badly–I pay about $45 for a 60 GB limit.
My Rogers account level is only 8 Mbps versus TW’s 15 Mbps, but that higher speed is salt in the wound–sure we’ll give you a fatter pipe, but you can’t use it as much!
Glad we don’t have that crap here. But we’ve got something almost as bad… Crapcast and its total monopoly on cable here.
Will they practice what they preach? Will they also charge for extra data usage whenever they sell a pay-per-view movies? I think not! This is unfair abuse of monopoly power and I hope our government doesn’t tolerate this.
If they want to cut out unfair internet usage, then block those greedy bandwidth sucking pay-per-view pigs too!
This is merely a way for them to take advantage of the booming trend of downloading/streaming TV shows & movies online. They want a piece of that pie and are going to hinder technological advancement unless you empty your wallet for them.
Actually, an open and honest pricing system managing internet “pipe” limits is a GOOD thing. Far better than secret cable company software programs that throttle back internet speed during heavy use. If ALL of the ISPs were open about how they handle this, then consumers could make an intelligent choice. I hope Comcast develops an open system, AND tries to make it cheaper than Time Warner’s!
Yeah, Time Warner is “Progressive”.
Here in San Diego, a disaster with their new TV system rollout. It’s so bad, they spun off their TV “services” (i.e. punishment) to another company.
This company is bad. They forgot all about making sure they aren’t in breach. They’re ripe for a class action suit.
Time Warner is the ISP for broadband service where I live. The worst part of it is that they, of course, are a monopoly service in my town. So there is no recourse. Free enterprise competition, what a bullshit fairy tale!
So no, I cannot say goodbye if they impose this until a competitor appears and that isn’t going to occur any time soon.
Does Verizon do this with their FIOS offerings? I was going to get Comcast, but all this throttling talk has turned me away. DSL sucks in comparison, especially where I am, but at least I can do what I want, when I want and for how long I want.
Do you get a rebate or discount if you don’t go over their arbitrary threshold of acceptable use?
moenrj –
That’s a great idea. Work it kind of like AT&T;’s rollover minutes and let people keep any unused bandwidth they haven’t used.
That’s exactly why I don’t use cable services.
GREEDY BASTARDS!!!
@beyondthetech:
++
Beryllium
You and any other person or company are free to offer your own answer to Time Warner, through Wi-Fi, WiMax, DSL, satellite, or fiber.
Just gather up some money and do it. Your city council will most likely not object.
That is the Free Enterprise system.
It is what will keep TW from doing this nationally.
I hope that anyone using Time Warner is giving them an ear full on the phone or through email. I know I would be if I were using there service. I would let them know they start that crap, GOODBYE!!!!
We the customers can throttle there business, right down to ZERO!!!
I believe this is a way for Time Warner to battle Apple TV and iTunes in content downloading. (And its completely classless imo.)
If this does take effect everywhere I wonder what it would do to Apple’s iTunes business (particularly in the movie rental department where each movie is usually around 1.5 gb)
Knowing the way SJ doesn’t tolerate being put into a corner I wouldn’t be surprised if he used his AT&T;partnership and really pushed forward to create a competitive wifi network via AT&T;’s towers that not only iPhones can access, but so can computer with wifi and it can all be on one bill and unlimited.
It’s time to find another ISP, where in the world is AT&T;’s fiber?
As someone already mentioned, they don’t offer discounts to those who don’t use bandwith, so it looks like another attempt to extort some extra money. Remember few years ago when there was that big thing about cable companies overcharging? What did we get? Higher prices! Yes, they lowered monthly fees by $1 and started charging for $3 for cable guide, $2 for something else and suma sumarum we ended up paying more.
If this is only for new costomers… Who is going to sign up? Lets see, Pay more than ATT, get same speed, get less service. Uh, no.