Time-Warner bandwidth caps cancelled after threats of protests
Adam sez, "Time Warner will no longer be implementing download caps in all markets. I can't thank you enough. As you know, BB is read by a lot of mass-media outlets and other national organizations. I have it on good authority that Senator Chuck Schumer's office was notified of the impending protest through the Boing Boing post, and it spurred them to take the issue seriously."
Time Warner's climbdown on this one is hilarious -- they say that they have to abandon caps until they can "educate" their customers (presumably it takes a lot of education to convince people to let your ISP clobber your participation in digital life to turn a buck).
We Won! (For Now) Time Warner Killing Usage Caps "In All Markets" - But TW Press Statements Suggest They Are Still Out Of Touch (Thanks, Adam!)
the latest
latest episodes
yes!
Now I won't have to cancel my cable modem!
So you don't have caps in the US. My cap is 10GB a month in New Zealand and that costs about $60 a month. I don't know of any residential plans without caps.
Wow, I'm impressed. I thought this BS would be coming down like a hammer.
Awww... I think Time-Warner should get a been boinged patch
There is a palpable sense of honor one feels when reading this post. Honor for the achievement that this cadre made manifest. My deep thanks to those with the ability to activate when there is work that needs to be done. Again, deep respect for the change you see to happen!
I always 'educate' my peasants before implementing new unfair policies. These people are obviously amateurs.
I'm just as puzzled as #3:
although it doesn't cost as much (for me CAN50$ for 90GB) both Bell and Roger/Videotron have caps for residential clients. There used to be an unlimited offer but everything else had a cap AFAIR.
What am I not understanding about this news?
#3 & #7 - Because no place in the US has a cap. And we're not about to start letting caps become some common we don't see any problem with them. To me it seems NZ especially is getting ripped off, that's a lot of money for what amounts to slightly more than a DVDs worth of data. I'd blow through 10GB in a day or two. Hulu, Pandora, Steam, NetFlix, Live.
#3 and 7, I live in Canada, and we are capped. The ISP's are in bed with regulatory agencies here, so the consumer has little or no recourse to complain.
This US event will have no effect on capping in Canada.
Great now I don't have to go to all of the trouble of changing my ISP. However, I have been doing some research on my downloading habits. I consider myself to be a heavy bittorrent user and I only use approximately 150GB a month. That might change if I start downloading everything in HD.
You'd just better hope no one tells that senator about a different blog that says the exact opposite in the mean time!
Part of Time Warner's problem is they've signed a whole bunch of their customers to "guaranteed rate" contracts that lock you in, much like cellphone contracts. You're given a guaranteed discount, but there's a penalty if you cancel your service before the contract is up.
I suspect many of these customers (and I'm one of them) would consider the imposition of bandwidth caps as a violation of that contract - I know I would. That's a pretty substantial change in terms.
Caps are good. In Fallout.
And apparently "Beaumont, TX" isn't a "market", then.
News Flash! Comcost quietly instituted a 250GB/Month cap on all residential customers last October. They claim it has always been their policy, but they feel they have to "clarify" it (IE, put it in writing so they can enforce it?).
http://www.bandwidthcaps.com/2009/01/coming-soon-comcast-to-offer-a-bandwidth-meter-13th-edition/
i don't understand why they don't just offer linespeeds which intrinsically cap max downloads at probably at best 75% of theoretical for most users. there are very few uncapped services here in australia and one i had for a while was 512kbit. my iinet service right now just went into slowmo today as i exceeded the 15gb peak quota. it's now at 64kbps. but if i'd had the choice i'd pick a 256kbit symmetric or 512kbit whatever adds up to about the same real world usage. now i can't watch any youtube videos after midday until 2am, for about 2 weeks.
i don't begrudge australian isp's so much as one could reasonably do for american isp's. probably more than half the internet is based in the usa, and capping usage is a bit ridiculous. but here we are linked by humongous long optic fibre links spanning the indian and pacific oceans and to a lesser degree satellite links and it's not a wonder we have a supply problem and high prices.
The choice is simple.
Either the net is "dumb", and has bandwidth limits, or there will be extensive packet filtering and traffic shaping..and you can be sure that "unknown" will be pushed out into the "if there's bandwidth avaliable to deliver" lane.
There's a difference between low caps and reasonable caps, certainly (seriously, people think that a 250GB a month cap is unreasonable?) but protests need to make that plain if they want a web where they can actually do things ISP's don't explictly approve of.
My info comes from the inside, though second hand. And I am speaking to the specific market for TWC that I live in. What I was told...14% of TWC users exceed 150GB threshold per month.Two years ago it was 4%.There is a definite capacity limit (due to physical infrastructure) for traffic that could be reached in the next few years that could slow all users down.I'm not apologizing for them, as I surely don't want my usage capped. I'm in that 14%!I'm just saying that ultimately without more infrastructure expansion bandwidth is finite.The only company to have laid out capital for that infrastructure in my area is TWC.There is no real competition.The only way a competitor can come is a massive captital outlay for their own infrastructure or pay for access on the existing TWC structure if possible.Unless the government wants to finance.Which is a great idea and another debate altogether!So I think what has happened so far is great.The company tried to impose a cap.The market rejected it!So here come the sound bites,ad campaigns and lobbyists!
Meanwhile, in Canada, Bell has petitioned the federal government for permission to impose 60GB caps at the common carrier portion of the DSL infrastructure. Once the government approves the request, no DSL ISP in Bell territory (which includes about half of Canada's population) will able to offer greater than 60GB a month. This is in addition to already implemented infrastructure-level deep packet inspection that caps BitTorrent, and all other protocols that Bell's DPI equipment doesn't recognize, at 64kbit even on 5mbit DSL connections owned by third party DSL ISPs.
Cable in most areas is already capped at 60GB @ 7mbit, with DPI used to block BitTorrent entirely and to cap encrypted/unrecognizable protocols--including MS RDP, IPSEC and PPTP--at 64kbit with an imposed >200ms latency. VPN blocking is even applied to cable connections marketed for business use.
The only way for Canadians in Bell controlled areas to get unfiltered Internet access is to pay $3000/month+ for a dedicated fiber line. Once Bell gets their 60GB infrastructure cap, dedicated fiber will also be the only way to download more than 60GB a month.
Canada's internet service has been sabotaged by government indifference and infrastructure owner conflicts of interest (both Bell and cable sell legacy TV--BitTorrent and streaming video would be serious threats to their business models) and there's no prospect of this changing.
I'm not so optimistic. I can't help but think that they'll just try later to bring it back under a different guise...
#16 When they try again then people need to act again. IT'S WORTH THE TROUBLE.
In Canada we are both capped and throttled, and we pay long distance charges for cell phone calls to the next town over. There is a cost to being complacent.
@15:
So wouldn't offering unlimited speed, no cap accounts WITHOUT price gouging generate enough revenue to invest in additional infrastructure? The network switches don't cost any more to operate at 90% utilization than at 10%, so bandwidth tiers are a crock. Assuming TWC operates on the same level as Comcast, they're not spending their money on tech support and top tier installers, they're minimum wage call centers that read from scripts in an attempt to frustrate users into hanging up and living with their issues. I'd be perfectly happy waiting 30 minutes on hold if i could get someone with actual technical knowledge. And the installers seem to use their fists or an oversized mallet to run new cabling through drywall. Oh and TWC, like Comcast is probably overpaying engineers to cripple DVRs into dumb terminals at the behest of the networks.
@14
Because it isn't about bandwidth, it's about money. They want people to go over the cap and pay for it.
They probably want to tell people that if things like Hulu and Netflix are driving them over the cap they could watch things with their On-Demand service instead.
Education?
I expect edgy PSAs: "Don't Stream That Meme!"
A lot of these systems seem like a cybernetic Ponzi scheme; works out fine till x% of investors(users) want cash back (bandwidth. Their business model really depends on having a large percentage of subscribers who do little to nothing with their connection.
I'm ok with caps that are reasonable. Comcast's wouldn't stop me from streaming, just seeding 24/7. This is where Time Warner is disingenuous. Also, if it is competing with their cable TV, why not give TV subscribers some slack?
Caps are insane, and here's why:
The effect of bandwidth caps per month is that the first day of every month the system is using everyone's maximum bandwidth, all day. The last day of the month, all the heavy users have been turfed or severely throttled, and grandma's surfing is the only thing happening.
Given that there is no way for the last day's excess bandwidth to supplement tomorrow's free-for-all, this is the wrong model.
Charge by speed, throttle during peak usage, these are rational if annoying strategies. Why they are not used I leave to the reader.
I find it funny that the foreign view is that we are somehow wrong for not wanting caps, because they've learned to live with it. Just because you get pwned by your corporate overlords, doesn't mean we want to.
I've been saying for a long time that if people insist on using the internet as if it was a phone line or video cable -- demanding lots of realtime high-bandwidth connections -- ISPs were going to have to start either rationing or charging more in order to deliver those bytes. On this scale e-mail is almost free, images more expensive, audio/video very expensive by comparison.
Use bytes. Don't waste 'em.
I wouldn't get too comfortable with the notion that "user education" is hilariously implausible.
For a similar example, I have been a little stunned at the way media interests have seeded talk shows and so forth with shills to plant the idea that net neutrality is some sort of sinister move towards meddlesome government Internet regulation.
The "education" part turns out to be quite easy. You just send out the drones talk about it as if it were a foregone conclusion that the public already supports your point of view. A substantial number of people will just assume that they missed the debate and fall in line with the "winner" they've been presented. In that moment, they mentally define the roles of the two sides of the issue. Once you think you know who somebody is, that becomes the filter through which you hear what he says.
You watch. Once the "user education" gets started, you will "learn" that people who oppose bandwidth caps are bad people who are hoarding all the bits and making the Internet worse for everyone. You will be "educated" about how Time Warner only desires to protect good people like you and deliver to you the best possible Internet experience, and the only way they can do that is if you support throttling.
Gooday all here in Aus my broadband is caped at 65 gig a month with a peak and off-peak times $79.00
Credit where it's due: it was really freshman congressman Eric Massa who jumped all over this from the get-go. Schumer's office is sort of coattailing. Here's a link to a post on Ballon Juice about the affair; BJ's DougJ is a Rochester-area resident, so he's been following this pretty closely.
@ #27
I find it funny that you think my comment as #3 meant that I thought you were wrong and should be happy with a cap. It was a request for information about the cap system in the US since in NZ we are supposed to be happy with 10GB a month. Maybe you need to read more carefully.
wiiiiiiin, many thanks to everyone who went out and protested saturday!