Time Warner Testing Metered Internet Usage

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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Time Warner is once again testing the possibility of changing its rates according to the amount of metered usage. This same test was conducted in 2009 to some very unfavorable feedback. It’s not quite clear what makes Time Warner executives think a two year hiatus in testing will improve the reception by its customers.

Customer reaction to this plan was needless to say not positive and Time Warner Cable quietly shut down the pilot program a few months later
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I can tell you what made the difference.
Canadian't getting screwed over by this same practice in early 2011.
Thankfully some ISP's up here have adopted much more favorable models for managing higher bandwidth usage.

With all the competition in the market I think Time Warner will be disappointed again. Unless they come up with some really reasonable pricing schemes, they will see a mass exodus of customers.

Also internet providers and TV providers should really consider that fact that with the recent economic downturns, many people cant afford the price hikes. So instead of paying higher fees, I imagine many people are very close to the point of canceling, or reducing their service packages. And that's not good for anyone.
 
testing = waiting to see if customers will actually have the balls to make a fuss about it, and if it hurts their subscription income from customers....

If folks just roll over and take it in the ass, then not only will it be 'business as usual', but you'll see it get adopted in the rest of the market.
 
Welcome to the future. There will be no more Sat/Cable/OTA TV, no more DVDs or CDs. You wont even be able to buy media any more. Everything will be streamed from the cloud or services like Itunes. This way everybody profits. They rent you the media then your ISP charges you again to stream it.
 
I'm guessing Time Warner knows exactly what they're doing: introduce a highly unfavorable change, watch people rage, undo the change, wait until said rage quiets down, then reintroduce the same change and expect people to concede. And concede they will since most people don't have a choice anyway.
 
Yup, sure sounds like Canada was a testbed for this... can only see it spreading from there... of course content creators want to extract maximum profits...

sigh...
 
If this ever happens to all ISP's I will shit bricks. Well, or just keep my business class connection that has unlimited bandwidth. Ha.
 
I still love my idea of cities building co-ops that operate all the fiber within city limits. You then can bid it out to the cheapest backbone.

As much as I sometimes dislike local government, I think its the best route. We could then stop worrying about this bullshit. Of course this would require someone within the local government to have a brain.
 
wonder why they're "testing" it again, somehow peoples minds changed?

In reality wouldn't be absolutely horrible if the meter rate was set such that whatever artificial "cap" you currently have worth of usage equals the price you pay now, but you know there's no way it'll work out that way.
 
I have cable and internet (20mb/s) and I can guarantee you that if they try to meter, I'll first protest and if they keep it in place cancel my subs. $200/month isn't a big deal, but if enough ppl do it, it will make a difference.
 
the question is, are they actually losing profit from the TWO percent who use excessive bandwidth?
or are they just being greedy bastards.....

If some limitation absolutely had to be implemented, I'd be in favor of speed throttling to 1.5mbit, rather than charging extra money.
 
infect0 said:
I still love my idea of cities building co-ops that operate all the fiber within city limits. You then can bid it out to the cheapest backbone.

As much as I sometimes dislike local government, I think its the best route. We could then stop worrying about this bullshit. Of course this would require someone within the local government to have a brain.
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One of the small providers around here is trying to go through a pilot program to bring affordable fiber to residential customers using a technique called microtrenching. However the city (San Francisco) hasn't responded yet, which usually is a bad sign as they always want a piece of the pie, or are in cahoots with the major providers.
 
dr.kevin said:
If some limitation absolutely had to be implemented, I'd be in favor of speed throttling to 1.5mbit, rather than charging extra money.
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The reality is if there was some actual lack of bandwidth this would happen anyways since you can't stick 2GB/s of traffic through a 1GB/s piece of fiber. The pipe just isn't wide enough :D
 
they tried to bring this to my city a few years ago, the better not try it again.
they are released "wideband" very soon, if not already released, which is 50/5
wtf is the point of that if they are going to cap you...
 
dang, hope they don't try this out in my college town. I just switched to time werner a month ago.
 
dr.kevin said:
the question is, are they actually losing profit from the TWO percent who use excessive bandwidth?
or are they just being greedy bastards.....

If some limitation absolutely had to be implemented, I'd be in favor of speed throttling to 1.5mbit, rather than charging extra money.
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I think there's also a factor of delivering good service to everyone. I mean the bottomline is always profits, but if that 2% is consistently bringing down the quality of the service to the other 98%, and it obviously isn't financially prudent to beef up a whole network to cater to that 2%, I can see the company wanting to do something with it. I guess it all depends on what the "testing" concludes and what is implemented thereafter.
 
Mr. K6 said:
I think there's also a factor of delivering good service to everyone. I mean the bottomline is always profits, but if that 2% is consistently bringing down the quality of the service to the other 98%, and it obviously isn't financially prudent to beef up a whole network to cater to that 2%, I can see the company wanting to do something with it. I guess it all depends on what the "testing" concludes and what is implemented thereafter.
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Its only 2% now. When everything is online it'll be 30% or 50%.

Why cant they beef up the network? If a restaurant offers "All you can eat" it does it knowing the people who eat a little are paying for the big eaters. They've been selling a service as unlimited for years and when people start to use it they complain. Are they the only ones allowed to be greedy?
 
Tak Ne said:
Its only 2% now. When everything is online it'll be 30% or 50%.

Why cant they beef up the network? If a restaurant offers "All you can eat" it does it knowing the people who eat a little are paying for the big eaters. They've been selling a service as unlimited for years and when people start to use it they complain. Are they the only ones allowed to be greedy?
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I'm not sure what you mean by "when everything is online it'll be 30% or 50%"? That we'll all eventually start consuming a lot as everything goes to streaming? Sure, I agree, but the networks will hopefully expand and develop accordingly to meet the overall customer demand.

Beyond pointing out the obvious that cooking dinner is a lot simpler than providing internet service, I'll run with your analogy. Suppose those "big eaters" eat all the food so that everyone is constantly waiting for new food from the kitchen to be put out at the buffet. You'd wait there so long and then say "well this is BS" and go to another restaurant. However, with ISP's, there really isn't a lot of competition, so many times this isn't a possibility.

So then, if the restaurant changes to a menu/meal-based venture with still competitive prices, who's really hurt? The same people who were "paying for the big eaters" at the buffet will hopefully still be paying the same meal price for an amount of food they were consuming either. The ones who will be pissed and complain are the "big eaters" who were disproportionately using the service per fee paid. They then would be more than welcome to go to another restaurant (or ISP), should one exist that will allow them to again act as such.

I agree that ISP's raking in profits while not putting them back into the network is BS. I also think everyone paying the same flat rate that is disproportionate to their usage is obsolete and needs to be reconsidered. Like I said, it all depends on how the system is restructured should these "tests" promote change, and that the resulting solution is fair to both the company and its customers.
 
I wonder why we don't here more from Google on this. This is something that kills the idea of something like ChromeOS.
 
Invest those obscene profits into infrastructure and you won't have to worry about internet "rationing".
 
bucket said:
Invest those obscene profits into infrastructure and you won't have to worry about internet "rationing".
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Bingo. They claim " ... people who want to spend eight hours a day watching video online is fine with me, but they should pay more than somebody who reads e-mail once a week." Don't we already do that? What the hell do I pay $70 a month for the 50/5 service for? If all someone does is check email then the $29 a month plan would more than suffuce would it not?
 
Tak Ne said:
If a restaurant offers "All you can eat" it does it knowing the people who eat a little are paying for the big eaters. They've been selling a service as unlimited for years and when people start to use it they complain. Are they the only ones allowed to be greedy?
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People used to pay for usage and paid about $20 a month for dialup. Along came broadband providers saying 'Hey, we'll give you all you can eat, but we want $60. $45 if you also sign up for a cable TV plan.' Now they're trying to whisper to the grandma that eats 1 scrap of food - 'Hey, it's totally not fair that they pay the same as you right? You shouldn't have to pay as much as them should you?' She replies with - 'Hey, you're right, that's not fair!' Only instead of lowering her bill they're just going to make what she consumes the baseline, and then try to charge everybody else for using normal amounts.

Keep in mind Time Warner's previous attempt tried capping things at 40GB a month, before anybody says 'well, I don't use that much', you probably come close to that if you're reading this site.
 
SockMan! said:
I'm guessing Time Warner knows exactly what they're doing: introduce a highly unfavorable change, watch people rage, undo the change, wait until said rage quiets down, then reintroduce the same change and expect people to concede. And concede they will since most people don't have a choice anyway.
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Right. They have been watching gas prices. OPEC (or even naturally occurring unplanned situations) shocks people with a ~$1.00 jump in price. Lower it back down ~$.50 and all is forgotten. Wait a while... $1.00 jump, pull back $.50... rince and repeat.

Kind of how exercise goes... you shock the body to adapt. At the point the body rebels, you throttle back the workload, take it easy for a while, and then shock your body again to newer intensities.

It's what companies are learning to do.
 
Don't now why everyone thinks tiered service is the devil.

I know why and its the ISPs fault for offering "unlimited" service. Its like a company that releases a widget called "widget professional"... then 6mo later release the same thing but calls it just "widget". If a customer sees both products for the same price, they will take the "pro" version every time because it MUST be better.

"Unlimited" service we have now is anything but... Read the TOS, in most there is some extremely vague clause about "acceptable use" which they can end your service if you breach this limit. Comcast has done this in the past for "abusers" (how can you be an abuser of "unlimited" service???)

Face it, you are already on metered service, your bill and their advertising just says "unlimited".

Is it clear enough that "unlimited" advertising pisses me off?

Granted some companies worry about removing "abusers" to some degree, true metered service will remove this worry.

What they should do is say "f" it... Offer metered plans for less then the unlimited, get the grannies, mothers, etc that don't use the internet except for the hotmail.

Then slowly work up the price of "unlimited", while offering their tiered service plans.


As mentioned these companies are seeing the writing on the wall, bandwidth needs are rising exponentially, netflix, icloud, pandora etc etc). They know there will be a day where they can't offer unlimited for the same price they are now.

They thought they were fooling us all with the "unlimited" service, when the internet was low bandwidth... not the tables have turned.
 
Ualdayan said:
People used to pay for usage and paid about $20 a month for dialup. Along came broadband providers saying 'Hey, we'll give you all you can eat, but we want $60. $45 if you also sign up for a cable TV plan.' Now they're trying to whisper to the grandma that eats 1 scrap of food - 'Hey, it's totally not fair that they pay the same as you right? You shouldn't have to pay as much as them should you?' She replies with - 'Hey, you're right, that's not fair!' Only instead of lowering her bill they're just going to make what she consumes the baseline, and then try to charge everybody else for using normal amounts.

Keep in mind Time Warner's previous attempt tried capping things at 40GB a month, before anybody says 'well, I don't use that much', you probably come close to that if you're reading this site.
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Said to say, I bet this is true. Metered service is not the devil the cable companies are!
 
I can't belive there going to try this again. AT&T uvers is all over TWC area's now. It's just a bad idea. Uvers is in my area and it's 24 down. TWC will have 50/5 here in the next few months. But lagging behind AT&T and trying to pull this crap again is not a go idea. When people can switch to anoughter service with fast speeds and a cheaper bill.
 
What's the cost of bandwidth these days per GB?

I pay $8 a month for unlimited usenet access that can push 40Mb/sec if your internet is fast enough.

So I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, count in a little extra overhead.

Does $25 a month for unlimited sound fair? That's paying three times as much for the same amount of bandwidth that my usenet provider gives.
 
The only way that metered billing might fly is if they uncap speeds for everyone and just sell bandwidth. 50GB = $25, 100GB = $40, 250GB = $75, and so on. And it would be even better if the amount purchased ran until used up, rather than being capped at 30 days. I'd love to buy 500GB worth of internet bandwidth and just run it for 4 months until I run out and need to buy more
 
They are always going to have problems if they don't keep up with demand. There is always the leading edge of people, once they become a large enough bunch of people whom they consider "abusers" it's a sign their network is not up to snuff with demands. Also that more and more people will be joining that group. They don't throw data very quickly on the last mile in the majority of the US, big cities differ, but it's stupid to talk about throttling people when their normal usage is peaking out their connections upper limits.

I know my connection is noticeably slower during the evening than late into the night. I also haven't heard a peep about them working on offering new household speed increases.....people who upgrade to business I can only assume means they get a fixed amount of the loop apportioned to them to maintain a baseline speed greater than a normal household user.

Plus, Time Warners customer service is terrible. Their troubleshooting teams are terrible. And it seems every other year we have some network arguing prices and TW uses that to explain bill increases....EXCEPT it increases when those aren't happening. And they keep moving more and more channels to "digital" packages.

I do not believe for one minute that anything TW does is for the customer, if it was for the customer they wouldn't struggle at fixing problems when they arise on a household level.
 
not sure why everyone is saying canada was the test bed for this. What Bell tried to do here was implement it across the board to every ISP not just there own. Big difference. But the government stepped in and had it stopped 2 weeks before it was to start. Yes the big 3 here are doing it and have been for years, but we do have alternatives with large caps unmetered.
 
dandirk said:
Don't now why everyone thinks tiered service is the devil.
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I have no problem with tiered service in theory, I just don't trust the ISPs to implement it in a way that doesn't rip people off. They would like to charge light users what they are charging now ($50 for 20GB or something similar), and then charge heavy users obscene amounts.

Think about it. If tiered pricing isn't going to gain them MORE profits, then why would they be doing it? Even if it was going to break even, they wouldn't bother.
 
travbrad said:
I have no problem with tiered service in theory, I just don't trust the ISPs to implement it in a way that doesn't rip people off. They would like to charge light users what they are charging now ($50 for 20GB or something similar), and then charge heavy users obscene amounts.

Think about it. If tiered pricing isn't going to gain them MORE profits, then why would they be doing it? Even if it was going to break even, they wouldn't bother.
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and the ISPs say it's good for us...
the only reasonable approach would be to give price ranges that are lower.
$20 for 20GB/month would be reasonable and all that most users would need.
 
dark4181 said:
The only way that metered billing might fly is if they uncap speeds for everyone and just sell bandwidth. 50GB = $25, 100GB = $40, 250GB = $75, and so on. And it would be even better if the amount purchased ran until used up, rather than being capped at 30 days. I'd love to buy 500GB worth of internet bandwidth and just run it for 4 months until I run out and need to buy more
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There is a usenet provider that does that, 1TB of transfers for $50 or so.
 
And to think I ran to TWC from the American Thieves & Thugs (AT&T) to escape these usage caps. What am I going to do? I don't at all abuse my Internet connection, I probably barely use 150 GBs a month. I just don't want to have to worry about some arbitrary number and the possibility of being charged more at the end of the month.
 
What gets me about all of these tiered plans is that they could just as easily let you hit your cap then throttle your connection way down to "guaranteed minimum" the contract offers. I think I have seen this mentioned ONCE as a solution to hitting caps, but they keep wanting to get something closer to a buck or more a gig out of people. Plus not have accurate measuring tools people can look to, warning systems, or really anything to prevent going over the cap because they have no idea where they reside on the scale from "nothing" to "too much".

It's ripe for abuse when their monitoring system only detects when you go over and you can't monitor it to see an accurate representation of your usage or even if their system says you had usage that even makes sense to what you know you've done. What they count as usage, what they don't count as usage toward your cap (their services usually).
 
The only issue I'm afraid of is what's going to happen in the future? Companies today are implementing 40GB, 60GB, and even some have 5GB caps. So then what happens when national or global Internet usage goes up by 50% in a few years? I doubt the ISPs are going to magically increase those low-today and stifling-tomorrow limitations without charging some additional "fee".

ISPs have made this "Data Crisis 2011" (queue news network breaking news music) that we all seem to be in. Funny, I haven't noticed any slowdowns. I guess I'll just have to take the word of everyone that "it's for the good of the people".

I mean, look at the companies who are implementing these caps compared to the ones who aren't. Coincidence that almost every ISP implementing data caps also has a video service competing with an online streaming service?

Myself, I'm lucky to have an ISP (Sasktel) that doesn't have caps. Even our 3g (I guess it's 4g now) only has an "unofficial" 5GB limit, but it's not a hard cap.

Riley
 
trparky said:
And to think I ran to TWC from the American Thieves & Thugs (AT&T) to escape these usage caps. What am I going to do? I don't at all abuse my Internet connection, I probably barely use 150 GBs a month. I just don't want to have to worry about some arbitrary number and the possibility of being charged more at the end of the month.
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Phone and cable companies are playing a game of good cop/bad cop with the entire country. They chase you to the other provider, then the other provider starts doing whatever the provider you came from did.

Then you go back, only to have your original provider turn the screws even tighter and the cycle begins anew.
 
this is crazy, people need to stand up and say, hey this is enough you cant do what you want, people need to grow ball's and stop letting companies aka cable companies putting caps on bandwidth, if you just let them do this and lay down and take this they will keep doing this, until we do something.

Yes some of you may disagree with my statement above, but i am sorry if you do, but its the truth, and until we do something about this it will go on, and i am wrong, please by all means correct me.


But my small local cable company (Buckeye Cable System) has no reason to put a cap on there internet bandwidth, the tech support/customer support/eng support is all local, nothing is out sourced, they are a smart company i will say that, if you ask for a manager they transfer no qestions asked, and they will not put a cap on even if other cable companies do, because then they get all the customer's, and the cable companies who come here dont have a chance.
 
It's getting to the point that internet access is becoming a necessity to people, so of course ISPs are going to try milk every dime out of people. Of course this is why they fought so hard to get rid of community internet access programs, so that we did not have any where else to turn to when this sort of crap hit the fan.
 
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