Time Warner Transfer Caps May Inspire Fair-Price Legislation 382
Time Warner's recently announced plan to expand their broadband transfer caps to new markets drew heavy criticism, which prompted their attempt to smooth things over with a ridiculously expensive "unlimited" plan. That wasn't enough for New York Representative Eric Massa, who now says he will draft legislation to "curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a monopoly on service." Massa said, "Time Warner believes they can do this in Rochester, NY; Greensboro, NC; and Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and it's almost certainly just a matter of time before they attempt to overcharge all of their customers," adding, "I believe safeguards must be put in place when a business has a monopoly on a specific region."
Re:Caps are about broadband video (Score:4, Informative)
What I have in Western Washington (near Seattle) is Comcast and Verizon. They both charge basically the same price for all services. If there were TRUE competition, i.e., many different companies, there's NO WAY they'd be able to charge such high prices without losing customers. But, since there are only 2 companies, they basically have all the benefits of collusion, without any actual collusion. I mean, if one of them decided to charge some arbitrary fee, the other one would follow. Double-Grrrrr....
Re:America against Bandwidth Caps (Score:3, Informative)
These caps don't seem to have anything to do with peak time usage. If the caps were only on peak time it'd be something different entirely.
Re:Complaining when you got what you asked for (Score:2, Informative)
One of the tech gurus at my local ISP posted an excellent thread which details how UK ISP's are charged for their bandwidth.
It is certainly UK specific, but it does go into some depth as to how and why there are bandwidth limitations on ISP services in the UK. By far and away the most expensive part of the connection is between the Customer and the ISP, and not between the ISP and the Internet.
The blog post is available here [plus.net]. Makes for some interesting reading.
Re:America against Bandwidth Caps (Score:1, Informative)
Huh? I'm from Europe - Germany, to be precise -, and I don't have any caps. I happily use about 150 GB / month by my own estimates nowadays (all legal, too, mind you); Torrent shows a total transfer volume in excess of 2500 GB already, and my ISP, who I've been with since 2001, has never complained to me.
Stupid astroturfer.
Re:Complaining when you got what you asked for (Score:5, Informative)
"High-speed data costs decreased for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 primarily due to a decrease in per-subscriber connectivity costs, partially offset by subscriber growth.
"In 2007, TW made $3,730 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $164 Million to support the cost of the network. 2007 total profit on high speed data: $3.566 Billion"
"In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion"
Stop shilling for corporations. Clearly the unlimited broadband model has been extremely profitable.
Wake up and smell the non-corporate content suppression.
Re:Up next (Score:2, Informative)
Re:America against Bandwidth Caps (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, I don't think you understood what you're replying to. Your analogy applies to pre-cap service, which no one was complaining about. To further your analogy, the addition of the caps is like having gone there for years and typically eaten 2-4 plates, then one day they take your plate away after you've finished your first helping, and tell you there's a one-plate limit. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like nearly as good a deal.
Re:America against Bandwidth Caps (Score:5, Informative)
Is it just me or do I find the complaint against Bandwidth Caps ridiculous?
I only seem to see people complaining about it in America, most of Europe (afaik) has gotten used to having bandwidth caps.
Are you out of your mind? The reason why you see people complaining about it in America and not in Europe is because a lot of European countries do not have any kind of download caps whatsoever so we don't have to complain about it.
Re:Complaining when you got what you asked for (Score:1, Informative)
Your numbers are strange, since Wikipedia shows TWC's 2007 profit to have been 2.77 Billion. A lot of the overhead must be included under the cable TV side of the business. While TWC seems to lying about the costs of broadband, it may be true that they won't be profitable as an ISP once their cable business dies. If they protect TV while milking internet, however, they will be obscenely profitable.
Re:Complaining when you got what you asked for (Score:4, Informative)
I work at a relatively small ISP, and our Internet circuits cost us $50-75/meg (plus we have multiple paths for redundancy), and that doesn't include our infrastructure (routers/switches, UPS/generator, A/C, people, etc.). If you want a guaranteed 6 meg pipe, you shouldn't expect to get it for $99.
You—like many other people—are confusing "speed of pipe" and "number of bytes transferred".
We know your ISP doesn't pay $50 per megabyte transferred, because you'd have to charge customers thousands of dollars a month for the equivalent of dial-up access. You might pay $50 for each megabit/second of pipe you want to the Internet, but if you do, you are getting severely overcharged.
If you sell me a 6Mbps connection, then, yes, I (and everyone else) expect to be able to use all 6Mbps twenty-four hours a day. Most users probably won't use it 24/7, but they all expect that whenever they get on the Internet, then that's the speed they'll get.
Your costs don't change if people do use their connection to download 24/7, because all peering agreements are based on transit out of a network. So, you don't want people uploading a lot, but downloading is essentially "free", since there are no costs beyond the price of the pipe, and that is charged based on the max speed, not the number of bytes transferred.
Last, there are ISPs that realize everything I have said is true, and manage to provide the full speed that was contracted for every hour of every day, with no limit on the total bytes transferred, all at a reasonable cost. And, those ISPs aren't losing money.
How about enforcing competetion instead of prices? (Score:3, Informative)
It is the same with mobile phone services - the telecoms must share their network with competitors, and allow them to put their services on the network. This means that if you're a customer of a "virtual phone company" you might use the bandwidth of "big telecom X" until some box in their network, from there it is the virtual phone company which controls your call.
In addition, all providers of internet, mobile phone services and landline phone services (including IP telephony) have to provide their pricing and coverage information to a government run web site, so that it is really simple to check if there is a better deal on the market.
Of course all the providers are endlessly complaining, but the effect is that the market works, you get lots of providers, low prices and lots of services to differentiate, even out in the really really remote areas.
With working competition you only see transfer caps on services where it makes some sense, like during the daytime for internet by 3g. (And I could get up to 50mbit/10mbit for $60 a month if bothered to switch it seems.. I hadn't checked the pricing site in a few months.)
Why caps can be good (Score:3, Informative)
I know you guys are scared to death of caps, but I just thought I'd take the time to point out a few reasons why they can be GOOD things, and not necessarily all bad. (I realise that it seems the US has been screwed by big telcos taking money from the govt and not investing it into infrastructure as it was intended, etc.)
[disclaimer: I work for a company that, for almost 10 years, has tried to provide Australian ISP subscribers with the content they want to have]
Here in Australia, we've had caps for a long, long time. The most common cap originally was 3 gigabytes - so imagine how lame it was for us. Of course this was pre-BitTorrent/YouTube/etc, so it wasn't as big a deal as that limit would be today.
Now, a common plan is 12GB (I say 'common' because while there are plenty of plans, the biggest ISP here, BigPond, has its 'default' plan around 12GB, or at least last time I checked - it's certainly what I'm typing this on at my parents place).
Because of these low data limits, there has been fierce competition between ISPs to provide "content" - mostly consisting of mirrors of popular stuff, such as files relating to gaming, open source, etc (more recently Creative Commons-licensed video like the Revision3.com stuff).
So anyway, some of the good things:
1) Many ISPs will maintain their own mirrors of popular content - meaning subscribers can get fast, local downloads (that typically don't count towards their monthly cap). Here in Australia we have a very high ratio of availability of Linux distributions vs # of customers, for example.
2) There's less congestion as users don't randomly leave their software connected and torrenting 24/7. This is good for people like me that prefer speed and responsiveness and don't want to have to worry about a heap of people torrenting last nights episode of Australian/American Idol chewing up all our links.
3) The above two cause lower congestion on our heavily-contested international links, helping keep costs lower overall for everyone (this is less of a big deal for the USA, but we're pretty far away from a lot of digital stuff people want).
4) Many ISPs will run their own local gaming services - even if its only a handful of game servers for popular games. This means fast pings and unmetered traffic - and more variety and competition.
5) Many ISPs will run their own unique content services. BigPond, for example, has a music channel (www.bigpondmusic.com), which offers discounts to subscribers. Internode, another ISP, provides free access to commerical USEnet services. iiNet provide Premier League video streams. All sorts of cool options.
Of course, all these are almost utterly dependent on network neutrality, which has (thus far) been maintained perfectly.
I obviously have a fairly biased perspective because of my involvement in the industry as a data-peddler, but I don't think capped plans are bad. The vast majority of people aren't going to notice.
I would say though that if they're going to /force/ all users to act like 'average' users in terms of bandwidth, there should be a general reduction in price across the board to match the savings they're going to make. Dropping the price for those users that are happy to stay on low plans and leaving it the same for those users that want to have a much higher cap would seem to be much fairer. However, given how big telcos operate, I'd say everyone is just likely to get screwed, and as I understand it many places in the US have a monopoly-type situation on broadband availability - so good luck :)
Re:Up next, Nobody mentioning COX? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.cox.com/policy/limitations.asp
No outrage over COX caps?
net capacity (Score:5, Informative)
Capacity is only unlimited if income is unlimited. Even in a monopoly people will only pay so much, so there's a limited income to expand the network - which puts hard physical limits on capacity, and to make any money at all the network has to be contended.
Thing is is here in the USA cablecos and telcos received almost $200 billion [tispa.org] to buildout broadband but they did not. All they did was use the money to pad their bottom lines. They also battle attempts by others build out broadband. Some articles and posts on /. have been about this, whither it's telecos trying to block muni wifi or cablecos trying to block cities from installing cable. One example is A Broadband Utopia [ieee.org]. Commercial broadband businesses tried to stop it but were unsuccessful. They were successful though having the Utah state government enact a law that requires it to be open, which was planned from the beginning. Because of the network Comcast [dslreports.com] was forced to offer a $90 bundle.
Falcon