Total Number of Ratings: 2
Time Warner Cable and Bandwith Capping
Thursday, April 16, 2009 6:32 PM
Recently Time Warner Cable tested in a few different cities some different bandwith capping plans. Suffice to say they didn't work out, but it looks like the still plan on trying. They made a post on long reply that can be found here.
There is only one way I can see this working for TWC, if everyone does it. If my provider for cable did this, I'd be looking at the first available alternative and jump ship. The only people who will be okay with these are people who only use theinternet for browsing purposes or light gaming. This seems to me as another play at trying to cash in on new technologies, the big one being streaming video, morespecically Netflix (which if it did streaming a while back when a certain Tubes remark was made...). Of course the best part about our society is competition. Which is why I feel this will never work. As long as the competition can offer "unlimited"internet why go to TWC?
I could maybe see my parents using a lower tier so that they could pay less, but they only use the internet for surfing because they are on dialup. As soon as reasonable broadband is introduced into their area, my guess is that they will upgrade. I also forsee them getting into streaming video and purchasing video which would take them up a notch. I make this statement because after I took my Apple TV up north my Dad informed me that I was not allowed to take it back with me.
Is there anyone out there that thinks this is a good idea? I'm really curious to see what people think.
This article can originally be found on jonstump.net.
The big issue I've read is that this does affect users who don't pirate as well. For instance some people who were in the capping program played WoW and streamed through Netflix. They didn't think that this would put them in a high tier because it was moderate usage, I.E. not playing WoW all day and watching Netflix at the same time. They ended up paying the 40 dollars more a month.
It's definitely a horrible idea for the consumer, but they are all going to try it. "They" being all the telco companies. Make no mistake, once one company enacts capping, they will all follow suit.
I think that's true to a point. I think the major telcos will do this but, there are smaller ISPs coming out that are willing to offer true unlimited, one just sprang up in NY that is offering 150 MB/s at 90 a month if I remember correctly. I'd have to track down the article to find the details.
Respond
Comcast had tried to implement something like this awhile back too. From what I understood it was mostly trying to hedge torrent traffic which they claimed ate up around 50% of their total bandwidth use. At one point they were even accused of using software that blocked outgoing torrent signals that violated their contracts with their customers about not blocking signals.
I think it will become a techie arms race to see if the pirates can out-think the providers and get around the caps while the rest of the people don't even come close to the cap and are unaffected.