Damn it, get PISSED.
Time Warner Cable announced the other day that they are going to be placing low usage based caps on usage in select markets, one of which being Rochester, NY.
Hey, the twitterverse is already pissed. I’m pissed. But lets think about this for a moment.
Media-on-demand providers should be pissed. Their service requires that end users have expendable bandwidth. High Definition movies are over several gigs a piece.
Families and Roommates should be pissed. Every computer you have on the net will be consuming that bandwidth. I live with 2 friends, and yes we’re techies, but we each have a computer. We have an xbox media center (for watching movies and such), a wii (which we utilize the internet for games such as mario kart), and we all have iPod touches that we use day to day for various reasons. All of these go through our pipe. Just imagine if we played online games! My World of Warcraft addiction would start to cost me more than the monthly fee.
People with a home office should be pissed. It’s highly doubtful you have a business line into your home, especially if you do less than 50% of your work at home, so you will be affected. Sure, it depends on what you do in your office… but if you use services like Skype (for conference calls), or are involved transfering documents, all that data is counted as well.
Friends that come over with their laptops should be pissed. What happens when Steve your buddy from freshman year comes by to say hi and you have to tell him “Sorry dude, I can’t let you connect to my wifi… I’m at my limit.” or “sure, can you give me a buck or two to cover for your bandwidth?” Even worse, what happens when someone leeches your wifi?
Well, lets address some of the issues…
In Rochester, there is no real competition to Time Warner for broadband service. Frontier doesn’t have the infrastructure, and other services are just reselling Time Warner infrastructure.
Of course, ’shit ain’t free’, I agree, and I totally understand. However, a strange thing happens when companies become the only really shop in town… they charge more then they need to. Numbers that I have read vary, from 3 cents to 5 cents, but that is the approximate cost for Time Warner to have a gigabyte of data pass over their network. The means, at the high end of those numbers, it costs Time Warner two dollars for 40GB of data. Then, they are going to charge me a dollar for every gigabyte I go over? Does that seem fair to you? Ok Ok… Support costs? Fine. You know what though? The average person who will constantly go over, doesn’t use support… unless Time Warner screws up their network.
Should someone that barely uses the internet have to pay the same as me? No. I agree again. You know what? Offer people the choice. Usage based consumption, or all inclusive. Usage based should be cheaper, and it should be FAIR. You wanna set up low limits? Fine. But charge reasonable overages. Still worried about the “all inclusive” plan being abused by people who transfer truely massive amounts of data? Fine. Limit them. Write it in their contracts that consistantly going over 1TB of data transfer will cause their service to be discontinued - but let it be a truely masive amount, and only if it’s really a problem should it be addressed. There are better ways.
Really, the crux of the matter is this… You may not use all that bandwidth yet. You may even think one dollar of overages aren’t that bad. What needs to be realized though, is that our world is becoming a truely connected world. Data transfer is what is making much of this possible. Limiting access to this data will stifle our economy more, and will cause a decline in the utilization of the internet for all of its purposes… and believe it or not, thats a BAD thing.
Just remember, even reading this brings you a little bit closer to your cap. Don’t worry though, to be considerate I decided not to include any images that might needless cost you more.
This is exactly the reason we need an informed and active FCC. The good news is, Obama’s appointments thus far indicate that companies like TWC may not have much longer to abuse their customers. :)
I think this is a terrible move. I hate restrictions created by the greedy service providers (telephone and internet).
Vint Cerf was asked the question today and he was against it. It doesn’t promote the use of the internet. Now people have to judge how much internet they use when they play a game or connect to a video conference. No one should ever have to pull out a pad of paper to calculate usages of all the wifi capable devices.
Charging based on data downloaded is the wrong metric. You should be charging based on the bandwidth.
Wow, I can’t believe they’ve started to do this! Thinking along the technology timeline though, we do have caps for phone usage plans, although they do provide unlimited airtime for the chatty Cathies out there, so I completely agree that they should have a tiered service for the different types of users.
Yet another reason to get out of Rochester. I hope it doesn’t become a nationwide thing. We’re lucky that out here we have AT&T which is starting to become a huge competitor with TW. Unfortunately, being a new service provider, they only service select areas.