ISP's trying to bring back bandwidth caps
On Monday, I saw an article on Yahoo! News about Time Warner Cable trying out metered internet usage in Beaumont, Texas. People in this area will have a monthly allowance for the amount of data they upload and download. If they go over this limit, they will be charged $1 per gigabyte.
They claim that this is an attempt to fairly deal out internet usage, which they claim is uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers. They also claim 'We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure'. However, the investment should have came from all of the millions of dollars given to telco's by the government over the last several years.
The article also goes on to talk about how phone companies are less concerned about congestion and will be unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers since their networks are structured differently.
Time Warner Cable gave some info about their tiered service. One will be $29.95 a month for 768 kilobits per second and a 5 gigabyte monthly cap and another will be $54.90 for 15 megabits per second and a cap of 40 gigabytes per month. The price covers the internet portion of subscription bundles that include video (think video on demand) and phone services. Both of which the downloads and uploads count toward the monthly cap.
Comcast, which is the country's largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month.
This is just a way for these companies to make more money to pad their bottom line. They see a trend where people are using the internet more and more and feel that its their best way to increase their profits. With iTunes, Amazon, Audible, NetFlix and many other services that use the internet for sales and delivery, these companies have set their sights on us users who use it for entertainment to increase their profit margins.
I have started watching TWiTLive.tv streaming broadcasts of Leo Laporte. The video and audio is 564 kilobits per second. If you multiply that out its in the neighborhood of 2 gigabytes per hour. He broadcast about 25 hours a week. If someone watched all 25 hrs per week and did nothing else, that would total over 100 gigabytes per month.
If you watch a movie from NetFlix, each one would be (roughly estimated) 2 gigabytes or 6-8 gigabytes for a high definition movie. This is completely ridiculous. It reminds me of 1995 when metered dial-up internet was around. Remember what happened to that?
Yahoo! News Article
CNet: The Digital Home Article
They claim that this is an attempt to fairly deal out internet usage, which they claim is uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers. They also claim 'We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure'. However, the investment should have came from all of the millions of dollars given to telco's by the government over the last several years.
The article also goes on to talk about how phone companies are less concerned about congestion and will be unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers since their networks are structured differently.
Time Warner Cable gave some info about their tiered service. One will be $29.95 a month for 768 kilobits per second and a 5 gigabyte monthly cap and another will be $54.90 for 15 megabits per second and a cap of 40 gigabytes per month. The price covers the internet portion of subscription bundles that include video (think video on demand) and phone services. Both of which the downloads and uploads count toward the monthly cap.
Comcast, which is the country's largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month.
This is just a way for these companies to make more money to pad their bottom line. They see a trend where people are using the internet more and more and feel that its their best way to increase their profits. With iTunes, Amazon, Audible, NetFlix and many other services that use the internet for sales and delivery, these companies have set their sights on us users who use it for entertainment to increase their profit margins.
I have started watching TWiTLive.tv streaming broadcasts of Leo Laporte. The video and audio is 564 kilobits per second. If you multiply that out its in the neighborhood of 2 gigabytes per hour. He broadcast about 25 hours a week. If someone watched all 25 hrs per week and did nothing else, that would total over 100 gigabytes per month.
If you watch a movie from NetFlix, each one would be (roughly estimated) 2 gigabytes or 6-8 gigabytes for a high definition movie. This is completely ridiculous. It reminds me of 1995 when metered dial-up internet was around. Remember what happened to that?
Yahoo! News Article
CNet: The Digital Home Article
Labels: Keeping the Man Down, Movies, Music, News, Rant
posted by Brian Wright at 10:02 PM
2 Comments:
Not that this comment is in any way going against what you said about the ISPs, you know I have a thing for numbers... and I think there is a flaw in your numbers.
I did some calculations, and it seems that listening to TWiTLive.tv for 25 hours at the 564Kbps you mentioned... would accumulate between 6.25 and 6.5GB per week, which is about 25GB per month.
I was doing a rough estimate, which I noted in the post. Plus, there is a rolling chat room which I do not have the numbers for the amount of data it takes to constantly update between 1000 and 2000 people chatting.
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