Time Warner Cable Expands Internet Usage Pricing

Time Warner Cable Expands Internet Usage Pricing

Web users, the meter is running. In a strategy that's likely to rankle consumers but be copied by competitors, Time Warner Cable (TWC) is pressing ahead with a plan to charge Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume. Starting next month, the company will introduce tiered pricing in several markets.

In the case of Time Warner Cable, customers will be charged from $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan's cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB. A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that's just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing. "To put it mildly," says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, "the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior."

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[edit on 4/9/2009 by semperfortis]

Ladies and Gentlemen I am unfortunate enough to live in Rochester, NY and am facing yet another strain on my budget and the entire face of internet usage could change forever! This information was run on a local television station yesterday and this is the first I heard of this though this article I found is from an earlier date. How many of you are Time Warner/Road Runner subscribers here?

When I first heard about this I could not believe they would be stupid enough to do that. Then I thought about what a huge conglomerate Time-Warner is and how for whatever reason Rochester is often used as a test market.

From what this article says and the woman that I spoke with at our local office my days of listening to hours of youtube interviews, lectures, and other footage are going to have to come to an end for me. I do not like DSL and the only competitor here is Clearwire and from what I hear that is terrible.

So now they are going to carefully monitor usage, I wonder what other doors this is going to open. The lengths these people go to in order to line their pockets is so wrong. The internet is for me and many people an affordable form of entertainment and my primary source of all information. I am outraged!

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[edit on 4/9/2009 by semperfortis]

reply to post by redhead57


Is always those places like INTERNET cafés, I am sure that if we have them here in the south were I live they must have them where you are.

When that starts hitting me here in my neck of the woods I will cancel my home INTERNET service and to the INTERNET cafés I will go.

I will flag this thread because it is VERY important that they do not get away with this... Unlimited internet is the only way I will pay for this because internet bandwidth is relative in worth.

Always make sure you ask your provider for UNLIMITED usage. The more demand they have for it, the longer they will keep it.

And if they try to talk you into limited GB usage plan tell them you will cancel your service unless you have an unlimited bandwidth plan!

If they are looking for more money just raise the internet bill 20 bucks, please do not nitpick at the GB usage. Oh this frustrates me.

On the other hand, hey at least we still got our neighbors wifi we can borrow.

From a conspiracy prospective, it is just like them to make it more difficult to obtain information. We all know that TW is a huge cable and news monopoly and as more and more people take advantage of alternative news sources they are loosing both money and control...of information.

What better way to shut down some of the chatter on youtube than by charging for usage? I see this as a very slippery slope and we are not even gaining real speed yet....unless you live in one of the 3 test cities!

I think this is important for many reasons, more and more control by the corporate people against the regular guy out here, or girl.

Better switch to Verizon.
Time warner is crap.

Commerce.

They are doing with the internet what they successfully did with the electromagnetic spectrum, they 'sold' it to commerce interests.

Americans must never be allowed a medium in which they can communicate freely. Make them pay for it. That way the poor and disenfranchised won't have to be heard.

I am wondering... what part of America belongs to the Americans?

Not even the bandwidth occupied by their messages or information belongs to them anymore, soon they will charge us for existing..., oh wait... taxes.

[edit on 9-4-2009 by Maxmars]

Information is the PTB's #1 enemy.

Originally posted by Gouki
Better switch to Verizon.
Time warner is crap.

I switched from Verizon to TW a few months ago because the Verizon was crap. My parents have had Verizon DSL since it first started and honestly I don't even know why they still have it. The service is intermittent at best. When it rains, it's out. If it's windy, it's out. They have had Verizon there dozens of times to fix it and Verizon even went so far as to replace all of the lines on the street and still the same. I got it at my apartment and had all the same problems.

TW on the other hand seems to let you think you have fast service for the first couple of months then one day your connection is too slow to stream anything. It takes 10 minutes of buffering to begin a Netflix stream now.

That's also not mentioning how my cable box likes to reset itself at least twice a day while I'm watching something and that's saying a lot considering I only watch about 2 hours of TV a day. And my HD channels go out at least 3 times a week. And HBO is all digital interference. And HBO On Demand rarely works.

The thing is they have a monopoly over all internet here. It's one crappy service or a different crappy service.

They know they can get away with ridiculous pricing plans. Where is everyone going to go? Even slower, intermittent service?

[edit on 9-4-2009 by Magnivea]

I just called my Time Warner representative and asked about the program. He said it was still in a "testing" phase and "if" it would be implemented it would be sometime around september. He also stated they were testing to see "what effect it would have on billing". This is in the San Antonio area.... I enjoy streaming video alot, and if they do bring this to fruition I will switch providers.

-E-

look, realistically, there is a reason for this, 90% of the bandwidth is consumed by 20% of the population. It costs money to bring a product to market, IF you like streaming video, playing wow, and surfing porn, realistically, you are going to pay more, and you should pay more, then grandma who uses it to check her email once a week.

I have no doubt though that they will roll out with a tier2 system where you get some many gigs for free, then you pay 1-2 dollars for each gig over that. This is whats realistic. Most movies you rent are 3-4 gig. That means if you downloaded a movie off the internet you would pay this amount.

I personnelly have no doubt that when they start rolling this service out, they will also roll out there centralized movie servers(what your DVR's connect to do insta-play) in a modified form, to allow yo,u for a subscription, to watch all the movies that are on that anyway. This saves them money, becuase the data isn't traversing the internet, which costs them money to supply.

The bottom line is yes it sucks if you eat up all the bandwidth in your neighborhood, but if your jo-mama, that hardly uses it, like most TW customers, you will get a discount in price. Its better for them to charge you, then to just cut you off. You'd complain about that too no doubt.

Just my 2 cents,

Camain

I think what you will see, is ISPs that won't go to a system like this, because they are going to be recruiting high bandwidth users. I'm glad I dumped Time Warner already. Sometimes I can exceed 40GB in a week!

reply to post by camain


Quite frankly thats BS, high end users such as gamers and people who watch streams rather than tv already pay more than granny who check her email once a month, granny still uses dial up or some tiny speed connection that costs next to nothing, gamers are on 10MB+ Broadband connections and already paying a high premium with the providers knowing full well if they want that connection speed, shock horror their usage is probably going to be relatively high.

Originally posted by camain
look, realistically, there is a reason for this, 90% of the bandwidth is consumed by 20% of the population. It costs money to bring a product to market, IF you like streaming video, playing wow, and surfing porn, realistically, you are going to pay more, and you should pay more, then grandma who uses it to check her email once a week.

The grandma in your example can get free internet over the phone lines, she doesn't need cable internet.

You're claim that 90% of the bandwidth is consumed by 20% of the population must be referring to people who host servers. These people should be paying a bit more for their service, not the normal cable internet users.

This proposed plan by Time Warner is so flawed it isn't even funny, they have no clue how fast bandwith gets eaten up by simple things such as youtube. Using their proposed tier plan most of their customers would have to use the top tier, and even with the top tier's pathetic 40gb limit most people will go over that in a week. Their proposed plan simply isn't realistic.

I say let them do this all they like. It will then force consumers to purchase their own T-1 and get a direct connection of their own directly to the net.

When the greedy get too greedy it always opens up opportunity. Would people rather pay them their $200/ month blood money or go in with 4 or more next door neighbors to get the same speed and they own it and it is completely unfiltered and unbiased with no big brother.

Even better, communities could buy their own DS-3 (28x T-1) then charge neighbors a reasonable fee for access.The money made could then go the community instead of wall street. Hell, I would volunteer my time to make this happen so that it was completely non-profit.

Dare us to think outside of the box and let the big corps choke on it.

reply to post by gYvMessanger


It's actually a myth that gamers require massive amounts of bandwidth. The actually ammount of information being transmitted for online gaming from your PC is miniscule. Your talking file sizes of a few tens of Kb's. You will see no performance gain playing WoW if you upgraded from a 2Mb ADSL to a 50Mb fibre connection.

by Mekanic
I think what you will see, is ISPs that won't go to a system like this, because they are going to be recruiting high bandwidth users. I'm glad I dumped Time Warner already. Sometimes I can exceed 40GB in a week!

What on earth are you doing to download 40GB in a week? I peaked at around 30Gb last week, but thats because I built a new Quad-core monster and needed to re-download all my games from EA and Steam. Usually, my weekly usage is less than 1Gb and I game, alot.

It's actually fair to charge people for bandwidth used as opposed to a flat fee. Bandwidth is expensive! Think about it, if everyone wants the super-fast broadband put in, that'll cost the telco's alot of money.

On top of that, with the new speeds people are going to be downloading alot more than they usually would.

A flat fee to provide a 100Mps service with no usage charges would be horrendously expensive for the user, as at any given time these highband services will only be seeing about a 30% usage on a busy day.

I know this as the telco I work for supplies, amongst many things, ethernet services to business. To see a 100Mps ethernet line reach 100% is almost unheard of. The vast majority of the time, highband services are underuterlised. Still, the rental for these services is very high indeed.

It would be fairer in the case of home users to charge for bandwidth consumed, rather than a flat fee.

Of course, money talks, so if consumers aren't happy then another billing model will evolve or ISP's will go under. Margins are pretty low in this sector, so they have to be inventive to maximise revenue.

You can't give everyone a 100Mbs connection and only bill them £29.99 a month, unless you cap them or charge for bandwidth consumed. The alternative is to go out of business.

Originally posted by xman_in_blackx
Even better, communities could buy their own DS-3 (28x T-1) then charge neighbors a reasonable fee for access.The money made could then go the community instead of wall street. Hell, I would volunteer my time to make this happen so that it was completely non-profit.

Dare us to think outside of the box and let the big corps choke on it.

Funny, this is actually what one town in the UK did last century. Kingston-upon-Hull, for one reason or another, seemed to be completely bypassed by the advent of telephones and had no network installed. After a point, the local council started their own corporation called Kingston Comms and it still runs today. They actually now have a monopoly in that town as no-one else even wants to build into Hull, given the fact it's a dive.

But, they still have to interconnect to other telcos to actually work, this costs alot of money. As it stands now, the prices you're charged for broadband are very low margin anyway, so if you set up a community run Telco, you wouldn't see much in the way of any sort of price reduction.

You may even see prices rise as you would not benefit from reduced maintainence costs, given your much smaller economies of scale and less benefical terms with suppliers of equipment.

I'd like to see you do it, but it isn't that easy.

I saw Mrs. Huffington last night on some PBS program saying how wonderful it would be to get a tax on the or generate revenue from it. Her and some other guy was on last night regarding this matter. Gov and other sub groups tied to it have tried this every year for nearly the last 7 or 8 years it was tried only a few times under clinton it has never been this bad.

Now you have spy agencies outside the united states that are being blamed for putting so called software into the internet itself to possibly bring it down. I can easily see some special interest group paying off china with some blackmail bribe to do damage in the United States for a political favor it wouldnt be the first time.

If any gov can put up a way to censor or stem off political commentary or at least figure out a way to control it they will spend any amount of money to do so I know what these people are capeable of. I know that the CIA coup is still on going and I have to be honest with all of you I may be joinin it here pretty quick if this keeps up.

Im simply not going to roll over even in my condition and allow things like this to continue un challenged. No matter if this or another governement likes it or not the internet is about the only thing keeping the people of this country and others from a full scale riot in all cities.

It would take a few days or weeks after the vanishing of the internet before there would start to be large scale riots everywhere. Ya if your part of the establishment elite you have alot to fear when it comes to the internet you cant just pay people off to shut everyone up.

I know that ted turner broke off his merger with aol over gov having this planned also because he knew they were going to go after his property like bill gates was gone after back in the 1990's so he broke up the deal. Just goes to show you that if your part of the establishment you get eaten by your own.

Falcon

My service provider a cable company claims and bills me for a 100 Mps connection but i rarely get a 100 Mps connection except at the wee hours in the morning.

If they go to a tiered system and i don't get my 100 mps i will challenge there bill every time.
A lower mps will mean i use more connection time and it takes longer to do anything.

The biggest bandwidth usage in the US is still spam and the botnets that send it.

Stop them and the usage will drop a lot.

It's alway been like that here in Australia.

You have X amount of download included with the Plan/Option you choose. The ones with more Download Capacity cost more. Once you have exceeded it, you are either charged a small amount per GB you go over at normal speed, or if you chose Shaped, you are throttled back to 64Kb/64Kb (might as well be dialup speed) until the Bill cycle restarts.

It sucks, but that is the only way you can get internet at all over here and possibly in a large chunk of the world.