AP: Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use

[sparksj]

what would this do to on-line gaming?

I have no clue how much data I send/receive for a 20 minute session of COD4. If IPs start metering their content, I wonder if Microsoft / Sony will come up with their own IPs with unlimited usage for gaming???

How bad would that suck to be limited to 4 hours of on-line gaming per month.

[Jimbo976]

Originally Posted by klac

How do you track your usage so you know if you're getting close to the limit?

There is a Rogers webpage where you can go and see your usage but it is only up to the end of the previous day.

[dk3dknight]

Originally Posted by tron3

Make a room for me. I don't want to be the only paranoid skitz left on the outside.

Fair enough but hopefully you bring alot of blus with you it will be a long time probably hook everything up on a private generator running off of street fighter dvds... which later can be converted to run off of dvds.

[Anthony P]

You need to remember that this is happening in TX in areas that have limited cable access (with TV reception either over-the-air or satellite) and so internet users sucking up bandwidth is a big problem.

Do not expect this to become the norm everywhere.

well you win the awardf for delusionaly optemistic. This is a test case for TW, but it is not meant to be limited to TX, try it there first adn then deploy it everywhere they service. As others pointed out, this is nothing new, other providers have tested and deployed the concept. Roger's Bell, Videotron that have the lion's share all do it here, and it is not a Canadian thing, l you could look at Comcast http://www.betanews.com/article/Repo...ees/1210198913 and others in the US, every few months a new Telco either goes with it or tests it out.

[Anthony P]

Ah so the internet is moving towards socialist communism... great.

isn't forcing people to pay more for something they want the definition of capitalism?

[Anthony P]

How do you track your usage so you know if you're getting close to the limit?

most will have it in your on-line account details. That is what makes doctorsteve comment so funny, TW will go through the trouble of creating a systeme where it tracks BW usage, change the billing system, redesigne a part of the web site... all for a handful of people in a small town. They want to make sure everything works well before it is pushed to everyone.

[dakota81]

Originally Posted by sparksj

what would this do to on-line gaming?

I have no clue how much data I send/receive for a 20 minute session of COD4. If IPs start metering their content, I wonder if Microsoft / Sony will come up with their own IPs with unlimited usage for gaming???

How bad would that suck to be limited to 4 hours of on-line gaming per month.

I used to play Doom on a direct 26.6 modem connection with a friend without any lag.

What would this do to on-line gaming? It'll force programmers to optimize their software. Wasn't all that long ago games were still being optimized for dial-up users. Really, even without changing the bandwidth of games, you're looking at like $1 for 48 hours of gaming. If someone can't afford that price hike, stop gaming and get a damn job.




This is the future. For every one customer who is pissed off, there are a hundred others who benefit from improved quality. You pay for what you use. I see no problem with that.

[dmxoneiuv]

i used to have service electric 2-way internet here in PA and i went over the limit 2 months in a row once so they made me upgrade to a "business" account which was 10 dollars more a month..they actually lowered the download rate but upped the bandwidth for the month, i dont remember by how much. ever since those 2 months i went over i was always careful of how much i downloaded and thought twice about downloading something big..they did have a website to track usage during the month which was helpful.

so i just moved a few months ago so my dad still wanted to keep the cable internet there at his place so i called to downgrade to the lower residential plan again and those guys had to come out to my dads house to verify it was a residence which took about a week, but when it was to upgrade to the business account they did that right away over the phone (bastards)

i'm not really a fan of the metering only b/c these days we have much higher quality pics/vids/music which results in larger files, not to mention online gaming and downloads thru the playstation (or xbox)...i'm sure its mostly to crack down on pirated movies...i guess we'll see what happens

[kuliddar]

This doesn't affect online gaming because there isn't that much transfered between the two except for updates but even that isn't huge. Don't worry about that. I was an early Everquest player back in the day and I was using dial up at the time. Rarely got lag, hence the point that very little is data weight is transfered between the you and the serve. This holds true to today's new MMOs and any multiplayer game as the principle of how this data is sent back and forth is the same.

[mikesoba]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

probably not, these schemes are to get the user to pay for the necessary upgrades, many telcos do it. The issue is that some "abusers" use too much BW and so they bottleneck what the telcos can offer (i.e. your internet is slower because your neighbour dl every movie out there). So the fee has one of two results, either the person stops/slows down (so now your internet is faster) or the guy pays and then the telco has the $ to upgrade the link. The problem is right now usage is way to high to what can be reasonably offered and is why telcos have these fees.

Nonsense. It is more income for these monopolies. Already, the monthly charge is excessive (no credible competition) and for the US, it is costlier than in many European countries. I pay nearly $60 per month with Cox -- outrageous.

[dakota81]

Originally Posted by mikesoba

Nonsense. It is more income for these monopolies. Already, the monthly charge is excessive (no credible competition) and for the US, it is costlier than in many European countries. I pay nearly $60 per month with Cox -- outrageous.

Stick it to the man! Switch over to Netzero dialup!

[Neo65]

Originally Posted by SkullPhyre

Bullshit aol tried that crap years ago and it failed miserably. good thing i have comcast.

The difference here is that the ISPs have noticed that ever since P2P, their backbone is getting to the saturation point where they either spend a lot of money to upgrade the available total bandwidth or throttle the traffic. While they went a log way down throttling the p2p traffic, video is also starting, and video traffic is many times heavier than mp3s.

So the ISPs are doing this not because they want to make more money, but because they can't handle the extra traffic and can't afford to spend more upgrading their infrastructure unless they can raise enough money.

In the last cycle, all that fiber were financed in the internet bubble where the bagholders were eventually severely burned while each company went out of business. I doubt anyone can raise the billions needed this time through a business case built around laying more fiber for internet. People have not forgotten what happened the last time.

The 40GB limit is outrageously low. In eastern Canada, the highest cap for cablemodem is 90GB with the highest premium service, and that is already too low, I exceeded that every other month and my family don't even download video other than watching youtube. Right now, I am getting only warnings, and the billing has not started yet.

PS3 also allows you to download these GBs worth of content and trailers. Don't overdo that as GBs will fly by quickly if you're not careful, and the trailers aren't really that interesting.

[ThePhantomOak]

Originally Posted by SkullPhyre

good thing i have comcast.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, Comcast is leading the charge with Time Warner.

There will never be Movie DLC replacing DVD or Blu until we get fiberoptic cable between all the major population centers (there are way to many people living in suburbs to let this happen). Chances are the internet has reached its top end until they invest huge amounts of tax dollars (like they did to get electircal then phone to every home).

[ThePhantomOak]

Originally Posted by dk3dknight

Ah so the internet is moving towards socialist communism... great.

Capitalism? Economics?

Socialist communism is when everyone pays the same amount. They heaviest users are subsidized by the little users. Socialist communism closer to how it is run now.

It is fine to be against Capitalism or even open market Economics, but it is silly to stick republican talk-show-host catch words to it when you dont like how it works.

Education can be a wonderful thing.

[WickyWoo]

Socialism and communism are entirely different things

Communism is always involving a totalitarian dictatorship, usually masked by a supposed socialist system typically designed in actuality to concentrate wealth and power to the party officials.

Socialism is summed up best as "community ownership", where everyone takes responsibility for the well being of the whole

[ThePhantomOak]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

Socialism and communism are entirely different things

Communism is always involving a totalitarian dictatorship, usually masked by a supposed socialist system typically designed in actuality to concentrate wealth and power to the party officials.

Socialism is summed up best as "community ownership", where everyone takes responsibility for the well being of the whole

Kind of true. Communism does not exists in the world and has not to the best of my knowledge. Communism by definition is not what Cuba or the USSR or China. It is more often that the totalitarian dictatorship hides behind Communism and is normally just a way to do exactly what you said...

Socialism and Communism are BOTH, as defined, best described as community ownership, and classless states. In fact Communism is the outcome of Socialism. It is only because of the totalitarian governments that either has a negative stigma.

Basically, Capitalism is based around a free market Economy (ie. not govt controlled) while Communism and Socialism are both attempts, that run with only slight variation, to make the Economy run better through government control. (Economic history of the world. My school had it at Econ 441 or something when I had to take it.) It is now generally assumed that free and open Markets work better than regulated Markets. However, an aside: right now there is a backlash against this in the US because of the housing issue. They wrongly assume it is because of a lack of regulation and government.

The fact is, Socialism is common in the United States for public service. Roads, electricity, Emergency rooms, fire, police, military etc. All are built under the socialist blueprint. The largest socialist movement in the US was likely between 1935 and 1947/8 when public projects brought poor rural area's things they would never otherwise have, and brought Social Security et al. In other words, our quality of life is based partly on a non-totalitarian socialist movement...

It is funny that both are negative in Americans minds. It is even funnier that when Americans try to claim that a move away from socialism is a move toward socialism.


Simply;
Socialism is if the Govt paid to lay Fiber optic to make Internet faster. Capitalism is if the ISP's "over charge" long enough that they can afford to lay it themselves, or just stick with the best margin they can get with the current system.

[Krandor]

This is a very bad idea and will ultimately cause lots of problems for lots of companies.

First, it is not the backbone that is the problem. There is a reason the article says that DSL is not doing this because they are structured different. The problem is at the local node level. In a typical cable modem setup there are 300-400 houses on a single node. That node only has about a 50M connection. They may be selling people 6-7M to their house, but that whole neighborhood is only on about a 50M pipe. That is the section that is getting saturated. DSL doesn't have their issue since it is full bandwidth to the CO where there is a much bigger pipe.

So because of this, the cable modem network was really only designed for people to email and surf and web. I read something one time where the median user (not average) only used about 5G. Those are the people who are just email and web surfing. This top 5% are really your users who are using the internet for some of the new type of things that are being pushed. Those are the people watching Lost they missed last week or using slingbox or download movies through netflix or amazon. The 24/7 bittorrent people are like in the .5% category. 5% are the people doing more then web surfing and email.

By putting this type of system in place the net effect will be to stiffle all the innovation going on on the internet right now and all the new types of services that are coming up because people will be scared to do much (especially with a cap as low as 40G). Want to download that movie from xbox live for $5? well, that is a 7G file so now your $5 rental is $12. For me, I'll say forget it and go to blockbuster.

On the same note there are so many devices nowdays that are coming out to use the internet for stuff - Blu-ray 2.0 players, Tivos downloading updates that way, etc etc. Again, if you start putting caps into play people are going to avoid those types of products due to the potential extra fees. Even if the amount of bandwidth they use is low, it will still scare people off.

The final issue is that bandwidth is not like water or electricity where if it is not used it is available tomorrow. It is gone if not used. These plans don't seem to take that into account at all. If I set my computer to download something at 2am in the morning there is likely going to be a surplus of bandwidth but that is treated the same as downloading it at 8pm.

IMO, an all around bad idea that will hurt a lot of companies that are trying to offer more and new services on the internet. Right now there are only 5% of the people who are using them, but put this in place and that number will take a lot longer to rise.

[raginranger]

Does this apply to content that is streamed such as youtube videos or does it only target files downloaded to the computer?

If this meters streamed material, that would really suck.

[Krandor]

Originally Posted by raginranger

Does this apply to content that is streamed such as youtube videos or does it only target files downloaded to the computer?

If this meters streamed material, that would really suck.

Metered doesn't care what the content is. It is how much bandwidth you use irrespective of what it is. So yes, streaming would be covered.

[Anthony P]

Except those "top 5%" that TW keeps mentioning could just pay more. Instead, they're going after everyone and that's what makes their PR look like crap.

the average user probably uses less then 1GB month, if you are one of those that uses more then 40GB then you are in the top 5%. And if so, then that is why you will be paying more. And how much more will depend on how much you use it.