[1st-mile-nm] Time Warner Cable tries metered Internet

[Carroll Cagle]

  From:  Good Morning Silicon Valley

San Jose Mercury News

June 3, 2008

 

 

The meter's running 

By LEVI SUMAGAYSAY <mailto:lsumagaysay at bayareanewsgroup.com> 

Raise your hands if you want to sign up for Time Warner Cable's trial of
metered Internet use. Anybody? Starting Thursday, Time Warner customers in
Beaumont, Texas, will have to pay $1 per gigabyte if they
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9456427>  go over their monthly
allowance for uploads and downloads. A company executive said the monthly
caps will range from 5 GB to 40 GB. How bad of an idea is this? Let me count
the ways. It's like rationing food, water, air. Like telling us we can only
have one plateful at a Las Vegas buffet. As TechCrunch says, Time Warner's
going
<http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/02/going-medieval-time-warner-begins-mete
red-bandwidth-testing/>  medieval. Says GigaOm: Is
<http://gigaom.com/2008/06/02/time-warner-cable-broadband-tiers-lead-to-fear
s/>  Time Warner Cable crazy? For some of us, this is akin to trying to
figure out how many minutes of the 500 we're allotted each month we've used
up on our cell phones. It's possible to find out, but it's too much trouble.
Imagine having to tiptoe around the Internet, trying to remember how much of
your allowance you've used so far, and struggling to decide whether you
should read this, download that or upload those photos. You'd think
companies such as Apple would be up in arms over this. With these caps,
iTunes users would have to limit how many songs, videos or movies they buy
each month. (Or those songs could cost way more than 99 cents each.) And the
timing's just ridiculous, as many of the cool things you can now do on the
Internet -- watch movies on Netflix, laugh at silly videos on YouTube,
listen to customized radio stations on Pandora -- require more and more
bandwidth. Some think the experiment will fail.
<http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/why_time_warner_cables_pay_per_use_inter
net_experiment_will_fail>  Let's hope some good old healthy competition
discourages other cable or telephone companies from conducting their own
experiments, although Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, has said
it's considering usage caps <http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_9183822>  as
well. The 250 gigabyte limit Comcast is mulling seems much more reasonable.
That is, if you're into restrictions. But isn't this America? Me, I don't
want no stinking limits.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20080603/67918d1b/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 862 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20080603/67918d1b/attachment.gif>