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

Tue Jun 3 16:32:20 PDT 2008

I wont bother to punt ( pun ) at the problems which are obvious but is 
the commenter saying GIGABYTE or gigibit

It did remind me of a metaphor we used long ago in Leapfrog " Carroll is 
old enough to remember that " called the French fry question and the 
Trust issue

Extract here for a full translation http://www.ideapete.com/leapfrog.html

/The next component that you add to make CONNECTIVITY work is TRUST. /

/Those of you who stopped at McDonalds this morning trusted that you 
could get breakfast including coffee for about $4. That's how McDonalds 
makes money: anticipating customers' needs and meeting them. What would 
you do if one morning the same McDonalds offered you a single French fry 
for $10 and when you complained they haggled the price down to $7.50? I 
know this sounds silly but bear with me. You would think that they had 
gone nuts! And you would be right. Trust would have broken down and you 
would go elsewhere for your breakfast. /

/This is what has happened in the connectivity market. The basic 
infrastructure vendors, whom you trusted to anticipate your most basic 
business need (CONNECTIVITY), are now in haggle mode. They are focused 
on how many French fries you want instead of looking for the right price 
and quality of your breakfast. This is what US West and their partner in 
crime, AT&T, are doing with connectivity. /

/One thing I hear all the time is "How much connectivity do you really 
need?" I call this "the French fry question." 1 megabit (1 fry)? 10 
megabit (fries)? How much are you prepared to pay? Or even worse with 
DSL/ISDN, "How much of a French fry do you want?" People keep trying to 
set a ceiling on an unknown need and then work backwards. If you stick a 
"this is a large box of French fries" label on one French fry, what do 
you have? Still one French fry! If you stick a Ferrari label on a 
tortoise you do not get a faster, or more valuable, tortoise./

A bigger question would also be " who in the heck would trust warner or 
any cable or telco  to measure anything when its linked to billing "

( : ( : pete

Peter Baston

*IDEAS*

/www.ideapete.com/ <http://www.ideapete.com/>

John Brown wrote:
> Hmm, so TWC sets up some pretty large PNG/JPG images on their various
> websites (on net hosted) and watches the meter crank up.
>
> Seriously, does this apply to those bytes xfered from TWC internal
> servers ??
>
> Does it apply to all protocols, or just web (port 80 / 443, the like)???
>
> So if a THIRD-PARTY, non-TWC customer, mail-bombs a bunch of TWC
> accounts with 10MB file attachments, does that count against your
> quota???    If so, what right of self-action does the customer have to
> force TWC to provide detailed technical information so that the customer
> can recover from the third-party abuser, or at least attempt to...
>
> The problem with quota's is that you have to define what you are
> measuring and limiting.  TO broad a description and you have problems
> like those above....
>
> Whats the real issue here??  Is it that high bandwidth providers are
> watching their transit get used up and thus impacting QOS for the client
> base??  Is that bandwidth consumption limited to specific types of
> applications ? (p2p, bit-torrent, etc)
>
> There are practical considerations, and limits that all providers face.
>  Question to the readership:
>
> How do you propose a provider protect the overall health of their
> network against those that "abuse".
>
> Its like the person that goes to the Vegas Buffet and eats and eats and
> eats.  There is a point where the provider looses money.  What do they do?
>
>
>
> Carroll Cagle wrote:
>   
>>  
>>
>>   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.
>>
>>  
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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