Hence, all the troll's postings here, making reference to this very notion.

Free speech is a contradiction in terms when you're paid to post an opinion formulated by someone else.

You're absolutely correct about a war they can't win. Unfortunately, for the cable companies, they failed to imagine a scenario such as this when they entered into the business of internet access.

Their argument about the explosion of data and speed growth, is further self incriminating. The cable companies have already let that Genie out of the bottle, as evidenced by their history of VERY easily accommodating demands of data growth.

The scope of data (in terms of size and speed) has been growing exponentially, year over year (without the advent of Video, HD or otherwise)

The internet (and tertiary providers) have handled these growth patterns with aplomb.

But now that the data threatens their core business, the sky will soon fall unless caps are imposed. I thank God that Sen. Schumer has the balls to oppose this.

However given the economy, many have reported getting their contracts altered with better terms when threatening to leave. Doubtful it would work in my case but hey, no harm giving it a shot, cause I'd be leaving anyway

Of course we'd have to open up some actual COMPETITION in most of Comcast's markets before I'd welcome bandwidth caps and pricing tiers.

Time Warner sucks.

@Radi0logy: Shit, I'll go back to dialup if I have to. I swear on the grave of my long dead hamster.

Good luck if you're up in Canuckistan. You cannot get an unthrottled home DSL connection except with either a local provider (LOL! Doesn't really exist!) or you're with Primus and are lucky enough to have their equipment near you (I think they're in one or two cities). Best part: Unlike in the US where your FCC mandated throttling be done with a customer's knowledge, it's done completely behind your back here.

What about Cable? What about it? None of them offer anything but seriously crappy UBB. No wireless service up here that isn't either seriously capped or throttled. Satellite internet? As far as I'm aware, there are currently no legitimate satellite internet providers in Canada (They would have to be approved by the Canadian government--Bell Canada's 'direcpc' reselling ended a few years ago).

And, did I mention, UBB will be coming to virtually all DSL here too within a few months?

This means that for the average Canadian, you will not be able to buy internet service with more than a 60-95 GB cap. Period.

The UBB should be implemented at the end of this year, but if Bell does another throttling escapade, they will start billing this month. Considering they've already run (and completed) UBB pilot projects, the only thing that's stopping them is whether or not they think they can get away with it.

He refuses to switch to U-Verse after watching that hell.

Frankly, we need to redefine broadband in the US to be something at a minimum of 1-3 mbs. It is fraudulent that companies are calling 758 line 'high speed'.

Just this afternoon I heard a knock at the door. As I went to throw a shirt on, I saw this man put his face up to my window and cup his hands around it to see in. Shirt on, I opened the door - he was just an AT&T rep offering to sign me up for AT&T U-verse. Or a pervert. Or a thief. Or all of the above.

I guess I'll stick with TWC.

We make Illinois politicians look honest.

And I live in one of those areas that there isn't much choice. So little choice in fact, that TWC wanted to use here as one of the first places to do price-gouging.

Also, Satellite is not a legitimate replacement for Cable/DSL, and DSL is much slower here due to where I live. So again, not viable alternatives. TWC's profits without price-gouging have steadily increased the last couple of years, so they're doing fine.

I would support Congressional legislation call ing for a maximum rate of consumption-based billing at 5-10 cents per gig. That's still a 500-1000% profit, but not so much that it would stamp out other businesses.

Fact: the way they're trying to increase profits is not as much by capping bandwidth, but using monopoly power to stamp out competitors in even higher-margin services. This is why to me this is a violation of Sherman Antitrust potentially, but Congress minus Eric Massa doesn't have the balls to go for that.

Also, I would disagree on internet not being a necessity. It's definitely a negative externality on a community to not have it. The City of Wilson, NC agrees with me- so much so that TWC got scared and is bribing a bunch of NC legislators to ban them from doing it better themselves.

Of course there is something wrong with it. It is a step backwards. ISP's have generated and grown a market for high-speed Internet where the standard of expectation is that the amount of Internet you "consume" is irrelevant. (aside from the random stories you hear about someone getting charged $500,000 for using an insane amount)

Now, even though the quality and speeds of our high-speed services are declining instead of improving, they are considering hobbling it even further. The Internet has become unquestionably a backbone for major swaths of businesses in the U.S., with a majority unable to even operate without it. Like cigarettes, now that they have hooked us, its time to start feeding off of us.

That is complete garbage and borders on collusion and monopolistic acts, assuming all ISP's implement these crap plans, as many here have alluded. I am simply making it publicly known, to any ISP that cares to listen, that if all other ISP's in my hometown are consumption based, and YOU aren't, then I am your customer. Simple as that.

Then why is it necessary?

--

This would be reasonable

'Lite Plans' : 75GB
'Middle Plans': 150GB
'Fastest Plan': 275GB

--

We all know the caps will be much lower. Any funny business here and I am off to *gasp* Fairpoint.

High Definition in 720P (1280X720@60FPS) uses about 2 gig an hour in a fairly low bitrate H.264 transport stream to get you "reasonable" HDTV. So if you wanted to get a SINGLE TV channel delivered over the internet to you for a whole 4 hours per day, it would use up ~240 gig per month.

The number I illustrated is on the LOW side for a signal that would be comparable to what digital cable TV is sending you now. But how many of us only have one TV in our household. are the only person who watches it. and at a mere 4 hours a day? I'd think it wouldn't be hard to envision a family where there are 3 TV's in use, with slightly more time per day let's say 6 hours each. This scenario now takes you over 1000 gigs per month, way above any cap number I've heard put out there.

What all of this "cap" nonsense does is prevent the cable co's from having to compete with a potential internet TV provider that could sell you "only" the channels you want at a fraction of the cable co's "400 channels but nothings on" price.

This is why they are pushing for metered service or caps. It has nothing to do with consumers "using too much bandwidth", but with the cable companies not wanting to be forced into a competition that they can't win that comes to your home over thier "lines".

Hell yeah. We saw this on the horizon and we switched to AT&T U-Verse and haven't looked back.

No it won't.

I think one of the real issues with us being so far behind, is that our country is so spread apart.

I would love for nothing more than to have an Uber fast connection system in the US, the problem is really relevant to the distance all that information has to travel.

Japan and Europe, by comparison, are so much smaller than the US that it's not a contest for them to have pockets of higher quality/speed than the US.

There's going to have to be some sort or massive public use of FIOS or the like in order to reign prices in any time soon. Even then, the companies that control those services are going to hold steadfast to whatever they have in order to make more money.

Really, you should be working for the Heritage Foundation with that kind of propaganda.

As I said, my friend in the biz is aware that it was poorly handled, and that the tiers were not defined well to suit their purpose. This is one of those things that happens in big corporate business where too many people feel they need to influence a decision they really don't know enough about.

The fact that the network is assymetric and that some customers are heavy hitters on the upstream is in fact a problem, because it saturates the upstream at nodes in neighborhoods and causes problems for other customers doing more normal things. Remember that there's an upstream component even to reading the Consumerist, you have to send up a DNS request, then send a request to the site, etc. Also, major ISPs build their networks based on that assymetry, and do things like sell off some of their upstream from their backbone (since they expect to be running something like 10x as much downstream as upstream, because that's clearly what they sell.) They run fiber to hosting companies and the like to utilize some of that "extra" upstream bandwidth, since hosting companies tend to have assymetric demands opposite those of residential customers.

Another of those pesky business problems is that the internet business it tangled up with the cable business, and they don't keep the internet service profits exclusively for reinvestment in internet services. If you wanted symmetric 100 megabit service and live in a metro area served by my friend's cable company, you could in fact purchase it, just not for $29.95/month. They'll gladly run fiber anywhere you want to pay for it and sell you however much bandwidth you care to sign a contract for, even including QoS guarantees.

There is no way I would ever pay for something like that, because it is obvious price gouging.

Now on the other hand, I would willingly pay for a "consumption-based" billing scheme in which:
1.) The speed given is the BEST offered. (Perhaps 100 mbit or 1 gbit line). This is already done on servers that host web content.
2.) The CAP is REASONABLE given the speed and there are ways to raise the cap. (Perhaps 100 mbit line with 300 GB cap for $40/month? I'm not sure of the logistics here, but it would have to be reasonable, and expandable/renegotiable over time)
3.) There is NO THROTTLING and/or SPYING on what I am doing.

Bandwidth caps aren't the end-all scenario everyone thinks they are right now, and they are widely implemented in other areas. The reason people think they are crap right now is because the so called "packages" that the ISPs in the US offer ARE CRAP. Give us something reasonable and we will go for it.

Interesting, because there are a lot of countries (Canada, Australia, the UK, for example), where Internet and cell service are both slower and more expensive than the US.

There are several internet choices for the vast, vast majority of people out there. People complain about "monopolies," but what about DSL? Satellite? Dial-up? If one wants the "niceness" of cable internet, then one has to pay for it. Fast internet (or internet, period) isn't a necessity in a home like power and water. There are plenty of alternatives (such as your local library).

I'm still with TWC for now, as they are the cheapest option (I only get IP service), but if they start capping my usage, I'm gone. I already reamed them up and down for getting rid of eBilling and essentially forcing me to go back to the 90s and a paper bill, or use their own billing site (clue: centralized e-billing with the bank is convenient. Logging into a separate website for each of my billers is anything but. I'll make you kill the tree, thanks,). If they institute bandwidth caps, I'm done.

Oh, to have FTTH here.

That's the issue. The amount of money they want to charge is vastly inappropiate. The cost per Gig is just under 1 penny, and they want to charge 100-200 times that.

I know :( Not everyone can enjoy the love of FiOS :(

But once I get this wording in my bill, I'll be calling to say "I DON'T agree to these terms, either accept it or cancel my service"

One of my closest friends is an ip engineer with a large cable/internet company, and the numbers they give out are pretty close to the truth... less than 5% of their customers are using over 80% of their ip bandwidth. He also admits that their handling of the tiered-plan thing has been a disaster, and that their first mistake was billing it as unlimited service at the beginning.

*IF* they implement this properly (big enough plans with small enough prices for the "standard" plan) they can accomplish their goal of getting the big users (primarily the big UPSTREAM users sharing via p2p) to pay more for their high usage without pissing off every one of their customers. Hell, if they focused their plans on the upstream, it would stop all of the people complaining about the threat to video-on-demand services (I use netflix instant and from time to time Hulu, for example) because the real pain in the ass from a network management perspective in an assymetric network is saturation of the "smaller" upstream pipe.

...or tiered rate plans

Diabolical, this is.

Part of the reason for this -- not an excuse to avoid fixing the problem, but an explanation -- is that the US had (one of) the most advanced and comprehensive wired phone systems in the world. Other countries whose systems were fairly backwards in comparison had a huge incentive to leapfrog ahead with cell technology (northern bits of Scandinavia, for example, were among the first places with ridiculously good cell penetration, because nobody ever bothered to lay wire lines up there).

Any time you build a comprehensive infrastructure, you tie yourself into that infrastructure and some kinds of innovation will slow as a result as other countries leapfrog over the infrastructure you're "stuck" with. (Countries that got plumbing early on, for example, have much more outdated systems (with a lot more lead) than countries who joined the party later.) It's very expensive to switch infrastructures.

Not that this should prevent cell companies (and wire-line companies) from innovating their asses off. But the existing infrastructure, systems, contracts, and cultural expectations that go along with that infrastructure do have a "dragging" effect on innovation.

Again, not that this should be an excuse. Since we KNOW it happens, we should be planning for and around it.

Consumption billing is fine, as long as there is competition. TWC is trying to do it in areas without competition.

@Radi0logy: I'm with a local tiered ISP, and I love it. I only pay $15/month for Internet access and couldn't afford it otherwise. The difference between this and TWC is:

1) It wasn't sprung on me-they were upfront about it when I signed up.

2) I can easily monitor my data usage on their website.

@bohemian:

I keep telling people this, but no one will listen. Japan and Europe both have far better cell plans than we do in the US, as well as better broadband speeds.

Even some of the poorest countries in Africa have FTTC. There are obviously companies willing to build this kind of infrastructure, if we'd just stop with the subsidized and mandated ISP monopolies.

No bullshit. No crap charges....just pure love.

I feel really bad for anyone who is in an area where they are "stuck" with this kind of crappy service.
I have moved 5 times in 8 years and AT&T has followed me throughout these 8 years with not a single issue with service or billing.

Will I have to skip the country to get decent Internet? I mean, I already do in order to get good cell-phone service, but it's the 'Net that's the deal-breaker for me!

You mean where they're not already conveniently illegal, of course.

This shit is scary, and I really can't believe that the country that used to be the most technologically-advanced in the world is letting itself be strangled by the greed of its own corporations. And moreover, that the media are generally complicit -- it's great that you heard this story on NPR, but where have they been for the last decade while all this was going on? And where are all the other media outlets?

...Oh, right. Owned by TW. >,<

It seems like TWC is wanting to go massively backwards. The time to create a model for consumption based internet was back in the early 90's. Most companies dumped consumption based internet when they moved from dial up to broadband. Consumption based internet on dial up was supposedly due to ISP having to have phone modem banks at local exchanges. Physically locating and having a finite number of concurrent connections was the cost factor of why some had limits on total mb or total time online.

It is already a real problem that cell phone service is totally behind every other developed country. Having internet usage be done in the same manner would be a horrible hinderance to learning, business and efficiency. TWC is behaving like the RIAA. Both have an outdated and dying business model and they are taking it out on consumers rather than changing.

Maybe the best way to fight this is to have people in cities that have TWC and few other option complain to the city office that decides who gets cable contract for that city. Tell them to dump TWC, why and to get someone new in the area or set up a city owned ISP.