Your opinion about paying for internet service based on usage?

[quote name='Strell']Oh please.

This is like asking them to make less money and be happy with it while also spending money to make the service more expensive to run (but better for their customers). It's not something they've considered at all.
[/quote]

No, he's right. Internet in places like the U.K. and Japan is half the price of here and quadruple the speed.

Not to mention cable internet in most places is a monopoly. These companies are overcharging.
 
I was just looking at my internet usage tonight, and alone, I have used 600 mb not on Hulu, Xbox live (which I am not using at the moment because of school for those wondering or thinking of defriending me), Netflix, downloading (torrents, podcasts, etc.), but by watching a single educational video/lecture from Yale's open courseware program (it's inconjunction to a course I'm currently taking, which is fascinating that a school would combine its own material with that of a perceived rival). If I were to watch 2 more video tonight, I would use roughly 2GB in a night, not counting other things, such as browsing, music, etc. You could theoretically download 10 albums from Itunes (think big birthday present) or Amazon, and have used 20% of the most basic (and expensive, for what you get) plan. Again, just to reiterate what I said earlier, this is probably one of the stupidest fucking things I have ever heard of. They are going to so fucking shoot themselves in the foot with this it isn't funny.
 
[quote name='HowStern']No, he's right. Internet in places like the U.K. and Japan is half the price of here and quadruple the speed.

Not to mention cable internet in most places is a monopoly. These companies are overcharging.[/QUOTE]

You don't even realize you killed your own objection.

Dood asked "why don't they improve?"
I say they'd have to spend money.
You say they have a monopoly and overcharge as is.

At the end of the day, what's the point of providing better service and cutting into your profits/revenue when you don't have to?

That's what these companies are saying. They couldn't care less about the fact that other countries provide better, faster service at comparable (if not lower) rates.

Tangentially, the lot of Americans won't know the difference anyhow. Us, debating on forums, are in the minority, and most likely will be for at least a few more years. Notice how everything nerds do online (or hell, really, just in general) ends up becoming popular some two or three years later. Napster, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace....then bam - overnight everyone is doing it. Until we've got that kind of saturation and people willing to get pissed, there's no incentive for any ISP to drop cash to improve their service.

A friend of mine had his work move to new offices, and Verizon refused to build them a high speed connection unless they footed the bill, several thousand dollars worth. His office said sure, but WE get to own it since we financed it. Verizon laughed at them and ended the conversation. (I want to note this new office was in the middle of a new subdivision, with new medical facilities and several other office areas close by, meaning there's no reason why there shouldn't be high speed hookups ALREADY there.)

Oh yeah, they sound positively eager to improve service, just because a kid in Europe can download trashy club tunes at ten times the speed we can.
 
fuck THAT. I've been there, and I hated every second of it. It was called the early 90s for me. Back when Compuserve charged me hourly for usage. I loved their service, but, they and their competition all charged an hourly fucking rate for usage.

I will not go back to that shit. Sorry for the excessive profanity but I feel great intensity over this horseshit of an idea.
 
Don't be envious of foreign broadband service claims until you've experienced it for yourself. The speed is just to the local network interchange. From there, the probability of a bottleneck that drastically cuts into the speed between you and the content is so high as to be nearly guaranteed. In my travels I never saw throughput that really impressed me that wasn't based on a very local server within the immediate metro loop.

I wouldn't mind usage metering if it were based on a reasonable pricing scheme. I want entry level connections to be so cheap that dial-up goes away completely in all but the most difficult areas to provision. The taxpayers have been dinged for a long time to provide telephone service to unprofitably isolated locations and it won't be long before data service is viewed not just by the young as a essential need.

That said, plenty of folks who make little use of online services can get by just fine with a monthly trickle compared to the typical CAG. Service that can be dialed up on the fly for those rare occasions when a large data volume must accessed would make such an arrangement more palatable. And that should apply up to the maximum supported by the pipe. The cost should be discounted as my volume in a billing period increases. The lower cost per gigabyte for a high volume user would be more than made up in the process. discouraging your best customers from using the product is bad business.

In a certain sense, my DSL has always had a usage cap in that there was only so much you could pass through it in a month. Back in 1999, when I first got hooked up, Pacific Bell (now subsumed within SBC under the AT&T brand) had a policy that you could do whatever you wanted within the speed the connection offered. Since you were never going to get more (at the time) than 1.5 Mb download speed, you were welcome to keep it going at that rate 24/7 if you somehow could.

That worked fine for everyone until torrents made it possible to keep a line just that busy. Ah well, give me a terabyte each way per month for a reasonable price and I'll be OK.
 
This is the ISP's Wave Of The Future. They believe in tier service, and ala cart. After all, since we all love paying for cable in such a fashion, there's no way we don't want to pay for Internet Access the same way. And now, they make more money.

Oh no, wait, except for the fact people won't pay, and will cut back their usage, especially sicne were in a RECESSION!!!!! Which will only impact busiensses as their onlinwe revenue dries up. Seems Time Warner, Comcast the Usage Capper, and their ilk are shooting themselves in the foot. Greed. It does a business bad.

Meanwhile, local ISP's shall return, charging a bit more than oen spend snow, but with unlimited usage.

Oh and let's not forget, msot people are clueless idiots, barely able to find their way online. They have no idea how much GB's the use, and thus, will be going over like nobody's business.

But hey, without all these bandwidth hogs, your comptuer service shall increase speed ever so slightly.
 
[quote name='crunchb3rry']Should just be $1 per megabyte. Tiers are fucking bullshit no matter how you slice it. Pay as you go.[/QUOTE]

You SURE about that price? ....


Anyway,I wonder what effect this will have on the future of "digital delivery". Would we have even gotten as far as we have today if these bandwidth restrictions were imposed in the beginning (broadband)?
 
What are we going to have to pay by the freaking hour again?! Wow this fucking sucks, can't believe this crap. I watch most of my shows, especially anime online, damn I would go quickly through that shitty cap.

It sucks since if my ISP, did this there is no alternative where I live, I would be forced to pay or cancel my net.

Wouldn't this also kill MMO's? I used to play world of warcraft a lot, and I can't imagine how much bandwidth I would use playing it.
 
[quote name='Koggit']the market won't let them anyway it's no problem.. their competition will run commercials underscoring that with them you get unlimited 'net while TW limits how much you can use it.. it's marketing suicide.. even the grandmas that only use 1gb/month don't wanna worry about having a limit.. look how popular unlimited cell phone plans are, even with ppl who'd never even approach their limit. customers hate limits.[/quote]

Let me reinforce Koggit here.

I work for an ISP. :evil:

Whenever we increase the bill by $3 a month, billing goes from 0 in queue to somewhere above 100 for a month.

If we keep the customer for another year at the same price, we'll make another $36.

If the customer threatens to cancel and we put him or her in a lower-priced campaign or give away a premium channel for a few months, we lose money.

If the customer keeps us on the phone for a hour, we'll lose money because of the total cost of the employee.

Once limits are imposed, there will be people calling in to find out how much service they have used for the month and when their cutoff time is. That will cause another application to be created, trained on and staffed. It'll be a money losing proposition.

So long as competition is not squelched through government fiat, another provider will pop up that provides for the customer need.

If you're the minority affected by TW's change, find another ISP. When canceling, ask to speak to a supervisor and advise him or her that you are canceling only because of the cap.
 
[quote name='Strell']You don't even realize you killed your own objection.

Dood asked "why don't they improve?"
I say they'd have to spend money.
You say they have a monopoly and overcharge as is.

At the end of the day, what's the point of providing better service and cutting into your profits/revenue when you don't have to?

[/quote]

That's what he was saying. People aren't going to pay more money unless they improve their service. So they would have to.

Why would even the most computer illiterate person start paying more for a lesser service? Monopoly or not people will only take so much. I think that actually the computer illiterate would be the first to jump ship. With a "what am I paying all this money for I don't get it?!" attitude.


But, yeah we won't be seeing Japanese speeds here because like you said we are in the minority.
 
[quote name='HowStern']That's what he was saying. People aren't going to pay more money unless they improve their service. So they would have to.

Why would even the most computer illiterate person start paying more for a lesser service? Monopoly or not people will only take so much. I think that actually the computer illiterate would be the first to jump ship. With a "what am I paying all this money for I don't get it?!" attitude.
[/QUOTE]

You have way, way too much faith in your countrymen and their understanding of how ISPs work.
 
No, I just know that the only people dumb enough to fall for this are old people probably living off their retirement fund. And as such they are going to only see the prices going up and not knowing why or for what. Only that they can't afford it anymore.

People are getting smart when it comes to this stuff. Even my 60 year old uncles know whats up when it comes to ISPs.
 
They just updated their proposed bandwidth policy

source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/162928/time_warner_changes_but_keeps_bandwidth_caps.html
Under the new plan, customers can choose between 1GB and 100GBs on various pricing schemes. The 1GB per month plan offers speeds of 768KB download and 128KB upload for $15. The 100GB plan -- called Road Runner Turbo -- brings 10MB download, 1MB upload speeds for $75 per month; anything over that costs $1 per gigabyte up to $150. That means if you want turbo speeds and unlimited Internet access, you'll have to pay $150 per month.
Click to expand...


In this day and age can you even use less than 1 gb in a month? And I love that paying $150 for something I am now only paying $40 is considered great for the consumer..
 
It's one of those things that sound ok in theory, but would suck in practice. Yeah, someone who uses 5 GB a month probably shouldn't be paying the same as someone who uses 300GB and is slowing down their neighbors connections with constant bit torrent downloads etc.

But the problem is very few people would save any money, if any. You'll have the lowest usage plans costing around what most of us pay now, and the others more so most end up paying more.

It's kind of like the idea of having cable TV available a la carte and being able pick just the channels you watch. Sounds like it should save you money, but no doubt by the time I picked the 15-20 channels I want I'd end up paying more than I do now--especially since I'm a big sports guy I have to have the ESPNs which are the most expensive to cable providers.
 
My opinion? Total fucking bullshit.

They do this shit in the Third fucking World (I lived in Indonesia for nearly a year). This is motherfucking America!
 
Okay I can understand having "lite" accounts and such for users who don't use their internet for beyond e-mail, light web surfing, and the like. But this whole idea for everyone else won't fly in this day of age of iTunes, Netflix streaming, YouTube, etc. Time Warner might discuss it and they might even test it in a few small markets but it will be one big gigantic epic fail on them when its all said and done.
 
[quote name='daphatty']My opinion? Total fucking bullshit.

They do this shit in the Third fucking World (I lived in Indonesia for nearly a year). This is motherfucking America![/QUOTE]

Damn straight.
 
This is just plain terrible. Also, this doesn't pass the sniff test. If the cable company has a monopoly over designated areas based on agreements with the FCC, I can't see these ridiculous price increases pass constitutional muster.

It would be like your electric or gas company raises their prices 100% overnight.

This is just ridiculous.
 
[quote name='PenguinoMF']UPDATE: http://stopthecap.com/2009/04/10/br...ce-the-massa-broadband-internet-fairness-act/

Congressman Eric Massa has introduced a bill that would ban IPs from charging based on usage.

----------------------------------

Time Warner announced that they will be rolling out a tiered payment system that is based on your usage.

See the following articles if you want:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090331_726397.htm
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20090402/BUSINESS/904020342

So instead of the current unlimited plan for $30-50 (based on deal when you signed up) you have to select a plan for either 5GB, 10GB, 20Gb, 40GB, or 100GB.

The prices (at least according to the second article) would be:
5GB - $29.99
10GB - $39.99
20GB - $49.99
40GB - $54.90
100GB - Unavailable

Plus $1 for ever GB over your limit.

What is your opinion about this new setup?

Do you already have to pay for internet based on usage? If so, what do you pay? How much data do you use? Do you play your 360 or PS3 online? Stream Netflix? Download music?

I worried that I use a lot already and this is going to cost me an arm and a leg. Between Live, streaming Netflix, streaming TV shows, and downloading music I feel like I'll use too much.

---------------------------------

Feel free to sign the petition against TW: http://www.petitiononline.com/twcfedup/[/quote]



My reply is this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYr7hFjs3wo

With Netflix alone, you could easily top 40 GB a month. At someone is taking a stand though.
 
[quote name='PenguinoMF']NY Congressman Eric Massa is stepping in and introducing a bill that would ban IPs from pricing based on usage.

http://stopthecap.com/2009/04/10/br...ce-the-massa-broadband-internet-fairness-act/[/QUOTE]

That dude really needs to chill the fuck out.

What he should do is work on reducing the monopoly situation in the broadband industry. Companies often don't have competition, which is why they do shit like tiered internet and don't upgrade their infrastructure to stay competitive.
 
[quote name='HowStern']I called it.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Backs-Off-Metered-Billing-101948[/QUOTE]

I'm glad they back off so quickly. I'm moving at the end of may and didn't want to sign up for Frontier (the only other option) because they require certain contracts. I wanted to stay with TW because RR is a quality service. I've never had a major problem with it going down, where as my previous ISP (Cablevision) always had problems.

Now lets just hope they don't pull a "Okay we heard from our customers and they didn't want a capped system. So now everyone gets unlimited for $74.99."
 
I'm happy to hear that bullshit from Time Warner didn't pass. Hopefully if this rears its ugly head again, it will be stomped down as quickly as it was now. They really had some gall to even think of going with such a plan.
 
Reality's Fringe;5718939 said:
You SURE about that price? ....
Click to expand...

OK, that's a bit steep. Maybe base it on gigabytes. But then the providers would piss and moan that they get less from grandma and grandpa, who only use up a couple megabytes a month e-mailing pictures of the deer Uncle Cletus hit with his truck.
 
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