Time Warner to punish gamers, other internet users.

By MottiKhan on April 3, 2009 10:20:14 AM from

MottiKhan

Join Date 04/2007

Time Warner Cable is going to start charging its customers extra to download games, watch videos or even update your games. This is going to adversely affect any internet based business, regardless of actual cost to the customer.

Percieved pricing will prevent some customers from using services like Impulse and Steam.

Imagine downloading a "free" 8 GB HD movie and having to pay $8.00 just for downloading it? Yep, it's $1.00 per GB.

Time Warner did a test run of the price gouging effort in a few cities and is now poised to widen its grip nationally.

Locally, a city council member has spoken out against Time Warner, but to what avail?

Leffingwell said not only will the plan have a significant effect on families who use the Internet to watch videos, download music or other activities that take up significant bandwidth, he’s also worried about the impact it would have on business owners, particularly those who work in the high-tech and creative services industries who need continued access to broadband Internet.

Leffingwell chastises Time Warner for Internet pricing plan

There's a loophole for some of us. Even though Time Warner has the monopoly on cable and dsl internet service where I live, a secondary provider that uses Time Warner's infrastructure doesn't have to apply the same pricing scheme. I got word from Earthlink this morning that they have no plans to copy Time Warner and that their customers are safe from the price increases. A time Warner customer can simply switch over and still use the exact same infrastructure as before and maintain peace of mind while using the internet. You don't even need to change your cable or DSL modem.

Hopefully, more customers will be able to find secondary providers like Earthlink. I'd suggest that any TW customers switch to whatever secondary provider is in their area before this hits the fan.

psychoak: I didn't say they could do the bandwidth they promised me. I said they can do a lot more than dialup. There's a difference.

My argument is wrong because you don't think they should be selling you a service you don't like, yet you have no alternatives because I'm right and the regulations killed the profit incentives to build competing networks and improve their capacity so they'd actually be able to handle all the porn you're downloading.

Also, you haven't addressed my question. Again: What ISP wouldn't want to charge massive overage charges on a ridiculously low cap? Not because it's a good idea (it's not), but because they think it's a good idea. Actually, think may be too strong of a word...

As previously stated, moo.

You asked me to address your question, not answer it. As I have nothing better to do and enjoy posting walls of text, I'll do it anyway. Any ISP with competition.

You also didn't answer my pointless question.

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Not to nitpick, B in "kB/sec" and "mB/sec" should be lower case since these are bit measurements, not bytes. So the 300 Kbps would translate to 37 KBps and the 24(!) Mbps would translate to 3 MBps.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 22

In the long-run, you'll have plenty of options because you'll have 3G (and soon 4G) options, your cable company of course, and others will come in if there's a market.

Right now, the problem is that the cable companies business model has fallen apart. For years, they sold $50 cable modem connections knowing that 90% of their users were using trivial amounts of bandwidth per month (some surfing, email).

But not anymore. Now people have game consoles, streaming netflix or Xbox 360 movies. Lots of people use Bit torrent, use iTunes for movies and music, etc.

So now a LOT of people are using a LOT of bandwidth. And the cable companies haven't figured out how to adapt yet.

My personal preference is to have it based on speed. You want a 1MB connection, it's $X. You want 5MB? It's $4X, 10MB? and so on.

I have no clue how much I use per month. I have one online game that I am constantly downloading patches and updates for. I play other games with friends online all the time. I have the Wii connected and download info for that. I get music tracks from amazon. Small games I had minor interest in but never got around to I buy on Steam and Impulse (still not a downloader of new releases). If I miss a show, several of the networks have their episodes online so I watch that.

They have a tiered system here but it starts at 128kb and goes up to 10mb and the middle, 5 mb is around 47 with a 15-18 dollar discount I have to beg the company not to raise every six months, at which point they try to shove their phone service on me or threaten to raise my rates. I know I use more than average but I would be suprised if I was all the way at the top, and don't even get me started on the upload limits. They are awful here because there is no competition. A lot of houses around here don't have access to DSL (mine included). If you are one side of the freeway, you don't even have cable, you use Sat internet and TV. Clearwire is starting to move around a bit so competition might finally show up. My city used to have its own cable service but it folded after Charter competed it to the ground and when it did, everyone in the zip code saw their cable bills increase 25% (there are others cities within 11 miles that had rates higher to begin with). These companies will do anything to charge customers more and then punish the people that actually use the service and do everything they can to avoid competition.

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Nesrie, you might not use the 20. It would depend on how much music and how many shows, but you're looking at 350 or so an hour on the television at standard resolution, much higher with the increasing resolutions. The gaming, patches included, uses very little bandwidth.

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Quoting psychoak,

reply 4

Okay. I will take your word for it. I will admit I never really thought about it much before. Charter hasn't mentioned the metered thing yet but these companies tend to think and move alike, and I think the way the these companies are going about the changes are symptomatic of the monopolistic nature they have (yes I know larger cities have competition but believe or not, these is not some small town I live in. It's in the northwest so its hilly and not ideal for a lot of companies to compete in.) Tell a bunch of customers who are consistently unhappy with your service (and cable companies score very low in customer satisfaction) that you they are going to raise your rates (which they do every year anyway) but this time using a meter except they don't actually provide you with information on your usage. At the same time, you've got an industry pushing digital download while the cable companies sit back and get ready to cash in on the future.

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Quoting Micah,

reply 7

Wow, it's amazing how socialist the world is these days. If a company wants to charge more or change their pricing scheme they are more then welcome to in my opinion. Having the government price fix or force them to use a certain pricing model will just result in one of two things. Either they will go bankrupt because they are unable to support themselves as a company or they will raise the prices for everyone, so those top 10% can exploitively use 90% of the bandwidth.

Most of the people that frequent a forum like this are in the top 10% so sure, it sounds great. The other 90% of the people who aren't using far more than what they paid for (in fact, they are using far less) will come out way ahead with pricing plans like this because either their rates will go down, the quality of their service will go up, or competators will enter the market and do one of those two things.

For the 10% that are sucking down most of the bandwidth (I'm definately included in that), start paying your own way instead of expecting the other 90% to support your bandwidth usage.

Free market principles only work when there is free market competition. That doesn't apply with monopolies.

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What monopoly? There's only one company you can get CABLE internet from? So get internet from someone else. Alltel, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T all offer wireless data plans, which means the cable company does not have any sort of monopoly.

Calling a service a monopoly when other companies offer the same services is ridiculous.

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Quoting Savyg,

reply 7

In many places there is only one service available. My cousin was stuck with dial up for years due to him living in a rural area. Big cities certainly have plenty, but smaller areas don't.

And if there is more than one, it is likely that only one, if that, is a decent speed and latency.

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Quoting GmOOnii,

reply 4

Where I live, I use Indo NetZap because there is no Time Warner. I don't like either way.

Saint Mina of Ophelia VII of Order of the Bloody Rose of Orders Militant of Adepta Sororitas

YODA IS A SISTER OF BATTLE?????????????????????

I live in England, so Time Warner can't do anythind about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Quoting alway,

reply 8

Quoting Savyg,
reply 7
What monopoly? There's only one company you can get CABLE internet from? So get internet from someone else. Alltel, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T all offer wireless data plans, which means the cable company does not have any sort of monopoly.

Calling a service a monopoly when other companies offer the same services is ridiculous.

In many places there is only one service available. My cousin was stuck with dial up for years due to him living in a rural area. Big cities certainly have plenty, but smaller areas don't.

And if there is more than one, it is likely that only one, if that, is a decent speed and latency.

What he said. If you actually read what I wrote early, you would know that DSL is not available where I live. There is one cable company and Clearwire is trying to fight for land to place a tower which may or may not reach my house. There are a lot of houses here who don't even have access to cable of any kind and by definition, this area is not rural, it's actually a Metro area but it's a valley with hills and a number of people on well water. This is not the sticks but there is one service provider and guess what, that makes it a monoply. And even with competition, the cable companies are still considered a bit of a monopolistic industry because of the barrier to entry into the market and because the of the nature of the industry. We don't have ten cable companies fighting for space under the city to put up ten different systems of cable lines, that would be a mess.This industry is not like some bookstore down the street you know. You can't just throw up another one. There are franchise fees involved witht the cities... and it's not just as easy as you think to add competition.

And when it was taking Charter too long to upgrade it's lines (after all why would they go to the expense when there wasn't anyone else around to change to), offer digital service, one of the cities here did it themselves and then Charter finally got around to it (imagine that) and priced them into the ground. That's the behavior of a monopoly, and I don't know if you know the size of Charter but there was no way one city was going to out due them when they dropped their rates by 25% in the area to drive out the competition. That brief blip of competition is what it took though to get them to actually do something with these lines because as a monopoly, they had little incentive to upgrade anything.

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There are now "Linked Monopolies", which are more or less legal and skirt the monopoly laws. Use to be companies would have actual price wars to get customers. When I was young, there use to actually be "gas wars"; gas stations would lower their price everyday to complete with the station on the other corner.

Companies now adays often "link" their prices, that is, they still compete agains each other for a peice of the pie, BUT, they "link" their skyrocketing costs together. So when the 3 major oil companies (for just one example) all link their rising costs together, near equally (and purposely), there is no where for the consumer to go. Instead of fighting for a bigger piece of the pie, the companies corral the consumer to make the pie bigger and bigger. They are not stupid (just gready and diabolical), they'll squeze the public until there is some outcry; lower their prices a bit (taking them from outragous to just overpriced), juuuuuuuust until you get use to it, then up the price goes again (coincidentally, by the same ammount from all companies selling the good/service).

It's just like if the only place you could buy a watch, was from the 3 different guys on street corners from the inside of their coats. You get to choose; choose who to get screwed by is all. . .

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Incorrect.

Gas stations rarely do better than break even on gas sales. The best they're aiming for is to pay for the cashier off the income from the fuel. They make their money off the convenience items inside. Didn't you notice when they knocked all the standard gas stations out of the competition? They all have close to the same price because they just can't get any lower. This becomes obvious in places that live next to tribal lands or state borders where a change in tax leads to two gas stations having large price differences in relatively close areas. You can't hardly find a gas station bordering the Choctaw lands around here, they're almost always several cents lower.

The petroleum itself is sold on the open market at auction. All paranoid conspiracy theories regarding the major oil companies are nonsense, OPEC runs the show, even Exxon has no control over the price of oil. They could shut down operations entirely and barely make a dent in the supply.

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Incorrect.

The countries involved in OPEC aren't even major trading partners to the USA. We buy from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudia Arabia then there is Russia, also not a member of OPEC... OPEC is way down the list and that cartel isn't even that affective. They constantly break their own agreements. As for gas stations. Yeah it's pretty odd that two gas stations next to each other 99% of the time offer gas at the same price. If you go down the stree two more gas stations sell their gas for different price but are the exact same too. I don't think they are linked though. I think one lowers it and then they send out a person to change their sign too.

Now back to cable companies and pc gaming.

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But saudi arabia and venezuela are (founding) members of the OPEC...

ON TOPIC: we had these kind of pricings for ages in europe. now it seems like you can get flatrates for 25-30€ from every provider.

My Point? as soon as they can adapt their infrastructure flatrates should return. they need to catch up with demand.

Oh and i am pretty sure the other cable providers are already paying traffic depended to the cable owners. so probably they will adapt the same pricing policies since time warner is unlikely to put themself out of competition by overpricing.

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They're unlikely to switch to that pricing plan in areas where competition exists, especially competition on their own network that isn't going to adapt to the new changes.

Opec controls 40% of the worlds oil supply, and has the cooperation of Russia most of the time in their supply control efforts. That's half the world supply. US based companies control a few percent all together. If you understand how oil is sold, the conclusion is obvious. This is reality, trying to pretend otherwise requires ignorance.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee would not approve of this bullshit one bit, I'll jump to Verizon if I have to, the 1 year cheap internet contract ran out anyway

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Free market principles only work when there is free market competition. That doesn't apply with monopolies.

In a truely free market monopolies are not a problem. Unfortunately, we haven't seen anything close to a real free market since before the Great Depression in the United States. Currently, due to massive government regulations on everything and high taxes the barrier to entry into most markets is prohibitively high.

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Shh! You'll attract the attention of the socialists!

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That's like saying "You'll attract air.". The socialists are all around us all the time now. You can't escape them.

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First, plenty of information about this issue at StopTheCap.com

Now some information about me and my situation:

I live on the edge of the suburbs east of Rochester, where they plan on doing this cap stuff. I'm paying about $45/mo for Time Warner internet, and according to the speedtest site Frogboy used, I'm getting just under 2Mbps down and 0.3 Mbps up. The advertised rate is 10Mbps, but it's very unusual to see even half that.

Unfortunately, the only other alternative to Time Warner is dialup. Verizon is building Fios networks out from Buffalo (80 miles west) and Syracuse (70 miles east), but Rochester is served by a smaller phone company named Frontier. They provide DSL service to most of the area, but they tried unsuccessfully to impose a 5GB cap on everyone last year, and I live just outside their service area so I couldn't sign up with them anyway. I actually get my phone service from Verizon, but given the amount of open farmland between me and Syracuse, I'm not getting my hopes up for a Fios rollout here.

Regarding bandwidth usage, my router logs say that the four people in my house used a combined 50GB last month. Two of them don't do much online except websurf and trade photos with friends and other family members. The other is a teenager who plays games and watches a lot of online video, and likes to download game demos on his 360. As for myself, I own several games that get patched frequently, some of them on Impulse. I also have an eMusic subscription, and I occasionally watch videos online or download Creative Commons works from LegalTorrents.com.

Now then,

One thing I would like to point out is that Time Warner already has a tiered pricing model in place, similar to the one Frogboy suggested. I have their standard service, which advertises an optimistic 10Mbps for $45/mo. There is a "Light" tier for about half the price but with a slower speed (I think 7Mbps?), and a "Turbo" tier that gives 15Mbps for $55/mo. Most people who use a lot of bandwidth are going to want the faster tier, so they're already paying more than Granny Email, who should be on the cheapest plan.

When the caps go into effect, people on the Light plan get stuck with 5GB/mo, while the Standard plan gets 20GB and Turbo users get 40GB. The speeds stay the same, so they're effectively downgrading everyone's service. Suspiciously, they're not doing it in any areas where they have actual competition.

There's so much I could say on this subject that I'm just going to stop now before this rant gets any longer. Needless to say, I am not happy.

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On the plus side, after they're selling something they actually have, you'll really have a 10mbit connection without needing to stay up till 3am to see it. Their problem is staring you in the face. They've sold you a connection they can't give you.

Considering your posting time and location, I'll venture a guess that they are oversold at least ten to one.

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It is reasonable to put a cap somewhere, but the present plan is intended to squeeze ordinary subscribers by the throat until they choke. Congress needs to legislate.

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Quoting psychoak,

reply 21

What's staring me in the face is the potential 50% rate increase when I'm forced into a higher plan with outrageous overage fees. We're talking about a company that raises its rates every year, and whose only serious competition provides an inferior service. I'm sure they could upgrade the network if they wanted to. Their problem isn't bandwidth, it's a lack of motivation combined with a serious conflict of interest.

They've got the best service in the area, so there's no incentive to make it better. They provide content in addition to the network it's carried on, so naturally they want to make sure their content works best. What we need is more competition, and separation between content providers and network providers.

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What that city needs to do is break the back of the Time Warner monopoly and give the city's cable contract to Grande Communications. Win-win.

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Psst. We don't get much oil from OPEC members compared to non-open members, those two are one of the few we do get it from and OPEC doesnt' control as much as you think. It has influence but they don't stick to their own agreements. Members make backroom deals ALL the time. Boy does the media like playing them up though, apparently its working.

As for truly free market places don't create monopolies? Are youkidding. How do you think some not so scarce resources became artificially scarce. Monopolies existed long, long before the great depression during the ancient era. History is full of examples of olive presses, salt, telephone companies, railroad owners... business naturally shifts towards a monopolistic position so they can control the market.

On Topic:

They try to sell me a higher speed everytime they call to solicite me for more money, i mean more services. They can barely provide the speeds they already sell me.

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The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Time Warner to punish gamers, other internet users.

MottiKhan