| Exemptions, why? I don't know why everyone was thinking that U-Verse would be exempt, the TV and Internet networks are completely different and should be easily countable. what I'd hate to see is an abuse policy for External DVR users who set up maintenance recordings so the boxes never turn off...
That brings up a good argument, I subscribe to TV, 200 Channels, do you tell me how much TV I can watch? Why are we being metered for the Internet in two ways? Our bandwidth is our channel package, the use would be the number of hours we watch. I think it should be one or the other, either you should charge me by my channel package/bandwidth, or give me everything, all channels, all bandwidth, and charge me by how much I view/use.
All these Internet rants and opinions are always dumb in some way so I'm just going to stop  |
Lion84
join:2007-08-10
Marietta, GA | Excellent point. As I understand it, the U-Verse box gets the command from the user to say, go to channel 2. The box sends a command to the headend (or whatever the equivalent proper terminology may be) requesting the data stream for channel 2. That data stream is then sent to the box. To me this is analogous to clicking on a Youtube link or Netflix icon to stream video to my computer. Why then should the user not be “capped” as to how much TV they can watch in a given time, say, per month? Probably because of competition – with cable there is always that “data stream” being sent to the box (or QAM receiver) so it isn’t like accessing that stream “fills the pipe.” Therefore it makes no sense for cable TV to “cap” viewing. But why not for U-Verse?
This could turn out to be the Achilles heel of either U-Verse, or caps, or both. If a lawsuit is put forth stating that the caps are not applied to TV services and data services equally, would that not either force U-Verse to cap TV viewing (unacceptable competition-wise to cable) or remove caps entirely? If it could be shown that TV viewing via Internet and via U-Verse TV service is analogous, then what does that say about caps?
The supplier is essentially saying that I have a 3mb download pipe for Internet but I cannot use it 24/7. Granted that most people likely would not use their U-Verse (or any) TV service 24/7, but the question remains, at what point is TV viewing considered “excessive,” and if TV viewing cannot be considered excessive under any circumstance, why not? |
