said by albundyhere :

just threaten to cancel the service...you dont get what you pay for anyways with TWC. this just makes you pay even more. Their loss is your gain.

said by Racerbob :

Right. And they will tell us all to cancel.. because they know how bad Frontier DSL is and we will come running right back to RR. Going to have to severely limit our internet usage here. My son games on ps3 and the wife and myself spend enough time on the net and I occasionally download large files and stream music, You Tube and other stuff too.

said by albundyhere :

just threaten to cancel the service...you dont get what you pay for anyways with TWC. this just makes you pay even more. Their loss is your gain.

said by older dog :

Frontier has a 5 gig per month cap. Cancel and go where?
Regulation is needed.

said by Smith6612 :

Frontier announced a week ago that they had scrapped the caps Punker, but 56k is probably the best solution if you have an unlimited package/unlimited phone line as well as patience.

said by djrobx :

The Canadians have had a head start on bandwidth caps. Read through their forums and you can get a pretty good idea how quickly people can run out of choices even when they thought they had a few.

said by OhHeckNoo :

So does this mean if I ever move and get an account actually under my name that I would be forced into one of these? Forget that crap I'm moving to an area with U-verse!

said by bop75 :

Just canceled my entire premium (pay channels) at 60 bucks per month and explained it was do to the upcoming caps in Rochester. Due to a number of trees along my southern property line, I can’t cancel everything till I’m sure satellite will work here. Road Runner will go the day the caps start.

said by Dampier :

The entire matter is extremely depressing, not just for individual customers who are going to get slammed by this outrageous cap, but also for Rochester in particular which will now be in an extremely uncompetitive broadband backwater, saddled with a greedy cable company and a telephone company that has woefully lost touch with the times and is a shadow of its former self.

Telecommuters, home based businesses, large families, and those who are doing what everyone, including the cable company itself has encouraged people to do, use bandwidth, are now facing an absolutely enormous rate increase. If the current pricing models remain true, the rate customers pay now for standard RR service will bring a 20GB usage cap. To just double that to 40, you have to pay $15 more. Then, it's an outrageous $1/GB after that, for something that costs them around 10c.

These kinds of caps will inevitably eliminate most of the broadband video services, from Hulu and Joost to Netflix's set top box, Apple TV, Slingbox, and any other high bandwidth content that requires a broadband connection to deliver should these draconian caps go nationwide.

It's the equivalent of rationing the Internet.

I hate having to spend time on these kinds of battles, because all of these companies delivering these broadband products are not hurting for cash from their broadband divisions. Bandwidth costs continue to decline, not increase, as new technology and delivery mechanisms make it possible and easy to deliver the kinds of streaming and high bandwidth services now becoming available. Yes, there can be an initial investment expense from deploying some of the most robust delivery and distribution platforms, but not anywhere near the cost TW wants to saddle its customers with.

TW was already earning extra ancillary profits with their Turbo product, which becomes completely meaningless with these kinds of caps.

It's honestly unadulterated greed that drives these things. The video delivery business has become more competitive with additional price increases becoming more difficult to justify and an economy which makes shareholder return demands harder to deliver. So more profits will be requires from other divisions, and now they've settled on broadband as a cash cow, utterly destroying a working broadband model which has become more important for new business development and new markets.

Consumption based billing at fair prices is one thing, but there is nothing fair here. A maxed out tier of 40GB with overage fees of $1/GB at a $54.95 rate is a profit goldmine for anyone using between 40-100/GB a month, which is likely to be more and more common in most active Internet households with a mix of video watching, VOIP, video games, downloading, and browsing across multiple family members.

A 50GB household formerly paid $39.95. They will now pay $64.95.
A 75GB household formerly paid $39.95. They will now pay $74.95.
A 100GB household formerly paid $39.95. They will now pay $114.95.

Are these the "bandwidth hogs" TW will claim is costing them money, or just more and more average households who are using their Internet access in the ways RR itself markets.

And the other nonsense about how this "saves" people money who use less flies in the face of years of evidence those kinds of plans are barely, if ever marketed. And even most of those plans could see price hikes, and more importantly leave those on them at risk of severe penalties through overage charges for exceeding them. People on these lower tiers of service are there because of economic reasons. The impact of a run-up bill with overages is going to be a shell-shocker for most.

I'd also suggest that with a maxed out bundle at 40GB, TW's number crunchers have also considered the ever-increasing profit they will continue to earn as online applications consume more bandwidth year after year, making it more and more likely more of their customers will max out. There never is an "unlimited" plan available with these bandwidth cap plans.

BTW, Verizon FIOS has made it a point in their marketing to remind customers they do not have a usage cap, and that fact has made them a lot of new customers who do not want to worry whether they can watch one more episode of Benson on Hulu before exceeding their cap. If only Frontier were that smart. They are saddled with a technology limited DSL product that cannot compete on speed or consistency, and is more subject to technical faults. But they could strike marketing gold for the first time since their product was introduced to sell the fact they are NOT going to impose caps on customers. They can still quietly impose rational limits on outrageous usage (1TB a month and that sort of nonsense from servers, etc.), but they would score a huge advantage in a market with a cable modem product that is now effectively being rationed out. Would you switch to a lower speed provider with no ludicrous cap?

But Frontier's insanity knows no bounds, and instead they tried to impose a 5GB (!) cap on customers last summer that attracted sufficient negative press to have it temporarily suspended. Stupid. You can bet the cap issue will be revived again now that TW is talking about it.

Of course, these cities were chosen by TW not to get a representative or rational sample of the impact of a national bandwidth cap. That's because each of these selected markets is already saddled with caps or the likelihood of caps from the competition, so there is no downside to imposing their own. If they tried this in a Verizon FIOS area, customers would flee in seconds. They are doing this where they can get away with it.

Unfortunately for cities like Rochester, which are high technology comfortable, the residents are stuck because there simply is no viable competition. Clearwire has their own usage limits and an even poorer technology than DSL so wireless is out (and virtually all cellular providers have soft/hard limits themselves as well).

It's a very dark day for this community, with our only hope being a Verizon buyout of Frontier and progress towards a forward-thinking competitor which sees the long term benefits of deploying advanced technology which lets them deliver products and services in the future they can build revenue streams from and keep customer loyalty. TW wants a payday and will stick it to their customers again to get it.

And, by the way, should this company elect to exempt "preferred content providers" from their usage cap, that will open themselves up for a serious legal challenge and the political pandora's box of net neutrality: A backdoor way for major corporate interests to obtain de facto control of the marketplace by making independent competitors subject to usage caps that make funding those endeavors far more difficult.

StoptheCap! »www.stopthecap.com is getting reactivated after dealing with some of the Frontier crap from last summer. I absolutely will need help to make a difference with a much bigger company that is making these decisions from corporate headquarters and is not as impressed from local customer revolts.

said by Anonymous_ :

With 7 isp to choose from nothing to worry about

with a T1 for about 110 permonth (unlimtied)