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| | Certainly hope for no metered billing I certainly hope metered billing doesn't come to pass. Especially not the Time Warner Cable version where you had a 40GB monthly cap (at most) and paid for each GB over you went.
We've recently started watching Netflix movies on our Roku box. Since they use our Internet connection, they would count towards our cap. I did some searching and found that Netflix movies tend to use about 2200Kbps. This means a 40GB cap would equal (with no other web surfing, mind you) about 42 hours of Netflix time or less than 90 minutes per day.
We could do double this easily as our kids love watching shows on Roku. If Time Warner had their way, we'd wind up paying much, much more per month for Internet access. (FIOS isn't available where I live so my only other option would be to switch to a slower Verizon DSL.)
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-Jason Levine
Support a children's charity. Buy a calendar and/or a photo book. Shooting For A Cause | |
|   espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2
 ·Clear Wireless
| Re: Certainly hope for no metered billing said by Jason Levine:We've recently started watching Netflix movies on our Roku box. Since they use our Internet connection, they would count towards our cap. I did some searching and found that Netflix movies tend to use about 2200Kbps. This means a 40GB cap would equal (with no other web surfing, mind you) about 42 hours of Netflix time or less than 90 minutes per day. We could do double this easily as our kids love watching shows on Roku. If Time Warner had their way, we'd wind up paying much, much more per month for Internet access. Ok, so you want to dramatically increase your usage and you are suggesting there should be no impact to the cost of your Internet service?
Internet pricing is based on actuarial science like insurance -- they develop an estimate for how much the average subscriber is going to use, budget for occasional large payouts (of bandwidth in this case), and set pricing accordingly. As soon as the draw exceeds the current planned usage, the pricing is going to go up whether you like it or not. Companies exist solely for the purpose of financial gain. | |
| | | | Re: Certainly hope for no metered billing But he's paying for a particular speed over time. He's finally utilizing what he paid for!
If that's not profitable for the ISPs why did they price it that way initially? They're now mad that the customers are using what they paid for? Bah! | |
| | | espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Clear Wireless
| Re: Certainly hope for no metered billing said by jjeffeory:But he's paying for a particular speed over time. He's finally utilizing what he paid for! No.
Say you spend $100/mo for $300,000 worth of automotive liability insurance. That doesn't mean that every month you don't get into an accident with a $300k payout that you're not getting what you pay for -- it means the pricing is based around the fact that it is statistically unlikely that you will have a $300k payout ever, yet alone monthly.
If broadband service were billed at the full unmetered data rate, a good percentage of the current subscriber base wouldn't be able to afford their connections. Statistically the average user draws less than 12GB/mo in bandwidth utilization, and it's that usage model that defines the current price structure. | |
| | | | | | Re: Certainly hope for no metered billing Bandwidth isn't insurance. If you use your insurance too much, your rates go up simply because insurance is a gamble. You are gambling that the money you pay to the insurance company will dwarf the claims you make and the insurance company is gambling that the money coming in from their customers will be less than they have to pay out.
A better analogy is an all-you-can-eat buffet. ISPs have set up their pricing as an all-you-can-eat buffet but they are now complaining that users are eating way too much. Many ISPs are making their offerings all-you-can-eat-so-long-as-you-don't-eat-more-than-50-pounds-of-food. At that level, very few would hit their overage rate. It would stop only the very worst "bandwidth hog." (Stepping out of the analogy for a second, this would stop the person who downloads and shares thousands of movies per month simply because they're there.)
Time Warner, however, wants to make their offering all-you-can-eat-under-half-a-pound. I would wager that most people at an all-you-can-eat buffet eat more than half a pound of food. So instead of nabbing the top 0.1% of users, this would nab a large percentage of users. Then users would either need to pay more or go hungry. (Remember, that the "Time Warner RoadRunner Restaurant" is the only "restaurant" for many people.)
If Time Warner's caps were reasonable, I wouldn't have a problem with them. However, the caps they are proposing are way too low and are obviously designed to kill off Internet video so as to protect their cable business.
--
-Jason Levine
Support a children's charity. Buy a calendar and/or a photo book. Shooting For A Cause | |
| | | | | espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Clear Wireless
| Re: Certainly hope for no metered billing said by Jason Levine:Bandwidth isn't insurance. If you use your insurance too much, your rates go up simply because insurance is a gamble. You are gambling that the money you pay to the insurance company will dwarf the claims you make and the insurance company is gambling that the money coming in from their customers will be less than they have to pay out. That's exactly what residential "unlimited" bandwidth plans are though. The ISP is gambling that you won't use more than an average amount of bandwidth. With averages hovering in the 10-15GB/mo range (depending on which study you read), and median rates hovering around 2-3GB/mo -- that plays out for them most of the time. Caps like Comcast's 250GB cap are simply a financial stop-loss point; customers start exceeding their cost model well before 250GB, but that's just the point where they decide to stop the bleeding.
said by Jason Levine:A better analogy is an all-you-can-eat buffet. All-you-can-eat buffets are rigged, because the capacity of the average human stomach is a known quantity. Even if they bring in truckloads of additional food, there are limits to how much any one person will be able to eat.
said by Jason Levine:However, the caps they are proposing are way too low and are obviously designed to kill off Internet video so as to protect their cable business. In either case TimeWarner is simply a middle man in the transaction. They are merely transporting the content of companies like Viacom, NBC/Universal, Disney, and others.
The broadband Internet infrastructure was never built or priced to be a replacement transport medium for standard video content using unicast IP delivery. That's not to say it couldn't be, but the cost of IP service will go up as part of that effort. | |
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| | | I don't have a problem with caps, per se. I have a problem with caps set so low. 40GB is the biggest cap. Time Warner might want me to spend more money than I'm currently spending to get that. Their lowest, 5GB (or 5 hours of Netflix per month / 10 minutes per day) might be the cap that my current plan gets assigned.
Meanwhile, Comcast has a 250GB cap. That would be over 264 hours of Netflix or nearly 9 hours per day. I might be able to understand some kind of overage if you are watching online video for over 9 hours every single day.
But capping a user at 10 - 90 minutes of video per day? To me that just sounds like Time Warner is trying to protect their cable TV service by killing off their customers' incentive to use online video.
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-Jason Levine
Support a children's charity. Buy a calendar and/or a photo book. Shooting For A Cause | |
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