Time Warner announced tiered pricing structure based on bandwidth yesterday (in Greensboro and Beaumont TX) and lots of friends sent me the link to the article asking what I thought about it and how did it impact their own usage and costs. The more geeky friends referred to it as a watershed moment in US technology and infrastructure. My bud, Lenslinger, called for some info and then re-called to see if we could get together. (In the meantime, I got smarter than I had been about the topic.)
Roch implies that tiered pricing will impact the creativity and innovation in Greensboro; I’m not yet sure that’s an expected outcome. Most residential users have a lot more bandwidth than they need; however, without having a history of usage, it’s hard to tell what size bandwidth package to buy. OTOH, TW will have a 3-month grace period to ease people into this new pricing, I hear.
I’m in favor of regulating bandwidth-providers like we do gas, electric and water utilities. Although I don’t like more government in my life, Internet accessibility is going to become as important as other utilities. The providers get fair pricing (I’m in favor of profit) but they also have to make it available to everyone; rural and poor people too. Besides, TW is effectively the only game in town for residential Internet; there should be some restrictions in place. See where total lack of regulation has gotten us economically? I’d love to see President Obama’s US-Technology Secretary (I hate the word “czar”) address this and build sensible policy.
I am absolutely opposed to this monitoring thing because the slope is too slippery – if they can monitor how MUCH I download, then it’s easy for them to determine WHAT I download. I want some assurances other than the TOS I’m forced to agree to in order to get service. The tools for monitoring bandwidth are robust; but will they tell me when I’m close to my limit or are they going to demand that I check my TW web page (another username, another password)? And those at-home wireless routers with no passwords? People will be much more tempted to steal your bandwidth; it’s time to tighten the home wireless.
Stewart and I interviewed this morning; he’s on his way to edit and it should be on at 6 pm at WGHP unless something important happens. His story is broader than my piece; I understand that I can talk for 30 minutes and less than 30 seconds will get on screen. As he set up, I snapped pics and then he snapped a memory of and for me.
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| Lenslinger arrives and unpacks the toys | He’s got his toys, I’ve got mine |
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| I think he could set it up with his eyes closed | “Hey look at me!” and click! |
Internet isn’t like gas/water/electric though. In fact, if you come right down to it, your cell phone is closer home to something that people must have than Internet on the grand scheme of things. Thus what TWC is doing hurts first adopters and technology people imho. I already pay them too much and with wireless plans moving to the “unlimited” realm…. progressive, not regressive.
Just my two cents, but I do think it’s not good news at all. And who knows if WS is thrown into the jumble or if the “Greensboro” market is actually just Greensboro.
Agreed, DM, I don’t think it’s ENTIRELY like gas, water, electric. The price changes are, in my understanding, for residential users and not those who have business class (and if I’m wrong, that’s a really big thing to be wrong about!). If you are a business, even a start-up at home, the price differential isn’t so huge that you can’t make it a business expense (much like having a business phone line in your house; it costs more). What I find to be the biggest problem in this whole scheme is that for years, we’ve been taught to WANT content by the big content providers (TV stations, movies, Google, Yahoo) and then once we want content, they decide to charge more for it (and given that everyone’s adding video to every little story, well, it adds up.)
I want some competition and without it, I want some regulation. This isn’t the last pricing/tier change we’re going to hear about.
But don’t you agree that most residential users don’t use a ton of bandwidth but just WANT it?
No. Mainly because as technologies grow, regardless of if residential users realize they’re buying it, they’re using more bandwidth. Let’s not forget that those people that buy the $99 tv/phone/internet? You’re paying twice in a tiered system because you’re paying for “phone” and paying for the use of the “phone” on the internet side by data cap. Also, pretty much everything is tying in Internet content. Your heaviest users are also your youngest all the way to about age 30 due to the adoption of Netflix streaming, Hulu, Vudu, and the like.
So basically TWC is detering not only business (regardless of if it’s an expense cost) but basically throwing out adoption.
The content argument doesn’t fly mainly because the Internet wasn’t provided for on that level. It’s one thing to start from a tiered system and move forward to unlimited. It’s another entirely to move from unlimited to a tiered. You wouldn’t have had Google/Yahoo at all if there was a tiered system in place. It’s also one of the reasons why mobile applications have been slow to move. Until recently, you had to pay for air minutes. So the adoption rate of applications is extremely slow and thus not in anyone’s interest to develop or buy.
Oh… going back to my first point. Residential users and bandwidth? It’s the same as buying a newspaper subscription. As a consumer, you don’t know how much it costs to print or on average how many pages there are but you do pay for say….. five sections. So basically, this tiered service is saying… you know what? Let’s not change the five sections, but because we know that on average most readers only read two sections, we’re going to have a monitor out there to see if you read all five sections. If you read all five sections every day, then you’ll go over our arbitrary page limit that we set now. Thus, for ever page you read over you have to pay us more money.
That in itself is ridiculous. On top of this, the data cap at 40G when Comcast (whom actually got some seriously bad press for their cap online) is 250G? That’s like someone telling you that you’re paying for a Ferrari, and you just bought one, but you can only drive it like a minivan. I can’t see a single “Ferrari” owner not revolting against that.
To be clear, I think tiered pricing isn’t awful but I think TW’s bandwidth limits as listed in this new pricing scheme are absurd. They’re WAY too low for any future thinking.
I think I agree with darkmoon. I dropped my cable TV from TWC because I can watch the shows I want to keep up with on the Internet and TWC charging me close to $100 a month for TV (that has gone really downhill in the last year) is ridiculous. When I’m on my computer, while sending you giant art files, I’m surfing the web for the latest information. I watch a lot of streaming TV, I download probably gigabytes of music, I play music sites like Pandora, Blip.fm and Lala all the time, and sometimes simultaneously. I’m that kid that Apple is marketing to; I’ve got my iPod updating, while uploading my newest iLife show from my pics on Facebook and downloading a new song from iTunes. I use a lot of bandwith every day.
That’s just stuff that I do. Let’s not forget those annoying ads that businesses put on websites that start playing once you mouseover. Those Flash movies are downloaded automatically (for most people). I now have to pay for advertisements? No thank you.
And in the business world, all I’ve read is talking about the move to doing more video in order to gain more customers, more views, more clicks. I think only 1 of them, surprisingly, has talked about this issue. Video is going to be the content king for a lot of websites. There has to be internet regulation or competition, but without either, I’m moving to satellite.
Am I supposed to be tax-deducting the Internet now that I have one day a week I work from home?
I screamed “That’s SUE!” when I saw you on TV… can’t believe Time Warner… what an atrocity of a company.
And I got your stickers today! Thank you, Liv. Will put to good use.
Lest I be associated with someone who thinks the new pricing plan from TW is a good thing, I do not. I’m not opposed to tiers, but the limits are reactionary to that 5-hours-per-month dial up silliness we all joke about.
Kid #2, I’m not sure about the tax thing; that’s why I pay that accountant. I’ll ask him. He’ll probably tell you that the best choice is to get the company to pay for 1/7 of your Internet bill, but that isn’t going to happen, is it?
In Austin, TX, another one of TWC’s experiment subjects, a city council person sees it my way:
“Internet access should be expanded, not constrained. Innovation and creativity should be unleashed by the Internet, not shackled by draconian usage caps. This is vital to Austin’s economic recovery. I hope that Time Warner will work with City officials and the community at large to reconsider this bad plan.”
http://austinleadership.com/blogPost.asp?ID=49
Darkmoon touches on another unanswered question. My “land line” is Vonage — VOIP on TWC’s Road Runner. How much bandwidth does a telephone call use?
Not being an accountant, but having done it in the past…. If you actually work from home and you can itemize … yes, a percentage of whatever you do for work can be written off on taxes. You have to keep records of it though in case of auditing. Although I doubt they’ll question it given your position.
@Roch: It’s whatever you set the “quality” at. That’s the up/down of the call. So if you call for X minutes, at 96k (which I believe is the minimum on Vonage), then just calculate it out. Although, you still would be paying twice with the phone by TWC. And if you don’t? Then you run into an issue similar to what Microsoft did with packaging Internet Explorer in their OS and got sued for it. It’s discriminatory practices towards other competition which Judicial system has said you can’t do (Vonage vs Bells over E911).
Any way you look at it, the tiered system is screwed up. I’ll sooner pull my own DS3 and share the cost with others than pay TWC if they go tiered. And believe me, that wouldn’t be too difficult to do. Don’t need millions anymore. Someone should start a petition against TWC imho.
Thanks, Darkmoon, I just found that number doing some Googling. Rounding it up to 100 Kb/s, 60 hours of phone calls comes to 360 Mb.
That’s funny, as you point out, that TW’s phone customers will be paying twice for bandwidth.
6 seconds = 1mb
1 minute = 10mb
1 hour = 60mb
60 hours = 360 mb
@Roch: Don’t forget. That’s making the assumption that you have it at 96k. If I’m not mistaken, in this household, we have it turned up because we want the crisp quality in sound. that’s even more in that sense.
@Kid #2: I didn’t even think about the automated flash downloads! Argh. That annoys me even more. Does this mean that TWC will block advertisements for us? If so, I MIGHT be at least slightly amused by it.
Darkmoon, I tried commenting on your site on your post about this (nothing crucial, agreeing with some of what you said and laughing at your observation that TWC phone customers will now be paying twice for the same service), but I got this error:
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Fatal error: Class ‘MT’ not found in /home/moonscythe/life.firelace.com/mtview.php on line 4
Roch, that happens to DM every now and then. It’s due to, I think I remember, the “robust” server he’s running it on (/snark)
Nah. It’s due to how MT runs on memory. And shared hosting doesn’t cut it. And I’m too lazy to migrate. Might do it tonight just for hell since I have to migrate another site anyways.
Political Theory here:
1. The 14th Amendment – you can’t target one group for these charges without doing all groups. It is the Equal Protection clause to which I refer.
2. Cable TV pricing rate changes are supposed to be controlled by our local governments – so, unless we have our reps vote to allow this, how can they do this legally?
It is this kind of capricious greed, extra legal in nature, that caused our economic crisis.
If I had a choice in Eden, I would move from RR, but I can’t, as they are a monopoly. Which should be illegal, but our local governments are corrupt nationwide.