Time Warner Axes Tiered Bandwidth Plans

[truehighroller]

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Time warner still sucks and I will still switch. Lieing money hungry pigs.

 

[mdillenbeck]

The consumer has won - but won what? A system that will not be upgraded because the profits they make will go to salaries and expanding service areas? Remember, you get what you pay for.

I, for one, do not mind a consumption based model. However, the pricing of the tiers that Time Warner Cable (TWC) chose were unacceptable. Had TWC chosen more reasonable priced tiers and given ALL customers the highest speed possible (without guarantees of speed, of course - because with cable the number of users can influence your speed).

 

[misry]

My biggest concern over the entire issue is the caps. How would they be able to know when one has reached the cap. By monitoring. How big a leap would it be to go from how *much* you up/download to *what* you up/download.

It would start with, "If you aren't doing anything wrong..."

 

[truerock]

As I said earlier this week, AT&T's attempt to get their customers to pay more for less was ludicrous and stupid. Any product analyst who isn't a total moron could have pulled the issue off using any number of typical pricing management strategies. It is extremely unfortunate that our country's communications networks are under the control of total idiots. I almost hope that AT&T isn't as completely incompetent as they apparently are - and, this was all a ploy to set up a long term pricing strategy. Greed is a nauseating human trait - stupidity is a dangerous trait.

 

[pocketdrummer]

Time warner is ALREADY overpriced...

If Verizon FIOS is $65 for 20mbps, then for $45 you should theoretically get 14mbps... but you don't. You get 6-7mbps.

FIOS = $3.25/1mbps
TWC = $7.50/1mbps

And now they want to charge more!? Someone needs to tell verizon to get busy spreading their FIOS network.

 

[Cache]

The thing that Time Warner should consider is what other ISP's may decide to charge THEM for the traffic that gets routed. For example, if Time Warner can tell me that my traffic is costing them 'x' amount of money, then what happens when I look up the latest fashion trends in Italy? Since technically my bandwidth is passed along through multiple carriers for almost each and every web activity we perform, those other carriers can logically come to Time Warner to charge a 'usage fee' through their networks.

I don't think Time Warner wants to pay them for the same thing I am paying Time Warner for. Time Warner may want to charge for usage, but I guarantee that there are other companies who want to charge for the traffic Time Warner has directed to them. And at that point internet access becomes a moot point.

 

[gorehound]

All I can say is NO CAPS EVER !!! and if you support them then you probably work for an ISP cause any intelligent human being will not want to see their access capped.
We pay our monthly bill and we surf when and where we want to and that is the way it should always be.
And any company who is capping or intends to needs to be brought down a few steps to see the "light".
Why would any of you on this technical site want to see your access capped anyways ?

 

[gorehound]

furthermore if any of you think a cap is right you better think again.let these greedy businesses get a foot in your door and they will try to force it open more and more.
we must stop this capping in any form.i do not trust any big company to cap me at one amount cause i know they will just change it a year or two later while they scream and cry over their upgrades.

i hope the folks in texas really stick it to TW !!!!

 

[jacobdrj]

Why do people accept caps for cell phones? Why do they accept fees on cell phones? Contract!?! For a UTILITY?!?!

I always get pre-paid. I pay for what I use, directly, without a contract saying so. OR I go unlimited. Either way, it is fair. A contract with cap restrictions and unspoken fees? That doesn't make sense. But people do it for their phones, so they will do it for anything.

Net10 did what I needed it to when my budget was super tight. Boost Mobile Unlimited gets me through now that I can afford it. And it is paying off every cent. I couldn't imagine doing it any other way.

 

[michaelahess]

Over the last month, I've used 204.39Gb down and 39.52Gb up, and I don't consider myself a heavy user compared to a lot of people I know. Last 6 months I've used 1.01Tb down and 301.33Gb up. Over the last year, 1.54Tb down and 472.94Gb up.

Looking at that you can really see how we are using more bandwidth every month. The six month span would average 170Gb down, and 128Gb over the year. It's obviously increasing at a steady rate.

Caps would have to increase montly/quarterly/yearly to take this into account or customers would be even more pissed!

 

[michaelahess]

Crap, meant GB not Gb, missread my own graphs

 

[jimmysmitty]

Looks like they finally decided not to nail their coffin shut. Doing something like this would send plenty of consumers over to FiOS and other competators that offer unlimited bandwidth.

I hope to God this never comes back.

 

[demyansk]

Now, Time Warner should go out and REDUCE INTERNET fees for their customers. Anything with a meter is wrong. What about all the spam email, videos, advertisements? THis will all eat away at my internet cap usage. I wonder if TWC reads these comments? They should reduce the price to try to get their FAITHFUL customers have some confidence in them. I sent them a letter and everyone else should write to the TWC address and state their willingness to bolt and they should reduce prices since it costs them 3 cents per gigabyte for service.

 

[B-Unit]

Name one other utility you get unlimited use of. Cable/Satellite TV is the only one. Yes, TWCs plan was ludicrous, limits too low and prices too high, but we all know bandwidth costs (initial network install, electricity, salaries of people to keep it running) and its NOT fair that Grandma and Grandpa pay the same $50 a month as little Johhny the BitTorrent master down the street.

Paying for speed is a gimmick, we should be paying based off what we use. I barely download, a per GB plan would likely save me money in the long run. I dont think it should be $X for 30, 60, or 100GB, it should be a flat per GB charge, and whatever you use that month, you pay for. If I go on vacation for a month and turn all my PCs off, I should have a $0 bill that month. If I go nuts and buy 10 movies, I should expect it to be a bit higher.

 

[Caffeinecarl]

Another thing to consider about internet caps... Recently, I had a packet loss problem with my internet connection (turned out to be bad RAM causing it, but whatever) and I had to restart many downloads in the range of 100's of MB's to multi-gigabytes. I can only imagine the cost I'd incur having to restart them if I had to deal with this crap and the original source couldn't be read as happens with many game demo sites. $1 a gig? Are you serious? Setting up a new Windows installation wouldn't just be very inconvenient, it would be costly with all the update downloads.

I get charged for a download even if it fails because my connection and computer are being retarded? Can I get some leniency here???

 

[scryer_360]

"What kind of bandwidth plans would it take for you to hop on the tier wagon?"

Simple: none. I will not now nor ever pay for a tiered system. What makes the Internet work is that access to it takes you to any amount of information with limitless data possibilities. To charge per gigabyte is absurd: already its being discussed in scientific circles the kind of infrastructure needed to support terabyte sized file transfer. It was a decade ago that hard drives were sized in a few gigabyes: today desktop PC's come standard with at least 320 gigs of storage in most ATX tower's, 500 gigabytes is "normal." The transfer of gigabyte sized files from a computer to another is a normal occurrence via flash drive, the Internet, and private networks.

Bandwidth caps only prohibit the growth of the Internet and its many possibilities by restricting (quite explicitly) the amount of data that can be transferred. Doing something like this makes American's less competitive with other nations around the world where bandwidth is unrestricted: that is, all of them sans those ran by Totalitarian regimes.

TWC will never get support for a tiered system. It's been proven again and again that it was just a money grab, and worse, its a money grab that does not benefit the consumer. What benefits the consumer is for TWC to invest in it's infrastructure, trying to gain higher speeds and more capacity. If that comes at the expense of larger dividends, then so be it. No company can call it a good practice to slaughter today what will be more bountiful tomorrow.

 

[Guest]

Don't think that the bandwidth caps are going away any time soon. Just check out Time Warner's own press release about it. They are trying to "educate" the consumer about how these are supposed to be a good thing. The reality is that they are just trying to make up for the money that they have lost by buying AOL. Time Warner has taken a beating financially for that move and they are now trying to get rid of the garbage but nobody is stupid enough to get stuck with it. Now they are trying to make the money back from the consumers so that they can continue to finance those excessive executive perks such as jets and vacations not to mention the pay packages. Did you know that in 2008 Jeffrey Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner made $21.5 million! According to their own earnings statements they had a net income after taxes of $-16 Billion! Yes they really lost that much according to what they have claimed. That amount is what they are left with after paying all of their expenses such as salaries and other expenses needed to run the business and taxes.

To me this looks like the executives are trying to milk the consumers while they are running the company into the ground just like all of the bank executives.

This is the link for Time Warner's press release about reeducating people to their way of thinking. http/www.timewarnercable.com/corporate/announcements/cbb.html

The financial results as provided to investors can be found here and it isn't a pretty picture. For those of you who aren't familiar with how to read these forms, all of the numbers are in millions and everything in parenthasis is a negative number. When your income is negative that is not a good thing. I guess it is about time that they are having to pay for so many years of mismanagement.

 

[solymnar]

They can reword it as much as they like. They'll still drive away customers into the arms of other companies if/when they try to roll with this plan. Its a poor value for most people that actually use their connection, no amount of "education" changes that.

 

[thegh0st]

This is damn sweet to hear! Way to go consumers! Now I personally think Comcast should get rid of theirs to even though I am not a customer of theirs and they do have a much higher cap. I still think it should go extinct to.

And on to this oil/gas companys! They need to quit raking the consumers over the coals to!