about time!
Slashdot | Time Warner Cable Tries Metering Internet Use
On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte… [T]iers will range from $29.95 a month for… 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for… 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.
All I can say is that it’s about time somebody started doing this.
Sure, on the surface, it sounds negative. Folks who were currently paying $55 for “unlimited” access now only get 40 GB a month… But, realistically, they didn’t have an unlimited amount of bandwidth before. The ISP was doing all kinds of traffic shaping behind the scenes, sending reset packets, overselling their bandwidth, and scowling at people who went over some invisible and undocumented monthly cap.
And I really think that 40 GB a month is a pretty reasonable amount. I’m not sure how much my daily surfing adds up to, but web pages are pretty small. MP3s are only 5 MB or so each. An entire DVD is only 8 GB or so. And I can’t imagine a game like WoW or HGL uses all that much bandwidth… DAoC used to play just fine with two people sharing a 56k modem.
Plus, if we’re actually charging people for the bandwidth they use, the ISP can’t really complain when I decide to download several different Linux distributions in one month – they just bill me for it. Which makes a lot more sense than mysteriously capping my bandwidth or tossing out reset packets or something like that.