SubscribeI hope everyone had a good holiday weekend. I am still working my way through all of the e-mail and will have managed to finish replying to everything up until April 10th tonight. I have several short updates:
If you’re a participant on DailyKos, please take some time and help our reader Z get the message out, and answer back a few of the folks involved in Z’s diary who are drinking the industry Kool-Aid about usage caps and metered access. While a lot of folks seem to get it, there are several over there who are in need of an education on this issue. Feel free to provide one and also give a recommendation to Z’s diary while you’re at it. It’s patently clear this issue is not one on the right or the left. It crosses political boundaries.
Reader James has made several banners attacking usage caps and promoting this site, if you care to use them on your own web pages. Anyone doing banners on this issue can use the Contact link at the top to let us know and we’ll spread the word.
Meter This! Just one of several protest sites popping up in Austin
Meter This! is one of several efforts in the Austin area working closely with us to spread the word. I want to reiterate how important it is for anyone setting up a protest site to consider bringing some of your news and action alerts to us as well, as a contributing author here. It is essential to try and make sure all campaigns to protest caps coordinate with each other for maximum impact. My preference is to provide you with access so you can submit ready-to-publish content here. That will guarantee it gets online fast, and helps give me a break from the email requests on these kinds of subjects.
Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief of Light Reading has a great chart showing the damage both AT&T and Time Warner has already done to the good people of Beaumont, Texas. I really need to hear from more folks in Beaumont – it has been the quietest of all of the victimized communities. For everyone else, this is an example of why we’re in this fight. If you live in Beaumont, your choices for flat rate broadband at reasonable pricing appears to be already a thing of the past. If you are one of the “lucky” Time Warner cap cities, one of your choices is about to evaporate. If you are living in a city that isn’t capping your access, the only word you need to remember is YET. We are your early warning wake-up call. This is YOUR fight as well, because if we cannot stop these egregious rationing plans today and now, they WILL be over your head tomorrow. That’s a 100% guarantee for the majority of American cities.
Table 1: Internet Usage Caps (Beaumont, Texas)
| Service Provider | Bandwidth Cap (GBs) | Internet Speed (Mbit/s) |
| AT&T | 150 | 10 |
| AT&T | 150 | 18 |
| AT&T | 80 | 6 |
| AT&T | 60 | 3 |
| Time Warner Cable | 40 | 10 |
| AT&T | 40 | 1.5 |
| AT&T | 20 | 0.768 |
| Time Warner Cable | 20 | 7 |
| Time Warner Cable | 10 | 3 |
| Time Warner Cable | 5 | 0.768 |
| Sources: Time Warner Cable, AT&T, The ghost of Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias. | ||
Oh, and by the way, AT&T, you are next. If you are stuck in Beaumont or Reno, Nevada, the test cities for AT&T’s caps, and want in on this fight, drop me a note or add your public comment here. I don’t want anyone to think this is just about Time Warner. It was about Frontier when this site started, and we’ve gone after AT&T and even Comcast. And our neighbors to the north in Canada can already tell you what living the Internet life under caps is like. It’s not a happy story. Canadians, your cause is also our cause. And although the approaches to solve it may not be the same, isn’t it time that consumers join forces and get started in driving public and private initiatives to stop the rationing of Internet access?
Other stories of interest:
are there any alternatives to TWC in the Charlotte, NC area…good ones that is? I play lots of games and I’d hit the cap in a few days just downloading game demos or hd stuff from hulu/netflix/any of the other 8 million websites out there, not to mention linux distros and stuff like that. I’d need decent latency without a cap. Something needs to be done about these ISP monopolies, total bullshit.
btw someone needs to come up with a big list of flawless counters to all their customer service BS they give people when they call to complain.
One of the requests that should be made as you protest to goverment is that if TWC is going to implement usage based billing then they should be forced to guarentee a clean network. If they are basing their billing on usage statistics then a virus received from their network could drive higher utilization. Credit Card companies are forced to invest millions in protecting consumers against fraud. This is because your credit card is usage based and that if someone gets your card information they can cause you harm by running up charges on your bill. Similar thing with TWC and usage based billing. The connection is always on. They must be required to guarentee that any polling that are doing on your equipment is not calculated into the bill. They should also be forced that with their premium service charges comes consumer protection from time warner connected devices which infect that network and cause consumers to incur high charges.
They should also be forced to provide Customer Edge equpipment that allows end users to simplisticly create quality of service policies for the applications that the consumer chooses to run on their home network. These policies would allow consumers to select which devices should gain access to their home network and what applications they would be required to use.
They should be forced to provide wireless security consulting and garentee that when wireless is setup on the TWC connection that their security policies ensure that no one is robbing the consumer of their fee based bandwidth.
TWC should also ensure that if the consumer has a voice service that no traffic origionated from voice based conversations is being calculated into the usage based billing fees as we are already being charged for voice usage.
If TWC wants to implement this usage based fees then local, state and federal goverment agencies should step in to ensure that time warner is protecting the consumer against fraud and providing them a service that can guarentee they are protected without heavy penalties.
The power company is monitored by the Public Service Commision sounds like TWC is introducing a fee schedule that would require them to be monitored and fined by the PSC.
Hey Phil, figured this was the easiest way to get a note in here, and may be something you want to address to your readers. Over the weekend I installed the DD-WRT firmware for my linksys router, and with that I’m able to monitor my bandwidth usage myself. Might be a good tool if you want to see how much you’re really using before Time Warner implements their “gas gauge”. http://www.dd-wrt.com
There’s also Tomato, which has similar functionality: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
Phil:
I thought that TW changed the lowest cap to 1GB/mo 786/kpbs for $15. (from here: http://a.longreply.com/109511)
I was able to meter one of my three computers this weekend. The slowest one of the bunch, an old Pentium II with Archlinux on it. I had ~200mbs of updates, then I did some light surfing for a couple of hours (in between making brownies and zucchini-carrot cake), and listened to BBC2 for the rest of the day. The computer was on for ~12 hours. In that time, I used right around 800mbs (up & down). No way this new limit works for someone–anyone–for a month.
You can tell how clever they think they are when they made this plan available at $15. The true believers in metered access could have had a pure example of life under metered access – pay for only what you use, with this plan. And then they made sure to discourage people from doing just that by doubling the overage fee. Who would want to be on this plan?
It’s all patently transparent what this is about. It’s not about making people pay for what they use. It’s about making everyone pay more for less. Pay more when people end up going over a cap, less service with a cap while paying the same price. And more anyone consuming more than 20GB or so, they need to be in a higher priced tier.
“Time Warner lost 13.4 billion dollars last year on revenue of 46.98 billion. Do they seriously think that lowering the service level, not raising it, will actually help?
Does it ever?”
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2009/04/clash-of-titans-pt-2.html
Man I really wish Time Warner had the balls to pick test city that has rivals so they can really see how badly this thing is for them. But hey if anything they are not is stupid. They know for a fact that the test cities have to choice but them so they have to feel their wrath, but what they do fail to understand is what they do in those cities will hurt them in the long run. So if I have to suffer because of them, then we as a whole must drop our accounts regardless what city you live in. I say if the whole country drops them all at once I bet they will get the picture real fast. And as much as I would hate to go to AT&T for the same price for less I would do it if it means that they would go under. With that all being said let draw a line in the sand and pick a date to cancel our accounts and tell them a date to TWC to comply with our rights or we will boycott them. Fight them with their own tactics, if they want more money then we will not give them any money. Soon they will get the picture that caps are bad. When TWC has to declare chapter 11 then the rest of the players will see that bandwidth capping is bad. So who is with me on setting a date to cancel our TWC accounts if they do not want back down. And remember for this to work it has to be an united front and does not matter if you are the unlucky victims of the “test” cities.
I have a date and that date for me is within the first week of June.