I’ve been bugging AlexTWC on twitter and stonewalled a bit, but he I finally got him to admit this:

“The trial in Beaumont will be put on hold too. Sorry, figured you’d
already heard.
Alex Dudley / AlexTWC”

Now the real question: is he lying? I really hope its true. I’m not on a capped plan but would someone in the GT area like to comment on whether they were notified of any changes to billing?

In a nutshell? No, I expect to pay my $59.99 a month bill and get it like I do now. I can assume that is almost $15 a month more than most people spend on their RR a month. I expect to keep doing the things that I have been doing for 10 years on the internet.

In last 10 years, my monthly roadrunner bill has not gone up, except when I added turbo on my own. In those 10 years, my level of service dropped for almost 1/2 of that time all the way down to 2 or 3 Mb at one point until Frontier came out with DSL.

Make no mistake about it, Frontier drove TW to increase their speed back to what it was when it originally came out.

As I have said before, I would have supported a $10 a month price hike for the same service. The problem with that is TW probably thinks that they will see that as less money, as more people might switch to the slower connection and save money that way.

How much data you download is a poor method of billing on the internet. It is wrought with problems, but those problems let TW get more cash in overages.

As I have said before, there is no reason to build anything to get things on your TV, on the couch with a regular remote. Xbox does this all integrated nicely. DirectTV supports it as well and a whole ton of other devices from portable device like IPODs and IPhones to AppleTV and others.

But I’d strongly encourage you to read my comment on another article here that attempts to describe why caps won’t do anything for anyone but Time Warner. (Warning: it’s long!) http://stopthecap.com/2009/06/18/on-sock-puppets-industry-hacks-reactions-to-rep-eric-massas-legislation-predictable-transparent/comment-page-1/#comment-4795

The short-short version:
1. low-volume users get degraded speed if they choose the cheapest plan (ostensibly to save money)
2. normal users who don’t change rates get slapped with overage charges if they wander beyond their cap (which is actually quite easy to do given these caps)
3. “power” users will pay more to prevent overage fees but may still end up going over once in a while
4. “heavy” users (the constantly-downloading types) will pay about 3 times what they do now but still not have unfettered access

**Moral of the story**: power and heavy users are the people who drive innovation, not light users. Light users are NOT subsidizing anyone, it’s the other way around. If there were no heavy users Time Warner would be hard-pressed to make a profit charging access at (or reasonably above) cost.

In reality I don’t do a lot of TV streaming on it, I have an OTA HD tuner card that gets my TV from the broadcast digital HD signals. However I do rip my DVD movies to my network and play them back from the computer. The benefits are not having to fiddle with DVDs, it skips all the menus and commercials, and there’s no pause (however slight) between layers of the DVD – just continuous playback with full 5.1 surround sound.

Gone are the days of a big, clunky, noisy computer being the most common. I see small audible (but I wouldn’t say noisy) computers as being common, but there are plenty of small form factor (SFF) computers that are designed to be unobtrusive and quiet – Mac Mini is a perfect example.

In case you’re wondering when I say “silent” I mean “can’t hear it under normal conditions.” There is only one fan in the unit – a 120mm fan running at something close to 1000 RPM (which is quite slow). The rest of computer uses only heat sinks and the air flow of that one fan to keep things cool. If I replaced the hard drive (only used to boot) with a flash drive or solid state disk (SSD) then it would be even quieter. As it is now, the clock on the wall across the room makes more noise than my computer in an otherwise silent room.

I guess that was my problem. I hooked a computer to our 55″ 1080p plasma and the kids were at the house all of spring break. Two movie watchers and two online gamers. The little network was fine on dialup for us. The little network became Big and is used for a lot more. Try worldwide telescope to get a rough idea of what is coming and why it needs to be available to all without caps.

I am too busy writing content for here.

I have a Slingbox in the basement also connected to cable, which I use mostly to stream cable to the computer over my home network. It doesn’t consume any Road Runner bandwidth at all — it just makes it easier to have a news channel on in the upper corner of my 26″ monitor.

What is changing these days is that what used to be the computer monitor can now be the TV and vice versa. I can browse YouTube videos and watch them on the 50″ plasma TV because of our Apple TV box. I can also catch a show I missed over Hulu if I wanted to back here.

I remember when our family first got cable TV in 1982. Nobody envisioned a 500 channel universe of TV channels back then either. We had 36 channels from People’s Cable which served suburban Rochester. The cable box had a row of buttons and a rocker switch to flip between a top row of channels, and a bottom row. It had a 10-15′ wire attached to it so you could set it by your chair.

That was a lot of television. Who would have thought we’d need more than that many channels. But over the years, things changed and the cable company changed with it. More channel capacity meant more revenue, so they upgraded. First we could get up to around 50 channels, then up to 78, and then they started offering digital cable, which meant getting used to channels numbers in the 100s on up. Now we also have HD channels, on demand channels, telephone service, and broadband Internet over one coaxial cable.

The same kind of evolution is happening in broadband. Time Warner Cable is participating in that evolution, and they intend to be one of the providers of TV shows down that broadband line themselves. Providers argue that delivering on demand online video is inefficient when compared to mass delivery of television channels. Of course, that’s because they designed their network so that more than 90% of their capacity is used to deliver those television channels, and only a small amount of it is designed for moving broadband data.

Could we reach the day where television programming is delivered on demand to consumers primarily over “IP” networks? Perhaps, and TWC is not about to be left behind. They are already using Switched Digital Video which delivers some digital channels to neighborhoods only when someone in that neighborhood is watching. At other times, that bandwidth can be used for something else.

Just because we may reach the day when 90% of the capacity of that coaxial cable is used to deliver video and data, with the remaining 10% for a few analog TV channels for people who just want a few local channels, doesn’t mean that is crazy talk.

It just means that we live in a changing society, and networks can and do change with us to meet our needs. The key here is to ensure that those people delivering those changes don’t exploit their status and charge outrageous fees to obtain access to that change, especially in places where equivalent competitors simply don’t exist.