SubscribeBeautiful Beaumont, part of the Golden Triangle with Port Arthur and Orange, Texas. Home to Lamar Univerity, the Texas Wildcatters, and the South Texas State Fair, the city is also known to online enthusiasts as the unlucky epicenter of broadband usage capping.
Time Warner’s Golden Triangle Division rolled out the first broadband caps on Beaumont residents last summer, implementing service plans ranging from 4-50GB of usage for new customers, or those intending to change their Road Runner service plan. Company officials rolled out the usual dog and pony show about how the change wouldn’t really affect most people at all.
1GB gets you about 70,000 e-mails, 34 hours of gaming or 1,344 hours of Web browsing; or, it’s the approximate equivalent of downloading 569 photos, 277 music files, 7 hours of low-resolution video (YouTube), 3 hours of standard definition streaming video or 45 minutes of high-definition streaming video.
As StoptheCap! reported last summer, the “experiment” was met with mixed reaction. Many customers felt the tiers had paltry limits, many didn’t like the fact an unlimited tier was no longer available, and the whole thing was too expensive. Notably, nobody asked for this kind of rationing, and nobody seemed to advocate for it outside of the company itself.
Alex Dudley, corporate spokesman for Time Warner, used most of the same rhetoric about the Beaumont “test” he used about those to be conducted in Rochester, the Triad of North Carolina, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas.
Dudley argues that the usage cap issue is not a foregone conclusion at Time Warner. Dudley told GigaOm that TWC’s experiment in Texas was just that “a test.”
A test that has now become indefinite, and today Beaumont is the only city in Time Warner’s national service area still under the thumb of usage caps. Dudley, bless his heart, added this familiar proviso:
“If consumers don’t want it, the company is going to back away from it. I think this is a trial and we are going to learn from this trial,” he said.
Consumers in Beaumont don’t want the cap. Consumers in Rochester don’t want the cap. Consumers in the Triad don’t want the cap. Consumers in San Antonio don’t want the cap. Consumers in Austin don’t want the cap.
Executives at Time Warner want the cap.
Beaumont is stuck with the cap.
It took thousands of protesters from all of these cities, a United States congressman, a United States senator, and pressure from investors, the media, and who knows who else to get them to “temporarily suspend” the cap nightmare, but with the allusion it will be back later.
The only thing they have learned from the trial is customers don’t like it. But they’re going to get it anyway. Just like in Beaumont.
The RICO At should be used against Time Warner
I still don’t understand the misconception about the cap applying to download only. If one reads the FAQ on help.rr.com (I dont know if it is still there or not anymore since the suspension) but the cap is a total amount of data, up and down. I guess I am not 100% sure of the details in the Beaumont ‘experiment’ but I do know that the caps that were to be placed in Rochester were for a total amount of data both uploaded and downloaded.
I measured my up and down usage (for my own knowledge of course – and not out of any means to help TWC), and I reached the 1 GB level within 4 days … not looking at the raw data at the moment. The video piece seems completely unbalanced in favor of TWC’s view that caps are “ok” and “will not affect the average user”, although there is no clear definition of what the “average user” is. The average user is becoming a high data use user. Like many folks, I use the Internet quite a lot. But to reach… Read more »
It kills me that that they use examples like 70,000 e-mails. Of course they’ll use big numbers like that because then the uneducated customer sees that big number and thinks they’ll be ok. 34 hours of gaming is wrong BIG TIME! I measured my own hours worth of online gaming for a racing simulator and I came in at 50mb. 2 hours = 100mb. 1gb = 1000mb, 20hrs of online gaming = 1gb and this is just one game, every game is different depending on how much data needs to be sent. I’m sure a game like WoW is more… Read more »
Maybe TWC thinks that if they throw enough numbers at you that something will stick. 😉
dTWC, I am sure you are correct, very much depends on the game as to how much data is sent/received.
What people fail to realize is, the way we use the Internet is evolving. It has, and always will be headed toward use of more bandwidth. Increasingly more of our television and movie needs will be met online. This means that SOONER, not later, these imposed limits will be met by the most novice of users.
Remember, you have a voice and using that voice will stop Time-Warner.
They did it in the other cities, now Beaumont needs to let them know.
Write and call Time-Warner and let them know that the cap is not for you!
Richard, online gaming has changed so much in the last 2 years. It used to be you would go to Best Buy, buy a game, install it on you computer and be done with it. The occasional patch would need to be downloaded but thats it. The online racing simulator I play online is completely online based. You pay for it online, you download everything online. I’m talking a few GB worth of data just for the core game then after that you have different tracks and cars you can buy. Plus every 2 weeks the game gets an update,… Read more »
Agreed, DOWN_with_TWC!, with your views.
Also, the other side of this is the improvements / new technology involved in squeezing MORE bandwidth out of optical cabling etc. that ALREADY EXISTS, (QAM technology, DOCSIS3 and whatever comes after it, etc., not to mention new forms of file compression / protocol compression technology, etc). Technologies such as these can only cause the amount of bandwidth available to effectively be _constantly increasing_ as time goes on.
This makes the notion that somehow there will be some “bandwidth shortage” in 2012 (as was originally posited by TWC) to be unlikely.
Here’s an interesting article written in Nov. of last year about the “last mile” being owned by the consumer and having a choice of which provider to use from the local Central Office or “hub”. http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/netsys/article.php/3787661/Moores-Law-for-Broadband-or-Homes-With-Tails.htm
The problem I have with TWC saying they’re loosing money or there is bandwidth storage is this. I pay $40/mo for internet, that same line into my house also holds my cable feed. My monthly bill is $115/mo. I find it extremely hard to believe that some where in that $115 they are not making a profit or don’t make enough profit in a year to upgrade my service.
“I find it extremely hard to believe that some where in that $115 they are not making a profit or don’t make enough profit in a year to upgrade my service.”
They are making a profit, it is just that they want to make a bigger profit on the same infrastructure.