[TriLUG] Time Warner Responds to bandwidth concerns

[Greg Cox]

> This is the crux of the problem. It's obvious the carrier encounters some
> amount of cost per megabyte and needs to recover that cost one way or
> another. If a small percentage of users managed to download a 100 petabytes
> of data per month, the carrier would need to build faster pipes just to
> satisfy those users. It wouldn't be fair to charge us all for those user.

At $WORK, we just enabled homedir quotas on our userbase after the free-wheeling
all-you-can-eat days.  There's a lot of bitching and moaning, of course,
but it's amazing how when you say "here's a reasonable level; you're 300G over,
and we'll help you diagnose your usage and help you cleanup."  A lot of
people have lightbulb moments and realize that maybe they shouldn't be backing
up their laptop there, or maybe they don't need to keep 6 year old core files.
There's some who are justified in their use, and you work with that, too.

And, of course, long-term storage doesn't completely hold up in an analogy
with bandwidth, but, my point is, for so long, a resource people have come
to think of as 'free' has been 'free', and so they didn't assign any value
to it.  It was just an unmetered lightswitch.

Now, I don't particularly want to feed a Gotcha revenue stream.  But if
the "i must have every torrent ever" folks are an issue for service to the
masses and that something to reel them in is needed, then maybe it's
time to stop stomping your feet and pouting that that meanie TWC is going
to take your bottomless bowl of Halloween candy away from you, and start
suggesting business-feasible alternatives (into the right ears) that would
work better for the power users, while curbing the high-flyers.

Here, I'll start:

"Hi, TWC?  You already do tiered service (RR Lite, Regular, and Turbo).
Since you have that tech in place, how about if instead of billing us
when we use too much, you instead detect when gluttons cross a cap,
send them an email/text to notify them, and derate their line speed."

You eat 100GB in billing cycle: Pay for it, or enjoy your trip to the 56k days.