[TriLUG] Time Warner Responds to bandwidth concerns

bak bak at picklefactory.org
Mon Apr 13 07:38:48 EDT 2009


Greg Cox wrote:
>> 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.
It isn't metered at the moment, but I do assign a value to it: $50 a
month or whatever currently buys me all the light I can shine with my
lightbulb.
>
> 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.
The anger here is not quite so childish. It's just that it's so
transparently a money-grab and an attempt to prop up their own VOD
services by making everyone else's more expensive. Telling your
shareholders that access charges dropped and you're a great investment
and your customers that you just can't keep up and you need to meter
them For Their Own Good is, IMO, a despicable business practice. Profit
and honesty are not mutually incompatible.

I see the problem as being more like:

-- If you're a utility, why does your tiered-by-bandwidth pricing model
have no relationship to the reality of how much it costs you to move it?
Why are your proposed overage charges so out of proportion to what
you're paying to move that data? Why not just charge me per-GB to start
with, with the understanding that it isn't costing TWC anything even
close to $1/GB to move that data to the Internet backbone even with
administrative costs factored in.

-- If you're a business competing with other businesses instead of a
monopoly, why can't I subscribe to a service that actually competes
using the infrastructure that I subsidized as a taxpayer? Saying
ClearWire and DSL compete with TWC around here for internet access is
like saying running a diesel generator in your basement or installing
solar panels competes with Progress Energy.

Obviously AT&T might change this, but it remains to be seen just how
pervasive the U-verse rollout will actually be.
>
> 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."
Here's another one I could live with: charge me per GB from the first
byte, but make the per-GB cost cap some multiplier of what it actually
costs TWC to move that data. That way they get every gigabyte paid for,
and they can make an added profit with added services like email,
website, firewalls, etc.

But neither of these will get off the ground, because it's less
profitable than having it both ways and requires them to be accountable
to the communities they are serving.
> You eat 100GB in billing cycle: Pay for it, or enjoy your trip to the
> 56k days.
Let me try putting it another way: it's time big, your-only-choice
regional ISPs like TWC decided whether they are a protected monopoly or
a business competing in a marketplace. Internet access is too important
a part of our society and our economy to trust these guys implicitly.

--bak




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