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road runner: now 3% faster than dialup

July 22, 2008 in AT&T, Internet Access, Regulations, Time Warner Cable | 10 comments

I’ve been following Om Malik as he writes about the upcoming metered, capped broadband that cable companies are starting to shift to in the US. Here’s a quote from an article that he posted recently:

Road Runner Standard package provides 7Mbps service and includes an Internet usage consumption allowance of 20GB per month. Although the initial 20GB plan is price locked, Internet usage above the consumption allowance is not and will be billed at $1 per GB per month.

That quote is especially important as it’s apparently buried in the small print of the service contract being offered in Texas. That’s pretty crappy given that consumers in the US have no expectation of overage charges. Basically no one does that in the consumer space.

What this does is turn the US broadband cable market into the cellular market. You’re never sure what that bill is going to look like at the end of the month because they very carefully do not inform you when you are getting close to your usage limits. (Ask the average consumer how they feel about “overage charges” and I’m sure you’re going to get an earful.)

There have been other articles that have talked about the other thing this does: It prevents people from using competing video services on the web without paying a tax to your Internet and Television provider. Attempts to route around the (new) false scarcity of TV cable service into the home become far far more expensive. Quality video requires bandwidth, bandwidth that is now metered to very low levels, which means that services that might (dare!) to compete with your cable companies other offerings are now stifled.

It also opens up an entire area of concern around what happens if you happen to own a machine that is hit with a virus and is used as a spam robot. Can you imagine getting a bill for thousands of dollars because your machine was hijacked and then being left with the responsibility of having to prove it wasn’t you? I can’t imagine those discussions in the consumer market. It’s going to be obscene.

And the last bit that makes up the title for this post. At 20GB/month that’s an average speed of 66kbps – just slightly higher than dialup speeds. We might need some underground re-marketing on this one.

  1. Havoc’s avatar

    Havoc on July 22, 2008 at 7:02 pm

    Where there’s a DSL company competing we shouldn’t get screwed too badly, but I’m pretty afraid since the one and only option for broadband at my address is cable…

  2. Mossop’s avatar

    Mossop on July 22, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    No-one else may do that in the US, but in the UK the practice has become prevalent. Even with packages that have usage limits you can also be stung with “fair usage” policies and have your bandwidth reduced if you are using too much data during peak hours. Every man and his dog can resell the main BT broadband service on their own pricing scheme. The whole system has become so confusing I don’t know how regular consumers can make a good decision.

  3. Jeff Waugh’s avatar

    Jeff Waugh on July 22, 2008 at 9:15 pm

    This has always been the case in Australia. :-)

  4. James Henstridge’s avatar

    James Henstridge on July 22, 2008 at 9:40 pm

    A lot of the plans in Australia have monthly download caps, although it is common for them to reduce the bandwidth (e.g. to 64kb/s) when you go over rather than charge extra. For the plans that do charge you for going over the limit (usually the cheaper low end ones), 15c/MB is not unheard of. So $1/GB doesn’t sound that bad …

    Also, comparing this to the maximum theoretical limit of a dialup account is a bit off base. Most users have bursty usage patterns, so are much more likely to be able to use 20GB with a higher bandwidth than if they were forced to keep their usage to a uniform 66kb/s for the entire month.

  5. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on July 22, 2008 at 10:49 pm

    Oh, it’s totally unfair. But that’s kind of the point. :)

  6. Mårten Woxberg’s avatar

    Mårten Woxberg on July 23, 2008 at 5:34 am

    So? It’s been like this for ages in Sweden, although here you can log into your ISP account and check your own usage.

    A friend and I bought an unlimited plan but still got our speed limited because we where using about 120GB’s+ per month.
    We just told them that it was in our contract and if they wanted to slow our speed down they had better lower the price too. The limit came off. (We got better at not downloading the same Ubuntu DVD iso more than once too :)

    About the Spam/Virus thingy, if you got it, you have yourself to blame.

  7. Sebastian Redl’s avatar

    Sebastian Redl on July 23, 2008 at 6:19 am

    Pretty much all of Europe usually has some sort of cap on download volume. Nothing new here.

  8. makkara’s avatar

    makkara on July 23, 2008 at 10:00 am

    “Pretty much all of Europe usually has some sort of cap on download volume. Nothing new here.”

    ????

    I don’t. I download some 1-3 terabytes worth stuff monthly, never had any caps. I actually can not find one single capped DSL connection from the country, no one sells those.

  9. John’s avatar

    John on July 24, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    Here in California, my wireless ISP gives me the privilege of downloading a whopping 3.5GB per month for 69.95$ and 13.95$ per additional GB of data! Let’s hear it for lack of competition in the wireless sector!

  10. Josh’s avatar

    Josh on January 29, 2009 at 12:09 am

    No cap here is Rochester, NY yet… but TWC is talking about capping my area in the near future… It sucks for those of us who love getting good use out of p2p clients. I haven’t needed to spend a penny on a single movie, music album, game, software or any of the above for about a decade.

    Always knew it was too good to stay true forever…

    I average around 300-400 gigs a month. I don’t know what I’d do without it… Would lose out on a lot of free entertainment.

    It all seems so unfair to set such a cap. I hadn’t even known it had been going on anywhere until recently.

    What they should be doing is figuring out a new technology which transfers Gigs per second and not KBs per second. Some sort of lazer network to help support the growing infrastructure we call the internet. Or am I too far fetched? Maybe in 50 years.

    Until then… Does anyone know of a way you can hack your ISP’s database into not knowing what volumes you’re using? Or maybe somehow confuse or scramble whatever software tracking device they are using to keep record of your bandwidth usage?