Time Warner Cable

You are currently browsing the archive for the Time Warner Cable category.

comcast says no to competing video services and imposes bandwidth caps

August 28, 2008 in Comcast, Open Web, Tee Vee, Time Warner Cable, Video | 26 comments

Comcast has decided to impose a 250GB/month limit on their customers. I have a lot of friends that use Comcast for their internet service provider and are likely to hit this limit, even counting fully legit data. Linux isos aren’t small. And I know that I do a lot of backups and whoisi testing that uses a decent amount of bandwidth. I’m sure I’m well past this limit. [ Note: I am a very happy Verizon FIOS user. ]

But the real story is about what this does to competitive video services. Want to get access to better, lower-cost video than Comcast cable service from somewhere like Amazon, Netflix or Hulu? Nope, welcome to the world of false scarcity. You will use their video service and you will like it.

Om calls this “the enemy of innovation” and he’s right. Part of the explosion of video, services and data via the web has come because of the growth and availability of broadband into people’s homes. What this says is “growth is fine as long as it doesn’t compete with our video offerings.”

I am reminded of the oldest story of this behaviour when AT&T didn’t want to support the Internet because they didn’t want competition to their proprietary long haul services. And rightfully so. It’s a good thing that AT&T didn’t win that battle, right?

Also, they list how many pieces of email you can send with a 250GB limit. (Huh? Seriously?) I wonder how many youtube videos or hulu videos that amounts to. Anyone know the avg size of one of those? That might make for a more interesting number.

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.