I was passed this article about metered Internet in the Rochester area by Time Warner Cable. It's a pretty hot issue and very unpopular.
Deaf community reacts to Time Warner metered pricing
In short, Time Warner Cable will be implementing metered pricing. When that happens, those who use videophones could be priced out of using them. Watching online videos like Hulu and YouTube adds up as well. Some downloadable videos are in the megabytes, while downloaded DVD movies can be about 4-8 gigabytes.
My question at the moment is how much data is being passed through the lines in a 30 minute session? Many VPs send data at 256Kbps and receive at 384Kbps.
It's a possibility this may be implemented in other broadband markets.
Update April 19:
Check the Victory of Internet Freedom blog post by Sharyn. She reports that Time Warner Cable has backed down from their metering proposal.
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7 comments:
Download a movie, video, TV content, or music is VASTLY different from using the Internet for VRS or peer-to-peer VP. It's an evolution from TTY/phone technology to more advanced platforms. With new FCC regs. that can be implemented, Cable/DSL providers cam offer parity to Internet users with hearing loss, so that their old telephone line discounts for TTY user are on par with the technology transfer to VRS and VP. I'm not saying FREE, just cut deaf and hard of hearing folks a reasonable break.
actually you should realize that the reason that they want to meter it is probably because of the fact that they are not scalable enough to be able to meet the needs of everyone all at once and they do not have the financial capability to generate a network to fully meets the needs for everyone so they are metering it instead. The only way they could basically do that is to outfit every home with fiber optic lines and to do that in every home across the nation, that would cost them billions and billions, if not trillions.
I was involved with a program that fight our freedom of Internet and stopped other cable companies limit or charge outrageous price of usage. Go to http://www.savetheinternet.com/
I hope it helps.
I already did these bitrate calculations. You would have to be on the VP for almost 24 hours a day, every day for the entire month to reach the limit. Since VPs usually peg out at 384kbps or 512kbps, there is a upper limit on how much traffic is generated.
Of course, if you watch video clips online, browse the web, and read emails, that would cut into the monthly limit.
This limit that was reported in the article is designed to punish those who constantly download/upload many large files per month at high speeds far above 384kbps or 512kbps.
Large cable companies such as Comcast and Cox wanted to milk more money from regular, everyday Web surfers who do not frequently download GBs of data daily. The heavy users who download/upload data too often consists only less than .05% of total Internet user population, a relative small number. I'm assuming that the metered Internet system is a method of applying one-size-fit-all punishment on regular Web users for the actions of a very small number of heavy users.
This NYT article tells a very different story: you could get the fastest broadband connection for only $20.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/the-cost-to-offer-the-worlds-fastest-broadband-20-per-home/
Metered internet pretty much sounds like the 5 cents per email fee thats been spinning around a decade ago.
What about upload file for a website?
Peachlady
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