A look at Time Warner's broadband pricing structure

by Alexander Sliwinski on Apr 7th 2009 5:30PM

OK, we need to get serious for a few paragraphs about new bandwidth rates being tested by Time Warner Cable, something that could seriously affect gamers' wallets. Gamers with Jobs has posted an excellent analysis of Time Warner Cable's new metered pricing structure, currently being tested in Greensboro, NC; Austin and San Antonio, TX; and Rochester, NY.

The price structure:

5GB: $29.99/month
10GB: $39.99/month
20GB: $49.99/month
40GB: $54.90/month
100GB: No information yet

Source: Democrat & Chronicle

In the piece, Lara Crigger breaks down her internet consumption to surprising results. She lives with her husband (also a gamer), they have no kids, and their consumption doesn't seem out of place for a young couple -- their Xbox Netflix usage apparently hides some serious bandwidth usage. In the end, she estimates they'd pay out roughly $67 a month under the new rates, instead of the $40 she currently offers the cable company. We strongly recommend reading her piece, because this is an issue that could be coming to a neighborhood near you.

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Source

Tags: broadband, gamers-with-jobs, internet, price-structure, time-warner, time-warner-cable

Reader Comments (150)

God, that's fucking awful, at least I have FIOS, hope that shit doesnt change like this

I'm sure they are only pulling this bullshit in areas without FIOS.
I'd like to see them try that in NYC.

Thank god for FIOS.

I'm jealous of you guys, you can get awesome fiber-optic internetz. :(

I know how you feel man, my friend lives out in the boonies of town and cant get FiOs. We can only play live a little bit because he downloads a lot of stuff and just cant afford more.

Yeah FiOS is freakin awesome. No bandwidth limitations and you get your own pipeline, unlike stupid TWC where you share the bandwidth with all the torrenters on the block.

People with FIOS should feel like they were specially selected by god and given the gift of immortality, flight, invisibility, and super strength. With cable it feels more like paying a ton of money to have a jungle animal take a huge dump in your mouth.

Too bad its not available in my part of northwest Houston yet. : (

Holy crap on a stick that's bad. I pay $29.99 Canadian for 3G wireless data access of 6 GB a month, to hell with just a cable connection, 5 GB, for the equivalent of $38 Canadian? WTF!

I'm a TW customer in Rochester and will be dropping my service as soon as this goes into effect. Unfortunately FIOS and Frontier have a gentlemen's agreement and won't overbuild each other. That leave Frontier as the only good option for broadband and they just announced that they were dropping all plans for imposing caps (at least while TW customers are disgruntled).

If you live in one of these areas and want to find out what you can do, stopthecap.com has been doing a great job leading the fight.

I live in an area where there is one DSL and one Cable company. That competition has brought the speed up to around 10mbit tops (more with powerboost, but 10 is the top tier). If both the Cable and the DSL company were to adopt that pricing model here, I'd be royally F**ked. With Netflix and Hulu, I easily use 60-80 gigs of bandwidth a month. Add in HD trailers from Itunes, Linux ISO's, countless Youtube clips, playing games over the internet, downloading game demo's over the internet, etc, and I'm easily hovering around 100 gigs a month. I'd have to pay twice as much or more probably to get into that 100 gig tier.

The people in the areas where they are rolling this out need to tell them to shove it by immediately canceling their subscriptions (which should be free, since the terms changed). That is the only way to nip this in the bud, other than competition (and we all know that no one is going to break the duopoly that exists in most places)

Meh! Meh I say!

As obscure Villain Said, stopthecap.com seems to be putting a lot of effort into this.

“With limited choices in broadband providers, and virtual monopolies in many market areas, I view this as nothing more than a large corporation making a move to force customers into paying more money. I firmly oppose capping internet usage and I will be taking a leadership role in stopping this outrageous, job killing initiative.”

he called it monopolistic and outrageous.

I'm going to hope that our political system can stop Time Warner from doing this sort of thing.

FUCK TIME WARNER. THEY ARE GOING TO BRING DOWN THE FUCKING INTERNET!

Pss... Joystiq is owned by Time Warner.

haha, this site is still a video game blog, and has the comments section open to its viewers. I think its still ok to express my opinion.

but if a bunch of companies follow suit with these bandwidth caps, then it can greatly affect the internet. This limitation will hurt things like streaming video services and new cloud gaming services.

What time warner is doing is sending the internet back 10 years. If there is enough dissent, then they could change their mind.

meh i think people blow this out of proportion every time, i honestly cant see myself using 40 gigs a month and i torrent tv shows and play my xbox online every day, even then i doubt im using 500mb a day.

unlike most people on this site i actually pay for my internet sharing with my roommates, and i have time warner cable in the san fernando valley ... but im not worried.

unless you are literally seeding torrents or hosting a server i dont see a real problem

the only thing that comes to mind is using pandora.com

My Steam Library is about 120GB, if I had to reinstall that at any given time, I'd have to dish out ~$160, and that's not including basic internet usage, netflix, etc.

Of course this doesn't affect me (as of yet, I guess), but I feel for those whom it does

You should take the Pepsi challenge D889. Meter your basic usage

http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/

I played gamed online for 3 hours while my wife watched some Hulu. A typical night for us. Nearly 2 gigs. This isn't even counting web browsing or downloading programs or windows updates. I don't buy Cable TV because we stream all the shows we like from netflix. I will pass 40 gigs in 2 weeks easy.

I've been a TWC customer ever since I moved out of my parents house 7 years ago. But guess TWC, I'll gladly take DSL for $10 cheaper per month than our current bill, even though it's a little slower. And you know why? Because FUCK YOU that's why.

Joystiq is owned by AOL, a unit of Time Warner. Time Warner Cable was spun off from Time Warner. http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?symbol=US:TWX&feed=BW&date=20090219&id=9627607

I have TWC in Milwaukee, this shit better not stick...

If this happens in my area, i'll seriously change providers, or give up the internet entirely. They will not get more of my money than they already are.

LOL! Good luck with that. All broadband internet providers are starting to do this CAP/Meter bullshit.

I have internet at work if i really need it. I live in a small community though, i could see this happening in big cities. Guess this could cut down on some piracy.

Why have all these broadband caps just starting popping up just now? Bad economy, rise of streaming videos, online gaming and Bitorrent?

I stay in Greensboro....its not a Big City at all...MAYBE 300k people stay here

I'll drop Time Warner if this happens too, unless the alternative ISPs happen to be worse.
Also, I just realized that this would have a huge impact on xbox live. People will have to think twice about downloading demos or media of any kind (including trailers or those game tips videos, not just tv or films). I assume those things have a benefit to MS, game publishers, film & tv studios, otherwise they wouldn't be there.
So hopefully MS and other companies will realize they will be hurt by this as well and do something to help us out as well as themselves.

Chris- I live in a town of 7500:) I wouldn't know how to live around 300000 people

Hmmmmmm.?

Mehh...
(unless it comes arround be of course =))
I so sound like an ass right about now.

ARGH! We need competition. Or have it be gov't run.

You can help the government force competition! Epicenter is the task force assigned to helping close the bandwidth gap between the United States and other developed countries in Europe and Asia. The biggest suggestion? Force competition.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/03/feds-need-your.html

It might also be worthwhile to state that the major ISPs (Time Warner, Comcast, etc) are refusing the 7.2 billion in stimulus money because the strings attached to the stimulus money states that they need to use a portion of the money to reach to un-served and better support under-served areas of the country, which they say is against their business model, they can do it themselves.

The broadband structure of this country agitates the hell out of me. Here's to hoping that the Obama administration catches us up with Japan and South Korea.

It is well past time somebody forced the big telco companies to step up their game in this regard. But the question is the development of technologies that will become available once the DTV transition finally goes through. A world of affordable 3G for all is a great possibility

slust:

It is the governmnet that is keeping these companies from competing in the first place.

If local counties and municipalities would stop giving right of way to a single cable provider or a single telco things would heat up a lot in these markets.

But the local governments are giving these companies de facto monopolies in their markets in exchange for a portion of the revenue - this must stop.

Gov intervention is always bad for the consumer. If it wasn't for massive regulation in America in the telecom industry, you wouldn't have all these defacto monopolies. Government is bad for consumers, Obama is worse.

yep, government regulation is bad for everyone! that's why all the banks here in canada are going bankrupt

wait, that's not right

Contrary to popular belief, the US banking industry was never deregulated, even during the Reagan "deregulation" years (the only things deregulated during Reagan were industries that Carter started but Reagan took credit for, like the television industry). Since Reagan took office, the Code of Federal Regulations page count on banking and finance nearly doubled. The US banking and finance industry is the most heavily regulated in the entire world. It is more heavily regulated than Canada's, which is why Canada isn't in as bad a shape (Canadian banks have fewer lawyer created rules to follow). It wasn't a terrible surprise to those in my economics circle (Austrian) that this happened, and we even sounded the warning back in 2001.

www.mises.org

Learn the economics that your leaders don't want you to know, mainly because this theory makes politicians obsolete.

Sorry LaughingTarget, there's a lot more to regulation than your quote encompasses. Keep researching, though.

And maybe somewhere else than an "Austrian School of economics and libertarian political and social theory."

What? There's more to regulation than a group of politicians responding to major business interests? That there's more to regulation than large corporations BACKING regulation (check the history, big corporations are the key driver of regulations) trying to protect their market share by making the operating costs to high for start-up competition?

Please, educate me, oh master of masters.

LaughingTarget, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your enlightened and provocative commentary - it's really assisted in making Joystiq bearable to read through for some time now. You have the respect of this anarcho-capitalist for speaking up regularly, honestly, and intelligibly to an audience which is probably indifferent at best or hostile in response at worst. So, thanks.

LAME! This is simply never going to fly, short of there being a complete monopoly on ISP's so that there's no one out there offering real service.

Oh come, Comcast's monopoly isn't that bad...

...not quite...

...yet.

ooo, also, is this only in America?
(im not american)

Time Warner is a terrible company with the worst customer service of all time. I just don't get how the U.S. is so far behind on broadband speed compared to other countries that some no good, greedy, corporate clowns can justify charging customers more money.

"no good, greedy, corporate clowns" that's your answer

My internet goes down for hours at times, probably once a month. It's even been days. Damn you TW and your monopoly of cable internet where I live.

Get used to it. If they can make you pay for it, they will.

The reason America is so behind in terms of this kind of technology is because America is one of the first to provide 56k/Cable internet. They had the infrastructure up and spread it all over the U.S. before most other countries jumped on board. Then, when the better technology came out, the other countries set those up instead. The other countries didn't have to "get rid" of the older tech, much like what the U.S. is trying to do, but man, that's going to cost so much just to "abolish" 56k internet as most businesses still use it for their credit card machines.

If by "older tech" you mean "phone lines" then Im pretty sure other countries had the telephone before the 90's. Except the commies.

If comcast has this strucure i'll switch

Comcast is currently the best of all capped providers, allowing a 250g/month bandwidth allotment. Time Warner is, with this model, going to assume the worst.

I've never been so glad TWC was bought out by Comcast here in the Twin Cities. This nickel and diming bullshit is getting old, fast.

I like my Cox cable connection. I get 20,000kbps down and unlimited bandwith a month.

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A look at Time Warner's broadband pricing structure

Reader Comments (150)

Posted: Apr 7th 2009 5:37PM TheDarkWayne said

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