f13.net forums - Austin Internet Question, RE: TW is capping internet bandwidth in Austin.

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July 15, 2025, 01:47:36 PM

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Quote from: Broughden on April 07, 2009, 10:00:06 PM

Quote from: schild on April 03, 2009, 05:19:19 PM

I honestly have no clue why they haven't expanded into Austin yet. What with it being tech fucking central and their only real competition being TW which is universally despised - even more so now. Seems like quite the opportunity.

Whats happening with Verizon that is so good?

FiOS. This is BIG.

It hurts, because as I was moving out of my apartment complex, FIOS was coming in, and in the new place? No FIOS.

Be nice to know if there's even the possibility of FIOS in my future.

FIOS internet is awesome, the TV is still unspectacular and you really need to fire whoever designs the internal operating system for your DVRs because it's utter garbage. Just fucking license TIVO already. It gets worse every revision and I'm going to cancel it as soon as my roommate leaves. God I hope they interview me and ask why because I've got a list of shit. #1 is lack of responsiveness.

Verizon phones suck balls too. When will they realize that no one wants their shitty OS?

Quote from: Cheddar on April 08, 2009, 03:55:41 AM

Quote from: Broughden on April 07, 2009, 10:00:06 PM

Quote from: schild on April 03, 2009, 05:19:19 PM

Whats happening with Verizon that is so good?

FiOS. This is BIG.

We dont even have 3G yet with T-Mobile here in Louisville despite our size. Piss ant liitle towns in FL and other places have 3G but not us, the 15th or 16th largest metro area in the US.
We probably wont get FiOS for decades. Heartbreak

Quote from: Cheddar on April 08, 2009, 03:55:41 AM

FiOS. This is BIG.

What speeds? My parents (Pittsburgh) got FiOS in '07 and when I benchmarked it, it wasn't any faster than my Cox cable connect in Arizona (6M)…

Or are they offering Japan/Korea style DL speeds now?

Usual plans are now (all speeds in Mbps)

10/2
20/5
20/20
50/20

doesn't docsis3 bring cable up to the FIOS level? Of course to get docsis3 you have to convince TWC that it isn't a threat to cable TV and I guess that isn't happening anytime soon. At least NY is on the ball (as usual) with talks of new laws and lawsuits. Of course this is most likely just a bunch of constituent pleasing posturing while advertising your availability to the opposing sides special interest $$.

Yeah, no ISP in the US is upgrading to DOCSIS3, primarily because there's no real competition forcing them to do so. UVerse and FIOS are still in very limited areas and cable outlets have essentially colluded in carving out monopoly fiefdoms.

Meanwhile Australia just said screw this crap, Fiber to EVERYONE, paid for by the government as a stimulus package.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/technology/internet/08broadband.html

Grats to the aussies here! You have a government that isn't just playing with their pud whenever asked about the internet!

Quote from: Salamok on April 08, 2009, 10:32:55 AM

doesn't docsis3 bring cable up to the FIOS level?

No it doesn't. It does boost bandwidth but it doesn't get rid of the architectural disadvantages of DOCSIS compared to Verizon's fiber approach.

No one can touch what FiOS is doing just yet. Perhaps AT&T. Its just too damn expensive and too many companies invested in money hats.

In almost all deployments U-Verse is fiber to the neighborhood (aka "fiber to the node" or FTTN) and then VDSL (plain old copper wires) to the home. In some new developments AT&T is in fact just dragging fiber to the new homes since in those cases it's just as easy to do that as dragging in new copper lines. Verizon's FiOS is only fiber to the home (aka "fiber to the premises" or FTTP).

At least this issue is starting to pick up steam, sure hope the media doesn't drop the issue until the politicians really get involved.

Ars Article

edit - Comcast has docsis3 in chicago! Also the current TWC plans are tiered by speed as it is, I wonder if they are adding caps to the existing speed tiers or upping everyone to 15+mbs and creating cap only tiers. If they are just adding caps to existing speed tiers the granny argument doesn't even work as she is most likely already paying the 5gb cap price for (3mbs speed).

I want rollover gigs at least.

I want no cap at all. It's bullshit. There is absolutely, even at my worst in terms of transfer, that this apartment is costing more than the cost of the sub in terms of bandwidth. Money grabs can eat my puckered up browneye.

Quote from: Lum on April 08, 2009, 12:53:58 PM

Meanwhile Australia just said screw this crap, Fiber to EVERYONE, paid for by the government as a stimulus package.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/technology/internet/08broadband.html

Gonna take 10 years to build (in a landmass the size of the USA minus Alaska, with a population of only 20 million), gives us more speed not higher download limits, and still leaves us with the giant bottleneck of cables across the Pacific. Most of the stuff people do on the internet involves servers located in the USA.

But it should free us from Telstra, the privatised monopoly telco that owns most of the current infrastructure, the wholesale enforcer of download caps by charging its customers based on data volume. I'd bet volume charging remains in some form, but for the sake of making this network a step forward, it simply must get cheaper than it is now.

I have an idea... it may be crazy.... But I was seeing adds on TV for a Cellular USB stick. 3G, unlimited downloads. $50/month.

it's only 384Kb, but see if you can get some sort of family plan... 4 of those sticks and you got almost 2MB of service with no download limit. Load balance it... eh? Ok... yea, it's crazy.

I had a similar idea in 1998 "why can't i plug 24 2000 minutes per month equipped cellphones to my phone system and ditch the T1". I hear most cell unlimited data plans have a hidden cap. Also, I tried putting a cell phone into pcmodem mode with a laptop and while it worked okay it wasn't letting me VPN/Remote Desktop, I am thinking they may block a bunch of ports.

But yes I am eagerly awaiting the next leap in wireless broadband and ditching wired cable entirely.

It should be illegal to charge me $150 for unlimited internet when I already get it for $60. I really don't understand how this isn't price fixing.

Anyway, yea, the unlimited plan is $150 a month. A depression is a great time to introduce this.

http://www.timewarnercable.com/corporate/announcements/cbb.html

Quote

Some recent press reports about our four consumption based billing trials planned for later this year were premature and did not tell the full story. With that said, we realize our communication to customers about these trials has been inadequate and we apologize for any frustration we caused. We’ve heard the passionate feedback and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns.

With the ever-increasing flood of content on the Internet, bandwidth consumption is growing exponentially. That’s a good thing; however, there are costs associated with this increased Internet usage. Here at Time Warner Cable, consumption among our high-speed Internet subscribers is increasing by about 40% a year. As a facilities based provider, we’ve built a network that must be maintained and upgraded. We have increasing variable costs and we have to continue to invest in the network itself.

This is a common problem that all network providers are experiencing and must address. Several other providers have instituted consumption based billing, including all major network providers in Canada and others in the U.K., New Zealand and elsewhere. In the U.S., AT&T has begun two consumption based billing trials and other providers including Comcast, Charter and Cox are using varying methods of monitoring and managing bandwidth consumption.

For good reason. Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years. According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012. This could result in Internet brownouts. It will take a lot of money to fix the problem. Rather than raising prices on all customers or limiting usage, we think the fairest approach is to move to a tiered model in which users pay more if they use more.

If we don’t act, consumers’ Internet experience will suffer. Sitting still is not an option. That’s why we’re beginning the consumption based billing trials. It’s important to stress that they are trials. The feedback we’ve received from our customers has been very helpful. We’ve made changes to the terms in our current and upcoming trial markets as follows:

* To accommodate lighter Internet users and those who need a lower priced option, we are introducing a 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 KB/128 KB for $15 per month. Overage charges will be $2 per GB per month. Our usage data show that about 30% of our customers use less than 1 GB per month.

* We are increasing the bandwidth tier sizes included in all existing packages in the trial markets to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively. Package prices will remain the same. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

* We will introduce a 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 per month (offering speeds of 10 MB/1 MB). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

* Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.

* Once we implement this trial, we will not immediately start billing customers for overage. Rather, we will first provide two months of usage data. Then we will provide a one-month grace period in which overages will be noted on customers’ bills, but they will not be charged. So, customers will have an opportunity to assess their usage and right-size their service packages before usage charges are applied.

* Trials will begin in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., in August. We will apply what we learn from these two markets when we launch trials in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in October, but we will guarantee at least the same level of usage capacity in these trials.

* As we launch DOCSIS 3.0 in the trial markets, we plan to offer a 50/5 MB speed tier for $99 per month.

The audacity of these chucklefucks is just appalling. Are they actually implying that those <1GB people aren't subsidizing the >150GB people? Do they really think a fucking tech center like Austin won't switch to a much shittier service (UVerse) just to avoid overage. Man, fuck them.

That said, I'm going to aim for 500GB+ a month until October. Then call and ask, and say "gotcha fuckers."

Edit: Seriously, I'm going to uninstall, reinstall Steam games - ad infinitum - and hope it hurts their entire customer base. I want them to go fucking EXTREME one way or the other. Because either way, I'll be done with them in 5 months. I seriously want to find the most painful disease possible, and inflict them with it. The fact their employees aren't outraged over this publicly is just appalling. YES, I AM RAGEQUITTING AN INTERNET SERVICE.

Edit 2: Does anyone have any fucking insight on why they're decreasing the speed of the "turbo" plan? What fucking good does decreasing the speed do? Is it just a totally artificial change that makes it harder to hit the cap (which it doesn't btw, it just makes me download tv and movies slower). I'd have that thing capped out 24/7. Bleh.

I saw the writing on the wall when they started the caps in Beaumont (why Beaumont? Because nobody in Beaumont ever complains about getting shafted by the utilities, so they all use that as their regulation-required test market), and switched to AT&T (which Schild mocked me for). Now that AT&T is testing the caps, I'll have to find another solution or find a way to choke off my 14-year-old's bandwidth usage (probably install Linux on the spare box like I've been meaning to, use it for a gateway and configure his MAC address for throttled bandwidth).

Going to be a lot of people with zombies they didn't know they had that get shafted by this.

--Dave

Yea, I thought about the zombie boxes the other day. Poor grandmas everywhere are fucked.

As for switching to AT&T, I'm still mocking you. Also, you already have a 150GB cap, right?

At this point, if I don't find a job by October, I'll just move somewhere with Verizon fiber. After that gets capped, I guess it's South Korea or Japan for me. OH WELL.

Uverse isn't shitty. I get better download speed and about 3 times as many HD channels as I did with TWC.

It's not FiOS, but it beats the crap out of giving TWC money.

Your TWC download speed must've been trash then, because I regularly get 3MB (that's MB, so 30Mb down). The fastest UVerse offered was 1.5MB.

Also, I haven't had cable in forever. There's no doubt, I'll have to switch to them, but there's no way they provide the same up/down TWC does right now.

Yeah, you must have been the only guy on your block that actually used Internet. TWC only promises 15Mb and usually I got 5-6Mb (and lost service every night right at prime time). With UVerse I am paying for (and get) right at 6Mb and will jack it up in a month or so to see if I actually get more for paying a higher tier. Plus, hey, voting with dollars.

I never got better than 6.5Mb (800KB/Sec), although I never had the prime-time outages. But my phone that I also paid for didn't work after the first week (according to the AT&T guys who installed my DSL and switched my phone back, the surprising part was that it ever worked at all, and didn't burn down the house), and the only reason I used their crappy DVR was because it could record HD and I didn't want to buy a Generation 3 TiVo. AT&T phone + Internet and DirecTV (separate, I didn't like Dish, wanted to charge me too much for the extra set-tops, use a smaller dish that's even more vulnerable to weather, and didn't have SciFi in HD) combined cost me half as much, and the only downside is a glitchy picture when a thunderstorm is directly overhead. I only get 1.5Mb, but it's steady, doesn't make me reboot the router or the modem at least once every day, and if I wanted to cough up another $40, I could get that back up to 6Mb.

uVerse not available for me yet, dammit. Hopefully will be before they start jacking around with caps on my DSL. Or I upgrade to a business account. But it's slightly surreal having the equivalent of a T-1 line and the other geeks look down on me.

--Dave (my first modem required sticking the phone handset on top of it. That made me alpha geek of my school, back in 1983)

What bothers me is that 600KB down (which is what 6Mb comes out to) will be the worst internet connection I've had since 1999.

No, I am not kidding.

Frankly, that's just unacceptable a fucking decade later. Honestly, I'm not even that happy with the average 30Mb down I get now. I expect, demand and need more. Mostly because I'm pissed off we don't have flying cars yet. They'll just have to subsidize my shitty future with decent internet.

Yes, I know I'm fucked come this October, unless Verizon gets off their lazy fucking ass and destroys all the competitors in the marketplace. Or we get lucky and get a Docsis 3 rollout - at which point I'd pretty much gladly pay the $150 a month to TWC.

This thread has really brought into focus how shit our broadband is in the UK.

I pay £30/month for ADSL capped at 45Gb/month, with a theoretical speed of "up to 8Mb" but which in reality is limited to ~2.5Mb because of the phone line/distance to exchange/phase of the moon. That is expensive even for the UK but it's the only way to get contention ratios of <50:1 here. Most of the cheap broadband in the UK has contention ratios of 200:1 or more and even more restrictive download caps.

Quote from: schild on April 12, 2009, 12:13:40 AM

Frankly, that's just unacceptable a fucking decade later.

What, things getting worse for consumers over time under a system that prioritises profit above all else? Who'da thunk it! Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

This is one of the few things that I'm thankful for living in Indiana for.....

Mediacom: 20 Meg down, 2 Meg up, no cap, 60 a month

http://www.mediacomcable.com/internet_max.html

Quote from: Falwell on April 12, 2009, 02:59:46 AM

This is one of the few things that I'm thankful for living in Indiana for.....

Mediacom: 20 Meg down, 2 Meg up, no cap, 60 a month

http://www.mediacomcable.com/internet_max.html

Hey that makes two F13ers in Indiana! Or you are Jimbo's gimmick account.

As the ads clearly state, "There's more than corn in Indiana."

Not much more, but those two increase my overall "people I know from teh intarnets in Indiana" to three.

That's pretty much all of them! why so serious?

Another angle to this - public libraries. This issue has finally got some time with the administration, and it's not looking good. We simply can't afford anything more right now, and we definitely can't afford to pay on a sliding scale, we need fixed costs. So this might fuck internet access for the underpriveleged of entire communities across the country, just as it's needed the most. We've seen internet demand skyrocket (though we've been saturated at peak times for years since we can't afford enough computers to meet demand), and laptop users are nearing the demand of our own computers, as people shut off cable at home and come here to use it.

Locally COMCAST provides free internet to the schools and public library.