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  April 22, 2009 10:41 a.m. Duke Dork

  Just for the record, what exactly are we saying taxpayers paid for?

  Johnboyjjb wrote:

  Second - You keep using the fuel analogy - to carry on that analogy - let me know when you reach the end of the internet.

  ??? I don't get it. Let me know when you've driven every road in the world. Just because I can drive my car an infinite distance, does not mean the oil company has to sell me enough gas to do so for a fixed price.

  A better analogy would be forcing us to lease a car at $60 a month, pay for all the other things to make it go like fuel and insurance - and then for us to be forced to stop driving it after 250 miles. Sure the old lady who only goes to the grocery store every week won't care but how about those of us who drive for a living? It just wouldn't be right.

  Then don't complain about traffic when roads are clogged and gas is expensive. We have 2 choices: build more roads, or limit the amount each person can drive. Neither is free.

  What makes this worse is that these companies are only proposing this solution in areas where there isn't really any competition. Since I live in suburbia there are about 8 different companies that will offer me high speed internet. 20 miles north of here there is one - and they have a 500 MB cap per day - after that you get throttled back to 50k speeds.

  OK, now, finally, we are getting to the crux of the biscuit.

  If there is legislation involved making that one provider the only provider, then there is a real and legitimate complaint. It's an issue that needs to be solved by removing the legislation.

  If it's just that so far only one company has found it cost-effective to serve those customers, then the customers either have to shut up and pay, or make it cost effective for other companies to offer competition, or they need to move somewhere that they have more choices.

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  April 22, 2009 11:57 a.m. Josh HalfDork

  GameboyRMH wrote: It's as if the oil company tried to charge you for the distance you drive on their gas.

  Actually, it's more like if a window manufacturer wanted to charge you for each photon of light that passes through the window. TW sets up the network, what all those electrons do after that doesn't cost them anything.

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  April 22, 2009 12:03 p.m. Duke Dork

  Except that if people continue to demand an infinite amount of light, they have to put bigger windows in... which isn't free.

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  April 22, 2009 12:17 p.m. ignorant PowerDork

  Duke wrote:

  Except that if people continue to demand an infinite amount of light, they have to put bigger windows in... which isn't free.

  Or they can go outside.

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  April 22, 2009 12:20 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  Exactly, so charge proportionally to each customer for the additional windows you have to install. What they want to do is put blinds on the outside that you have to pay them to open for an hour :).

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  April 22, 2009 12:36 p.m. Duke Dork

  Josh wrote:

  Exactly, so charge proportionally to each customer for the additional windows you have to install.

  But that's exactly what you guys are whining about! They want to cap how much you use, unless you pay for more capacity. That's a problem... how?

  It's exactly like a gasoline tax. The theory is that people who burn more gas put more wear and tear on the roads, so they are paying more, because they buy more gas.

  @ ignorant: you are right - people can go outside. That's perfectly good for them, and when enough people go outside (or rent apartments with bigger windows), the company will realize they need to provide bigger windows.

  @ Josh: they're not metering time, they're metering usage. The "window" analogy doesn't work, because light gets from the sun to your house for free. A better analogy would be, well, electricity: if you want a lot of light, you need to pay for how much electricity you use. Even if you are using a lot of power for a short time, they need to provide for peak demand, or you get brownouts. And if it runs at peak demand all the time, you get equipment failures.

  I really don't get what you guys are not getting, except it seems like you're being childish and don't want to get it.

  Again: I agree it's a poor business decision, because where better options exist, people will take them. But I don't see how it is evil.

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  April 22, 2009 12:36 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  What people really need to keep in mind is that TW is not AT ALL doing this to cover costs (internet service is a ridiculous cash cow for them), but to leverage their existing service monopolies to prevent internet-served video content from cutting into their dying cable television business. Internet-served video on demand pretty much spells the inevitable death of programmed television, but cable wants to do whatever they can to push back the timeline of that inevitability.

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  April 22, 2009 12:43 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  It's not at all like electricity. Electricity is consumed, needs to be generated, and that generation carries a specific cost. Data on the other hand, is just there. It is not created by TW or consumed by the end customer, it's just hitching a ride on their pipes, which are still there whether it hitches a ride or not.

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  April 22, 2009 12:45 p.m. Duke Dork

  Rainwater is free, too, but that doesn't deliver it to your sink, does it?

  OK, fine. TWC will eventually lose out to the new technology. It's not like other industries haven't tried to keep their own thing going as long as they can.

  Understand, I agree and I'm all for competition. But if you don't like a service or don't think it's worth it, don't call the provider evil, just don't buy it.

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  April 22, 2009 12:51 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  Except that for a LOT of people, "Just don't buy it" equates to "cut off contact with the outside world", due to the monopolies that cable companies are allowed to have.

  The trouble is that when cable came around 30 odd years ago, it was a luxury service for delivering entertainment. In order to entice companies to set up networks, communites allowed them to have monopolies over their service, because there was no other way to attract the service, and they could not have foreseen that those companies/networks would eventually be the main communications provider for the community. Cable as an industry does not want to give up those monopolies, even though the service they provide is not anywhere near the same as the service they provided 30 years ago, and is now properly defined as a necessary utility rather than a purely optional luxury service.

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  April 22, 2009 1:06 p.m. Duke Dork

  As I said earlier, if it is a legislated monopoly, that needs to be changed. But that is not the same as breaking up a monopoly with legislation.

  Plenty of people here on this very board do not have cable television. Broadcast television is still available. Free internet access is a close as your local library. And if you want more communication with the outside world, I don't see a problem with making you pay for it. And if it's that big a problem, move somewhere with better service.

  But wanting to have your cake and eat it too is not my, or the cable company's, problem.

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  April 22, 2009 1:09 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  Duke wrote:

  Rainwater is free, too, but that doesn't deliver it to your sink, does it?

  I'm not saying there is no cost associated with piping data into your house, just that the data itself isn't the cost, and to treat it like a finite resource is dishonest. Rain water IS free. If I install a rainwater cachement system on my house, I don't expect the manufacturer of the tank to charge me every time I draw water from it. On the other hand, treated municipal water IS a finite resource, and being charged for the cost of treating and delivering that water is not at all unreasonable. TW in this scenario is more like the manufacturer of the water tank than the municipal water company, except that you are basically paying rent to use the system that they own. However, they want to be treated like the provider of a finite resource, and they are not.

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  April 22, 2009 1:14 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  There is nothing wrong per se with a cable company having a local monopoly as long as we start expecting them to act with the responsibility of a public utility rather than abusing that monopoly to maximize profits. I will admit I'm not sure how to do this. How does it work with water and electric services? Obviously there must be some sort of legislation that prevents them from charging whatever they want for those services when customers don't have any choice of provider.

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  April 22, 2009 1:14 p.m. Duke Dork

  Josh wrote:

  I'm not saying there is no cost associated with piping data into your house, just that the data itself isn't the cost, and to treat it like a finite resource is dishonest.

  They're not charging you for data. They're charging you for moving a certain amount of data through their wires. The more you move, the bigger the wires need to be.

  Of course you wouldn't expect the rainwater catchment system makers to charge you per gallon after you buy the system. BUT: could you pay for a 100-gallon system and then expect it to handle 2,000 gallons? Is it unreasonable to assume that a 2,000-gallon system should cost more to buy than a 100-gallon system?

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  April 22, 2009 1:24 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  Duke wrote:

  They're not charging you for data. They're charging you for moving a certain amount of data through their wires. The more you move, the bigger the wires need to be.

  That's not really accurate. I can send a million bits back and forth down an ethernet cable for essentially the same cost as one. It's not the data, or the moving of a specific amount of data, that costs money, it's the throughput capacity of the network. They have a fixed cost of building a network, but they want to charge as if they have a variable cost for providing a metered resource. We are better off as a society if we don't let an essential public communication utility maximize profits based on this false assumption.

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  April 22, 2009 1:29 p.m. Tim Baxter Online Editor

  It seems worthwhile to point out that modern fiber-optic lines can easily handle terabytes per second. It's a BIG pipe.

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  April 22, 2009 1:38 p.m. Duke Dork

  But really: is building a bigger network NOT more expensive than building a smaller network? A million bits of data take bigger wire than moving a single bit of data. A larger throughput capacity costs more money. You seriously don't think that bigger networks are needed to handle bigger traffic? I wouldn't expect my home network of 4 computers to handle business traffic of a 100-person company. I'd need a bigger, stouter network... shouldn't that be more expensive than my little handful of wireless relays?

  Otherwise we could wire the entire planet with lamp cord and everything would be fine. Even terabytes of data gets filled up when people are DLing multi-gig video files.

  Let me keep trying other analogies: say you have a small old bridge. It's narrow and limited in capacity to 10 tons. You can drive cars back and forth across it all day long, but traffic's going to back up and if a truck is using it, cars can't go at all until the truck is across. Really big trucks are out of luck.

  Now, to move more traffic, they can build a bigger bridge. Is this free? No. Or, in order to prevent the bridge from collapsing and to let as many cars get through as possible, they can stop you from driving big trucks across it.

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  April 22, 2009 1:45 p.m. ignorant PowerDork

  The cost to build bigger now is so miniscule and is diminishing every day. Like I said earlier.. Its $6.50 per house according to the NYT article. It is incrementally tiny and like storage is becoming cheaper every day.

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  April 22, 2009 1:47 p.m. Tim Baxter Online Editor

  Well, actually, given the wires they're using these days, a million bits of data takes no more wire than a single bit. Moving that million bits a million times STILL takes no more wire (if my math is right. Teras are big numbers)

  Really, these days the limiting factor isn't available bandwidth, its speed. The biggest bottleneck is your home network, which is using a relatively slow ethernet or wireless connection.

  Second would be the speed of your connection. Even "high speed" internet is relatively slow compared to the amount of data that can travel through the pipe.

  And then there's the slowdown from the server sending the data packet in the first place. You have to wait while it does it's thing.

  Road analogies don't really work, unless you're talking about some 50-lane superhighway that already exists

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  April 22, 2009 2:02 p.m. Josh HalfDork

  This is really a two tiered dilemma. Tier number one is deciding what constitutes a fair way to charge for usage, because the cost of upgrading the network is NOT linear with the number of bits moved, as the "finite resource" type of charge would assume. Part number two is how much control we as a society want to let communication companies have over the service that they provide, given its neccessity in people's lives. The way we see these services has really changed over the last 10-15 years, and we are behind a lot of the rest of the developed world in terms of treating communications access more as a necessary public service. Given that TW's current service charges are far above the actual cost of the service they provide, the first tier might be academic.

  The danger for everyone is when a cable company decides it can make more money charging ever increasing prices for the same or lesser service as congestion on their network increases. People need the service, they're often the only place to get it, and even though they might be able to upgrade the networks and still make more profit by charging less for better service, why bother if they are making money hand over fist metering out what capacity they have.

  If we don't allow them to extort customers who need access by metering out service on their congested networks, they are basically forced to continually upgrade their networks to keep everything running. Maybe this is a really good thing :).

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  April 22, 2009 4:35 p.m. Wowak Dork

  I'm RIT alumni as well. Go nerds!

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  April 22, 2009 4:35 p.m. JoeyM New Reader

  Tim Baxter wrote:

  Road analogies don't really work, unless you're talking about some 50-lane superhighway that already exists

  I don't know if this is still true or not, but back in 2005 consumers in the USA were definitely getting the short end of the stick. from Salon.com

  Oct 18, 2005 | Next time you sit down to pay your cable-modem or DSL bill, consider this: Most Japanese consumers can get an Internet connection that's 16 times faster than the typical American DSL line for a mere $22 per month.

  Across the globe, it's the same story. In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month. Places as diverse as Finland, Canada and Hong Kong all have much faster Internet connections at a lower cost than what is available here. In fact, since 2001, the U.S. has slipped from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband use per capita. While other countries are taking advantage of the technological, business and education opportunities of the broadband era, America remains lost in transition.

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  April 23, 2009 12:08 p.m. ignorant PowerDork

  http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-cant-compete-with-city-o...

  It gets even shadier.. Time warner is getting NC to shut down a community owned ISP that undercut their prices significantly.
  

  Boooooo losers.

  Well they'ver permanently lost me as a possible customer for ever. Good Job TWC.. Alienate your base..

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