Time Warner Will Cap Bandwidth Usage To 40GB

Time Warner Cable is under fire as they continue to roll out a 40GB cap to customers in various markets.  They are not the only Internet Service Provider doing these restrictions, but they are the most conservative at 40 gigabytes.

• Charter Communications – Connections less than 15mbps (Most households) – 100GB Cap
• Comcast – 250GB Cap
• AT&T – 150 Cap

“A mere 5 percent of our subscriber base is responsible for requiring half of the available capacity through local cable lines.” said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president of advanced technology

Nearly all these companies will charge $1 per extra gigabyte your go over the cap in a billing period.  This could leave some families in the red when their cable bill comes.

Companies in markets that Time Warner Cable is testing the new capped system are already jumping on the offensive.  Frontier Communications in Rochester, NY have publicly released they will not place any caps on their DSL service in that market.  Frontier has also stated they will deploy an aggressive marketing campaign to steal customers away from Time Warner.

A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein supplied by Business Week suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.

“To put it mildly,” says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, “the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior.”

I wonder how ISP’s like Comcast can feel they will remain competitive by capping bandwidth.  File sizes and quality continues to rise, but with data caps consumers may be hesitant to use the new technology.  The perfect example comes in the form of high definition video.  If you were to download an HD movie, (from a legal source!) it would eat up about 8GB of your bandwidth.  That’s nearly a quarter gone from one machine.  Let’s not even delve into the prevalence of routers and most homes now having two or three personal computers on a network.

These data caps are just another effort to ward off P2P illegal file sharing users.  Comcast thought it had the answer until it got slapped by the FCC for violating principles of network management.  The large ISP’s need another way to put a kink in illegal file sharing, only difference now is they are willing to jerk around their entire subscriber base since they can’t single out file sharing users by throttling their traffic.

It just does not seem logical.  I would hate to see something like this stifle technological advances in quality of content.  I think this again strangles the United States in becoming competitive in the broadband race.  Japan has ran away with the title with this move by domestic ISP’s. But let me make one thing clear, I’m not 100% against capping, but 40GB is down right outrageous.

Speaking of Japan, 1GB bandwidth with no cap sounds good to me.

Here is a graph showing the average advertising broadband speed from countries around the world:

Phone call from Time Warner Cable warning about bandwidth usage

This second video is from a guy named ‘Joe’ who was threatened by Comcast Cable a few years ago.  There are a few obscenities so watch it at your own discretion if your at work.