Prepare to pay....All Tech ConsideredInternet Bandwidth Hogs May Soon Pay For It by Omar GallagaAll Things Considered, April 13, 2009 · Consumers watching their cell phone minutes may soon have something else to worry about: their Internet usage. Time Warner Cable and other Internet providers are adding fees if customers exceed a set amount of bandwidth each month. User complaints are already starting to roll in.Time Warner plans to expand the reach of consumption-based billing, where consumers pay for a set amount of monthly bandwidth and then pay additional fees depending on the amount of additional data use. The policy covers everything from e-mail usage to downloading videos.The policy, which was tested last year in Beaumont, Texas, will be expanded this summer and fall to Austin, San Antonio and other Texas cities, as well as Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C.Time Warner isn't the only Internet provider to move in this direction. AT&T is conducting its own tests of tiered billing, and Comcast already sets a limit on how much data its residential customers can download each month.Stop the Cap Meter This A place to bitch
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Consumption Charge for Internet Use
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Bandwidth capping has been in effect for quite a while now, and the only people that are in trouble, are pirates, and maybe big businesses, but they have the money to pay for "extended plans" if the companies decide to offer them.Most of these bandwidth caps are set (the lowest that I know of, as of ~4 months ago) at least 70 gigabytes. 70 gig's is ALOT of data, I have about 2000 songs, several videos, about 10 games, and thousands of pictures on my hard drive, and I still haven't reached 70G's.(I take that back, I'm using 79.4) Comcast took the measures that they did to stop the sharing on P2P networks, Gnutella(what Limewire uses), etc. There was a huge outcry, because the pirates that were uploading and downloading, were sucking up the bandwidth for John Doe down the line, because they only had so much to give out for their customers. I agree with what they did. Other networks should do the same, and I think AT&T(again, ~4 months ago) was proposing a ~120GB cap, which is astronomical.It will never get so bad that you have to be charged minute by minute for Internet usage. Just like the fear ~1 year ago that 2 years from then (2010) the whole Internet would be crashing because of increased bandwidth consumption, and 'experts' projections.(See C|Net news for for updates on this subject...) Originally Posted By: C|NetOf the 10,000 subscribers in the Beaumont, Texas trial, only about 14 percent exceeded the cap and had to pay the additional fees, which totaled on average about $19. The company also learned that the top 25 percent of users consumed 100 times more data than the bottom 25 percent of users, which suggests a pretty big gap in how consumers are using broadband. Originally Posted By: C|NetFor now, the trials appear to be angering consumers, who likely aren't breaking these caps anyway. But the very idea that the company could meter its traffic may be enough to cause some subscribers to cancel their service and sign up with a competitor that offers no caps. And for those customers who don't have a choice of another provider, Time Warner's trials may spur a more aggressive eye from lawmakers, who would want to curb the use of these caps. Sorry this was so long, I don't get the chance to talk about these things very often... ...Now onto my Japanese project! Thanks for hogging all my TIME, Scotty! Jeez!!
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I already have a bandwidth cap of about 25GBs a month. Which is horrible, being the pirate that I am! Although I never download music...
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Are you, sir, insinuating that I pirate my music? How dare you! How dare you, sir!Heheh, actually.... ≤1 year ago, it was... ~9-7months ago, it was from youtube, and now, believe it or not, griping aside, I get it all from MS. From their Zune division anyhow...Much better than the rest of the company...hehe
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Good shit!
I have DLed more than that just since monday night through 10 am today!