Sunday, June 15, 2008

Time Warner Cable Testing “Internet Metering” in Texas

"The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes."

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=762193

Oh no! I will have to give up food if they start this here.

11 comments:

OrbsCorbs said...

Dang. This is so fair that it ticks me off!

kkdither said...

Nooooo....Please don't meter my addiction! It is the only bad habit I have left!

Whatever happened to the citywide wi-fi that was supposed to provide super fast connections for less than $20. a month?

Huck Finn said...

I need an excuse to walk away from this box. This would do it.

OrbsCorbs said...

I've thought it over, and I'm OK with this, IF Time Warner Cable meters all of their products and all of their customers. I currently pay for 60-some channels on cable TV, but only watch 4 or 5 regularly. Charge me only for the TV that I watch, TWC. And make sure that your business internet customers are metered, too. The article talks about individual "bandwidth hogs," but says nothing about businesses that use up thousands times more bandwidth than any individual ever could.

Fair is only "fair" when it applies to everybody and everything, TWC.

Anonymous said...

Right now TW is reaching down the back of your pants to grab your wallet. By the sounds of it, they're going to keep reaching and grab your....

SER said...

It's all Al Gore's fault. He's the guy who started the internet.

AvengingAngel said...

I know something about this. The phenomonen is called "Moore's Law".

Moore of Intel observed in 1965 that the number of transistor per square inch had been doubling every year since the intergrated circuit had been developed. He predicted that this would continue for the foreseeable future. He has been fairly accurate with this prediction.

What this means is that computing power doubles every year. That is a staggereing growth curve. What is interesting is that we develop applications to match this growth.

Once you make the nice big shiny roadway, developers create appications that fill up the bandwidth. So, the internet companies make bigger, faster networks to accomodate the appications. Of course, once they do that, bigger applications are created that eat up the newly created bandwidth.

Since many of these applications are very helpful, it wouldn't be a good thing to see metered pricing stifle their development.

hale-bopp said...

AA, small correction...Moore said the number of transistors would double every two years (see Intel's web site http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/index.htm) (although an earlier version of his law said every year, he has said every two years since 1975).

He also said the performance would double every 18 months (performance does not scale as the number of transistors).

So after that lengthy setup, now for the joke...

It takes Intel 18 months to double the speed of a computer and Microsoft six months to slow it down again.

AvengingAngel said...

HB, thanks for the corrections, I was typing extemporaneously. Great joke. Must be a Vista user?

hale-bopp said...

AA, it was really more of a clarification as the law did change a little bit (and may change again!)

I have a Mac and run both Leopard and Windows XP on it (and would like to test Linux on it as well). I am avoiding Vista for precisely the reason specified in my joke!

We are all waiting for Windows 7.

Anonymous said...

The only Windows I want are the ones built into the side of the house. But I digress.

If TWC goes to metering for internet, you will see a satellite dish on the side of my house, and I will have a new internet provider. Even if it means, *sigh*, dial up.