I was disappointed that comments from Ed Cone served to justify TWC's intentions, especially since doing so relies on a suspension of Cone's trademark rigorous logic.
Saying, as Ed does, that the "last mile" of access, that portion of the infrastructure maintained by the cable companies, may indeed be under capacity pressure misses the point. Digital data for phone service, digital television and internet access all travels through the same pipe, yet it is only internet access that is being subjected to price increases and data limits by Time Warner Cable. Were it truly a capacity problem and not a competition problem, TWC would be putting caps in place for all data traversing its system. They are not.
Time Warner Cable customer Jennifer Sanders-Melvin sums it up in Joe's article:
“I can watch all the high definition television I want through the same cable service, order on-demand movies and watch all day, and they have no problem with that,” [snip] “But if I want to do the same thing on the Internet, through the same cable, they have to limit what I can use?”
Ed suggests that the reaction from customers is like people not liking speed limits. Well, no. TWC internet customers already deal with speed limits, what they haven't had to deal with is monthly limits on miles traveled. The proper driving analogy would be a system where people who drive red cars would be limited to 100 miles per month, while the drivers of other colored cars have no limits.
[* Nicely absent, from this article or any publicly available source, is commentary from our elected or economic "leaders."]
10 comments:
I did make some calls to city leaders but didn't hear anything back before deadline. My calls to the city were passed to John Gribble, the Franchise Manager, who is in the piece.
I'm back on it Monday and hope to write a story about the city's relationship with TWC and how that could be affected by that altogether.
Also, while Ed's speed thing may not be an exact analogy he did say he thought the caps were too small, which is a common sentiment. More common was the sentiment that the caps don't need to exist at all.
Joe, to be clear, I wasn't faulting you for not including commentary from our elected "leaders." I am sorely disappointed in their complete and total silence on this issue, in your articles or anywhere. If you do reach any of them, my first question would be, "Did you have a nice nap?"
I'm upset and disappointed to learn that the city leaders appear to have their hands tied on this matter. It makes avenues for action even less hopeful.
Even the 250GB cap you mention for Comcast in your article is a joke. Families that use the internet, as well as users like myself will routinely push 500-800GB a month. At the prices they are suggestion, such usage would be a bank breaker. Totally unacceptable.
I think Ed's starting to get a clue about the real reason for the hike, despite his recent chat with Vince Cerf. I'm writing a blog post about this issue today and will have it up tomorrow as well. People need to know that TW isn't doing this because of expenses, it's all about controlling the monopoly and keeping their cable TV service viable.
I have friends who have not signed up for cable TV because they can watch Hulu on their desktop computers. Think that isn't the real reason for the rate hike and you're smoking crack.
I'm disappointed that none of the coverage is looking at the potential economic impact to the region. At a time when cloud computing is taking off (like it or not, it is driving the sales of netbooks) Time Warner is metering access to the cloud.
This price change will affect telecommuting, start ups (many small companies begin by using their existing residential resources and only get business class services when revenue starts to come in) and other innovative practices.
The News and Record still lists the activities required to consume a Gb of bandwidth, but the numbers come from Time Warner. I'd love to see independent numbers from one of our main stream media outlets.
Even with my complaints about the News and Record, I appreciate Joe Killian following up with a second story. I'm in Winston-Salem and the WS Journal basically published Time Warner's press release.
Unfortunately, Ed's also misinterpreting Cerf. Cerf has time and again talked about how we measure up internationally (Japan, EU, etc). That's where the last mile argument lies. It has really nothing to do with data caps.
All in all, Cerf's point is actually in why it's non-profitable to deliver high-speed to rural areas which is driving our overall "speed" differentials compared to more population dense markets like EU/Asia.
TWC's data cap based on the last mile perspective doesn't even float in this realm.
I'm going to be looking at other issues involved in this thing in further stories. The business impact may be next up and I've already done some interviews on it.
One of the limitations of print - and doing it for a living - is you can usually only produce one reasonably good story a day and you're only given a certain number of inches for it, which you have to justify and have approved by your editors. The Sunday story was originally going to be a Friday AND a Sunday story on two different but related aspects of this that I had to turn into one because of space/editorial decisions.
I've written two stories on this so far - about 25 inches and 35 inches respectively. Both could have been longer and/or I could have written more stories - but I'll keep them coming if you'll keep reading.
Glad to hear it Joe. There are many aspects to this story, and you're just starting to scratch the surface. I'll keep reading.
I haven't had time, but this is just some food for thought as far as the entire "last mile" situation. Time Warner is one of the few but larger cable operators that is slow to adopt DOCSIS 3.0. This allows you to bind multiple lines together. The cost per household is basically a new cable modem (somewhere around $100).
In Japan, this same technology is deployed where NTT and I believe Liberty (I forget exactly) somewhere around 100-160Mbp with no limitations. For about $50-60USD/month. Again, this is nothing spectacular. DOCSIS 3.0 has been talked about for a long time now in the States.
So the fact that we're going backwards because it's "more expensive" to invest in new infrastructure? Please. No one buys that for a second.
That's like saying that the gas price at a gas station should go up because the station doesn't have money to buy the new pumps with the credit card swipes. And actually knowing there's a fiber ring that TWC holds under GSO? Fat chance I'd buy into that one (if you didn't know... ask about it. One of their local execs told me about it at one of my community meetings a long time ago).
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