Maybe I'm off, but (for arguments sake) say it costs TW $100 minimum to provide a service to their customer, and they charge the customer $150. Now, say the customer goes OVER the bandwidth service so far that it costs $110 for TW. It'd eat into their profit by $10, but they're still making $40.

Now let's say that the customer is total bandwidth hog. The customer goes so far over the minimal service that it costs TW $160 to provide the service. Now, TW is LOSING money every month on that customer. It's costing them $10 a month just to retain the customer. In that case, yeah, I can totally see them wanting to charge more.

Of course, things aren't quite that simple (plus I'm sure some people are using MUCH less bandwidth per month than others, so it'd even out anyway). But it costs them so little that I think scenario 1 is more likely (even though it is balanced out by people that use less bandwidth)

I guess I'm just coming from a place of having had such bad service and care from Time Warner, and have had to deal with their "we don't care we're the phone comp...er... Time Warner" attitude, that my gut instinct says they're trying to pull a fast one on the public. They're trying to say "yeah, we're going to charge you more for the same service, just because we're Time Warner and we want more money out of you. We'll tell you it's because it's costing us money, but really, we'll pass that extra $5 it costs us onto you, which will appear on your bill as $15."

Of course, I personally don't have a choice (on the cable end), but okay :P

And they can charge whatever they want, of course, it's their business. I just find what they are doing is disingenuous and lousy from a customer service perspective. Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining, I think is the phrase Judge Judy uses ;)

It has to do with what the market is accustomed to combined with how the services are used.

That model has been in place for telephone use pretty much since telephones became a household thing. Pay for your call. Want to pay less, use it less.

And while internet use started like that with the portal services like AOL and Prodigy, it quickly went out of favor. My guess for the reason is that the length of time you use the internet (the old "bill for usage" model") was in many ways out of the consumer's control. It's not their fault a page took forever to load, or a download got corrupted so they had to spend the time downloading it again. That, combined with the open-ended nature of internet usage, it was simply not as easy to curtail one's use the way we're used to with phones.

So once that model went out the window, we've now had 10 years to become accustomed to unlimited use. It's hard to go back at that point. Of course, the method of determining usage amounts is different, being bandwidth instead of time connected. But some of the same arguments still apply ("Hey, is it my fault the website I chose to go to was loaded with data-intensive multimedia content"). Of course, if they balance the billing right such that general web browsing, video viewing, some itunes downloads and a Skype call or 10 during a month leaves the vast majority of users paying something close to what they are paying now, it might not be an issue. But I still think it's rather jarring to force everyone to make that mental switch from unlimited to having to monitor every kilobyte of use.

I understand people getting used to the system and not wanting it to change (particularly if you're currently engaged in a project of downloading the entire history of cinema from bittorrent.

I just think it is weird that the idea of someone changing it is causing some people (nobody here really) to act as if TW is now requiring payment in children and eggshells. Like it is some wholly bizarre and terribly unethical method that has never before existed.

I never had AOL or any of the minute-based plans so I don't know exactly how they worked but I hope TW doesn't actually block access but just start charging more. I also hope they have tools for you to track your usage, and warnings when you are approaching a threshold.

That's pretty much what AOL did (though not so sure about the warnings).

I dunno. It think it would fundamentally change use patterns of the internet, and not necessarily for the better.

It might. But I don't see it changing my behavior any more than my limited phone minutes changes my phone behavior.

It all depends on where they set the caps. And if it pisses off too many people then other internet companies will arise that offer better plans and it'll sway back. Which is the reason all of the minute-based plans fell away (even after they expanded the # of minutes beyond what any reasonably average person actually used; I know they by the end they were offering a plan of 32 hours/day of connectivity) and why I do think this may actually really be just a method for trying to deal with the pain-in-the-ass customers using their full download pipe 24/day or running businesses on residential accounts.

I also don't consider it much of a coincidence that this is happening at a point where more and more television and television-replacement content is being viewed online.

In the end, it'll be a matter of whether it's, "I really want to download this video file, I guess I can eat the $.25" vs. "Oh crap, I wasn't paying attention and went over my bandwidth, my bill is $30 higher this month." vs. "I'm apparently not wasting nearly enough of my life on the internet because I'm still using it as much as I ever was and I'm not paying a dime more."

Also, we've moved to an "it's all on the internet" philosophy (as noted in the other thread on rennet tablets). Maybe it's just my phone phobia, but I don't remember using the phone all day long, while I was doing other things, to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. Whereas I'm online pretty much all day - even if just to check the headlines every half-hour or so.

And we've somewhat abandoned the idea of preserving information in other formats, since the internet is widely accessible. For example, I don't think I even own a hard-copy dictionary any more. Not that occasional dictionary access would likely take me over whatever this use threshold ends up being; it's just one example.

I just don't want to have to keep track of such stuff. If someone has to pay, I'd be more inclined to stick the increase to the content providers as the cost increase might encourage the elimination of bandwidth eating pap. Might also discourage someone from putting their catalog of pirated content on the web. Most content sites have banner adds, so there's income being generated by their popularity and a viable revenue stream.

The corporate world is of course free to screw me as they please, but hopefully there will still be a competitor who promises to be more gentle.

Slightly related - I found myself checking if the major candidates' books were checked out at the library. All the ones we did have, we had at least one copy on the shelf. The only exception was the latest John McCain book, which we still classify as "new" and is out along with all the other new books, so that's different.

People just don't pick up books for info the way they used to.

Did anybody ever read campaign books? Even when I was constantly surrounded by poli sci, public policy, and history people none of us ever did.