Time Warner Cable Capping Down on Internet Usage

Life has been a touch busy/hectic lately, but luckily things seem to be easing out again – and as such, I get to pay more attention to my little corner of the Internet again. Speaking of the Internet, it appears that my use of it is going to get a whole lot more limited if my current ISP, Time Warner Cable, has anything to say about it.

Time Warner Cable is planning on expanding their bandwidth cap tests to include Austin, San Antonio, Rochester, NY, and Greensboro, NC. These caps will impose a 5GB limit per month on users, with the ability to raise the cap to 40GB a month, and the possibility that they may have a 100GB option in the future. This is likely both up and down combined. According to Ars Technica the reason for this is because they need the added revenue the caps would bring, as well as the curbed bandwidth, to cover the cost of their infrastructure. The same article is also highly – or deeply, as they state – skeptical about this.

I believe Scott Jennings does a good job of clearing up who is going to be affected by this new plan – and, admittedly, I certainly do fit into all three of the categories he lays out. When it comes down to it, as shown by DropTimeWarnerCable.com, there are an awful lot of things that one can do online that can quickly eat up bandwidth. Online gaming, streaming media (Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, etc…), downloading digitally purchased content (Steam, Amazon, iTunes, etc…), downloading open source software/Linux distributions, keeping your system up-to-date with patches/bug fixes, video conferencing, uploading files to your work server, uploading music. images, and/or video that you (if you’re an artist) created, and the list goes on and on.

I’m not just concerned about how this will impact myself and other users, but also considering the impact on businesses with essential Internet components – like many those that provide many of the services noted above. Google, Microsoft, Hulu, Netflix, Steam, Amazon, Apple, and many, many more.

When it comes down to it, I can actually understand charging high-end users more than light Internet users. I really can. However, they’re setting their caps quite low as well. I remember complaining about the 250GB cap that Comcast enabled when I was using them while in Michigan, but at least my monthly use was generally under that. Yet, the caps that TWC is instituting are going to be… difficult to stay under, to say the least. Not only that, but the prices that they are charging are excessively high for what they realistically should be.

Saldy, there’s few options for me to switch to where I’m at in Austin. I’m looking at moving over to AT&T’s DSL service, which is about 1MB/s less than what I get now for about the same price – not terrible, really. Once U-Verse comes here, then I know exactly what I’m doing.