Time Warner Cable users may lose God-given right to unlimited downloads
Adam Turner's heart bleeds for Time Warner Cable users in Texas threatened with download caps and excess usage fees.
Time Warner Cable has started a riot in the blogosphere by threatening to restrict users to a paltry 40GB per month and charge them a whopping $US1 per gigabyte for excess data usage. This is on a 15 megabits per second service costing $US54.90 per month. As a long-time Australian broadband user, my heart bleeds for them. It really does.
I mean come on Time Warner, that's only 1.3GB per day. How can anyone survive on such rations? Sure it means practically unlimited email, IM, web browsing, VoIP and music streaming/downloads. Still, that only leaves around 1 GB per day for other entertainment.
How can any civilised person make do with only 10 full length movies per week, or 20 television shows? What if some wants to download a disc image, Linux distro or a bunch of system updates? That's one less movie they can watch that week! Time Warner, can you live with yourself if a customer is forced to pay an extra dollar to download a movie? Do you really want that person's pain and suffering on your conscience?
So far Time Warner Cable is only trialling the new limits on customers in Beaumont, Texas, so it's not too late to fight back. Maybe we can call out the national guard, or George Dubya can liberate Beaumont and bring about regime change to protect his fellow Texans' constitutional right to watch Joost 24/7 whilst downloading terabytes of porn. Perhaps it would be easier to find another country with vast bandwidth reserves and invade it, in the name of democracy of course.
Why should the five per cent of Time Warner Cable subscribers who use up 50 percent of the company's available bandwidth be punished in this way? Why should they be forced to cough up some loose change if they exceed their monthly limit by a mere gigabyte? Why should they be expected to show a little restraint so there's enough bandwidth for everyone? What is this, communist Russia?
Sure there are some whingers who don't understand the pain and suffering Beaumont's internet community is going through. Like those people sucked into signing up for two year, 200MB per month plans with $130 per gigabyte excess data charges. Or those dodos with "free" ADSL2+ which is shaped to 64 kbps after 150MB.
Or anyone who lives in a country where the dominant telco can hold the country to ransom because it owns the copper, and is threatening to do the same again with Fibre to the Node. Sure those people won't understand, but that's the price they pay for living in the third world.
In civilised land like Texas, who can survive on 40 GB per month? I say it's time for a class action. If I was forced to pay an extra dollar to download the latest blockbuster movie the week before it was released in cinemas, I'd be on the phone to my lawyer faster then you can say "punitive damages".
What Time Warner Cable is doing is un-American. If Texans can't have unlimited downloads, the terrorists win.
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