Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

:curse:

They have been trialing it in Beaumont for a while now and are going to trial it here now. They crow that a low %age of folks in Beaumont exceed their cap - well duh, Beaumont is not exactly a high tech city with a lot of people working from home over VPNs, people with Slingboxes, people who download Netflix movies, and the like.

http://gigaom.com/2009/04/01/time-wa...dband-rollout/

We have no real alternative to TWC at the moment. :(

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

yep it seems we're another Town thats being forced into this one for the "trial..I think its disgusting its just another way for them to get more money from you...I mean who really knows just how much GB you use per month..I know I don't..

Time Waner seems to be doing this kind of Tier in Towns that they have the monopoly in..:curse:

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

Oh that really bites monkey balls. We have recently looked into Netflix and Hulu, and a tiered system would likely bite us in the a$$. That's crappy news SB.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

Time Wanker sucks.

I'm thinking this could be seen as price gouging if they really only do it in markets that Verizon FIOS and AT&T Uverse are not in - which seems to be the case. The people who use DL bandwidth are mostly DLing video - from Netflix, Amazon, TiVo, you name it, and people watching *that* video aren't watching the "content" from TW.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

Our local cable company pulled the same trick. They proposed a 20Gb cap on usage, claiming that 99% of their users consumed less than 2Gb a month. At the same time, they were running an extensive advertising campaign about all the great things you could do with their 16mb/s service, like watching movies, VOIP, etc. (at least for a day and a half per month before your 20Gb ran out).
After a revolt by their more tech minded customers, they decided to up the limit to 100Gb a month.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

I think I burn through 2 gigs in a morning...

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

Is there any way to know what you DL in a month? It's not printed on our monthly bill.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

There's a monitoring tool you can use for Windows:

http://download.cnet.com/Net-Meter/3...-10435551.html

free trial, $19.95 to buy.

TWC says that during the "trial" or "grace period" we will be able to login to our account and see how much we're using. But I know that I'll exceed the cap.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

For you "Geeks" out there you can download a freebie firmware upgrade for some wireless routers which will report your hourly, daily, weekly and monthly upload and download amounts (google tomato + firmware) on your network.

I can easily download / upload at least 10 Gig per day (so more like 300Gig per month), along with my UK expat round the corner we absolutely suck all the bandwidth here in Rocklin, CA (surprised if the neighbours get a look-in). Can't wait till they upgrade us to fiber round here, then we can hog even more bandwidth of a few Terra bytes :rofl:

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

I do my router tells me how much bandwidth I've used each day or month over my home network.

Last month it was 9421MB in and 11368MB out not high but I recon I'm just an average user.

dd-wrt.com for the software I started using it when Comcast went to a 250GB a month cap.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

I'm not with TWC so I don't know how accurate their metering will be but my ISP's is not that accurate at all. It seems to be a good 10% over. It may not sound much but at $1.50 per Gb of overage, it could cost an extra $15.
Hence, I monitor my own usage to compare to theirs.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

Tell me about it! It's seriously cut into my UKNova and Thebox habit. Also, being an I.T. consultant based at home, it's a major inconvenience. Sadly, the so-and-so's have a monopoly in the area.

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

What they got a bandwidth cap on their business service :p

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

hmm..I wonder if I can get my OH to make our router tell us how much..

thanks for the idea..:thumbup:

Re: Metered broadband to be "trialed" by TWC in Austin
 

If it's Linksys, probably.