The solution is simple, although hateful to me, a Libertarian: A federal law making it illegal to grant a territorial monopoly to any Internet service provider, period, and immediately terminating any such grants already in existence at the State or local level.

I would go further: Make it illegal for any Internet service provider to also sell cable television services at extra cost. Mind you, this would not prevent TWC from selling both cable TV and broadband access; they simply couldn't charge more for having both than they charged for either one or the other.

I love internet geeks who fail to do the smallest bit of research on a topic before posting their childish rant.

The FCC prohibits Time Warner, Comcast, etc. from entering into areas. They would LOVE to get in there and compete but they are not allowed to. Currently Comcast could not add another chunk of customers without stiff resistance from the FCC.

Read a little, then write your congressmen - instead of writing ill-researched diatribes on the internet.

i just had to comment that technically, the internet was invented by Tim Berners Lee and CERN (as in the LHC). It was invented so scientists could share ideas along a network of computer sites in house there.

The internet was invented in the American university system. Gopher, the direct parent of "WWW", or http, was invented in Minnesota, and http, which made the internet *meaningful*, was invented at CERN by Sir Tim. "The internet" is not just the most important part today, as it was invented many years before Sir Tim made his very important contribution to our world.

And all this time I thought Al Gore invented the internet...

:D

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is not the Inventor of the Internet he is credited with the idea of the World Wide Web, Internet's were already present for some time, before Tim came along. Scientist and the military were utilising Internet's way before Tim.
Tim was just smart and quick enough to join the dots!
Well done Tim.

@You're wrong: That's exactly my point. I am well aware that cable operators are prohibited from competing in most areas. This is precisely one of the problems I am "ranting" against — government-enabled monopolies that have no place in the 21st century.

Thanks for commenting, in any case.

Good article - thanks!

I would be willing to pay a flat $10/month subscription fee + 20 cents per GB. That is about the most though.

So if I downloaded 250gb it would cost me $60, while someone who only downloaded 10gb would only have to pay $12. ;) That would be fair, right?

I wonder why Time Warner isn't working to help low bandwidth users pay less?

Do we want the Internet to be the information superhighway, available to everyone like our libraries and interstate highway system, or a tollway, with limited or no access for those at a disadvantage?

The nominal reason for TW's capping plan was because they (cue violins) felt bad for the users who weren't using very much bandwidth and thus were overpaying. They also pointed out that bandwidth usage was going up, and was projected to climb much higher in the coming years with the advent of hulu, et al.

However, nothing is stopping them from simply refunding the lower-usage customers, just like nothing is stopping them from charging reasonable rates for overages in their capped plans. That's not what they're offering, though.

TW's plan makes perfect sense when you understand that their plan is to extract the maximum amount of money possible from their customer base while delivering the lowest possible quality of service.

I completely agree that private monopolies should be abolished. The last mile should be regulated as the public utility that it is

If I am paying for 12 megs, then I want to have 12 megs every time I am on the Internet. All of this capping crap comes from the providers' inability to give me what I pay for. The theories whether it's wrong or right to charge more the people who use torrents and the discussions about it are pointless. I repeat: I want my 12 megs if I am paying for 12 megs. Upgrade the backbone, invest in it. Give us better service. You've been overcharging us anyways for many years. And this "You're wrong" person, if you don't think that TW enjoys every second of its monopoly, you're wrong.

what is i with people using mac's in title pics; when the majority of the wold uses windows.

@Samuelc: I agree with what you are saying about having a flat rate plan. I myself have RoadRunner with is a subdivision of Time Warner. I am not happy with seeing the possibilities of there being metered plans put in place. I recently reformatted my computer, with all the updates that I needed to download for my OS, software, and games it reached into the 10's of GB's from just one day of updating. I could have potentially gone through my entire months worth of bandwidth in day.

I wouldn't mind seeing an unlimited plan for around 50-60$ a month then having a metered plan, one similiar to what you suggested of 0.20$ a GB. That would allow the users who wish to have a high speed always online connection to check email, stocks, ebay, etc. without needing to pay what the other power users such as myself pay for all the bandwidth that they will never use.

what is i with people using mac's in title pics; when the majority of the wold uses windows.

When our government and corporate influencers have finished pillaging our nation's wealth, diminishing our ability to build and educate, we will indeed be a 3rd world nation. In case many of you haven't ventured out of your tech and well-educated circles lately. You should. We are already well on our way to becoming the most uninformed, gullible, dumbasses on the planet. And the biggest joke of all, is that we PAID our legislators huge salaries to get in bed with corporate executives who in turn gave bribes and luxuries to OUR legislators so they would write bills to funnel MORE of our tax dollars into businesses that are investing in developing other countries. That is the funny thing, we're over-taxed to our own demise and our voted representatives represent corporate power-mongers who can't even vote in this country.

So basically if companies start metering the internet, then it'll end up like cell phone usage. Here is a hypothetical situation...

You don't want to download the next big update from Microsoft or Apple because it'll put you over your monthly limit of bandwidth, so you wait. Problems ensue.

If the internet really is the Information Superhighway, then everyone pays flat fees for the ability to drive on it. Next, I can see the DMV charging me for the number of miles I drive when I go to renew my tags.

Is this really what we are coming to?

Paying 50 - 60 bucks for internet is way to much. It sould be around 25.

Do your research before you claim it as fact. The PDF shows South Korea being #1 and Japan being #2. As a journalist you should get your facts straight.

I have to disagree with you on this one. The internet is like roads - roads have a fixed width on which everyone can drive upon. There is no significant additional cost to the company if the road is full, or if the road is hardly used. You can argue about equipment costs and maintenance, but 1) the roads are already built and 2) but a router isn't going to break down significantly faster If my neighbor and I paid for the same size of bandwidth (road width) and he uses it once per day, and I use it 1000 times per day should not impact how much I pay for it.

The problem is that ISP's are set up to oversubscribe available bandwidth isn't my problem. When I sign up for a plan, I and I am told I am paying for X Mbps, no where am I told that that is shared. Your John Q. Public doesn't know the difference.

It's just a method to make more money. To squeeze excess money out of the consumer. It's like putting a toll both on a tax payer funded road. 1) you've already paid for the road & maintenance with Income tax, tags for your car, licenses for your person & gas from the pump. 2) the toll both is essentially additional free money for the people who built the roads, with more expense to you.

No. The solution is that they need to get their collective butts in gear, and build the infrastructure needed to support the demand.

@JC the guy who wrote the article said japan was number one in PRICE and SPEED if you take 2 seconds to read the pdf, japan has nearly 13 mbps more than south korea and at less than half the price! south korea is number one on that list because nearly every household has service, unlike japan who only has about half. so you should in face get your facts straight buddy.

Your article is spot-on. And I most CERTAINLY would give up TV channels I never watch for a faster internet connection.

Let's make the postal service stop delivery of mail by paper and, instead, use the internet for normal postal ops. I bet that would get things rolling.
Dr•HD

No one seems to realize that the cable and telco companies do not put a cap on how much TV we watch. I live in NE Penn and have a 50gig limit/month. I would gladly turn in the 500 channels I don't use and apply that bandwith to my internet limit.

We have been following the Time Warner case since it was dropped on us here in western NY on April 1st. Our site, stopthecap.com successfully beat back Frontier when they suggested 5GB was a good monthly limit, and we pounced all over Time Warner for their Money Party.

It's incredibly easy to get suckered into THEIR arguments over reasonable usage, caps, limits, and tiers. It's also easy to buy into "exafloods" and "brownouts." And then you do the research, as we have, and uncovered the facts:

1) Time Warner's existing broadband model is incredibly profitable as is. The company is in no hurry to upgrade because, as we just heard this week during an investor conference call, there is NO NEED to be in a hurry.

2) Usage pricing tries to pit subscribers against one another with claims that someone is paying for someone else's usage, but that turns out to be a false premise. It's not like electricity, water, or gas. It's a lot like wireless phone service, which is becoming flat rate as time passes because the costs are dropping.

3) Cable operators costs AND investment into their broadband networks are both dropping, not increasing.

4) The costs to administer metered billing guarantee rate hikes for everyone. Besides, when is the last time your cable bill ever went down?

5) The exaflood theory comes from a bought and paid for study produced by a group that lives off the revenue it earns from the clients that ask them to do the research. Guess what that means....

6) In three polls and surveys, an average of 80% of customers oppose usage based pricing, even as lighter users, and 50% would switch providers based on it.

7) Most ISPs already offer an unlimited access "lite" plan, but as we documented, it would take Leonard Nimoy and an In Search Of... production team weeks to find out the details. Light users have choices today!

8) Competition from other cable companies is not likely, not because the government forbids it, but because there has been an unwritten rule for decades that major operators not overbuild into each others' territories. Verizon FiOS is limited in deployment, as is AT&T's U-verse, and DSL cannot compete on speed.

We've written about this issue in exhaustive detail on stopthecap, so feel free to drop by and absorb.

The roads aren't already built. Time Warner doesn't have the bandwidth to handle the near future.

Here is another thought. Just like telemarketers calling people who don't have unlimited minutes on their cell phones, advertisers using up your precious allotment of megs with flashy adds etc.

Please don't give me numbers, I know that in comparison to video an add is nothing but when you only have so much to burn, every k counts. The average size a advertisements on a web page is about 48K so it only takes about 22 visits to different web sites to equal a meg, I can do that in one evening with casual browsing. After 30 days that adds up to almost a third of a gig just for adverts. If I went one third of a gig over my cap I think I would be resenting every advertiser on the internet.

Think about it.

Fuzzy

Responding to: Old Man Dotes at 7:10 PM ON 04/30/09

How can you claim to be liberatarian when you are proposing a law that would regulate a business. I in turn say that if you do not like the rates that TWC is putting on broadband services, go to another company that will give a better rate -- the beauty of capitalism!

I consider myself a strong conservative btw

We CAN solve this problem.
To do so, we have to get this idea out of our heads of one single "Magic Bullet" technology. We need, instead, to look at what each technology is capable of, think of it as a tool, that can solve some piece of the problem, and figure out which part it is best suited to solve!

Keep in mind that satellites have that latency! It's inherent in the geosynchronous orbit!
The future lies will building out rural parts of the country in fiber, then strategically placing wireless access points at the population clusters, while leaving the lower-density rural areas, and even the fringes near the high density areas to connect directly to the fiber, either by fiber-to-device, or CAT-6 to the device, or, where the cost can be justified, wireless routers that cover a couple of rooms!

I'm no fan of the cable companies, but to give credit where it's due, they were smart to put fiber to the neighborhood, then roll to coax at the neighborhood level, and link individual houses and businesses to the system with COAX!
Now, they don't have an overwhelming investment to take that to the next level, and go fiber to the premises, leaving the COAX in place as a backup, and /or peak-demand circuit!

Starting from scratch, even linking wireless access points with fiber is going to be insanely expensive. Satellites are good for one-way streaming, but have some real issues when upstream and downstream traffic are close to equal volume, or where high latency is a killer, such as VOIP, or "Telepresence!"

The difficulty companies such as Verizon face is, they can go two ways. either try to modify the existing wireless network to carry more bandwidth, and while that has possibilities, there are spectrum-utilization and interference issues that are not going to be easy to get around, or they can essentially rebuild the wireline network with fiber. I suspect the solution will involve a fairly complex combination of the two

The USDA?
They probably have a role to play!
The Rural Electrification Administration is not really up to the task themselves. The template they provided can, however, be tweaked a little and will still work!
It may not be the most ideal methodology, but it is a proven success!
The record of bringing both electric and wireline phone service to rural America is irrefutable. While it is true that many of the rural telcos set up originally have been folded into larger companies at this point, that took 30 years, so, even if it takes 10 years on broadband, the concept was still a successful one.
One of the reasons why people who live in rural areas use wireline telephone so much more than city dwellers do is because, in most of rural America, cell phone signals, where they exist more than a mile or so off the interstates, frankly stink!
So much for letting private enterprise solve the problem!

This problem is completely solvable! We've solved bigger problems! At the time we built our nationwide power grid, and our nationwide wireline telephone network, also the national interstate highway system, the technologies available to us were roughly at the same point in their development as broadband technology is today, and we did it!

The sad part: I don't see that kind of political will out there
anywhere today!

Jobs:
On the issue of using broadband access to "create" jobs or concerning ourselves with the number of jobs broadband can create in rural areas, I'm convinced we need to think differently. Broadband will be the Interstate of the 21st century! Rather than try to use it to "create" jobs, it it is a better approach to think of broadband as "attracting" jobs the way the interstates did. The cities and towns, and even the neighborhoods within the large cities, that had somewhat convenient Interstate access grew and mostly propered. Those too far away, or with little access withered! It will be the same with broadband in the 21st century.
Those places that have good, reliable, reasonably priced access will attract the jobs that occur naturally in the economy, those that don't will wither!

This sounds like astroturfing

Very good points, glen! And who knows, there may be some breakthrough technology that will make wire or fiberoptic obsolete.

"How can you claim to be liberatarian when you are proposing a law that would regulate a business."

Because the communication business is already heavily regulated and because just about every libertarian accepts that one of the roles appropriate to government is to prevent any private business from becoming a monopoly. In the current scenario, government actually works with big business to deliberately give them monopoly powers which is to root cause of poor service.

With suitable competition in the marketplace, ordinary customer preferences will remove the need for a lot of other regulation (like network neutrality crap) so although anti-monopoly laws are a form of regulation, they are about the most minimalist regulation that you can have.

A competitive market is the answer.

Good article. You seem to understand that this is a complex problem in which a lot of people/groups claim to have the right answer, and that nearly all of them don't (I certainly don't claim to)!

You mention the guy who's running a video hub out of his house. I'm wondering if there's a LEGAL activity that requires this kind of bandwidth. it's almost certain he's providing access to copyrighted video materials. Why should his situation be the test case for fair bandwidth use?

The situation with Greenlight in Wilson NC suggests that we should start considering Internet access as a utility, just like we do electricity, water, natural gas and phone service. Is it practical to have five electric companies stringing wires and burying cables and knocking on doors trying to get consumers to take their service?

You mention the choices of broadband service in Japan. How do they handle this? As I alluded above, do they all have their own infrastructure, or do they share common infrastructure? In my area, the electric company allows customers to select the source of the electricity they use. If they choose to buy wind-generated electricity, the utility just increases the amount of electricity they buy from that supplier and pass the (presumably) higher cost on to the customer. In any case, this is even more justification toward making internet access a utility.