shooshee

probably using too many metaphors and maybe more fun than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

Archive for April, 2009

spam

April 23rd, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been getting hammered with comment spam over the last 12 hours or so – luckily moderation is catching it all. But I thought I’d share the offenders and let you/them know that I am reporting all of this to the appropriate abuse contacts.  Not that I expect much… If you’re bored or so inclined, you can contact them too. Otherwise you might want to block all of the IPs listed below.

FDCservers.net
141 w jackson blvd. suite #1135, Chicago, IL 60098
AbusePhone:  +1-630-729-0228
AbuseEmail:  abuse@fdcservers.net
66.90.103.130
67.159.41.89
67.159.44.137
67.159.44.206
67.159.45.96
74.63.87.134
74.63.116.6
74.63.117.174
76.73.1.50
208.53.137.178
208.53.138.228

NOC4Hosts Inc.
4465 W. Gandy Blvd, Suite 812, Tampa, FL 33611
AbusePhone:  +1-877-801-1443
AbuseEmail:  abuse@noc4hosts.com
66.232.107.104
74.50.119.142

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (Yahoo! LEVEL3-YAHOO-1)
1025 Eldorado Boulevard Broomfield, Colorado 80021
AbusePhone:  +1-877-453-8353
AbuseEmail:  security@level3.com
For issue regarding IP Security, AUP or Spam, please email your information to abuse@level3.com
67.28.113.237

SoftLayer Technologies Inc.
1950 N Stemmons Freeway, Dallas, TX 75207
AbusePhone:  +1-214-442-0605
AbuseEmail:  abuse@softlayer.com
74.86.238.186

GigeNET
545 E. Algonquin Rd Suite D Arlington Heights, IL 60005
E-mail: support@gigenet.com
TechPhone:  +1-800-561-2656
TechEmail:  ip-admin@coloquest.com
69.65.33.41

Webair Internet Development Inc.
333 Jericho Tpke Suite 200, Jericho, NY 11753
AbusePhone:  +1-516-938-4100
AbuseEmail:  IPAdmin@webair.com
74.206.236.244

Bluehost Inc.
1958 South 950 East Provo, UT 84606
AbusePhone:  +1-801-765-9400
AbuseEmail:  abuse@bluehost.com
74.220.207.119

SingleHop, Inc. (SINGLEHOP-SERVER2-SURPRISEHOST-COM)
223 West Jackson Street Suite 1014 Chicago, IL 60606
AbusePhone:  +1-866-817-2811
AbuseEmail:  netops@singlehop.com
67.212.185.186

goneo Internet GmbH
Marienwall 27 32423 Minden Germany
For abuse and spam issues, please use only abuse@goneo.de
82.100.220.47

UPDATE 4.23 – They’re at it again tonight… but it’s not worth blogging. Too bad they’re not Time Warner customers, they might be cut off for using too much bandwidth.

No comments

greed

April 16th, 2009 | Category: austin, work

15 April 2009 – In an article posted on msnbc.com, Alex Dudley (Vice President of Public Relations for Time Warner) announced that the Time Warner cable bandwidth caps would  “be modified, or even abandoned, if they meet too much hostility.”(1) Well I guess they met enough hostility from Time Warner/Road Runner customers in Austin, San Antonio, Greensboro, N.C., and Rochester, N.Y. – the cities identified as trial markets because the very next day there was a very different announcement…

16 April 2009 – Time Warner Cable Charts a New Course on Consumption Based Billing.

(New York, NY) — Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

While the “customer education process continues”? Oh please. The hostility Time Warner met was from customers who are educated. I don’t think that the educated customers are going to feel any less hostile reading the condescending statement above and another made by Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt in the same press release, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing.” I’m pretty sure *I* understand it.

Even though Time Warner announced they are shelving plans to roll out “consumption based billing,” I think Phillip Dampier of stopthecap.com put it best, “So this is our victory today. But the war is not won.”(2) With that in mind…

I’ve been tumbling a lot of this but wanted to consolidate in one space what I’ve learned in the past couple weeks about Time Warner Cable’s proposed bandwidth caps, which is a lot, so this is long. There are footnotes throughout to document the source.

I first took notice of this on April 1. I thought surely this was an April Fool’s Day joke (and a lame one at that) when I followed a few tweets(3) to Omar Gallaga’s Digital Savant blog on austin360.com and this post: TWC/Road Runner tiered Internet pricing coming to Austin/San Antonio. In that post he referred to an article in BusinessWeek in which the initial pricing proposals and bandwidth caps were announced. The bandwidth caps ranged from $29.95/month for the 5GB/month cap to $54.90 for the 40GB/month cap plus a “super tier” 100GB/month cap with undisclosed pricing. All plans would charge $1 per GB over the cap per month.

After this announcement, people started squawking. So Alex Dudley (the PR guy, you’ll see a few quotes from him) was quick to point out that in their test city 86% of customers were unaffected.(4) But this test city was Beaumont, Texas. No offense meant to the citizens of Beaumont, but it’s not exactly a hot-bed for technology. Omar Gallaga asked about Beaumont being a very different market and got this response from Dudley, “Internet usage is a lot like television viewing. It doesn’t vary from geographic area to geographic area.”(4) This should’ve been an early indication that TWC is NOT in touch with their customers.

Just a few days after Dudley tried to say there was no difference between Beaumont and Austin, TWC spokesman Jeff Simmermon said, “Austin is a passionate and tech-savvy city, and the spirit that we’re approaching this (metered broadband) test with is that if it’s going to work, it has to work in a tech-savvy market where the use patterns are different.”(5) On that same day, Landel Hobbs (Chief Operating Officer, Time Warner Cable) conceded in an announcement, “We have heard customer feedback, and understand that a 40 GB tier seems low to heavy Internet users.”(6) Ya think?

On April 9, Time Warner Cable announced revised billing tiers(7) that were adjusted from the initially proposed 5GB/month for $30 and 40GB/month for $55.  When you did the math on the original plans, the originally proposed base rate of 5GB/month at $30 came out to an outrageous $6 per GB per month. The restructured plans are somewhat better, depending on your plan. Price per GB/month is based on only using up to your cap at that level:

  • Road Runner “Super Lite” – $15 per month ($15 GB/month)
    768Kbps, 1GB cap, $2 per GB per month overage charge
  • Road Runner Lite* – $20 per month ($2 GB/month)
    768Kbps, 10GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
  • Road Runner Basic* – $35 per month ($1.75 GB/month)
    3 Mbps, 20GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
  • Road Runner Standard* – $40 per month ($1 GB/month)
    7Mbps, 40GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
  • Road Runner Turbo* – $55 per month ($0.92 GB/month)
    15Mbps, 60GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
  • Road Runner Turbo 100GB (”Super Tier”) – $75 per month ($0.75 GB/month)
    10Mbps,  100 GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge, overage charges capped at $75
  • DOCSIS 3.0 (to be launched in trial markets) – $99 per month
    50Mbps, cap not listed, overage charges not listed

* Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo are approximate monthly rates that vary based on your “bundle” pricing and the exact monthly rates are a little difficult to find on the Time Warner Cable | CentralTX website.

According to Ars Technica, this does not compare to competitors’ plans in other markets. If you assume 400GB per month, because these other plans currently do not have caps, AT&T’s 6Mbps DSL is $0.09 GB/month, Verizon’s 10Mbps FIOS (fibre-optic) is $0.11 GB/month and Verizon’s super fast 50Mbps FIOS is only $0.36 GB/month.(8)

Also mentioned by Ars Technica is Comcast, who does have a cap (but a much more reasonable 250GB/month cap and they don’t charge overage fees), they are only at $0.17 GB/month.(8) Hrmm… Based on that lets do some more math (because math is fun and the numbers are revealing). Comcast does not currently offer service (that I know of) in the Austin area, but let’s assume that you would use that 250GB in a month. Let’s also assume that the only plan that has an overage cap is the “Super Tier” because that’s the only one that specifically says it will have an overage charge cap of $75.(7) What would that cost per GB on TWC’s new plans?

  • Road Runner “Super Lite” – 250GB would cost you $513 ($2.05 per GB)
  • Road Runner Lite* – 250GB would cost you $260 ($1.04 per GB)
  • Road Runner Basic* – 250GB would cost you $265 ($1.06 per GB)
  • Road Runner Standard* – 250GB would cost you $250 ($1.00 per GB)
  • Road Runner Turbo* – 250GB would cost you $245 ($0.98 per GB)
  • Road Runner Turbo 100 GB (”Super Tier”) – 250GB would cost you $150 ($0.60 per GB)

Even with the $75 overage charge cap at the “Super Tier” level, TWC is $0.43 higher per GB per month than Comcast. Ouch.

What would that 250GB cost you with an actual competitor that is in some (but not nearly all) parts of Austin(9) – Grande Communications.(10)

  • GForce Basic – 250GB would cost you $20 ( $0.08 per GB)
    384Kbps, no cap
  • GForce 1.5 – 250GB would cost you $30 ($0.12 per GB)
    1.5Mbps, no cap
  • GForce 8.0 – 250GB would cost you $40 ($0.16  per GB)
    8Mbps, no cap
  • GForce 12.0 – 250GB would cost you $50 ($0.20 per GB)
    12Mbps, no cap

I’d love to go to Grande’s service. I’ve heard great things about it and the price is very reasonable, but they do not offer service where I live in Austin. And that’s a big part of the problem, many areas of Austin are limited to only TWC service. So what about DSL? “Compared to the performance of cable Internet service, DSL speed has historically been slower.”(11) I have experienced that to be true. We do not have apples-to-apples competition in large chunks of the city and no competition = monopoly. Although Alex Dudley (Vice President of Public Relations for Time Warner) doesn’t see it that way apparently, “just because our product is better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we’re a monopoly.”(12) It would seem, to the average Joe (or Jill as the case may be) that Time Warner has found a way to charge more simply because they can.

If it’s not just because they can, then what is the reasoning behind consumption based billing? One reason TWC gives is that it’s not fair to customers. Landel Hobbs: “Our current pricing plans require all users to pay the same amount, whether they check email once a month or download six movies a day. As the amount of usage has dramatically diverged among users, this is becoming inherently unfair and not the way most consumers want to pay for goods they consume. When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?”(6) To which Omar Gallaga replies, “If someone is using Road Runner to check e-mail once a month, they’re paying too much for broadband, no matter what tier they’re on. Might I suggest a nice dial-up plan or a public library terminal?”(13) Agreed.

To that point, while I was trying to find out the Lite, Standard, etc. pricing, I went to the Time Warner Cable | CentralTX website and went through the process of signing up as a new, rather than existing, customer. Road Runner Lite, the lowest tier, was not offered to me. There was no way to select it as an option. Road Runner Basic was the lowest tier choice option made available to me as a (potential) new customer. So at that same steak and salad lunch, was I only offered a baked potato?

And also to that point, why aren’t they extending this “fairness” to their cable tv offering? I watch a small fraction of the channels they provide, but TWC makes me pay for 300+ channels just to get the 10 or so I want.

Another justification for Time Warner’s proposed consumption based billing is that they need to cover the costs associated with increased bandwidth usage which they point out “is increasing by about 40% a year.”(14) (If that’s true, aren’t we going to hit their bandwidth caps pretty fast?) Okay, so there are costs involved in providing high-speed internet access. Do these costs justify the significant cost increase associated with the bandwidth caps?

According to Ryan Singel at Wired: “A close look at Time Warner Cable’s books shows no significant link between its high-speed data costs and network usage. For 2008, the most recent period available, Time Warner Cable reported that its high-speed data costs actually declined by 12 percent to $146 million. Meanwhile subscribers increased by more than 10 percent to 8.4 million, and high-speed data revenues climbed to more than $4 billion.”(15) And Ars Technica notes, “the dirty secret of these DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts is that they’re cheap.”(8) How cheap? A New York Times article covers the numbers. The fastest consumer cable broadband service in the world is 160Mbps offered by J:Com in Japan. J:Com had to invest, get this, $20 per home to upgrade the network.(16) Even if this is conservative, according to several vendors, “most systems can be upgraded for no more than about $100 per home, including a new modem.”(16) So at less than $10 per month per home, the cost of upgrading cable internet service could be covered in 1 year. Interesting…

“Heavy Internet users” (the steak people) seems to go hand-in-hand with “BitTorrent users” suggesting that people who use BitTorrent(17) are using it to share illegal downloads and pirated software. Um, no. Here’s one example: legal, free songs featuring music from South by Southwest (which I don’t have to tell you is a huge part of Austin every March) were distributed in torrents. And if I’m not mistaken (which I might be, because I’m not quite this much of a geek) legal open-source updates for Linux are distributed in torrents.

Even if you don’t use BitTorrents frequently, even if you are an above-board, totally legal, nothing shady internet user, the original standard 5GB a month plan is an extremely low number. And quite frankly, 40GB isn’t a whole lot better. Network Performance Daily posted a really great run down of some other file size examples and what they would cost you. One HD movie download is 7GB, to put it in a bit of perspective. Buh-bye streaming Netflix on that plan.

I’d be in the “heavy internet user category” by TWC standards and all of my usage is pretty normal and definitely legal. I’m a designer and when I need to work from home (when my kid is sick or for whatever reason) the file sizes I am moving a quite large. I enjoy photography and upload to flickr as well as sharing photos with my family who lives in another city. I stream public radio. I watch videos on Vimeo or YouTube or Hulu.

Yes, Hulu. Remember last year when NBC affiliate KXAN and its corporate owner LIN TV got into a dispute with Time Warner Cable?(18) When LIN pulled the KXAN signal, Time Warner ran “how-to” videos on that channel slot showing you how to hook your laptop up to the TV to watch NBC shows that we were missing.

We can’t blame Time Warner for showing us that online content existed. With products like boxee and Apple TV (and a whole slew of others), paying for cable tv service is becoming less and less attractive when there is so much content available online for free. “GigaOM astutely notes that $150/month for unlimited internet is the exact amount Time Warner would need to pull in to make the same amount of money if you killed the cable box and switched to watching all of your video online—as we’ve long crowed that much of this is about their fear of internet video.”(19) So it shouldn’t shock you to learn that on the same day all the bandwidth cap crap broke, Time Warner Cable Chief Operating Officer Landel Hobbs said, “Viewers should see the same commercials during television shows on the Web as they do on traditional TV.”(20)

Aside from all of this there are social implications that I hadn’t really considered and regretfully have not researched enough yet. But I did read this:

Lauren Rich Fine, research director for ContentNext Media, called consumption-based broadband billing “a huge step backwards.” She added, “Inner-city youth’s ability to go online is the best way to give them broad access societally. Consumption-based models will end up being a bigger burden on less affluent people.”(21)

I’ve learned a lot. And I’m sure there’s more to learn. Through it all I’ve found Omar Gallaga to be an excellent reporter, giving very thorough coverage on his blog Digital Savant. I am also pleased with the coverage at Stop the Cap! While biased, it has covered the issue in all of the trial cities. I’d bookmark both of those or add them to your rss feed reader. Below is a list of other articles I tumbled. And below that are all the footnotes.

I hope that you’ve found this summary useful and informative. I probably could have gone into even more depth on much of this but it’s already a mile long. If TWC decides to take consumption based billing back off the shelf, I’ll post anything new that I learn and give you plenty of people to contact, including local government representatives.

My trust in Time Warner Cable is blown. I’m cynical enough to think that “shelving the plan” just means not talking about it and that they’re moving forward with their plans anyway. If that’s the case, I expect this to all come back to life in October of this year when the capping was/is supposed to kick in or January of next year when the overage charge billing would begin.

In the meantime, if you are a Time Warner customer, I encourage you to let them know how you feel. You can email realideas@twcable.com (as long as they keep that email address available). Or on twitter:  @jeffTWC (Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communication, Time Warner Cable), @AlexTWC (Alex Dudley, Vice President, Public Relations, Time Warner Cable),  @MsmarTWC (Mariam Asmar, PR Coordinator Time Warner Cable) and @melissatwc_tx (Melissa Sorola, Regional Director of Communications, Time Warner Cable – Texas)

Other articles and blog posts that I read:

footnotes
  1. source: msnbc.com – Internet providers want to meter usage [↩]
  2. source: Stop the Cap! · We Won! (For Now) Time Warner Killing Usage Caps “In All Markets” – But TW Press Statements Suggest They Are Still Out Of Touch [↩]
  3. note: tweets are 140 character or less posts on twitter.com [↩]
  4. source: Digital Savant – TWC/Road Runner tiered Internet pricing coming to Austin/San Antonio [↩] [↩]
  5. source: gigaom – Time Warner Cable Says It Singled Out Austin’s Geeks [↩]
  6. source: Statement From Time Warner Cable’s Chief Operations Officer on Tiered Broadband Trials [↩] [↩]
  7. source: Statement from Landel Hobbs, Chief Operating Officer, Time Warner Cable RE: Consumption based billing trials [↩] [↩]
  8. source: Ars Technica -The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner’s data caps [↩] [↩] [↩]
  9. note: Grande Communications does not provide service where I live [↩]
  10. source: Grande Communications – Internet Service Plans [↩]
  11. source: About.com – DSL Speed – How Fast is DSL Internet Service? [↩]
  12. source: AlexTWC on Twitter [↩]
  13. source: Two from Time Warner talk more bandwidth cap details | Digital Savant [↩]
  14. source: Consumption Based Billing | Time Warner Cable | Corporate [↩]
  15. source: Wired – Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics [↩]
  16. source: New York Times – World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 per home [↩] [↩]
  17. note: in case you’re not familiar with BitTorrent read this: What Is BitTorrent? | BitTorrent [↩]
  18. source: Viewers take sides in cable vs. KXAN [↩]
  19. source: Gizmodo – How Much Time Warner’s Broadband Caps Will Screw You – Broadband caps [↩]
  20. source: Time Warner Cable COO: Ads Should Match For Shows On TV, Web – FOXBusiness.com [↩]
  21. source: Internet providers want to meter usage – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com [↩]
2 comments