Congressman Still Wants to Outlaw Usage-Based Pricing and Bandwidth Caps
Time Warner Cable has blinked – suspending plans to proceed with the consumption-based pricing tests in four markets — but the company has already created a political foe who’s not letting the issue rest.
Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.), in a statement yesterday, patted his supporters on the back for forcing TWC to postpone the metered billing trials
But he’s still planning to proceed with the Broadband Internet Fairness Act, which would “eliminate broadband Internet caps, increase competition and provide incentives for businesses while protecting the consumer.” (See N.Y. Congressman Plans Bill Banning Internet-Usage Billing.)
“We’re delighted that common sense prevailed,” Massa said. “Together we have won and I am glad that I was able to play a small part in bringing about this change. This is a true grassroots victory, but we will move forward with our legislation to ensure that any future plans to charge customers based on how much they download do not spring up anywhere else.”
VISPA1 commented:
Bandwidth cost's ISP a given fee for meg.this has a direct effect on the monthly cost.In most cases the ISP's cost for band width is between $50 to $100 dollars per meg for bandwidth alone. this means that if the ISP offers 8 Mbs download speeds for $50 per month that this ISP has to share or what is called oversell the amount of internet bandwidth capasity the ISP has. As more and more people actualy use the bandwidth as services such as streaming Video increase. The ratio of bandwidth over sell has to decrease inorder to keep up with customer demand for bandwidth usage. The ISP must now increase his amount of bandwidth and raise prices to all customers or find a way to bill only the customers that require the added capasity. The best answer to solve this problem is an Internet Truth in Advertizing law.that require all broadband ISP to have a maxiun over sell ratio of bandwidth. Curently the consumers have no idea of the actualy bandwidth ratio to customer. One isp might offer 16 Mbs with a banwwidth over sell ratio of 100 to 1 and and another ISP beeing selling 1 Mbs download seed with an ovr sell ratio of 5 to 1. The customer would actualy be better off with the 5 to 1 ratio. The ISP even though they are offering 16 Mbs with an over sell ratio of 100 to 1 The ISP should not be able to call their service broadband. If only 50% of their customers tried to acces an internet aplication of 720 Kbs the system would fail to provide broad band speeds.
jason commented:
TWC's mistake was making the caps too low. Comcast's 250 GB caps seemed reasonable to many that didn't like TWC's caps.
Also, with the extremely low caps TWC announced, many thought their true motivation was to deter people from canceling their cable and going online for their content.
Phillip Dampier commented:
Massa's bill hasn't been introduced yet, much less ban cell phone data plans that are not unlimited.
Moose commented:
Tell that to the cellular providers . . . only unlimited broadband access plans on your cell phone or other wireless devices? That doesn't sound very consumer-friendly, if all I want to do is check my e-mail and a couple of web pages.