Honestly, this is the biggest threat to Stardock's business model out there right now.

I'm in Quebec Canada and here my service provider is Videotron and since they've had Braodband they've had caps. I pay 30$ a month for 20 gig. I can get unlimited but it's like 60$ a month.

So no big surprise for me I'm already used to it.

one good point though to this system is that my quality of my internet connection is garanteed. My connection is A1 all the time.

Hope you guys won't get hammered to much.

so, time warner cable is finally doing somthing no one likes, i have them and im very upset by it, i download games and updates alot on my computor, and in these times in the US im not sure ill be able to keep doing that for long

That's way better than Time Warner customers get, the 40 gig per month deal is close to $60 and there is no uncapped option.  So you've still got it better than Time Warner customers.  By the way, if those values are Canadian dollars that means you get an even BETTER deal.

I don't understand the point of racking the speeds up and up if it just means you can burn your usage away more quickly.

That's exactly why they're doing it, though. Think about it. Netflix started offering streaming movies through the Xbox so you don't even need to buy another device, and they can actually stream in HD. There are other movie streaming sites as well.

Fast speed and a cap on usage is perfect, you can watch one HD movie stream and there goes 7gb of your 20gb cap in 2 hours!

Can you imagine how much money they'd make on overage charges this way?

A lot of the problem isn't even what the pricing structure actually does.  It's what it appears to do and how it makes the customer feel.  The cap will make people shy away from large downloads, even if they're nowhere near the limit. 

Take, for instance, cell phone users such as my wife.  She has more included minutes available than she could possibly use.  She uses much less than 1% of what she has before she comes close to the limit.  She also gets roll over minutes that keep adding up and eventually just expire from non-use.  Just having the limit makes her feel the need to limit her cell phone use.  The same psycological effect will happen with the internet caps.

I know that I can easily afford $1/GB if I exceed the limit, but I'll also tend to limit my usage with the mere threat of extra charges.  Although some people will shrug the limits off, the majority will feel constrained by them.  Let's say a game takes 300MB to download.  Even though it won't affect the actual cost of the connection, many people will avoid it. 

I'm just glad that there are anti-monopoly laws that allow providers like Earthlink to compete with giants like Time Warner and even use their infrastructure.  If there was another option within reason, I'd look into them as well.  As it stands, we don't have any DSL providers in our area and only one cable provider.  Unfortunately, that's Time Warner.  There are others in the same boat.

For DSL up my way, you pretty much only got Verizon, perhaps some Earthlink though.  Cable however is only available via whomevers TV territory you are in.  So even if I WANTED Comcast cable internet...I cannot have it. I'd love to have the internet packages from about...1.25 miles to my east.  Their equal in speed service is $10/month cheaper.

Oh yeah..and both of those cable providers farm out their internet service to the SAME company.

Free pizza to those who help me move my house a couple thousand feet.

Not only companies are charging outragous prices for simple internet service, they are also doing bandwidth shaping.

As the government here in the US gets more and more controled by big business (rather than the people) this was bound to happen.  Banks and home morgages; credit cards and 30% interest with hidden fees and surprise penalties; oil and power companies raising prices to extortionistic levels (while they make historical profits); heck even cell phones companies have pretty much followed the credit card companies lead (there are so many sneaky overage charges and hidden fees in my cell phone contract, I doubt even a lawyer could find them all).

Sure, you can change services, but as each company sees how much money there is too be made by the above practices, they jump on the band wagon too.  You can complain to the government (aka 65% companies 35% us), but they will just have a silent chuckle while they nod in agreement to playcate you.  Heck, we can't even get a life and death service (hospitals, health care, health insurance and medicines) taken care of because the huge greedy corporations have such a foothold in the lawmaking process now that they block most reform laws, and put more and more loopholes in existing ones.  So good luck with the internet stuff.

Like president Obama said in a recent interview, "the sad thing is, all of this is legal".  I think what he meant by that was, that over many years big business, using their vast influence in governement, has "changed" the laws to make and this type of "theft" technically legal.  And since you can pretty much run any business from any part of the world now, greedy corperate owners pledge aleigence to no country, let alone it's citizens, they are only loyal to their profits and the power that brings with it. . .

My provider (in Canada) also went to a 20GB monthly cap. Since the cap went into effect here, the speed and reliability of my internet connection has become flawless. According to my ISP, (prior to the limits) 10% of their customers were using 90% of the total bandwidth. (I question the validity of those numbers, but it's what they wrote in their monthly advertorial.)

The news about bandwidth limits elsewhere doesn't surprise me. Since "traffic shaping" has proven unlawful in some courts, ISP's have no choice but to set cap limits to control bandwidth costs. I'm sure the music, movie and software industries do not mind this buisness trend either.

Indeed. So this actually makes me think TW is inleague with EA.

Seriously though, I really hope this doesn't have any kind of signalling effect to the european market.

Here providers are actually throwing flat rate offers at ya like foul tomatoes. One cheaper than the other with bandwiths up to 16 GBit/s and no download limits at all.

But then Warner is well known to be a greedy bunch of asswipes anyway...

Is that so? In the lights of i.e. Microsoft Open License programme having switched to a no CD/DVD policy which forces you to download applications like MS Office 2007 that seems highly unlikely...

Also it would really hurt i.e. iTunes and pay per view movie download services and the likes, wouldn't it?

The problem is the pro consumer regulation, not a pro business government.  As with any regulation, unintended side effects are numerous.

When, you require a company to sell their network to others at cost, you discourage further advancement of that network.  The investment costs cannot be profited from in such a situation.  You're unable to compete with your own network, the scenario demands minimal margins.  It's far cheaper to use someone elses at cost than it is to build your own, so you discourage the creation of competing networks as well.  In the end, the consumer gets the shaft when the infrastructure falls far enough behind that it's no longer functional, as Time Warner's cable network has been for several years now.

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.  Requiring a company to sell a service they do not wish to sell, in this case uncapped bandwidth, is forcing the owners into involuntary servitude.  Will congress to violate the rights of an "evil corporation" at your own peril, it will come back to bite you.

The only thing (okay, the most important thing) wrong with your argument is the idea of "uncapped bandwidth".

There is no such thing as "uncapped" or "unlimited" bandwidth.  The maximum you can get is 24/7/365 downloading at your maximum thoroughput.  For a shoddy 768k connection like the one I'm on, that's on average about 240GB/month.

For something higher up the line, say a 6Mbit connection, you're looking at 1.92TB/month, give or take.

Granted, that's more than you or I probably need.  But it's disingenuous at best to call it uncapped or unlimited.

Since latency != bandwidth and bandwidth != latency (although they do have some marginal bearing on each other), if the companies don't want to provide "unlimited" or "uncapped" service, then they should cap the service rate.

But then of course they couldn't institute stupid overage charges, and you can't honestly tell me that there's an ISP that wouldn't want to.

You being an idiot doesn't make my argument wrong.

I don't want to wait six hours to download a one gig file just so some moron doesn't have to read his terms of service.  Neither do any of the Time Warner users that are already using less than that cap will provide them.  My connection, if the actual bitrate were to match what I can download in a day before hitting the cap, would be completely useless.  I'd have to start twenty minute 380p video streams ten hours in advance and restrict myself to only using services with unlimited buffering.  When a game were updated on Impulse, I'd get to spend a few hours waiting for the 40 meg download to finish.