Abuse version 2.0

Yesterday evening Time Warner released a second statement regarding their bandwidth tiers and pricing. Time Warner claims in it,

We’ve heard the passionate feedback and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns.

Oh goody! They've gotten rid of the caps (or at the very least significantly increased them) right?
Not exactly. Here's the breakdown of the "new and improved" tiers:

• A new "lighter Internet user" tier will exist providing 1 GB per month at speeds of 768 KB up/128 KB down for $15 per month.
  Overage charges will be $2 per GB per month.
  
• Bandwidth tier sizes are increasing to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively.
  Package prices will remain the same.
  Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.
  
• A new 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package has been added for $75 per month at speeds of 10 MB/1 MB (very notably slower than RR Turbo now but $20 more expensive). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.
  
• Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month.
  That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.
  
• Trials will begin in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., in August.
  
• DOCSIS 3.0 will be launched sometime in the future [editorial: 2090?] with a 50/5 MB speed tier for $99 per month [editorial: with an unknown cap].

If you were like me you laughed, you cried, and you hurled. Then after you finished watching Wayne's World you read this memo and your jaw hit the floor.

I'm not exactly sure who Time Warner has been listening to because I'm quite sure I didn't hear anyone, anywhere say, "I wish there was a low-end tier with next to no usage and double the overage fee for slower than DSL speeds." Or maybe the execs over there have some really powerful drugs.

Time Warner Doesn't Get It

They just keep missing the point. People don't want usage caps....PERIOD. We're not shouting up and down about how slow Road Runner is and how we need DOCSIS 3.0 for 50Mbps download speed. (Well, ok some people are, but they're a very small minority at the moment - DOCSIS 3.0 is just good business sense for them no matter what.)

Laughingly Time Warner refers to two studies Conducted by Nemertes Research about the pending so-called 'exaflood' wherein the demand for Internet services exceeds capacity and people start experiencing "Internet brownouts" where speed unexplicably is reduced at times.

The first study conducted in 2007 stated in its conclusion,

We conclude that the evidence is good that demand for Internet and IP services is increasing exponentially, while access investment is proceeding linearly.
[...]
The next Google, YouTube, or Amazon might not arise not because of a lack of demand, but due to an inability to fulfill that demand. Rather like osteoporosis, the underinvestment in infrastructure will painlessly and invisibly leach competitiveness out of the economy.
[...]
There is, however, another gap that is within scope for us, as researchers, to address, and that is the data gap. We have several times noted that the best available data (chiefly that from CAIDA and MINTS) is exceedingly limited, due to the unwillingness of service providers to share details on their infrastructures and capacities.

What I take from that study is that it says our infrastructure is limiting our access and by doing so having an adverse affect on the ability for online businesses to thrive and move forward.

Additionally it says that companies like Time Warner are stingy with their data and this report could be highly flawed due to "exceedingly limited" data.

A second study the following year repeated the same message: capacity (i.e. bandwidth) is not keeping pace with demand and that needs to change for Internet businesses to be viable.

There have been accusations that Nemertes is simply astroturfing for the industry, but whether they are or aren't, it seems to me their warnings are going unheeded by TWC. Indeed, TWC is attempting to address the "problem" by limiting usage instead of building out infrastructure.

Time Warner hasn't done themselves any favor with this latest memo. I know it's simply renewed my efforts to get the word out and bring people's attention to the fact that not only are these caps ridiculous but that TWC has seen fit to move the date up to August from the original planned start date in September...but just for Rochester and Greensboro. That's probably because we're simply the loudest two test sites and they want to silence us first by capping our usage and making it unfeasible to continue fighting online.

Ars Technica breaks down the cost per GB of TW caps

Ars Technica does a fairly good job of breaking down the TWC pricing costs per GB with the proposed caps. Unfortunately the article author and the editor of the trade publication DSL Prime are woefully ambivilant to the concept of capping altogether and seem to buy into the spiel that the Internet can't grow anymore without caps. Nevermind the fact that the lack of caps is what has spurred the incredible growth over the past 10 years.

I'm going to try one more stab at why usage caps don't address the perceived bandwidth problem. This time we'll compare Internet access to time shares.

Internet service providers have a fixed amount of bandwidth available to them to resell to customers. Let's say for the sake of this example they have 100Mbps connection to the Internet.

In a time share scenario, the ISP could divvy up that 100Mbps however they wanted but once they run out of bandwidth, they can't sell anymore. Perhaps at time share-style ISP would sell 10 customers 10Mbps connections and that's it.

Time Warner and all modern ISPs realize that's an inefficient use of the available bandwidth because not everyone uses their 10Mbps connection all the time leaving a lot of "empty" bandwidth. So instead, the ISPs sell 100 people 10Mbps expecting that not everyone will be online using their full bandwidth at the same time. When that happens however, everyone's connection slows to a crawl because they can each only get at most 1Mbps.

The usage caps do not change this scenario in terms of how much bandwidth is available or sold. Instead it creates a disincentive for you to use your full bandwidth because you have a limit on the amount of data you can download. If you use your full bandwidth frequently you'll exceed your limit and pay overage fees.

This is like the time share you've purchased (2 weeks in August in the Florida Keys) and one week into your stay the owner calls you up and tells you to be out by 5pm or he'll charge you an additional fee for every night you stay. Most people would find this behavior outrageous since you've already paid for then entire two weeks, but your usage of the 2 week access time is capped to only 1 week.

In this way, ISPs essentially scare people into not using their Internet connection as frequently so as to help avoid the network slow-downs that occur when everyone is using it.

Clearly this method of selling bandwidth doesn't guarantee any particular performance for your money and with the caps may actually punish you for using your full bandwidth.

Additionally in the case of Time Warner one of their talking points is the promise to bring even higher speeds than they have now. However, higher speeds just means you can reach your cap faster so that's not much for "helping people save money".

A Civil Conversation With Time Warner Cable

This evening I called Time Warner Cable's customer service number to talk with them about their company's plan to implement usage caps and my resolve to cancel 10+ years of service should that happen.

After bypassing the annoying menu system, I reached a service representative who introduced himself as Gordon. I began by saying, “Good evening Gordon, how are you tonight?” I think this caught him off-guard a little and his reply sounded somewhat disarmed.

I introduced myself and told him I was calling to find out more about the proposed usage caps I'd been hearing about. Intentionally my tone was kept calm, soft, and my language civil. He asked if I had read the open letter written by their Chief Operating Officer Landel Hobbs. I had. I informed him that I worked as a software developer, have a fairly complex home network set-up and am quite savvy regarding things computerish. I also mentioned that I have been a customer with Time Warner for over 10 years and overall have been very happy with the quality of the cable service itself. Next I expressed my concern at the concept of capping data usage as it does not reduce the possibility of a slow network if everyone is using it at once, even within their limits.

Our conversation went back and forth from me trying to explain bandwidth versus data using my water glass analogy and him repeating with some regularity how times have changed and the usage cap has nothing to do with speed. As a matter of fact he was happy to remind me that along with the caps there would be speed improvements. I guess it didn't occur to him that with more speed I can simply hit my caps faster.

I could tell at times he was flustered with my cool and technical questions and responses. I wasn't about to buy into his talking points I've seen so frequently that attempt to distract from the issue at hand:

• The Internet market is shifting, people are consuming so much data these days and TWC has to change their pricing structure to keep pace with it
  
• Everyone will be implementing these caps soon
• Frontier tried implementing a much lower cap last year [at which point I reminded him that it was not implemented due to customer backlash and exodus from their services -- he didn't respond to my comment directly but continued talking]
• Most customers will actually save money with this plan
• It doesn't make sense that people who only check their email should pay as much as someone who downloads movies all the time [again, at this point I interjected and suggested that people pay for the access speed so when they want to use it they can; if price were a factor they would be using DSL or dial-up]
• This is just a test of a new way to bill [this was kind of a slip-up on his part I think]

I attempted to ferret from him the exact problem Time Warner is attempting to address with these caps, but he just repeated the line about the Internet changing and Time Warner's business needs to change with it, etc.

The conversation continued for about 22 minutes and in the end I simply explained to him politely that he should make a note on my account that I will be canceling my service with Time Warner if they insist on putting these caps in place even for only a test. I told him if the test concludes and they remove the caps then I’d come back, but as long as there is any provider with an unlimited usage plan, that company will get my money for Internet access.

He was very cordial, if not somewhat flustered, and the conversation ended with a “Have a good night.”

I encourage everyone who opposes these caps to have a civil conversation with the customer service center of Time Warner. These are people who get dumped on all the time for the decisions of their bosses and higher. You're much more likely to be taken seriously and your viewpoints appreciated if you're not yelling in their face and casting obscenities at them.

Additionally, the decision to cancel one or more services now to show you're serious is of course up to you, but I prefer to provide a warning and be ready to follow through with action if the caps actually arrive.

One interesting thing to note from the conversation is that he very clearly repeated that the so-called "gas gauge" will not be available until September and the three month grace period will begin at that time. This essentially means by December 31st, 2009 we will either have caps or we won't.

I also encourage the use of DD-WRT or Tomato as open source router firmware that you can install (with some moderate risk of damage if done improperly) that will enable a bandwidth monitor that you can access without actually using any external bandwidth to read it. I have DD-WRT and it provides a built-in WAN and LAN usage monitor per month broken down by day. Other software includes MRTG which requires an SNMP-enabled router[1] but provides more bandwidth details on a web page hosted on the machine on which it runs.

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[1] DD-WRT has SNMP support even if your router doesn't support it with the pre-installed firmware. SNMP support for Tomato is not default, but there are articles on how to get SNMP with Tomato

"Bandwidth Cap" is a misnomer... and it's illegal

The Wrong Term

For much of this debate about Time Warner's consumption-based billing plan we've been using the wrong terminology -- bandwidth caps.

If you consider my previous posts (yes, I mis-used the term as well), bandwidth is merely a measure of the network speed and that has always been capped. Time Warner sells access levels based on speed, standard and turbo at rates of 10 Mpbs and 15 Mbps respectively. By the very definition of access speed the bandwidth is capped at a maximum. So our focus isn't on bandwidth caps so much as it is on data consumption.

Consumption-based Billing Is Illegal

Further consider that Time Warner only has a right to charge fees for what it owns or is licensed to distribute. This means that Time Warner has the right to charge fees for access to its Internet backbone infrastructure, but only access. The content of the Internet may or may not be licensed to Time Warner and certainly everything found online is not owned or licensed to Time Warner.

According to various sections of the U.S. Copyright Law, it would be massive copyright infringement (punishable up to $150,000 per infringement and arguably on a scale large enough to be considered criminal) for Time Warner to charge subscribers for content from the Internet without either being the copyright holder or a licensed distributor.

It only follows that consumption-based billing is equivalent to charging for data, not access -- data for which Time Warner does not own or have a legal right to redistribute and charge a fee. Therefore consumption-based billing is outright illegal.

I am not a lawyer by any means. I have spent a fair amount of my life in the legal industry and have participated in several mock trials in addition to being an active proponent of open source software and Linux, so I am quite familiar with copyright law in the United States of America and I'm a bit surprised this hasn't been brought up before. I'd be interested in hearing the explanation from a judge as to how this would not fall under the purview of copyright infringement.

[Update 4/8/2009 12:07PM]

To clarify, I am saying that because Time Warner is effectively charging for content (data downloaded) and not for access to that content, they are in violation of the content owner's rights to monetize their own works since I'm sure TWC is not paying anything out to the content owners for the fees they collect in overage charges.

If TWC however changed their data usage cap to a time usage cap like AOL did back in the day, then they'd be in the copyright clear. You would now be limited by the amount of time you spent online, not the amount of data you download (which doesn't impact bandwidth at all and doesn't contribute to any perceived "crisis").

For example, the low tier might be 60 hours a month for $20 (about 2 hours per day) and the high tier would be 300 hours a month (about 10 hours a day) for much more.

People would at least know exactly what the caps mean and it wouldn't affect their bandwidth / connection speed. Maybe a discounted connection (< 10Mbps) could be offered for even lower, but quite frankly it's more profitable for everyone ("heavy" users and "light" users alike) to pay the same amount because TWC makes a huge profit off the "light" users since they rarely spend time using the bandwidth they're given.

A Thank You Letter to Congressman Massa

The following is a copy of a thank you letter I sent to Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY) for taking a stand against Time Warner's unfair and anti-competitive proposed bandwidth caps.

You can e-mail and thank Congressman Massa too

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Congressman Massa,

I want to thank you for taking a stand for the people of Rochester. In particular I'd like to thank you for speaking out against Time Warner Cable's predatory bandwidth cap proposal.

In Rochester, modern users are consuming more and more data from the Internet as more and more services and products move online. Time Warner's move appears to be a thinly-veiled effort to lock customers out of competition and stay within TWC's own product offerings. The products TWC provides that are most under threat are digital phone (Voice over IP or VoIP), video on demand (such as Netflix), and even their flagship product television with sites like abc.com and hulu.com providing the same content in high definition for free online.

The excuses Time Warner has made are laughable at best when compared to other cities where Time Warner must actually compete for business. While Frontier does offer some broadband Internet access, they are no strangers to suggesting a cap and their DSL technology is an aging one that is rapidly losing pace to cable and fiber technologies. Even wireless broadband is expected to exceed some DSL speeds in the near future.

Frontier is not a viable long-term option. Rochester needs more cable and Internet competition to keep the prices reasonable.

Thank you again for hearing the painful cries of Time Warner Customers in Rochester and for taking a stand against these unfair and anti-competitive proposals.

Sincerely,
Brion Swanson

Another Analogy for Bandwidth

I realize my previous water company analogy may not have been as all-encompassing as I'd hoped, so here's my second attempt at a simpler analogy.

Imagine a glass of water with straws in it.

Consider the width of the opening of the glass to be the bandwidth that Time Warner has to the Internet for everyone to use.

Consider the water in the glass to be the data that you want to download (by sucking it up through a straw).

Finally, consider a single straw as your connection to the Internet.

When there are only a few straws in the glass, everyone can suck up data as fast as their straw will allow them (that is, the speed of your connection in Mbps - also known as bandwidth).

Some straws represent more speed / greater bandwidth and are bigger than others. But there is only a limited amount of space in the glass to put straws. If you pack the glass full of straws to the point where you can't add any more, then you've reached the maximum capacity (bandwidth) of the glass (backbone Internet connection).

What Time Warner is proposing is that you will get a bigger straw for the top tiers, but you'll only be able to take two sips. Every sip afterwards will cost you extra money. Because you're straw is so big, you only get a few sips as opposed to a couple good slurps.

Time Warner's plan doesn't deal with the problem of too many straws in the glass. Indeed they're exacerbating the problem by making some straws bigger.

The people in the lowest tier will also receive the smallest straws and take much longer to reach their allotted number of sips because they don't get as much data per sip as the higher tiers / bigger straws.

Let me know if this is any clearer. I really want to help everyone understand why Time Warner's tiered Internet access by usage doesn't help anyone -- not even the light users.

I'm not the only one using water as an analogy for bandwidth.

Demystifying Bandwidth, or The Internet Is Not A Natural Resource

We need to get a couple things clear before this gets too out of hand.

• Bandwidth is not the data you consume or produce.
• Bandwidth is not a natural resource.

This seems to be of some confusion especially among Time Warner Cable executives. They continue to state incorrectly that some customers are "using up" more than their share of bandwidth. They also suggest that by sorting customers into tiers will alleviate the bandwidth problem because you'll pay for what you use.

Two Problems

There are two problems with that line of thinking and they go straight back to the two things I made clear at the top.

1. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be simultaneously transferred across a network path (such as from your house to Time Warner's central office to the Internet). This means that if Time Warner's total bandwidth for a single connection from my street to the Internet was 32 Mbps (that's megabits, not megabytes per second) and only two people on my street were using a full 15 Mbps connection at the same time, Time Warner would still have 2 Mbps of bandwidth available for others to use.
   
   To that end, those two people could continue on transferring data at 15 Mbps forever and the remaining 2 Mbps would still be available. Nothing's being consumed except the space in which to transfer data. When one or the other stops transferring data their 15 Mbps of bandwidth frees up and now 17 Mbps is available for others to use.
   
   The problem Time Warner is running into is that it oversold its available bandwidth and now that more and more people are actually using their full connections there isn't enough space (bandwidth) for everyone to transfer at their full speed at once. As you can see, just because you pay more for more data usage doesn't mean there's going to be space for you to transfer that data if enough people are in the same tier as you.
   
   I'll revisit this idea in a moment.
   
   
2. When bandwidth is used it does not go away permanently. Unlike water, gas, or electricity -- all three of which must be produced or refined before (and sometimes after) consumption -- bandwidth does not require any pre- or post-processing before it's available to another user after being used.
   
   Bandwidth is replenished the instant someone stops using it. Think of it like a rubber band. This rubber band is special in that it cannot break, but it does have a limit to how far it can stretch. Now imagine pulling on that rubber band a little bit. How much it's pulled is analogous to how much bandwidth is being used. As more and more people try to pull it a little bit further it stretches to the point where it cannot stretch anymore. This is the "used up" point.
   
   As soon as one person lets go of their section of the rubber band it relaxes a little bit such that another person can pull on it. This is the elasticity of bandwidth -- it becomes available for another user immediately after it is released (not actively transmitting data). How does one meter elasticity? You're not losing or gaining anything, simply pulling and releasing. Bandwidth is not a natural resource and it does not get created or consumed in the same sense as a natural resource.

So now we understand that bandwidth provides us a means to transfer data, not a measure of the data we transfer (only the rate at which we do so). This means that a low bandwidth connection can transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data while still allowing many other people to do the same. Likewise, a high bandwidth connection will reduce the number of people who can simultaneously transfer data.

Time Warner Water Company

Question: If Time Warner Cable is concerned that the amount of bandwidth available will not meet demand at the access rates they sell (10 Mbps or 15 Mbps), they why aren't they building out their infrastructure to meet the demand?

Remember the first problem of oversold bandwidth? Let's revisit that...

Imagine Time Warner Cable ran the water utility (we'll call them Time Warner Water), then their story might be something like the following:

Time Warner Water (TWW) lays 12" water mains down each block of the city of Rochester in 1905 thinking pipes that size would be more than enough to meet water demand for the current residents. TWW charges each resident a flat monthly fee for unlimited water flow at a rate of 10 gallons per minute.

Most residents at the time did not use much water other than to run their tap and toilet and they were content. A very few residents used their water for gardening and cleaning, but they did not cause a problem for other residents because there was more than enough water pressure for everyone.

Over time houses are updated with appliances and additional bathrooms all of which use an increasing amount of water. Consequently, increased demand is placed on the common water main. Soon people start noticing low water pressure and poor rate of flow from their hoses when they're out watering their lawn in the evening at the same time as everyone else on the block.

Some residents complain to TWW and say they're not getting the flow promised for their monthly fee. TWW's solution to the perceived common problem is to roll out a tiered pricing structure whereby each resident will be charged a base rate for the amount of water they use plus additional charges if they go over that amount.

Some people don't see this as a big problem and fall under the low-use tier of consumers. Most of the rest of the block determine they are medium or high quantity users and pay for the middle- and high-end tiers.

One evening everyone on the block is out watering their lawn again and low water pressure again occurs even though they've all paid for their usage. In this scenario, we're assuming no one is going over their limit, they're simply all using the water at once.

Do you see how the tiers are not a solution to the problem?

Time Warner Cable's real solution

What hasn't been made very clear in Time Warner Cable's communications is that access speed will be determined by your tier as well. This means if you're in the bottom tier -- the less than 5 GB / month tier -- you will have a lower bandwidth (perhaps 2 - 5 Mbps). If you're in the top tiers -- the 40 GB or 100 GB / month tiers -- you will have the same bandwidth you're used to now (between 10 and 15 Mbps).

Oh ho! Now we start to see how Time Warner will try to make this work. They'll slow down the low-bandwidth users so they don't take up so much space in the "Internet tube" and give the high-bandwidth users more space to download data. The side effect of course is two-fold:

1. People who infrequently use the Internet now but see pages load very quickly will find their pages load much more slowly even though their monthly billed rate may not have gone down (or may have gone down only slightly).
2. People who frequently use the Internet will be able to download the same amount of data they do now but that amount probably far exceeds the 40 GB monthly cap leading to excessive overage charges.

In both cases Time Warner makes out like a bandit by degrading the speed of service for infrequent users and making it simple for frequent users to go over their cap and incur additional fees.

What Time Warner needs to do is stop overselling its bandwidth. If it can't service all of its customers at peak times at 15 Mbps, then it needs to lower the maximum speed to something it can handle at peak times or upgrade it's connection to the Internet backbone (make the water mains bigger).

Charging for data usage is simply ingenuous, inaccurate, and completely missing the point of bandwidth. What they're really doing is finding a way to charge you more for less, and I'd let them know what you think about that.

And by the way, this goes for Comcast, AT&T, Rodgers, Sprint, T-mobile and any other ISP or cell phone carrier charging for data transferred instead of access speed.