The giant money grubbing telecom company, Time Warner, has started testing another way of raping their customers.
They’re planning on setting limits between 5 and 40 Gigabytes of transfer a month. Charges of up to $7 per Gig beyond your limit. They claim this isn’t to capitalize on the online movie industry (yeah, right). A 40 gigabyte transfer limit a month:
(40 gigabyte) / (30 days) = 16.1817284 kBps (thank you Google)
That’s ridiculous. That’s barely faster than dialup. A 40 gigabyte transfer limit can easily be exceeded in 30 days. Even if you’re not a heavy sharer of anything. If you’re downloading at your peak rate, you’ll exceed this in about 18 hours (at my internet speeds, which are slower than the fastest Time Warner offers)
(40 gigabyte) / (630 kBps) = 18.4934039 hours
That’s not very long. I’m going to have to find some open source software to watch my pipe and calculate some monthly totals. Anways, back to the issue.
Instead, it’s to penalize the heavy downloaders: those that download “terabytes” a month. Let’s do a bit of math here. 1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes (Yeah, I know, technically it’s 1024 Gigabytes, but I doubt that Time Money-gruHHHH Warner is going to measure it that way). And to work on the conservative side we’ll say that someone that downloads “terabytes” is getting 2 Terabytes worth of data in that monthly billing period. And we’ll set a monthly billing period at 30 days.
(1 terabyte) / (30 days) = 414.252247 kBps
That’s feasible. I could maybe download constantly over 30 days 414 K/s and come up with 1 Terabyte worth of date. But going for “terabytes” of data in a month. That might be more difficult. I’d have to constantly be pushing 800 K/s. Right now I’ve got ATT’s U-Verse junk. (Their TV service isn’t all that great. It’s not quite soup yet.) Only the Internet service and I can’t get more than 630K/s.
(630 kBps) * 30 days = 1.52081251 terabytes
So their rate should be based on those numbers. If they want to penalyze heavy downloaders, like those that run torrent farms on thier computers, they should set the limits upwards of 100 - 200 Gigabytes of transfer a month. Time Warner is just trying to scrape more money from their already expensive internet rates.