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Time Warner Cable to begin charging by usage in select cities (including Rochester N.Y.) and crappy data

Posted by colin on April 2nd, 2009

From BusinessWeek:

Rut Roh Juicers.

Time Warner cable, starting in April, is beginning to collect usage data from users in Austin, San Antonio, and Rochester. Later in the summer, they will begin charging based on multiple levels of usage per month: 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. 

Kind of sucks hard, and feels like a step backwards.

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Just something to add: I planned on writing this post about how I am pretty pissed about the capping, and I am, but I got sidetracked because I think I found a flaw in the article. I think they are wrong in some of their math.

According to Hulu and RealWorldVideoCompression.com, an average video stream from hulu will be between 480 and 700 kbps. That is an average of 590 kbps, which translates into ~74 KBps, rounding up for audio.

270 MB for an hour long, low definition video on Hulu. Which sounds about right.

The article, however, claims

A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.

Really? Lets take our 270 MB for an hour of video. You would need to watch about 148 hours a month @ 270 MB an hour to use 40 GB of data. Thats 37 hours of video a week.

Lets assume that kb and KB were never properly converted, and that an hour of streaming video was 2,160 MB, or 2.160 GB (which is definitely not true), then a family that watches 7.25 hours of video a week would be using 15.66 GB / week, or 62.64 GB / Month, which … is still off by a factor of ten, according to this guy, who claims that 7.25 hours of streaming video a week is effectively 240 GB of transfer a month.

Sounds like some stretched numbers to me. What is he assuming, that the average household streams blue ray data to their home?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under No Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Time Warner Cable to begin charging by usage in select cities (including Rochester N.Y.) and crappy data”

  1. April 2nd, 2009 at 11:14 am

    rob says:

    Well, that’s Hulu/YouTube/Other relatively high-compressed video sites. I’d like to see the math done with regards to Netflix Instant Queue streaming.

  2. April 2nd, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    brad says:

    YEAH COLIN & ROB!!

    edit: wrong author the first time ’round

  3. April 2nd, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    jake says:

    Well good thing they are doing this.

    Have you ever seen the movie where those ghosts and stuff get in your brain through wired technology?

    TW say it. They are doing this so people drop their services, and hopefully stop using the Internet altogether.

    Now we just need cell phone companies to jump aboard, and when the ghosts invade our airwaves in 2010, the people in the cities where cell phones and internet have become too expensive will live.

    I can only hope Comcast and Qwest jump aboard as well before it’s too late…

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