DISQUS

OhGizmo!: Time Warner Attempts To Outlaw Faster, Cheaper Community Broadband

  • mcman · 7 months ago
    That's about the only good thing about Comcast broadband. They only have one level of residential service and over the past 4 years the speed has gone from 3mbps to 16mbps but the price does not go up with the speed changes.
  • Blairf Felgenheimer · 7 months ago
    Just another reason to dump Time Warner. They have about as much chance to stop city owned ISPs as does Microsoft to stop Linux.

    mcman, not sure what podunk you live in but the Comcast here has 4 levels of residential service 15/20/30/50 mbps download (with powerboost) at costs ranging from $43 to $140 per month.
  • Jon · 7 months ago
    Don't get me wrong, Cable companies are the devil. I totally agree that a community should be able to setup and manage there own ISP, cable services etc. , but in Time-Warners defense, they have something called build-out requirements. They have to run lines and offer service to any area with certain specified population densities, even if it is not profitable.
  • jmlee337 · 7 months ago
    One would think their attempts would fall under some anti-trust/anti-monopoly legislature or something
  • Matthew Walton · 7 months ago
    Not to be one of those nitpicky jerks who find every mistake there is, but do you mean Mbps not mbps? wouldn't mbps be millibits per second?
  • Broadband · 6 months ago
    Comcast last year paid the state of Florida $150,000 to deal with this exact issue and the ambiguity that surrounded it. Each month, Comcast would contact the top 1,000 users of its 14.4 million user network network, regardless of how much data they had transferred, and warn them that they were violating the acceptable use policy. When users asked what the limit was, they were simply told that they needed to stay out of the top 1,000 user list—something impossible to know.

    The state attorney general said that "a 'top 1,000' criteria, as previously applied, did not clearly and conspicuously disclose to the consumer the specific amount of bandwidth deemed to be excessive under Comcast's subscriber agreements." In response, Comcast adopted the explicit 250GB/month cap.