(Remixed photo sourced from Elizabeth West, Flickr.) In the aftermath of last week’s Consumer insurrection to testing of bandwidth caps, Time Warner Cable’s Glenn Britt hinted that metered billing was inevitable. “…We continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers.” Now Patrick Knorr of Sunflower Broadband has gone … Read more
Get used to it. We’re going to be talking about bandwidth caps for a long time to come. To sum up the latest happenings, Time Warner Cable sparked fresh outrage with the recent news that it would be testing consumption-based billing beyond Beaumont Texas. Then lots of other cable operator folks jumped in with their … Read more
The analyst firm Infonetics came out with a report this week on the Broadband CPE market. CPE stands for customer premises equipment and refers to the home devices attached to a broadband network – everything from modems, to set-tops, and lately new gadgets like femtocells and a variety of home management controllers. Jeff Heynen, author … Read more
According to a post over on DSLReports, Amazon and AT&T are now locking down free Internet access on old Kindle models so that users can only visit Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and the Kindle store after they hit a fixed monthly cap. No more browsing the wider web, or hacking Kindle hardware to create a free-riding mobile hotspot … Read more
Comcast is out with a conveniently timed announcement going over their intention to replace broadband caps with… “improved data usage management approaches.” However, despite management spin, to my eye they’ll continue to deal in data caps. Look, you’re either providing unlimited access or you’re not. Having said that, Comcast’s 250GB limit instituted in 2008 and upcoming 300GB limit … Read more
Last fall The Wall Street Journal reported that Sony had plans to launch an Internet-based video service. Now there’s word from Variety that the company is holding off. Apparently it’s not the content licensing deals that Sony’s worried about, but bandwidth caps. At an industry conference yesterday, Sony VP and GM Michael Aragon noted: “These guys have the pipe … Read more
While I still don’t come close to the Comcast bandwidth cap of of 250 GB per month, I’ve noticed a significant increase in my household’s broadband usage since Roku pushed out their new Netflix UI. The new interface makes it easy to browse content by genre, and, most critically, allows users to play any selection … Read more
Comcast will institute a per customer 250GB bandwidth cap starting on October 1st.