Some assorted bits and pieces about the cable world to tie together for you:
All the various tech sites are reporting that Time Warner Cable is going to test-drive a “pay-per-bits” pricing scheme for Internet access. Not unlike your cellular service, you would pre-pay for a set amount of bandwidth usage per month and then pay a premium in the form of per-byte overage fees. But, as DSL Reports also informs us, TWC is likely to set the bandwidth cap pretty low during the trial period — perhaps as low as 5GB. On the face of it, that might sound like a lot to you, but to anyone who downloads media content from the Internet, 5 gigs is a pittance. A single movie might be 5GB.
Most reactions to this news are pretty unfavorable, but telco guru David Isenberg says he thinks this isn’t a bad idea at all as a stopgap measure to deal with bandwidth usage outstripping the existing network infrastructure. Making people pay will slow down some bandwidth hogs, and is probably a fairer way of dealing with the issue than abandoning net neutrality and establishing preferred-access tiers for providers.
Meanwhile, at the CES show Cisco announced a 1Gbps “concept” cable modem that would work under DOCSIS 3.0′s channel-bonding process (which otherwise caps out around 150Mbps). Since DOCSIS 3.0 isn’t even implemented yet (and probably won’t be for another year), this is a “sneak-peek” at something that might be four or five years down the road. Of course, if your cable service only lets you download 5GB a month, about the only thing a gigabit cable modem will do is let you use up your allotted bandwidth 25 times faster than you can right now, but maybe by the time this puppy starts shipping they’ll have beefed up the backbone a bit.
They will want to get going on that sooner rather than later, too. In 2006, cable provider Cablevision tested a “network DVR” service that let customers have some DVR features without having to have a set-top box, but the test was pulled due to a court order that said they were crossing over into broadcaster territory by “redistributing content”. Now, our friends at Comcast think they’ve found a way around that by limiting the functionality of the network DVR. Your TiVo, or even your cable company DVR set-top box can fast-forward and rewind through recorded programs as well as provide the time-shifting ability of recording a show and watching it whenever you want. Comcast’s test service will only let you jump back to the beginning of a program already in progress — no fast forwarding whatsoever (which means you can’t skip through the commercials), and, from the description Ars Technica provides I’d say that rewinding and recording aren’t going to be part of the feature set either. There are indeed times where it would be great to be able to jump back to the beginning of a program you just turned into (a feature you can’t do with TiVo or other hardware DVRs unless they’re already on that channel), but personally I can’t see why anyone would pay for that service instead of a full-featured DVR unless it is super-cheap. Unless, of course, the real goal of the cable companies is to defeat the DVR in the long term and make this sort of “crippled” service the only one you can have.
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