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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the also-have-great-deals-on-oceanfront-property-in-Kansas dept.

Charter tries to convince FCC that broadband customers want data caps

Charter Communications has claimed to the Federal Communications Commission that broadband users enjoy having Internet plans with data caps, in a filing arguing that Charter should be allowed to impose caps on its Spectrum Internet service starting next year.

Charter isn't currently allowed to impose data caps because of conditions the FCC placed on its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The data-cap condition is scheduled to expire on May 18, 2023, but Charter in June petitioned the FCC to let the condition expire two years early, in May 2021.

With consumer-advocacy groups and Internet users opposing the petition, Charter filed a response with the FCC last week, saying that plans with data caps are "popular."

"Contrary to Stop The Cap's assertion [in an FCC filing] that consumers 'hate' data caps, the marketplace currently shows that broadband service plans incorporating data caps or other usage-based pricing mechanisms are often popular when the limits are sufficiently high to satisfy the vast majority of users," Charter told the FCC.

Or you could offer some kind of software that shows which users are hogging the network.


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  • (Score: 2) by rcamera on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:21PM (13 children)

    by rcamera (2360) on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:21PM (#1036115) Homepage Journal

    i'm still on my old "minutes" plan from ~2002. 2 phones, 500 minutes shared between the two, ~$62/month all-in. that includes the 5-10 "junk" texts that cost $0.20 per.

    i think we hit 300 minutes of use in a month, but only once. when we had our first kid and got lots of calls from family.

    but we might switch over to one of those "old people" plans that feature the big numbers on the clamshell phones. those would save me ~$15-$20/month. but i don't like that they all (?) feature an "emergency" button that can't be disabled and tends to be "activated" when you keep the thing in your pocket.

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:50PM (11 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:50PM (#1036126)

    That's a cell plan? If so, I don't want to border on "shill" or "spam" so I won't mention the company, but I just got a prepaid phone plan that gives me unlimited talk and text + 5GB / month data for about $16 / month. All prepaid, no fees, no online payments. Nothing to even think about for the first 3 months I prepaid for, other than checking the phone for total data used, which is very tiny because I use WiFi most of the time. After 5GB, no $ penalty- data will drop to 2G speeds, so no videos / streaming at that point but you could still do email, simpler websites, etc.

    And you can keep your number as long as your existing company will release it. I've read horror stories of that taking more than a month, but sometimes it's almost instant.

    Next I'll buy their year-long plan which will be about the same $ / month. They'll work with pretty much any existing phone, and on any of the 4 major networks. I don't want to sound like a shill nor spammer, but there are many companies out there with equally inexpensive plans, or less, but less data too. Most are limited to a single carrier like T-Mobile, which is fine, but I wanted to keep my existing AT&T phones.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:23PM (7 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:23PM (#1036142)

      Warning: my wife had a SUPER cheap cell plan for a year... tried it month to month for a couple of months and it was brilliant, so paid for the annual plan which cost something like 9.5 months to get. Once she was on the annual plan, quality became spotty - data very unreliable, and even voice had major outage spots that would come and go.

      I think these cheaper plans often rent "3rd tier" access from the cell towers, so are the first ones to suffer when tower capacity is getting stressed.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @03:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @03:18PM (#1036168)

        that makes sense. when the storm hit last week, our cell reliability was unchanged. no loss of reception, no dropped calls. it would kind of suck for that to have dropped off when we needed it...

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:10PM (3 children)

        by RS3 (6367) on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:10PM (#1036188)

        I'm of the ilk that if I buy 12 months (some sell 15 months ahead) and audio quality goes down, I'll persist until they either fix it or give my money back, including filing FCC complaints, and every other govt. hotline, media (TV station) help, governor's hotline, file lawsuit, etc. Somebody's got to clean up the mess! :)

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:59PM (2 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:59PM (#1036210)

          Good luck with those windmills Don Quixote ... I don't know if they have the capacity to give you "preferential" service within their tier, but that's about all I think you would get in exchange for your squeaky wheel efforts.

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          • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday August 15 2020, @02:28PM (1 child)

            by RS3 (6367) on Saturday August 15 2020, @02:28PM (#1037086)

            Gee, thanks for the encouragement. /s

            I suppose we should all just shut up and let corporations rule us?

            I think a little too much of that has caused a lot of the problems in today's world.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 15 2020, @04:09PM

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday August 15 2020, @04:09PM (#1037123)

              I find that complaining to the (insert evil character here) directly only educates them on how better to serve [wikipedia.org] you.

              If you want to get some real traction against them, complain to their regulators, licensing boards, etc. Which is why cell phones and ISPs are such a lost cause... our regulators are actively screwing the customers in favor of the companies. To effect change there, we're going to need to start with the politicians who are appointing these foxes to guard the henhouses.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @08:48AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @08:48AM (#1036478)

        Was that the FreedomPop annual service?

        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday August 14 2020, @01:18PM

          by RS3 (6367) on Friday August 14 2020, @01:18PM (#1036518)

          That's one of the ones I looked into but nixed quickly. Not only for voice quality and network access problems, but they fail to mention- NO voicemail is included. You can buy it separately though, but that puts the total price in line with most other much better plans, so why deal with horrible "service".

    • (Score: 2) by rcamera on Thursday August 13 2020, @03:15PM (2 children)

      by rcamera (2360) on Thursday August 13 2020, @03:15PM (#1036166) Homepage Journal

      not "shill" or "spam" - just "accurate". as i said, that plan is ~18 years old; price never went up or down. i'm sure i could go cheaper. the prepaid options i looked at a few years ago expired the minutes every month - which defeated the point of prepaid; haven't looked since

      i used to love getting a new phone for "free" every 2 years with a re-up of the contract (that was baked into the plan). when they killed that, i got a bit grumpy - but my 5-year-old phone still holds a charge for 2 weeks, including light usage. the wife's 7-year-old phone holds a charge for a bit less, but still over a week, including light usage.

      my family (including in-laws) are pretty much all on the same network, which is part of the reason my usage is so light; in-network m2m (and nights and weekends) do not count against minutes.

      i know i should change, but i'm lazy :-)

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      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:06PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:06PM (#1036185)

        Not at all. There are always many factors in decisions, including "it ain't broke so don't fix it". If it's working for you, keep it! :)

        Very long backstory, but I couldn't keep my previous plan so I did a very intensive multi-week search and came up with a great plan. All good reviews. It's not the cheapest, but the 5GB / month is the most of any lower-tier plans. Audio quality is much better than before, but I need to qualify- I can't use the same phone (I have several) that I mostly used before because it's carrier-locked and getting it unlocked would involve me paying a lot of $ that I don't think I owe (because I never had a contract with the provider, and the people who did- my parents- are both passed away. There's more but not worth the time to type it all in.)

        All that said, I did use current phone with old provider and audio quality was bad, so I blame carrier.

        It turns out that cell plans and MVNOs are popping up everywhere, so competition is great.

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:25PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:25PM (#1036198)

        To clarify- I mentioned "shill" and "spam" because I didn't want to write the name of my new provider and get accused of shilling or spamming. But I will if someone asks. Let's just say the name involves a primary color that is not yellow nor blue, and also involves a thing typically made of cloth that's sewn into clothing so that you can put stuff in it like keys. :)

        I think it was a cnet article that mentioned them, and after almost 4 weeks of very intensive research, including calling many customer service reps. about the many many other plans, and deducing many "gotchas", I settled on the aforementioned one. So far it's perfect!

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:32PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:32PM (#1036145)

    We're on GoogleFi, something like $60/month for 2 phones with our normal 4G data usage: no contract, unlimited voice and text. Such a plan was unheard of 10 years ago, I think it was T-Mobile that cracked first and all the other carriers were forced to follow suit.

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