bandwidth

Time Warner Cable has put the brakes on a trial that was testing its new "consumption-based billing" system for its broadband service, the company said Thursday.

Chief Executive Glenn Britt said in a statement that there has been "a great deal of misunderstanding" by consumers and lawmakers who have criticized the plan.

Britt said that the company still believes that consumption-based billing may be the best way to handle rising network costs among its heaviest bandwidth users. But he conceded the company will not proceed with tests until it consults further with customers and interested parties.… Read more

Time Warner Cable's plans to cap broadband speeds and charge $150 a month for unlimited broadband downloads has caused quite a stir among consumers and politicians.

U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York is promising to introduce in Congress that will curb the use of tiered broadband services in areas where there is only one service provider. And angry consumers have taken to the blogosphere to express their outrage at a new plan that would theoretically charge them more on a per Gigabyte basis for downloads than they'd et from other services.

Last week, Time Warner Cable, … Read more

AT&T had an outage yesterday morning in the bay area due to fiber-optical cables being cut. This didn't just affect landlines, but cell phones as well. Rafe describes the dangers hackers would face in trying to cut those cables. We also estimate the distance to New York as 12 worms, and give a plus-five Holy Avenger sword salute to Dave Arneson.

AT&T was vandalized in the Bay Area? http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=26715

AT&T uses Twitter … Read more

BMExtreme is a great tool for computer users who enjoy hot-rodding their Internet connection. Much like a dashboard's gauges tell a driver everything they need to know, this program does the same for Internet-related system information.

This free unlimited trial downloads in the form of a medium-size box that allows a fully-customizable look at your system's bandwidth usage. The main screen measures the megabytes sent, received, and total for the session, day, and month. This is a great snapshot, but if you want something more particular, opening the configuration tab gives a world of variables. In addition, there … Read more

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Charlie in South Africa sent a video about bandwidth metering. There are a lot of filtering programs out there meant for protecting children, but that can be used to password protect Internet access. For more … Read more

DSL Reports has gotten word that Comcast will soon be offering its Internet subscribers a bandwidth usage meter as early as the first week of January. With the new system users would presumably be able to see how much bandwidth they've used, akin to cellular service providers offering estimates to keep customers from going over their allotted limit. Such a tool for Internet bandwidth would let customers adjust their usage habits accordingly.

Back in October the communications company imposed a limit on user downloads to 250 GB a month without providing any monitoring tools of its own short of … Read more

Tuesday's election was good news for Democrats, but it was also a good night for many online news sites and one, relatively unknown tech entrepreneur. Hear a rundown of our election coverage from the tech perspective. Also in this podcast, antitrust concerns lead Google to ditch a proposed ad deal with Yahoo, and AT&T quietly begins limiting users' bandwidth usage.

Today's stories:

Election spurs record traffic to news sites

Election a win for multitouch inventor

Tech's future under Obama, Democrats

What Obama presidency means for clean tech

Antitrust concerns kill Yahoo-Google ad deal… Read more

Updated at 7 p.m. PT to indicate customers will have a tool to measure their usage.

In an effort to keep "bandwidth hogs" in check, AT&T is testing the idea of placing limits on how much Internet data its subscribers can transfer each month.

The test, which began being applied in the Reno, Nev., area on Saturday, limits customers of AT&T's slowest DSL service to 20 gigabytes of monthly data transfers, while users of the fastest service will be limited to 150 gigabytes. Customers will have access to an online tool to … Read more

Hey, here's a thought: a free, open-source video codec that could be universally portable and playable. I'd vote for that, wouldn't you? In other news of the day, Dash stops making hardware to focus on software, Apple brings in an IBM guy to run the iPod division (other than Steve Jobs), and BlackBerry sneaks the Bold into stores today. Yeah, today. There's got to be something wrong with that thing.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Apple’s iPod chief to step down http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10082065-37.html

Dash Navigation pulls the plug … Read more