http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/bowing-to-press.html
Under intense press scrutiny and customer backlash, Time Warner Cable is altering but not discarding its controversial plans to ditch flat rate broadband subscriptions in favor of a metered approach that effectively charges customers by the bit.
The company announced late Thursday a bare-bones plan that might actually save the most miserly net user money, and upped the data levels for its other tiers.
But the company is sticking to its argument that increased bandwidth usage will become extremely onerous for the company and could lead to "internet brownouts," despite the fact that its public financial statements contradict that asssertion and show that its broadband costs actually fell in 2008.
To accommodate lighter Internet users and those who need a lower priced option, we are introducing a 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 KB/128 KB for $15 per month. Overage charges will be $2 per GB per month. Our usage data show that about 30% of our customers use less than 1 GB per month.
• We are increasing the bandwidth tier sizes included in all existing packages in the trial markets to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively. Package prices will remain the same. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.
• We will introduce a 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 per month (offering speeds of 10 MB/1 MB). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.
• Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.
• Once we implement this trial, we will not immediately start billing customers for overage. Rather, we will first provide two months of usage data. Then we will provide a one-month grace period in which overages will be noted on customers’ bills, but they will not be charged. So, customers will have an opportunity to assess their usage and right-size their service packages before usage charges are applied.
• Trials will begin in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., in August. We will apply what we learn from these two markets when we launch trials in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in October, but we will guarantee at least the same level of usage capacity in these trials.
• As we launch DOCSIS 3.0 in the trial markets, we plan to offer a 50/5 MB speed tier for $99 per month.
Epicenter remains doubtful these new levels will make its customers happy, though the lowest level might be a way to keep Congress from getting too interested.
Our questions still remain: If broadband is cheap, why install these meters? We suspect it's still just a ploy to get consumers to sign up for a more expensive plan than they need, and think it's bad for innovation and a step backward for the net.
Read the rest of TWC's statement here.
