Time Warner introducing even lower caps in the U.S.

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Regs

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Reply # 207236 16-Apr-2009 09:57

freitasm: For those who keep quoting the U.S. as the land of wonderful Internet, here comes the caps. While Comcast introduced a quite generous 250GB cap in their plans, Time Warner is introducing plans with 5, 10, 20 and 40GB caps.

Position has changed somewhat, but caps still appear to be there to stay:

http://a.longreply.com/109511

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.

BTW: i downloaded a little over 12GB of legitimate traffic yesterday - two sql server 2008 service packs at 300MB each, an ISO for the visual studio team editon from MSDN at a little over 4GB, and a couple of testdrive VHDs at 4GB or so each.

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wired

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Reply # 207386 16-Apr-2009 20:58

richgamer:

watch everyone switch over to comcast for their 250gb cap. bad move from time warner. their going to lose all their subscribers.

Good more for TW.

They tend to only loose the heavy users which they don't want anyway. Comcast ends up with a higher proportion of heavy users paying little per GB than the light users (high average $/GB). This drives up their costs compared to revenue and they are likely to pull their caps down in the future.

NZ has already been there. Wired Country started out offering unlimited data usage and with its low latency etc., attracted a lot of heavy users. They introduced data caps while Orcon went to very high data caps/(maybe unlimited - the memory has faded). While people left WC, Orcon became overloaded and for a while provided terrible service. From memory Telecom couldn't provide a suitable backhaul to Orcon for a while.

Offering big data caps is only helpful if you can get a good revenue for it.

Screeb

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Reply # 207397 16-Apr-2009 21:51

wired:
Offering big data caps is only helpful if you can get a good revenue for it.

Time Warner DO get a good revenue for it. Their revenue increased 11% from 2007 to 2008 - from $3.7B to $4.2B (USD). Also, a US congressman wants to ban caps.

This is purely a matter of stopping internet video from their competitors.

Ragnor

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Reply # 207429 17-Apr-2009 00:19

Consider that TW will not implement this scheme in markets where Verizon offers their fiber-based service (FIOS)....

Ilmarin

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Reply # 207635 17-Apr-2009 16:25

Time Warner Cable shelves broadband usage billing

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Cable Inc said on Thursday it would shelve plans to test a system that bills customers for the amount of broadband bandwidth they use instead of at a flat fee to access the Internet from home after an uproar from consumer groups and politicians.

"It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans," Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Glenn Britt said in a statement.

Full article here.

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