This is a continuation of the post started a few days ago on Time Warner’s newly proposed tiered pricing plan for a handful of US markets, including Rochester, NY.

The NY Times published an interesting article showing that the US has some of the worst and most expensive broadband service in the developed world. Japan’s J:Comm is rolling out 160 mbps service (that’s 16 times faster than Road Runner) for $20/mo. No caps. The reason they cite that the US is behind? Lack of competition and the fact that TV service is often sold by the same company selling broadband and they don’t want to enable customers to stop paying them for cable TV service.

Then again, we could always move to Australia where the government is implementing a national broadband infrastructure program to get 100mbps service to 90% of homes. Hear that Mr. Obama? Sounds like a shovel-ready project to me.

For those of you looking for additional ways to help fight the TW demons who seek to deprive us of our precious Internet, consider the following:

• An online petition to discourage Time Warner. It’s easy to sign.
• Two websites dedicated to stopping this: stopTWC and Kiss My A**, Time Warner
• An email address where you can send your concerns to TW

The text of the email I sent to them is below. Feel free to plagiarize it heavily in writing your own message.

Your proposal to roll out tiered pricing for Road Runner service in Rochester, NY is a highly unfair business practice on your part. It is a thinly veiled attempt to discourage the use of high-bandwidth Internet content, which at this point is predominantly video, VoIP, and gaming. It is no coincidence that you also sell video and VoIP services, so you have a definite incentive to price these services from other providers out of your market.

It is also no coincidence that these tiered pricing programs are only rolling out in markets where you have no viable competition. Should you attempt to deploy tiered pricing in a market like Buffalo, NY where you face competition from Verizon FiOS, you are well aware that you would drive a significant portion of your user base to the competition. You speak of fairness in your propaganda for this new pricing structure, yet you are only willing to deploy it where your customer base is “trapped”. If it’s truly the fairest and most equitable approach to pricing Internet connectivity, then deploy it in markets where you are competing with the “unfair” unlimited bandwidth pricing models.

Further, your tiered pricing model is in direct conflict with Net Neutrality principles, and the roll-out of such programs that discourage the use of the Internet for certain content types through price gouging ($1/GB!) will doubtless drive the movement for the legislation of Net Neutrality, or at the minimum, the regulation of ISPs as a public service monopoly.

I implore you to reconsider this ill-conceived new program. I know that personally, you rather have me over a barrel as my family and home office cannot really afford to be without Road Runner, and there are no viable alternatives in this market. However, if this goes forward, I can assure you that I will be canceling my TW Cable television service. I can live without that, and I refuse to support this abusive new policy of yours by continuing to shell out $110/mo to your company.