Time Warner Cable wants you to know they’ve heard the uproar over their proposed tiered pricing plan, and they are sensitive to your pain, so they’ve revised the plan. They will offer more tiers, and their tiers will cap both speed and volume. Seriously? We didn’t like one cap, so your solution is to impose a second one?
They have also announced overdue plans for a DOCSIS 3.0 roll out, but this is rapidly just table stakes in their industry. This would be like Sony announcing that all their new televisions will support HDTV. And the strong implication is that they are going to charge yet more money if you actually want to use DOCSIS 3.0 speeds at your house.
Let’s be clear. True unlimited service that you now pay $45/mo for will cost you $150/mo under the new plan. Yes, you actually have to use a lot of data to get to the $150 mark, but it still means that your cost each month may well vary with your usage, which means you will need to monitor your Internet activity in a way that you do not today. A new pricing model that incents behavioral change is not progress!
As today’s editorial page points out, Time Warner has not remotely defended its need for these changes. Anyone who understands anything about their delivery system’s technology knows that charging for volume makes no sense whatsoever as that is not how their cost is incurred. Data is not water or electricity. It is not consumed at a cost. Rather, the gating factor is the amount of data/sec that can be delivered. They do not save any money at all when the network is idle. So if you want to download movies while your neighbors are sleeping, it costs TWC no increment at all.
In light of the actual definition of bandwidth (which is what TWC enables) and in light of the behavioral changing nature of volume based pricing, if they really really need to abuse us with some sort of tiered pricing, why not charge for speed? In fact, they already sort of do. Road Runner is more expensive and faster than DSL. In turn DSL is more expensive and faster than dial-up. Road Runner already offers a “Turbo” speed package that jumps your speed 5mbps for $5/mo. With the advent of DOCSIS 3.0, they could create variable speed plans from 768kbps to 50mbps. Based on other providers who are rolling out this same technology in other markets where there is actual competition they might charge a range from $20/mo to $80/mo. Anything else is just price gouging. It’s selling flashlight batteries for $20 each during a blackout.
I suppose the good news is that TWC is hearing the messages from their enraged user base. The bad news is, they still aren’t listening.
