That damned Road Runner is hard to pin down. It now seems that Time Warner Cable is responding to the public denunciation of their tiered pricing plan by saying that they are scrapping plans for the very high speed DOCSIS 3.0 roll-out in our areas.

Their claim seems to be that they cannot afford to do the technology roll-out without the money from the new pricing plan. However, this is sophistry, pure and simple. DOCSIS 3.0 is not a major investment. In fact, it is rumored that some of their own internal memos pegged the cost at about $6.95 per household. Personally, I would gladly pay $10 more each month for that service, so this is not at all about cost. Also, the DOCSIS 3.0 architecture allows them to multiplex their lines, which actually eases the local loads placed on the system by high bandwidth users. It’s a win all the way around.

So what’s their motivation this time? Is this a retaliatory strike against us consumers? I don’t think so. I think this is actually a good business decision on their part. Markets where TWC competes with other very high speed ISPs (e.g. Verizon FiOS) need DOCSIS 3.0 worse than the Rochester market, at least from TWCs perspective. They are hemorrhaging customers in those markets and desperately need a more competitive offering. From a strictly business perspective, they are already the fastest ISP in our area. They have no current or impending competition. There simply is no business reason that upgrading our area should be a priority.

All of which further amplifies the point that either there desperately needs to be a viable broadband competitor in our local market, or TWC needs to be recognized and regulated as a public service monopoly.