Lest you think Time Warner is the only one in public denial over their plans to create non-competitive markets for their video products, apparently our friends across the pond are having similar issues with British Telecom. While BT is claiming bandwidth problem too, its solution is a little more directly at their true issue. Rather than trying to charge high volume users extra fees, they are simply throttling every user’s bandwidth during prime time in an effort to make TV quality video online all but unwatchable in the evenings.
Curiously, it was just 2 years ago that BT was advocating net neutrality and stating that bandwidth problems were unforeseeable. But with their TV service losing revenue, they needed to manufacture a problem in order to boost the content side of their business.
Another interesting point in the article about BT is that the average cost of actually providing broadband service to a home is about $1/month per customer. This is not a BT specific number, but is considered an average across all ISP providers. Think about that next time you pay your cable bill.
The upshot is that TWC is hardly alone in trying to gouge its ISP customers in non-competitive markets in an effort to boost the bottom line of its other businesses. But that still doesn’t make it right.
