Bloggers blast bandwidth plan
2008-06-04 09:32
New York - Time Warner Cable Inc' attempt at metering customers' internet use ran into a buzz saw in the blogosphere on Tuesday.
The plan, which Time Warner Cable will start testing on Thursday in Beaumont, Texas, is aimed at charging users more for heavier volumes and faster service. Given the reigning orthodoxy that the internet should be free, it's little surprise the digital crowd objects.
Blogs, however, focused their complaints on the essentially financial argument that Time Warner Cable's move is out of step with trends in usage and could end up costing it customers.
Bloggers questioned the size of the pricing tiers, especially in an age when downloading movies from Apple Inc's iTunes store or Netflix Inc's unlimited streaming set-top box could easily push consumers past the allotted bandwidth.
Time Warner Cable told the Associated Press that its tiers will range from $29.95 (about R230) a month for relatively slow service and a five-gigabyte cap to $54.90 (about R425) a month for 15-megabit-per-second downloads and a 40-gigabyte cap.
Users that exceed the gigabyte caps will be charged. That's a sore spot, as a standard movie can consume about 1.5 gigabytes, the AP reported.
"Is Time Warner Cable crazy?" wrote Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm.com. Limiting internet usage could drive customers from cable operators to phone companies, which she noted are less concerned about congestion because their networks are structured differently.
'Any serious user should run away screaming to the nearest competitor'
"By offering tiered service at 15 Mbps it's promising me faster speeds that I will have limited opportunity to use, potentially driving me into the arms of another provider," Higginbotham wrote.
Jeff Jarvis, a professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, writes on BuzzMachine.com that Time Warner Cable's pricing model will hurt its relationship with customers because people don't like worrying about surpassing a certain bandwidth level.
"The essence of the media model is that you want your customers to consume more and more: more pageviews, more shows, more podcasts, more, more," Jarvis wrote. "TW Cable is making itself the enemy of more."
Alex Dudley, a Time Warner Cable spokesperson, said it would be prudent to let the test run its course before jumping to any conclusions.
"We're going to learn a lot from this test, and we'll be able to make decisions going forward based on everything we learn, including the reactions we get from our customers," Dudley said.
Silicon Alley Insider notes downloading five movies from iTunes would cause a consumer to exceed the cheap subscription limit. "Even 40 gigs a month for the 'fast' service isn't that much bandwidth in the era of all-you-can-eat Netflix streaming and four-computer households," the blog said.
Time Warner Cable won't apply the gigabyte surcharges for the first two months of the trial. It has 90 000 customers in the trial area, but only new subscribers will be part of the test.
"These caps are impractical, and any serious internet user -or someone who might become one someday - should run away screaming to the nearest competitor," Silicon Alley Insider says.