With FIOS coming to a lot of places around the country? Good luck with that, TW.
It's un-American.
If I choose to purchase more cars, or more lumber, or more of a zillion other things, the company selling to me rolls out the red carpet, thanks me extra for my business, and goes a little out of their way to make me feel special. They also charge me more in total, of course, than the customer who buys just one car, or just one sheet of plywood or just one of whatever. One hundred cars costs more than one car ... how else could it be. But the per car cost goes down a bit, for bulk purchases.
The high volume customer is valued, more highly.
So here comes Time Warner, trying to make it sound like they are going to penalize the high volume customer with punitive penalty fees, "for the sake of the little guy." The damn liberals must have run the common sense capitalist businessmen out of Time Warner. They got the message all backwards.
Even the electric power company, though liberal around the edges with their green environmentalist propaganda, is at heart capitalist -- the more electricity I use, the more I pay -- fair deal. True, the per-kilowatt cost tends to rise with usage, not shrink, but at least they don't go out of their way to punish you (unlike the Cell Phone company did, when my teen age son discovered text messaging, for example.)
Time Warner? Their cable Tv is OK BUT my AT&T hi speed connection (yes, the same AT&T that wants to “peak” at your “illegal” downloads) is great, so I can bet $$$$ that subscribers will be leaving TW ISP for the competition.
Reminds me of my family members in Canada who are being monitored (and sometimes “capped”) by Bell due to “excessive” donwloads.
I download about 200 Gigs a month on my FIOS, and I am not even trying.
I can download an entire 5 gig DVD in less than 40 minutes.
Metered rates. Fat chance. Cry me a river Time Warner.
Time Warner is trying to make up revenue, lost when people get a chance to rid themselves of the TW monopoly.
Verizon laid fiber optic lines, and almost everybody in my neighborhood is switching from TW cable, to FIOS.
And it is NOT mainly about technology. It IS mainly because Time Warner (remember AOL Time Warner) is such a lousy company to deal with.
It is a classic example of what goes around, comes around.
My internet is more reliable than TW, but the same speed. My phone is unchanged, but the TV is way better.
Metered rates? Ha.
Using their logic, I should be paying according the the percentage of my [purchased] rated bandwidth I am receiving.
I’m paying my cable net provider (not TW) for 6 megs down. I should be able to get 85% of that. For two months my throughput has dropped to .75-1.5 megs EVERY night from approximately 7: to 10:45. Right at quarter to 11 it jumps right back up to 5.3 megs. And they just can’t figure it out (major sarcasm).
Thus TW should charge a customer based on their real throughput, not on their “rated” throughput, if one were to make a logical extension of their reasoning.
In reality, logic has nothing to do with it. They will get what the market will bear, if there is competition, or what their monopoly permits if they have greased the right palms.
What's next? Charging per show watched? Hey, those rabbit ears will soon come in handy! (And they don't effect global warming!)
I talked to a cousin who lives in Beaumont, he said RR is pretty much the only game in town, that in large parts of the area, RR is the only broadband option. He thinks that was probably why Beaumont was chosen, since in other markets, people would flee for another carrier as soon as they got wind of it.