Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > April > 03
Friday, April 3, 2009
Time Warner Cable capping: gigabytes of fallout
It’s been two days since we first reported that Time Warner Cable would be rolling out usage-based Internet service pricing this summer and the reaction has been… what’s the word? Intense? Outraged? Apocalyptic?
It has been interesting to watch not only Time Warner’s public relation moves when word of the Austin/San Antonio “test” spread, but the swift organizing and public kvetching of customers in the face of a pricing change that is months away.
It’s the first time I’ve seen a situation like this in Austin where much of the back-and-forth is going on via Twitter as customers (rightly) freak out about the effect this will have on their monthly bills and representatives from a large company defend the move and tout what they see as their product’s superior service in real-time. (And without the need for an intermediary like, say, a reporter who covers technology for a local newspaper.)
(An e-mail address has also been set up by Time Warner to get feedback from customers about the bandwidth billing, realideas@twcable.com.)
In my view, the two most fascinating Twitter postings from much-fired-upon Time Warner rep Alex Dudley were these: “just because our product is better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we’re a monopoly.” and “Have to get off Twitter and go prepare my Austin “Man of the Year” acceptance speech…”
Would it be off base for me to refer to that pair of Tweets as “Hubris & Humanity?”
Let’s talk nuts and bolts, though. A lot has happened since my previous blog post, and I’d like to round it up for you, wasting as little of your time and bandwidth as possible (something we will all have to start thinking about in the future).
- Burnt Orange Report posted a good summary of what’s happened so far, including statements from two Austin mayoral candidates, Lee Leffingwell and Brewster McCracken taking Time Warner Cable to task for the metered pricing. Leffingwell even cites downloads of “Friday Night Lights” in his statement, a move sure to pull at the heartstrings of devoted Austin fans. A follow-up post on BOR lists a quickly growing list of grassroots campaigns targeting Time Warner’s move. It includes a Facebook group, two dedicated Web sites and an online petition.
- Tech Web sites Ars Technica and Slashdot weighed in, bringing national attention to the issue.
- Austin-based GigaOm writer Stacey Higginbotham wrote about the situation and national bandwidth usage and pointed to a November post where Austin’s average Internet usage on Road Runner was estimated to be about 6 gigabytes a month. I’d argue that by summer, I would expect that average to have increased based on the growing popularity of Hulu, Netflix and other online streaming sites, but I have no specific numbers to support that idea.
- Statesman’s A1 story that ran yesterday.
- Brian Boyko, editor of Network Performance Daily, interviewed Alex Dudley and asked much more technical questions about how this is all going to go down.
- Chip Rosenthal suggests Austinites attend a City of Austin Community Technology & Telecommunications Commission meeting on Wednesday to voice their concerns.
- An e-mail this morning suggested that everyone against the new pricing send a brick. “Basically every one mails a brick to a TWC address (the local Austin branch would be perfect) using a flat box at the post office.” I can say emphatically that I am against the mailing of bricks of any kind, as it seems antithetical to how we approach things as early adopters. Can’t people send virtual bricks, or, say, create a hologram of a brick that can be mass-produced? I know bricks represent a physical inconvenience and are meant to convey a wall of protest (I listen to Pink Floyd too, thanks). But, come on! Think innovation, people! Speaking as someone who once received a cinder block in the mail during the heady dot-com boom days, I can tell you that it made me think much less of the mailer and made it hard to take that person seriously ever again.
Other thoughts I’ve had the last few days:
What if Time Warner partnered with services like Netflix, Xbox Live, iTunes or Hulu to allow for a kind of “Bandwidth immunity” on content downloaded from these sites? As long as you were accessing legal downloads, it wouldn’t count toward your monthly quota. If the true bandit here is illegal downloaders pursuing more content than they can ever consume, why not charge them, but not people who are already paying for legal content they are downloading? An editor I work with just signed up for a Major League Baseball online video service and all that HD video has her in a panic about what’s going to happen come September/October. Why not make legitimate use cheaper/subsidized over questionable usage?
If I were Grande or AT&T, I would be aggressively pursuing angry Time Warner Cable customers right now and promising not to enact similar bandwidth caps for at least the next two years. That may not be feasible for AT&T, but if you weigh an influx of new business against bandwidth costs, I imagine there might be a magic number there where it evens out or helps the company come out ahead. Grande seems to be wooing customers amid comment complains over on Burnt Orange Report.
It’s not set in stone that the caps will be the same as they were in Beaumont and, nothing against Beaumont, but it just doesn’t seem to make sense that Internet usage there would be the same as a city like Austin that has a huge early adopter community and so many techies. Does Time Warner know something about the Austin community that the rest of us don’t? If I were a betting man (and I am certainly not, so don’t ask me), I would wager that the caps will have to be higher here to make sense. And they would have to grow over time as the average amount of data customers consumes grows with the Internet. Alex Dudley has hinted in his posts on Twitter that different caps for Austin/San Antonio are a possibility as the company researches those markets between now and summer. Prices, we have also been told, are not set in stone, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where customers here would be paying less than those in Beaumont.
If all Internet providers go along with something like this, it pretty much puts nails in the coffin of OnLive, an innovative idea for a new gaming service. Talk about bad timing.
More thoughts and links? Post them in the comments.
Edited to add: I forgot to mention this excellent article from PC Magazine showing ways to monitor your bandwidth usage. Might want to start checking that out soon if you’re a Road Runner customer.
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, Movies & DVDs, Shopping, TV
