TWC's un-metered broadband is, err, metered

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches as Time Warner Cable stops imposing metered broadband and instead, imposes metered broadband. Not to mention Sockington the cat, celebrating 300,000 Twitter followers...

Stacey Higginbotham "whines" about Time Warner Cable:

Well, I hope all of you who complained about Time Warner Cable’s plans for metered broadband are happy. Shortly after the cable company pulled its metered broadband trials, it’s also rethinking its deployment of super-fast broadband in San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Greensboro, N.C., and Rochester N.Y.

Whiny citizens in those communities (including me) apparently don’t deserve super-fast broadband speeds of 50 Mbps unless it’s accompanies by tiers.

Joshua Topolsky has a message for TWC:

Time Warner Cable: you are fools and bastards if you pull this testing because you can't make your tiered billing work.
...
In a flurry of tweets from the company's cocky VP of PR, Alex Dudley, there seems to be an indication that with the consumption based billing (CBB to us industry types), so potentially goes the DOCSIS 3.0 trials.

Saul Hansell asks how much is that Gb in the window:

Hard numbers are not that easy to come by, but I’ve found a few. I see no evidence that the pace of spending to expand network capacity has increased at all. Indeed there are a lot of areas where new technology is radically cutting the cost of Internet bandwidth.
...
There seem to be two major buckets of expense to consider: the cost of local networks that connect to people’s homes and the cost of the bandwidth that link those networks to the Internet. The local costs are larger, but falling faster with new technology.

But Mark Cuban disagrees, as only El Cuban can:

Time Warner ... you are not going to win the PR battle if you make usage caps an issue related to cost. There is far too large a contingency on the internet who will do their best to shout down anyone and every corporation that challenge the dogma of “free internet” or “unlimited bandwidth”. You will have folks like Saul Hansell at the NY Times who doesn’t seem to realize how often he contradicts himself.
...
I like usage caps because there is nothing that pisses me off more than the network slowing down when Im trying to get work done. I’m a consumer that places a premium on quality over quantity.  I’m one of the 99pct of your consumers that you are putting 2nd to the 1pct. The vocal minority that probably don’t turn their lights off and then wonder why the electric bill is so high..

Robb Topolski has a different view:

In an excellent story, Saul Hensell debunks the ISPs which claim that they to increase the flow of your money in order to increase your Internet speed.  But the actual facts may not matter, as the industry seems to be bending to trickery in order to get its way.
...
Yet the cable providers have a problem – the faster the Internet gets, the less consumers may need its core product: television. So to convince you that everyone wants to pay heavy usage fees, they’ve turned to a fake consumer-advocacy group called the American Consumer Institute (ACI) to get the word out.

AC-who? Karl Bode explains:

Over the weekend, when a group called the American Consumer Institute penned a missive declaring that metered billing is a great idea for consumers ... Except the American Consumer Institute isn't actually a consumer group. It's an amalgamation of think tank reps pushing for corporate deregulation under the guise of consumer advocacy. A quick WhoIS notes that the ACI website is registered to ... a public relations apparatus for paying corporate clients
...
In reality, you'd be hard pressed to find a genuine consumer advocacy group that thinks Time Warner Cable's combination of low caps and high overages is a good idea.

And finally...

• Sockington 300,000 Followers

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Oracle-Sun: "Dumb... Sad... Moronic."
• Obama's CTO is Aneesh Chopra
• Mac malware builds botnet, while smug fanbois gently weep
• ...more

Buffer overflow:

• Shark Bait: Wait, you do WHAT?
• Richi Jennings: Websense (finally) gets appliance religion
• Scott Rosenberg: Mark Penn's fuzzy pro-blogging stats
• John Michelsen: Meeting the Business User's Expectations with Cloud computing, SaaS
• Information Aesthetics: Google Labs News Timeline
• Mike Schramm: Full text from "Legal Copy" ad isn't quite PC-specific
• Mary-Jo Foley: All-women's team makes Microsoft Imagine Cup contest finals
• ...more

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 24 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.