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As you’ve probably read here and at other Internet sites, Time Warner is temporarily shelving plans to offer capped bandwidth plans to customers. But that doesn’t mean that the company still isn’t acting like a petulant child – news is leaking out that users in Austin, Texas are running into TWC’s “proposed” 40GB limit and having their Internet service cut off. Worse yet, when Time Warner contacts heavy users, the company’s not giving them an explicit cap – just advising them to “use less”.

Did Time Warner learn nothing from the Comcast debacle?  Last year, Comcast got in trouble for threatening to disconnect heavy users… but not telling them how much data was “too much”. This led to considerable criticism from tech websites, who (rightly) stated that it was impossible for people to stay within the company’s bandwidth limits if no one would tell them what those limits were. Imagine, if you will, signing up for an “unlimited” cellphone plan, then getting a nasty call from the company’s “security team” telling you to not use so many minutes. And when you ask “well, how many minutes can I use?”, the only answer you get is “fewer”. That’s essentially what Comcast was doing, and it got a smackdown for it (well, that and actively interfering with Bittorrent protocols). So now Comcast has an explicit cap of 250GB/month.

Of course, TWC wants to have a smiliar cap… of only 40GB/month. Let me break down the math on that for you again: assuming that each company’s “basic” broadband plan costs $45/month, Comcast is charging its customers around 18¢/GB/month, while TWC wants to charge its customers $1.13/GB/month for the exact same product.

If people could change cable providers as easily a cell phone companies, I wouldn’t be up here bitching up a storm about it. But, in many areas, TWC is the only choice for broadband. They’re a monopoly. And one of the key legal tests of an illegal monopoly is whether a company, as the sole provider of a good or service, increases its prices for no legitimate reason. We all understand that companies occasionally have to raise prices to account for inflation. Or they might have to increase their prices significantly if the price of one of the raw materials skyrockets. But that isn’t happening with Time Warner. Bandwidth has never been cheaper, yet TWC wants to double the rates for your home Internet connection, if not treble them.

I’m watching you like a hawk, Time Warner.

Oh, and just this past Friday, the missus and I got a slick new color catalog from AT&T about their U-Verse offerings. Hmmm……

I know it’s a little late, but Ars Technica posted this great article on Wednesday about how Time Warner just might be stretching the truth about their bandwidth costs. Apparently, all of TWC’s whining about “increased costs” just doesn’t bear out analysis… of the company’s own shareholder reports. In fact, external bandwidth is the least of all of TWC’s contractual obligations, except for existing debt obligations.

How’s this for a figure: Time Warner pays around $40 million per year for their external bandwidth. Compare that to how much the company pays for carriage contracts – the contracts between cable networks and cable providers ($3 billion), digital phone bandwidth ($453 million), and purchases of set-top cable boxes ($175 million) and you can see that TWC really is raking it in on its Internet service.

And not only that, the cost of backbone bandwidth is dropping by around 50 percent every year. So whatever Time Warner pays for bandwith this year, expect the price per megabyte to actually fall next year… and the year after that, and the year after that.

You should really read the linked article. It will open your eyes.

It seems that Time Warner and Embarq never really paid much attention to the town of Wilson, NC. So when residents got fed up with paying too much for subpar service, they decided to do something about it.

They created Greenlight, an ISP that provides awesome packages for very good rates. How good are Greenlight’s deals? Well, for $99/month, you can get for 81 cable channels, unlimited phone service, and 10Mbps of synchronous bandwidth Internet; compare that to a similar “basic” plan from Time Warner, which offers fewer channels and less bandwidth for an “introductory rate” of only $137. For only $33 more per month than Time Warner’s “introductory rate”, Greenlight has a plan that provides every single channel (including premiums, like HBO and Showtime), unlimited phone service and 20Mbps of (let me mention this again) synchronous Internet.

Of course, Time Warner doesn’t like this one bit, so they’re teaming up with DSL provider Embarq to try and convince the North Carolina legislature to ban this type of “community-owned” ISP. And frankly, I can kind of see their point. Why is it fair for a community to use tax dollars to create a company that competes with Time Warner? Why not use tax money to create a chain of “community-owned” fast food restaurants or “community-owned” tire stores?

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