April 16th, 2009
What Price Bandwidth? Time Warner Cable Should Not Back Off
Let Time Warner Cable charge whatever it wants for bandwidth on the Internet. This is a free country.
If you decide to go elsewhere, that’s the penalty to TWC. But TWC should not back off on its usage-metered billing plans. People who don’t download movies should not have to pay for the bandwidth consumed by those who do.
Verizon has three tiers of pricing for high-speed Internet access. If you want to pull down data at 7.1 Mbps and upload it at 768 Kpbs, it’ll cost you $43 bucks each month. That’s the Turbo option. The highest.
Meanwhile, Time Warner was going to allow a user to download at 768KB a month and up at 128Kb, with maximum traffic of 1 gigabyte, at … $15 a month.
Or get 100 GB for $75 a month, at 10MB down and 1MB up.
Sounds like good old competition here. If you don’t like Verizon’s tiered plan, you go with Time Warner’s consumption plan.
But why exactly should anyone’s Internet connection speed suffer because other folks want to have the unlimited ability to download all the high-bandwidth movies they want (from a possibly illegal torrent site) at a fixed fee?
The answer is easy. Everyone wants the most they can get, for the lowest price possible. For free, if they can get it.
But the real world says you have to pay for what you get, even if it’s general improvement in capacity (i.e., bandwidth) on the communications infrastructure you’re using.
And if Time Warner chooses to charge for consumption, so be it. It’s actually mindful of the majority of users who aren’t big bandwidth hogs.
If you don’t like it, call Verizon. Not Charles Schumer or other United States Senator.
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is editor-in-chief of Securities Industry News, as well as a long-time media, technology and business journalist. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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