Wednesday, Apr 8, 2009    Text size: 

Last year, Time Warner experimented with bandwidth caps in the guinea pig city of Beaumont, Texas, imposing anywhere from a 5GB to a 40GB limit on the total amount of data users could transfer online. Going over meant an extra dollar paid for each offending gigabyte.

Apparently that test was a success, because Time Warner is expanding it. They're expanding it into four new cities: Rochester, N.Y., Greensboro, N.C., as well as Austin and San Antonio.

"We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business," Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt told BusinessWeek. "We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension."

Industry professional Media of AdultDevelopments.com told XBIZ that he would be in danger of hitting a bandwidth cap ceiling because he does so much work from his home office.

"I think its one of the stupidest moves that a cable company can make," he said. "To deny your customers true unlimited downloads when their service is already capped at a download speed without a throttle. If you want to stop people from downloading so much then don't allow the high megabit per second accounts they give to people. It makes it redundant sort of. They're basically controlling the way a surfer surfs. They want to offer all these bells and whistles to people, yet keep them on a leash. 'You can have blazing fast Internet as long as you don't download a lot of content.'"

And in that case, Media was referring to Comcast's own bandwidth cap, which tops out at 250GB, not the relatively meager 40GB that Time Warner is doling out.

Online response to Time Warner's plan has been so harsh that the company has unveiled a "super tier," which will charge customers more money for the privilege to have a 100GB-per-month bandwidth cap.

In addition to scorn from around the online community, Democratic Congressman Eric Massa of New York has come out strongly against the cap:

“Internet access is as essential to our economy as water is to our survival,” he said. “With limited choices in broadband providers, and virtual monopolies in many market areas, I view this as nothing more than a large corporation making a move to force customers into paying more money. I firmly oppose capping Internet usage and I will be taking a leadership role in stopping this outrageous, job-killing initiative.”