Time Warner Transfer Caps May Inspire Fair-Price Legislation

Time Warner's recently announced plan to expand their broadband transfer caps to new markets drew heavy criticism, which prompted their attempt to smooth things over with a ridiculously expensive "unlimited" plan. That wasn't enough for New York Representative Eric Massa, who now says he will draft legislation to "curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a monopoly on service." Massa said, "Time Warner believes they can do this in Rochester, NY; Greensboro, NC; and Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and it's almost certainly just a matter of time before they attempt to overcharge all of their customers," adding, "I believe safeguards must be put in place when a business has a monopoly on a specific region."

Comments

Re:Complaining when you got what you asked for

[Jewfro_Macabbi]

From Time Warners' financial filings:

"High-speed data costs decreased for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 primarily due to a decrease in per-subscriber connectivity costs, partially offset by subscriber growth.

"In 2007, TW made $3,730 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $164 Million to support the cost of the network. 2007 total profit on high speed data: $3.566 Billion"

"In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion"

Stop shilling for corporations. Clearly the unlimited broadband model has been extremely profitable.

Wake up and smell the non-corporate content suppression.

Re:America against Bandwidth Caps

[dnaumov]

Is it just me or do I find the complaint against Bandwidth Caps ridiculous?

I only seem to see people complaining about it in America, most of Europe (afaik) has gotten used to having bandwidth caps.

Are you out of your mind? The reason why you see people complaining about it in America and not in Europe is because a lot of European countries do not have any kind of download caps whatsoever so we don't have to complain about it.

net capacity

[falconwolf]

Capacity is only unlimited if income is unlimited. Even in a monopoly people will only pay so much, so there's a limited income to expand the network - which puts hard physical limits on capacity, and to make any money at all the network has to be contended.

Thing is is here in the USA cablecos and telcos received almost $200 billion to buildout broadband but they did not. All they did was use the money to pad their bottom lines. They also battle attempts by others build out broadband. Some articles and posts on /. have been about this, whither it's telecos trying to block muni wifi or cablecos trying to block cities from installing cable. One example is A Broadband Utopia. Commercial broadband businesses tried to stop it but were unsuccessful. They were successful though having the Utah state government enact a law that requires it to be open, which was planned from the beginning. Because of the network Comcast was forced to offer a $90 bundle.

Falcon