Time Warner Cable is doing a bit of a social/economic experiment in four cities in the US. They are placing caps on internet bandwidth usage in these four cities. The bandwidth cap seems ok when not given any details but when the details are known-- it seems damn near criminal. For 15$ you can get 1GB of service per month. Ok, sure, some people use really low levels of internet. Now they have several price ranges (currently unlimited internet is about 40$) which seem to have rather low caps with 1 to 2$ charge for every GB overage. The unlimited internet is now going to cost 150$ per month.
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A bit of background on this policy is that there are NO other internet providers in these areas besides DSL/Satellite. So no other competition is present so many businesses/online students/media users will have to pay very large amounts of money since streaming a HD movie alone takes up 6-8 GB bandwidth.
Now I contest this is a case of exemplary greed on TWC’s part and they should be sanctioned by the city-county-state-federal government for gouging the consumer hopefully dissolving the franchise contract. I will probably be forced to switch to DSL for monetary and ethical reasons ( I can’t support this) but should they be allowed to do this? Is this right in any way?
I have already written a letter to the editor, and the governor. I have done my homework and began my steps.
I disagree with the idea of a lack of right or wrong here. Taking advantage of a market to the point of excess is clearly immoral. Accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake is/should be considered immoral.
TWC’s decision could affect several factions. The companies that offer movie dowloads, software companies that use bandwidth for the programs they sell, gaming corporations that utilize multiplayer servers, etc… It is funny how they originally worked to get people to buy their services, then all of a sudden there is a bandwidth problem. I’d like to know what they based their raised rates on.
They seem to be trying to steer people back to their cable services in order to compensate for losses brought on by companies such as Netflix and streaming video. Yea they say it will help people who only use a small portion of bandwidth keep their costs down. What should be interesting is how those people get net pirates (people who hijack their bandwidth) because they know little to nothing about net security.
The bandwidth problem is pretty much non-existent. Hopefully AT and T brings in their FIoS system soon.
