Angry hordes would be at their regional offices' doors almost instantaneously.

Time Warner Expands Data Caps

Cities in Texas, New York, and North Carolina are targeted for tiered data plans.

by Scott Lowe

April 2, 2009 - Bend over and kiss your router goodbye, folks, because Time Warner is taking new steps to ensure the death of the open and unregulated internet access. In February Time Warner announced that they would be expanding their tiered Internet data capping -- the practice of setting a limit on total monthly internet data transmissions allowed per user – to "more cities," but now they've announced which cities will be chosen as their next victims. According to a report published by BusinessWeek, the next four cities to undergo usage monitoring and billing will be San Antonio and Austin, Texas, Rochester, New York, and Greensboro, North Carolina. Beginning this April, Time Warner will monitor customers in those targeted cities' data usage and then later this summer start billing them accordingly.

Time Warner Cable's proposed pricing tiers will range from $29.95 to $54.90 for four data levels – 5GBs, 10GBs, 20GBs, and 40GBs a month. For each gigabyte a user exceeds on his or her chosen data plan, the company will charge one dollar. As we've said in the past, the 40GB maximum may seem more than sufficient to most, but when high-volume websites and streaming media services are taken into account, the perceived wiggle room is drastically reduced. Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm, puts conservative estimates of potential costs for users who view streaming online video for roughly 7.25 hours a week at up to $200 in overage charges a month under Time Warner's proposed service. Bernstein's estimates, mind you, are based on streaming video services alone and don't include other media transfers, such as purchases from iTunes.

Still, Time Warner insists that overages are and will continue to be rare in their targeted markets. According to the ISP, of the 10,000 customers currently under the tiered data policy in Beaumont, only 14%, roughly 1,4000 users, have exceeded their monthly allotments. While in a city like Beaumont, whose population is estimated at around 114,000 residents, 14% is fairly isolated number, but if the company were to apply the practice to a city like Los Angeles or New York, which have populations in the millions, the number of penalty paying customers would likely jump to hundreds of thousands.

Come to think of it, we think Time Warner should give their data capping practices a try in big cities, angry hordes would be at their regional offices' doors almost instantaneously.