Where I live in Hawaii I have only 1 choice in broadband. That company is Time Warner. Today they started their trial in Beamount Texas where they are capping customers usage at 5gb and 40gb depending on the broadband plan you are on.
If you bust the 40gb level its gonna cost you a $1.00 a gig where wholesale price of bandwidth in the quantities they buy is about .07 to .08 cents a gig.
So lets do the math here. Lets say you use 40 gigs a month in traffic, that bandwidth cost Time Warner Cable about $2.80 my current monthly bandwidth bill with the Turbo service is $54.95.
Seems to me like their margins are pretty fat! In order for them to loose money on my account I would have to move 785 gigs a month. Comcast is currently considering a more reasonable cap of 250 gigs per month.
The way I figure it based on my usage last month which included a AppleTV and Vudu Box plus Amazon Unbox. 2 kids and 2 adults on the net was about a 100 gigs. Under the new plan my bill would rise to about $104.95 per month for broadband alone the actual cost to deliver that bandwidth is about $7.00
The executives at Time Warner are being criminal in their pricing plans. For people like me that have to deal with their Monopoly it pisses me off, and I will change providers as soon as their is a viable provider available to me.
Comments (3)
Grrrr. This is upsetting. I suspect with gaming and torrents my single adult monthly tab could be alot more than your household usage.
My roomates check email.. thats about it.
Here in Minneapolis we have city wide wireless now available but nobody gets to use it. I haven't even been able to figure out how I could purchase a key for it.
Hopefully the race to cover the nation in wi-fi picks up enough to offer municipal alternatives.. but they have to make it available to people.. not just there.. teasing them.
Posted by matit | June 3, 2008 3:13 PM
Posted on June 3, 2008 15:13
Todd I have the Wildblue Satellite which caps me at 17Gbs of downloads in a rolling 30 day period. With a satellite they have the excuse of truly limited pipes. I have a friend that works for Comcast in the Bay area and he tells me that the bandwidth available in cable is so far beyond what we are offered it's ridiculous. This is plain greed, these cable companies need to lose their monopoly status so maybe they will stop screwing their customers.
Posted by mark | June 3, 2008 9:20 PM
Posted on June 3, 2008 21:20
I just heard about that yesterday ... wow. We just moved from Massachusetts to New York a couple of months ago, and we used to have everything under Verizon, but DirecTV doesn't have local channels here so we got Time Warner for cable. The DSL speed is also slower than back in Mass, so we were contemplating switching ... we paused when TWC fell near the bottom of a recent customer service ranking, but this was the proverbial straw!
Posted by Michael Anderson | June 4, 2008 6:24 AM
Posted on June 4, 2008 06:24