Sometime overnight, it appears the Rochester division of Road Runner quietly added Powerboost to standard Road Runner accounts.  Customers conducting speed tests began seeing the use of the technology starting early this morning.

Powerboost is a temporary speed boosting technology that offers several seconds of improved download speed before returning to normal levels.  The technology was licensed from Comcast, which began giving it to their customers in 2006.  Time Warner previously only provided Powerboost to its “Turbo” tier of service, which increased upload and download speeds for an additional $10 a month.  Powerboost is not a traditional speed increase because it does not sustain the extra speed for very long.

The concession of providing Powerboost may be part of Time Warner’s ongoing “damage control” for the increasingly unpopular tiering and capping experiment they are conducting in several “test cities.”

Adding Turbo speeds to all tiers is a small concession, especially considering the extra speed will now allow you to hit those paltry caps even faster than ever.  Customers are unlikely to be mollified:

Current Plan Customers Want to Retain

Standard Service without Powerboost: about $40 a month

Turbo Service with Powerboost: about $50 a month

Coming This Summer, Whether Customers Like It Or Not

Equivalent level of service: $150 a month

Or a range of heavily capped tiers that expose customers to steep overlimit fees of $1-2 per gigabyte

Sorry Time Warner.  No customer should be exposed to overlimit charges and 300% rate increases for a product that made the company plenty of money last year.  Throwing people scraps like Powerboost still does not give customers what they want: no usage caps, no forced tiers, and no massive rate increases.  Powerboost just exposes the reality that customers who don’t want punitive tiering but need higher speeds have absolutely nowhere else to go.

As one of our readers pointed out on Broadband Reports:

We have Speedboost on standard service now. Big deal. When the caps come, I am still off to DSL.

Powerboost is another gimmick I can live without.