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A one-way street or Avoidant personality disorder?
Back in July we noticed Time Warner Cable’s Conversations website, engaged in two-way conversations with customers, began a “dialogue” on the issue of its new 5GB usage-capped “Internet Essentials” plan first unveiled in several Texas cities.
The company provided its view that broadband innovation required pricing flexibility with new usage-based broadband plans to offer customers “more choice” and a $5 discount on service if they agreed to limit monthly usage to 5GB or less.
Despite sharing our two cents (and several of our readers tried to add their own as well), we noted none of these views ever appeared online.
This week we checked back and discovered the dialogue had decidedly turned one-way: namely from Time Warner Cable to you. The company deleted the few views that were published on cable television programming costs and removed its comment section altogether.
Our reader Kevin even tried to be generous in his comments to the company last summer, but to no avail.
“I basically told them if usage meter billing is inevitable, then give us no less than 300 GB a month, at a rate of $40 a month,” he wrote. “Seeing how 1 GB of bandwidth and data costs you less than $1 to generate to me, this is more than fair. Doubt they will even read it since it isn’t a ‘wow this is awesome, OMG i luv you so much for this new plan TWC’-message.”
They might have read it, but elected to avoid the uncomfortable notion of sharing the actual costs to provide broadband service to customers. It is not the first time, either.
“give us no less than 300 GB a month, at a rate of $40 a month” The math doesn’t work here. Perhaps he meant $1/GB? But that would actually be expensive bandwidth… “Seeing how 1 GB of bandwidth and data costs you less than $1 to generate to me” It is my hope that journalists like Phillip join me in vigilantly correcting this kind of language. There IS NO COST to providing data or bandwidth in any real sense, setting aside arbitrary business agreements that may exist to pay such-and-such per GB. To briefly explain, the only real cost is… Read more »
I think he means buying the broadband service itself for $40 a month and getting at least 300GB in usage allowance.
For the record, TWC pays pennies per gigabyte and their service has a 90-95 percent gross margin. The industry surprised itself when they finally found a product to sell that earns them even more profits than cable TV used to.
It really is a license to print money.
Hehe yeah, I figured that’s what he really meant, but he could be seen as making a case FOR TWC if he really valued his Internet service somewhere in the range of up to $1/GB. 😉 As for how much TWC *pays* it’s peers/upstream providers, is another aspect of my point. They may have a formal agreement to pay such-and-such for each GB they send onto the network of a peer/upstream provider, but they get the same amount of credit for traffic they accept onto theirs. They keep this very well balanced so that the net cost is close to… Read more »