Beautiful Beaumont, part of the Golden Triangle with Port Arthur and Orange, Texas. Home to Lamar Univerity, the Texas Wildcatters, and the South Texas State Fair, the city is also known to online enthusiasts as the unlucky epicenter of broadband usage capping.
Time Warner’s Golden Triangle Division rolled out the first broadband caps on Beaumont residents last summer, implementing service plans ranging from 4-50GB of usage for new customers, or those intending to change their Road Runner service plan. Company officials rolled out the usual dog and pony show about how the change wouldn’t really affect most people at all.
1GB gets you about 70,000 e-mails, 34 hours of gaming or 1,344 hours of Web browsing; or, it’s the approximate equivalent of downloading 569 photos, 277 music files, 7 hours of low-resolution video (YouTube), 3 hours of standard definition streaming video or 45 minutes of high-definition streaming video.
Largely a re-purposed Time Warner press release in the making. When a news report says “Time Warner says” more than three times, you know you aren’t getting the whole story. This report relied almost entirely on Time Warner’s calculations, Time Warner’s claims, and Time Warner’s predicted impact on customers. A local “computer expert” defines a person who checks e-mail and looks at a few web pages as the “average” customer, an assertion without foundation. Then he claims only “power users that are possibly going to hit those caps.” Possibly? As we’ve since learned, some 14% of Time Warner customers ended up with overlimit fees on their bills, averaging $19 extra dollars a month.
As StoptheCap! reported last summer, the “experiment” was met with mixed reaction. Many customers felt the tiers had paltry limits, many didn’t like the fact an unlimited tier was no longer available, and the whole thing was too expensive. Notably, nobody asked for this kind of rationing, and nobody seemed to advocate for it outside of the company itself.
Alex Dudley, corporate spokesman for Time Warner, used most of the same rhetoric about the Beaumont “test” he used about those to be conducted in Rochester, the Triad of North Carolina, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas.
Dudley argues that the usage cap issue is not a foregone conclusion at Time Warner. Dudley told GigaOm that TWC’s experiment in Texas was just that “a test.”
A test that has now become indefinite, and today Beaumont is the only city in Time Warner’s national service area still under the thumb of usage caps. Dudley, bless his heart, added this familiar proviso:
“If consumers don’t want it, the company is going to back away from it. I think this is a trial and we are going to learn from this trial,” he said.
Consumers in Beaumont don’t want the cap. Consumers in Rochester don’t want the cap. Consumers in the Triad don’t want the cap. Consumers in San Antonio don’t want the cap. Consumers in Austin don’t want the cap.
Executives at Time Warner want the cap.
Beaumont is stuck with the cap.
It took thousands of protesters from all of these cities, a United States congressman, a United States senator, and pressure from investors, the media, and who knows who else to get them to “temporarily suspend” the cap nightmare, but with the allusion it will be back later.
The only thing they have learned from the trial is customers don’t like it. But they’re going to get it anyway. Just like in Beaumont.
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