Ah lovely. I stop following tech news for a few days and I end up missing some big news. The most notable news item IMHO was Time Warner Cable’s decision to start testing bandwidth caps for broadband subscribers. The company would introduce new plans featuring 5, 10, 20, 40, and 100GB caps with prices ranging from $29.95 to $75 dollars a month. Users would be charged an extra dollar for every additional GB they download during that effective month – up to a max of $75 dollars. Thus an “unlimited” package would basically cost you $150 dollars.

As you’ve probably guessed, folks on the net went in an uproar when they heard about these new bandwidth cap limitations – so much so that Landel Hobbs, COO of Time Warner Cable, even wrote a blog posting in response.

Yes, I can somewhat understand TWC’s predicament.. bandwidth usage is increasing and thus to keep up with the times, the company needs to charge more to make sure the customer’s experience is still pleasant. Plus another argument used in the past  – only a small percentage of the public will be affected by this since the majority out there don’t consume much bandwidth… right?

Hm.. I’m not so sure about that. With the proliferation of digital content via devices such as the Xbox 360, Sony PS3, and Apple TV, you have to figure that more and more families will be consuming more bandwidth per month – not just P2P users. As more devices become network-enabled, it’s inevitable that broadband usage will rise for the majority of Internet connected households. Just consider how much online video content you watch in a given month at home!

So what this ultimately means is – much in the way we watch how many minutes are left on our mobile phone, we’re going to have to watch how much broadband we’re consuming in a given month. Great. (Oh.. and this will really suck for those of you with infected PCs)

I can accept occasional price increases to accommodate for inflation .. and I can accept price increases if I actually witnessed better overall service. However aside from a few more HD channels here in LA, I can’t say that TWC has improved in any real way over the last few years. In fact, I’ve had several cable outages this past year – not to mention some super flaky DNS service which caused me to switch to OpenDNS.

So I should trust TWC that they’ll do the right thing with the price increases? That the higher prices won’t simply pad their bottom line and make their investors happy? Yeah.. I probably won’t stick around to find out. I was a DSL subscriber for nearly five years before switching to TWC a few years back. I might have to check out DSL again.

[Check it out via SlashGear]

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