The masses have spoken and it appears the powers that be at Time Warner Cable have decided to heed the masses by announcing today they are scrapping plans for their consumption-based billing until they can improve their “customer education process.”

In a blog posting over at longreply.com, Time Warner Cable’s CEO Glenn Britt stated the following:

“It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

I love how Time Warner Cable is attempting to shift the focus of this debacle away from their plans to do tiered pricing to the “customer education process.”

Clearly, we the customer are not away of their plans and how they believe these new price plans will actually help us save money (but in reality we won’t.. because the overall cable bill is still going up – at least it is in LA). I digress..

sorry TWC – we understand what you’re trying to say but we clearly don’t agree with it. Instead of trying to segment the bandwidth market – why not simply make it easy. 150GB a month for a price and then unlimited for the rest? Why not make it somewhat affordable too? And while you’re at it – take some of the money you’re earning and actually use it to improve that infrastructure of yours. I could care less about Science HD if it meant that I could actually get 6 mbps download speeds any time of the day. Afterall – I am paying for turbo download speeds aren’t I?

Ultimately it doesn’t matter for me. I’ve made my decision to switch away from TWC cable modem already… As for cable service – I’ve got no choice but to stay with them thanks to my building mgmt (although that’s technically illegal to do in LA). Sigh.. I just don’t have the time to fight these things…

But at least customers of TWC have won one small fight… for now. Don’t think this is the last of it folks.

[Check it out via PC Magazine]

Read this in Chinese Simplified and in French

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