It seems that Time Warner Cable may be trying to put one over on the public, or maybe not. If rumors of a metered service trial are true, the time is now to get started mobilizing the forces necessary to respond to this.

An article at Ars Technica talks of a trial in the Texas market to see if anyone will salute this as it goes up the flagpole. I know I would not. I don’t think many will. While some may say that if every ISP did it there would be no choice, I say that the only way that could happen is if every ISP made the move at the same time.

If this was done in any other way, lots of movement would be seen to ISPs that offer unfettered bandwidth, with the ultimate winner being the last one to offer unrestricted access.

This is important to all as the casual user of today may be forced to become the bandwidth consumption big dog when a job change makes them a telecommuter, or perhaps the user decides to turn a profit for his family by selling online. Almost all users are online more now than before, and the ISPs have been making large amounts of profit on the small usage of Joe Average. Now that Joe wants to use what he has paid for all along, he will quickly take offense to being reigned in or having the prices raised.

Acceptable use policies have been shown to be very bad things, as Comcast and Cox have both had customers get irate when cut off or reigned in. (Isn’t it strange that it is the cable companies who are getting the most greedy? (It seems like they would be more magnanimous, since they are raking in huge amounts of money supplying television to the public.)

Bandwidth caps are not something we should have or expect. It has not been that way until now, and the large profits of the past should have been put partly back into infrastructure, but in many cases were not. So necessary upgrades should not penalize the users, who have been helping handsomely line the pockets of providers for the past 15 years.

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[tags] Time Warner Cable, metered usage, ISP, unlimited accounts, bandwidth consumption [/tags]