Time Warner’s Unlimited Download Plan: $150 a Month

Time Warner Cable has modestly softened its plan to test usage limits for its broadband data customers. Landel Hobbs, the company’s chief operating officer, has just published a post with the new price tiers for a test of the plan it will conduct in four cities.

The company increased the capacity of the plans it had tested earlier in Texas. They had ranged from 5 to 40 gigabytes of uploading and downloading a month. Now those plans run from 10 to 60 gigabytes a month at prices that range between about $25 and $65 a month, depending on the area.

The company introduced a new plan with 100 gigabytes, for $75. Any more than that costs $1 a gigabyte. But there is a $75 cap on the extra fee, meaning unlimited use is capped at $150 a month.

By comparison, Comcast’s basic broadband offering costs $43 a month and has a cap of 250 gigabytes. Verizon’s cheapest broadband package with its FiOS service costs $45 a month and has no download limit.

In the wake of no small amount of protest, Time Warner made a few other changes that are meant to accommodate consumers. It won’t impose any overuse charge for two billing cycles, so customers can adjust their plans or their Internet use. It is also introducing a new $15-a-month plan, suitable for light e-mailers, with a top speed of 768 kilobits per second and a 1 gigabyte monthly cap.

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in the announcement is the price that Time Warner set for its coming super-high-speed service, which uses technology known as Docsis 3. It will offer service with 50-megabit-per-second download speeds and 5 Mbps upload speeds for $99 per month. That is cheaper than Comcast, which charges $139 a month for the same speeds where it offers them. The post did not specify the download limit, if any, for that plan.

It is not clear that this is going to mollify critics of Time Warner’s plans. In his post, Mr. Hobbs justified the change this way:

Here at Time Warner Cable, consumption among our high-speed Internet subscribers is increasing by about 40% a year. As a facilities-based provider, we’ve built a network that must be maintained and upgraded. We have increasing variable costs and we have to continue to invest in the network itself.

This view of costs is not shared by many experts in Internet technology. Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, wrote in an e-mail message Thursday afternoon that the cost of running broadband networks is falling quite rapidly.

Fuente: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/time-warners-unlimited-bandwidth-plan-150-a-month/