He’s seeing the glass half full (or better):

The company didn’t close the door on the possibility of revisiting this kind of billing, but it’s hard to imagine a situation where it wouldn’t again meet such a backlash, especially now that customers and those who fought on Twitter and the Web against it will know that their efforts seemed to have turned the tide.

I hope he’s right, and I do agree that any future attempts will be retooled to avoid such a backlash. But where we disagree is that I believe they’ll be back. The cablecos perceive the threat of online video too grave (and the revenue opportunity from monetizing bandwidth consumption too great) to just throw up their hands and walk away.

Read the full article here: Time Warner Cable shelves tiered billing; what just happened?

“Plugged In” is a weekly technology show on 88.3 FM WNIN. We discuss technology news and topics with a focus on how they affect our daily lives.

I asked Justin before the show who was the cable provider in his region. He said there actually were three, with Time-Warner Cable serving a suburban part of the region.

We talked for about ten minutes and covered the general issues: what’s happening, why it’s a problem, and what people can do about it.

The interview is scheduled to run on the show that airs Friday, April 17 starting at 12:30pm. They stream live through the net, and the show will be posted later that day to the “Plugged In” web site.

Here’s what he told the Greensboro News & Record when they asked him about the TWC  broadband cap proposal:

“The cap is a serious issue for Greensboro,” says Vint Cerf, a senior executive at Google who is known as the “Father of the Internet” for his pioneering work as a network engineer. “It will inhibit innovation. People will cut back on usage and become afraid to try new applications. It will be a terrible drag on new entrepreneurial services, and that’s got to be exactly the wrong thing at a time when we’re trying to stimulate the economy.”

(Greensboro, N.C. is one of four cities identified for TWC metered broadband trials.)

Read the full article here: Time Warner plan could throttle economic development

A lot of people have been pointing out the absurdity of the TWC plan by providing concrete examples of how much various activities would cost. I’ve been doing that too. In most cases we’ll take the $1/GB cap overage charge and calculate the costs for watching a movie, playing a game, etc.

One possible critique of this analysis might note that these charges won’t apply to people that stay within their cap. You only get hit by overage charges when you go beyond the allotted amount. (I don’t totally agree with that critique. I think people want to know this information to assess the cost risk when they bust their tier.)

Today, Stacey Higgenbotham posted a shrewd analysis that asks what are the costs for people that stay within their caps. That is, she calculates the cost per gigabyte for people who do not run into overage charges.

The results there are even more disturbing:

Time Warner’s price per GB for its proposed tiers ranges from 75 cents to $15 (unless you max out the overage fees on the 100 GB per month tier and default into unlimited service for $150). This means the bandwidth for “Twilight” would cost between $2.85 and $20.60. After adding in the $3.99 rental fee, the evening at home costs between $6.84 and $24.59.

This analysis shows that a TWC customer could pay as much as $24.59 for a single viewing of “Twilight”. This compares to $5.36 for AT&T, $4.64 to $6.19 for Comcast, and $3.99 (the cost of the movie alone) for Verizon (the only “optical fiber to the home” solution surveyed).

Read the full article here: The Metered Broadband Math: As Much As $24.59 to Rent “Twilight”

In an article in yesterday’s San Antonio Express News, a TWC spokesperson confirmed that the delay was in response to local backlash from the metered Internet proposal:

A trial program intended to charge varying rates depending on usage was slated to begin this summer. The decision to delay the meter program was prompted mostly by customer reaction, said Gavino Ramos, Time Warner’s vice president of communication for South Texas.

“What happened as we’re continuing to listen was we worked in some of the comments and ideas that got sent to us,” Ramos said. “We came to the realization, let’s do this in October.”

Read the full article here: Time Warner delays meter program

Last night, I sent a short list of questions to Time Warner for a piece airing today on NPR’s “All Things Considered” (which I’ll link when it’s available), but was told that the answers to my questions were not readily available and couldn’t meet my deadline. Maybe we’ll hear more later this week.

The show will air locally today on 90.5FM KUT, and will be posted later to the NPR web site.

So that’s the scoop … reported in a blessedly exclamation-point-free fashion.

See the full post here: Post-Easter Time Warner Cable update

10:44pm Update: The radio segment has been posted online here: Internet Bandwidth Hogs May Soon Pay For It