The issue may have died down in Rochester for the moment, but Time Warner continues to push it’s caps in various ways elsewhere in the country. In North Carolina, they’re teaming up with another company to put pressure on state legislators to ban municipal broadband. Why? Well because a town called Wilson has created it’s own kick-ass broadband service that Time Warner has no interest in competing with.
And meanwhile, they’re also freezing plans to implement DOCSIS 3.0 in communities that effectively voiced their opposition to caps as consumers. DOCSIS 3.0 is, in short, a huge leap forward in the speed of Internet connectivity the implementation of which Time Warner wants to tie to it’s capped Internet connections. You know, because they listened to their customers. . . and decided those customers were assholes.
So, in summary: Time Warner insists it needs to raise prices because people are using too much Internet, but a capital investment in the quality, bandwidth and speed of the Internet is being held back because we don’t want to pay more. Tell me an industry where you get to charge more *in advance of* improving your product? If you said “Soviet Era toilet paper factories,” you’re probably right.
For more local reaction to the various threads of this story, check out StopTheCap.com and Fighting29th.com, who points out from the ArsTechnia.com article above that digital phone service is by far and away more expensive to Time Warner’s bottom line than it’s Internet service is.