So there is good news and bad news today on the subject.

Lets start with the bad:

Time Warner Cable has modified its plan for usage-based Road Runner fees, a company officer announced late last night. The company also said the trial will begin in Rochester and in Greensboro, N.C., in August, and said it plans to launch the super-fast DOCSIS 3.0 service in the trial markets.

“We’ve heard the passionate feedback and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns,” Landel Hobbs, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable, said in a statement posted on the Web.

The company is adding tiers for the lowest users and a cap for overage fees.

Among the changes:

Bandwidth tier sizes in trial markets, including Rochester, will be increased to 10, 20, 40 and 60GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively. Package prices will remain the same, ranging from $29.95 to $54.90 per month. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month. Previously, the tier sizes were 5, 10, 20 and 40GB.

A new 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 a month will offer speeds of 10 MB/1 MB. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

A new 1 gigabyte-per-month tier, offering speeds of 768 kilobytes download/128 kilobytes upload, will cost $15 a month, with overage charges of $2 per GB per month. Hobbs said the company’s usage date shows that about 30 percent of Time Warner customers use less than 1GB a month.

Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. “That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds,” Hobbs said.

When the Rochester trial begins in August, Time Warner will not charge immediately for overage. First, it will provide two months of usage data, then it will give a one-month grace period in which overages will be listed on bills but not charged.

Trials will be expanded to San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in October.

Hobbs’ statement also said DOCSIS 3.0 would be launched in the trial markets, but did not give a date. When it is, Time Warner will offer a 50/5 MB speed tier for $99 a month; no overage fee or cap was reported.

Well fuck.  Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck.  This is no good.  Neither is this:

So I fire up the laptop looking for something that will bore me to sleep in short order.  Since I already had waded through the Bank of America “change in terms” legalese mailing they sent me explaining why they needed to raise everyone’s credit card interest rates, the only other surefire snoozefest was reading Securities & Exchange Commission 10-Q filings.

I consider the fact Time Warner has been on my mind as of late for some reason, so why not start there?

As I scroll through a whole lot of excuses about why AOL has fallen from grace, I finally find my way down to a peculiar passage.

High-speed data costs decreased for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 primarily due to a decrease in per-subscriber connectivity costs, partially offset by subscriber growth.

Wait.

High-speed data costs decreased for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2008 primarily due to a decrease in per-subscriber connectivity costs, partially offset by subscriber growth.

Oh no.  I am fully awake now!

I fire up Google.  How can this be?  Did we not read less than 24 hours ago the sob story from company officials complaining their costs were spiraling and they needed more revenue from customers in order to pay for required upgrades?

Thank goodness someone else had braved the even more ponderous 10-K filing and mined these goodies (quoting their findings):

“In 2007, TW made $3,730 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $164 Million to support the cost of the network. 2007 total profit on high speed data: $3.566 Billion”

“In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion”

“It cost TW 11% less money in 2008, to keep their network running, than in 2007.”

If you actually spent less on your infrastructure in 2008 (during the incoming tidal wave of those pesky “heavy users” sucking down all those files and videos) than 2007, earned even more last year than you did the year before on broadband, then why are you coming to the consumer in 2009 begging for a bailout?

Uh…wow.

So yeah, that good news?  I was just kidding, there isn’t any.

Well, unless you consider the fact that our boy Eric Massa (D – N.Y.) is none too happy about it either, and wants to bring the fight to Washington.

So yeah, fuck you Time Warner Cable.

Tags: Lots and lots of fucking pulp, Time Warner

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under Lots of Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.