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Time Warner Usage Caps
Time Warner will soon be introducing usage caps for all of its customers in the Rochester area, as well as other areas where they have no competition, this summer. This means that you will now be paying by the amount of information you are downloading and not by the bandwidth you have available to you.
I am not alone when I say that this is a perfect example of corporate greed. Time Warner claims that we will all save money by this, but I think this can’t be further from the truth. Rather than debate this issue, I would like to just focus on the innovation aspect of the usage caps.
Back in the mid 1990’s, we started to see pictures showing up on websites. This was because modems were getting faster and there was more bandwidth available to pull down the additional information needed to draw the graphics. Since then we have moved from a mostly text based Internet to a media rich environment with flash animations and high definition video clips. This is all thanks to the bandwidth of services such as Time Warner RoadRunner.
If a usage cap is imposed on users, we could see websites revert back to text based sites with minimal graphics. If I’m using the Internet to read the news or even research what colleges are out there, and I have to pay a usage cap, I’m going to stick with those sites that have no graphics or animation on them to ensure I don’t go over my cap.
This could very simply result in a loss of innovation on the Internet. Consumers may start demanding sites to be developed with only text based information and to remove all of the graphics and video. We could even see a new version of web browsers that block this information from being downloaded to prevent you from going over your caps. This could decrease the new innovative technologies out there such as high quality video cameras that consumers could use to upload high quality family videos to share with friends and family.
If Time Warner imposes a usage cap, I’ll either switch to Frontier DSL or I will stop playing online games, stop signing into things like Facebook and Secondlife and even stop watching video highlights of Sabres games where they actually win for once. Even worse, I’ll probably have to start coming into work at all hours of the night to review server logs, perform maintenance and help students with their assignments over services such as Adobe Connect because that will very quickly take me over my cap. Forget the idea of me ever teaching an online class from home.
So what can we do to try and stop this. A great place to start is with StoptheCap.com as it has an enormous amount of information on this topic including information about what we, the consumer, can do to try and fight Time Warner on this. Another way is to write your local congressman or senator to support the The Massa Broadband Internet Fairness Act which is aimed directly at stopping this type of monopolistic practice.
Either way, it is important to make your voice be heard. Don’t sit on the sidelines and let Time Warner take away your ability to communicate without restrictions with the rest of the world.
In closing, I’d like to remind anyone reading this that these views are my own and are in no way affiliated with the E. Philip Saunders College of Business (SCB) or with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). If you have issues with my comments, please address them to me and not to SCB and RIT.
Thank you.
