Time Warner Cable, The Power of Us to Charge You
Corporate slogans are so common that they often go unnoticed by the public as so much marketing noise. In the case of Time Warner Cable however, their decision today to implement tired pricing for "so called" heavy users of Internet bandwidth could make their slogan, "The Power of You" that much more poetic.
Under the new plan user will pay between $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan's cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. "To put it mildly," says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, "the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior." The company discounts those claims and said that in the Beaumont Texas trials only 14% of users exceeded their cap and had to pay additional fees of about $19 per month.
Some have suggested that the cell phone industry model applies here, namely users who go over their allotted minutes are charged extra per month. The problem is Internet providers have never charged users based on that business model and perhaps that will change as Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said. "We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension."
While Infrastructure is not free, there is a real concern that companies will use this argument as simply a marketing tool to collect more revenues from consumers. As iTV is in a nascent period with more video content on-line is now the time to be stunting the growth of the medium? In these depressed economic times people will vote with their wallets and it may become the power of us to dump you as our provider.
