Geek News and Musings

Time Warner Expands Capped Broadband Plans
Time Warner has been testing broadband plans with traffic caps for several months, and apparently it likes what it’s seen, as it plans to soon expand the caps into four more markets. The company alleges it has to switch to capped plans in order to “support the infrastructure of the broadband business,” even though the supposed bandwidth crunch ISPs cite when talking about these plans is little more than a myth. As the company’s CEO notes, getting the cat back in the bag by getting consumers to switch from unlimited to capped plans is going to be very difficult. Previous studies have found that even light internet users would look to take their business elsewhere if their ISP introduced caps, mainly because they have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth they’re consuming. That’s a good thing, because the absence of mental transaction costs helped wired broadband take off, and laid the groundwork for all sorts of innovative internet services — not to mention lots of revenues for ISPs. Compare this to the mobile world, where per-KB or per-MB pricing helped stymie the growth of data services.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

No Responses to “Time Warner Expands Capped Broadband Plans”

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Comment :