Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

From about September 2008, Time Warner started testing out bandwidth caps for its Internet service.  The company line at the time was that 5% of the company’s subscriber base was using up 90% of the bandwidth on its backbone and that Time Warner needed to do something to make up for supporting those high bandwidth users.  It resulted in $1-2 charges per gigabyte of data over a 250GB cap, easily hit if you were an heavy duty Netflix or digital downloader.

Immediately after that announcement, there was little furor, but over the ensuing months, more and more complaints have come from a large segment of users that have been hit with ever rising bills from Time Warner, especially tough during tumultuous economic times like these.  The rallying against these chargers really came to a head in the last few weeks, as many Americans went to their representatives in Congress to find out what they could do.

It seems like Congress can have a lot of sway when it comes to threatening Capital Hill investigations into bandwidth cap pricing, and with Chuck Schumer making those exact threats a possible reality, Time Warner was backed into a customer relations disaster, to which it could only do one thing to salve the public – shelf the bandwidth cap.

The biggest winners in this backdown have to be services like Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Steam and Netflix.  They were probably going to take a big hit from these bandwidth caps if they were ever rolled out to the general public.  Another company that is probably relieved to see these bandwidth caps go away is OnLive, which would have been DOA if these caps would have been in place when it launched.  The losers are all bandwidth providers, and the effect was immediately seen in New York, as Frontier Communications, a competitor to Time Warner, also dropped its bandwidth caps.  Check out the full statement from Time Warner president, Glenn Britt:

“It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process. We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable.”