There's not a broadband provider out there who wouldn't instantly begin billing you by the byte if they thought you (the consumer) would sign off on it. Unfortunately for them, Time Warner Cable's recent PR disaster illustrated that consumers aren't sold on low caps and high overages when broadband delivery costs continue to drop. Many customers may be stupid, but they can apparently read Time Warner Cable's 10-K form, which shows that flat-rate billing has provided Time Warner Cable with very healthy profits.

Meanwhile, Verizon currently doesn't cap or meter their FiOS customers, which acts as a deterrent for competitors in Verizon markets eager to implement metered billing. Pushing metered billing in a FiOS market puts a carrier at a marketing and competitive disadvantage, something Time Warner Cable was well aware of when they hoisted their metered billing trials upon consumers, but only in non-FiOS markets. Even then, Time Warner Cable had to deal with Frontier Communications scrapping their own cap plans to gain a competitive edge.

As we've stated all along, the only way this market sees a shift from flat-rate to metered billing is if the entire industry moves that direction en masse -- leaving customers with no ability to vote with their wallet. Right now, Verizon stands as the finger in the dam.

If you recall, the network neutrality debate truly took off in the States back in 2005, when former SBC (now AT&T) CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week in an article that Google wanted to use Ed's "pipes", for free. "I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," insisted Ed at the time.

As we just mentioned, copper thieves are getting bolder as the price of copper rises, often stripping live power and phone lines from poles. Time Warner is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of persons involved in a suspected copper theft and fiber sabotage in Texas.:As previously noted, a pound of copper scrap nets thieves around $3.50, so they're stealing it from literally everywhere, including homes, air conditioning units and telecom infrastructure.

The union representing AT&T employees in metropolitan Milwaukee (CWA) has launched a campaign to get users to drop Time Warner Cable service in the city and switch to AT&T's union labor-driven U-Verse. The CWA has this to say about Time Warner Cable at a new website:

In discussions yesterday about the Patent Reform Act of 2007, many users brought up the point that we have to be wary when it’s the companies with big patent portfolios that are seeking reforms. In that same vein, let’s turn our eyes to the Time Warner / IBM agreement to cross-license their patents. IBM owns more than 40,000 active patents, hundreds of which the company says will be useful to Time Warner’s media and entertainment services including “video-on-demand, video search, interactive advertising, multiplatform content distribution, content protection and home networking”. It’s worth noting that the Patent Reform Act of 2007 will make it harder to get patents, which means that if big companies want to cross-license their patents like this, the little inventor guys are going to get left out of the loop.

Users in our Comcast forum note that as of July 1, the company is now charging customers in many markets a $1.99 fee if they want to pay their bills in person. Yes, you can mail, electronically transfer your payment or even leave it in a drop box at the payment center for free -- but some people are just annoyed on principle:Resident cable technicians justify the decision by noting it's an extra expense to have an already busy human being process the payment (apparently that's not part of what you're already paying for).

Users claim that Time Warner Cable also now charges a fee to pay in person, and an Ohio TWC user tells us the company charges an extra fee if you want to pay your bill over the phone with a credit card.

Time Warner today released their second quarter earnings. The company continues to struggle in converting AOL from a dial-up ISP to an advertising juggernaut, with AOL revenue sliding 38% to $1.25 billion -- thanks largely to the continued emigration of AOL dial-up users to broadband ISPs.

As we mentioned in our recent price roundup, a number of cable providers do offer very inexpensive (and very slow) broadband tiers, but many only trot them out when customers threaten to cancel. Time Warner Cable does both: they advertise lite tiers in some markets, but use it as a customer retention tool in others.

One of the biggest changes in the broadband sector over the last few years is the emergence of long-term contracts, a frequent tool of wireless phone operators. Long-term contracts are designed to reduce "churn" (migration to other ISPs or VoIP providers) and usually lock customers in at a fixed price for one or two years.

Premier Buffalo, New York, customers in our Roadrunner/Time Warner Cable forum report they're now seeing the faster 15Mbps/2Mbps speeds ($57.95/month). Standard customers in the area still see 4Mbps/384kbps and have not been upgraded. You can see the significant geographical price and speed variations in Time Warner Cable & Roadrunner service in our recent speed/price breakdown.