said by myokitis:I'm sick of all of this carping about corporate "greed" on this site and elsewhere. IMO, TWC is trying to manage a complex, capital-intensive business in a highly competitive environment.
Consider these factors:
- Demand for bandwidth is growing rapidly as customers use more bandwidth-intensive applications like video, and in the near future, HD video. This would certainly put strain on backend networks.
- TWC is carrying a massive amount of debt dumped on it upon divestiture from the larger Time Warner corporation. I wonder if they have the financial ability, in tight credit markets and under intense competition from VZ & DirecTV/Dish, to make massive capital investments to beef up their network.
- Changing customer habits to increased video streaming/downloading puts their entire video business model at risk.
I think I understand why they're doing this. It has nothing to due with greed and everything to do w/ long-term survival. Unfortunately, caps would probably cause increased churn, so in my estimation they're between a rock and a hard place.
A highly competitive environment?!? I have two choice, my local ILEC or TW, some have AT&T (DSL, not even U-Verse yet) or TW. That is called a duopoloy and is hardly "highly competitive." In how many areas does Time Warner actually have to compete? Why aren't they rolling out the usage based trials in THOSE areas if they are serious about it? Why are they rolling them out in their extremely UNcompetitive markets? Perhaps because they know the consumers in those markets have little choice but to accept the slop they're fed?
