Last year, customers of Frontier Communications learned that the company was considering imposing 5GB monthly caps on all DSL tiers. The company's handling of this announcement was sloppy, the language first showing up in Frontier's service TOS, before even company support employees were notified. The company then launched a website FAQ aimed at making 5GB sound reasonable (after all, that's 500,000 basic text e-mails!). Hints of a winter launch never materialized, though executives kept making hints that a shift to metered billing was coming -- until now.

Apparently, Time Warner Cable's announcement last week that they'd be to imposing metered billing in one of Frontier's key markets -- Rochester NY -- has the company changing their tune. According to the Stop The Cap blog (started last year by Broadband Reports user Dampier ), a memo is circulating at Frontier suggesting the telco will now use Time Warner Cable's plan as a marketing opportunity to leech customers from the cable giant:As we said last week, the only way the US broadband market is shifting from flat-rate to metered billing is if all carriers decide to do it at the same time. Otherwise, those still offering flat-rate pricing can unleash marketing blitzkriegs on companies that charge $1 per gigabyte overages, pegging them as greedy cheapskates. Time Warner Cable's trial has carefully avoided Verizon FiOS in the carrier's five trial markets for just this reason. AT&T, who is also considering low caps and metered billing, is Time Warner Cable's competitor in four of the five trial markets.

Ironically, Rochester was picked by Time Warner Cable because it's one of the few markets in New York not served by Verizon -- and therefore will never see the competitive threat created by FiOS. With Frontier talking about low caps, Time Warner Cable execs must have figured Rochester was a safe testing ground, and that Frontier's own caps would provide cover and justification. Apparently, they were wrong.