For much of 2003, cable executives waxed poetic over "Lite" broadband tiers; connections from 128kbps to 1Mbps, offered around $25, designed to appeal to stubborn dial-up converts. Most of these tiers never materialized in 2004, primarily because of a fear that existing users, often paying in excess of $40, would downgrade and cost the companies money.

Earlier this year, Time Warner Cable and Roadrunner started testing a "Lite" tier they eventually hoped to market at around $23 a month. That tier offers speeds of 256kbps downstream and 128kbps up, and was tested in Columbus, Cincinnati, and San Antonio. But the company decided not to offer it to customers directly.

Why? It's very quietly being offered as a safety net for disgruntled users who threaten to terminate their service. Unhappy customers are then offered the lower speed and price, if they're willing to stick it out with the company.

Cable providers seem to be stuck in a digital catch-22. If they release lite tiers, they can finally appeal to those stubborn dial-up users who refuse to pay more than $30 for a broadband connection. But they also face the prospect that many existing users, unhappy with paying $40-$50 for a connection they don't fully utilize, would downgrade their connection.

Their answer, it would seem, is to make these tiers so hopelessly anemic that they appeal to the latter, but not the former. One can assume that's the logic behind Roger's release of an "Ultra-lite" tier this year, which features a whopping synchronous 64kbps for $20 a month.

Right now cable providers are doling out yearly price increases, accompanied by downstream speed increases nobody asked for. The latter are used primarily as marketing fodder to keep the bells at bay, appealing primarily to that small percentage of customers they'd secretly love to cap and throttle anyway.

Instead....and I know this is ludicrous fantasy....why not actually lower prices on your standard tiers (to around $30-$35), appealing to both dial-up converts and existing customers alike? Then if need warrants, create a less expensive tier for the fiscally cautious, and a higher tier for pure bandwidth gluttons.