[TriLUG] Time Warner Responds to bandwidth concerns

[Steve Litt]

On Saturday 11 April 2009 10:04:54 am Neil L. Little wrote:
> I believe that TW successfully argued the point a couple of years ago
> that they were no longer a monopoly and thus could no longer be restricted.

This is the crux of the problem. It's obvious the carrier encounters some 
amount of cost per megabyte and needs to recover that cost one way or 
another. If a small percentage of users managed to download a 100 petabytes 
of data per month, the carrier would need to build faster pipes just to 
satisfy those users. It wouldn't be fair to charge us all for those user. 
They really should be able to charge more, UNDER NORMAL CONDITIONS.

Under normal conditions of massive competion, no one carrier could play stupid 
little games like turning broadband usage into "the price is right" where if 
you guess too high you pay for nothing, and if you guess too low you pay a 
huge penalty. If there were such a carrier, its users would migrate to a 
company with more respect for the users.

But these aren't normal conditions. With exactly one company owning the cable 
running down the street, that company has a monopoly. They might license 
other companies to use that cable, but they could do it at a hefty price. 
They could give preferential treatment to their own packets. These 
situations, where one company has undue control of the marketplace, is one of 
the main reason regulation was invented.

If the government doesn't want to dink with the price structure to the end 
user, another way to do it would be a government decree that the cable owner 
must rent out bandwidth, at a regulated and reasonable rate, to all comers. 
This would produce a situation of a lot of competition (similar to the old 
days of modem ISPs), and lower prices, even if those prices went up and down 
with bandwidth.

SteveT

Steve Litt
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