Eric Massa held a town hall meeting in Pittsford NY today which some Time Warner representatitves attended.
We couldn’t have a better representative than Eric Massa gunning for us against Time Warner. He really understand the issue and he seems well informed. He brought several new pieces of information to light, for example, the federal government subsidizes a large portion of any internet infrastructure enhancement work, also billions of dollars in the economic stimulus plan have been dedicated to projects just like that.
Ironically enough about 20 minutes after the meeting began Time Warner released a new press release containing new/different tier information. The following is a breakdown of the new plans.
| Plan Name | Cap | Price | Speed | Overage Charges | Current Equivalent |
| Lowest Tier | 1Gb | $15 | 768Kbps Down, 128Kbps Up | $2/Gb | NONE |
| Lite | 10Gb | $30 | ?? | $1/Gb | NONE |
| Basic | 20Gb | $40 | ?? | $1/Gb | NONE |
| Standard | 40Gb | $50 | ?? | $1/Gb | NONE |
| Turbo | 60Gb | $55 | ?? | $1/Gb | NONE |
| Turbo XL | 100Gb | $75 | 10Mbps Down, 1Mbps Up | $1/Gb | RoadRunner – $40/Month, Unlimited, 10Mbps Down 380Kbps Up |
| ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | ?? | RoadRunner TURBO – $50/Month, Unlimited, 15Mbps Down 1Mbps Up |
Their new plan does offer unlimited service but for a hefty price.
Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.
This means that for the Low Low Price of $150/month you can have exactly the same as what you get for $40/month right now. That’s right, their TURBO speed is slower AND you’ll be paying almost 4x as much as you do right now.
My friend Dean threw together a great graph illustrating the Monthly Cost vs Bandwidth used per plan.
From the graph it would appear that the lowest tier would always be the best, but we know that the lowest tier is crippled (most experts agree that 768Kbps shouldn’t be considered broadband at all). We really need to get speed information regarding these plans but they have yet to release those figures. Given that TURBO appears to be crippled according to their current speeds, don’t hold your breath for good numbers.
The feeling couldn’t be scrubbed that the new press released was perfectly timed with the town hall meeting and Time Warner did it this way in order to claim during the meeting that “We just recently released a new press release which has a drastically different pricing scheme and which you may be happy with.” They did say this and I suspect they timed it this way to quiet some of the more vocal people in the town hall. Luckily, some of those who had mobile devices had already read the new proposal by the time they announced it in the meeting and they were quite vocal that the new plan did nothing for anyone (I also spoke up to that effect).
Eric Massa suggested we convene at a latter date to discuss the Time Warner issue specifically. It was interesting to see because it felt like Massa was throwing down and challenging Time Warner to just try to cross his line in the sand. The Time Warner representatives seemed to agree to this on the spot (whether they have the authority to do so is still to be determined so time will tell) so I suspect we’ll be seeing another event soon.
In summary, it’s great to have Eric Massa with us but Time Warner’s new proposal is laughable at best.
Randy Aldrich 