Time Warner Cable Inc. has shelved plans to expand testing of a consumption-based billing model for broadband Internet service after running into public opposition to the idea.

I don’t know why they thought there wasn’t going to be a lot of loud public opposition to their plan. I imagine the back-peddling has more to do with the subscribers who are ditching Time Warner for other options than it does the public opposition and complaints.

My major complaint about the bandwidth cap plans –other than hating Time Warner in general– is that they are (were) planning to tie the various cap levels to the speed of the internet plan. My mom may use less than a gigabyte of bandwidth a month, which would allow her to seriously cut down her cable bill with their lowest plan ($15/month), but why should she have to also have the slowest possible internet speed just because she uses less of it? 768kb/sec is a good bit slower than the standard package’s speed, and I know I would notice the difference. Somehow, it doesn’t seem fair to lump internet speed with amount used.

Well, at least they put it off a while. It’ll happen eventually, but hopefully they are actually listening to what the public opposition is saying. Caps are the way it’s going to be in the future, but there are reasonable caps and unreasonable ones. The companies with reasonable usage caps are going to make money. The ones with unreasonable caps are going to go out of business. A 40 gigabyte cap on a standard internet package is slightly unreasonable in this day and age when people are buying/renting movies and TV shows online, playing games, surfing the media rich internet, listening to and watching podcasts, buying e-books, and so on and so on. It’s a shame TW didn’t use any of the money they have been making building out their infrastructure more, but that’s hardly the fault of the users that they chose profit over growing their business and keeping up with the times.