One Rochester, NY resident is fighting Time Warner Cable’s bandwidth caps by trying to lure in some competition from Verizon. VerizonFiber.com is a petition to bring Verizon’s FiOS service to Rochester as a broadband alternative to TWC’s Road Runner.
A bandwidth cap is a limit placed on the amount of Internet activity broadband customers may conduct. If a customer goes over their limit they may be charged overage fees or have their service interrupted.
Time Warner Cable is following the example of other broadband Internet service providers such as Comcast by testing bandwidth caps in Austin, San Antonio, Rochester (NY) and Greensboro (NC). Customers choose from plans ranging from $30 to $55 per month, which are limited between 5 and 40 GB per month.
The traditional argument for bandwidth caps is that the limits are meant to stop pirates who transfer many times more data than the average customer. However as time moves forward and Internet-based innovations quickly become further entwined with more and more facets of the average customer’s daily life, this traditional argument holds less and less water. The Cable TV providers seem to be clamping down on Internet usage just as high quality streaming on-demand movies and TV shows are picking up steam and gaining ground on traditional television programming.
Customers who are upset with bandwidth caps are often even more frustrated by the lack of competition among broadband providers — in many markets customers must choose one service provider, or go without access. The “Bring Verizon FiOS to Rochester, NY” petition is one customer’s effort to give Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service some competition by bringing high-speed unlimited Verizon FiOS broadband to town so that those who do not wish to be limited by bandwidth caps have the option of moving to a different service providers.
Link via @Wolfman-K on Twitter.
