Customers Failing To Fling Themselves At Limited Broadband Usage Cap, TWC CEO Admits

(Photo Nut 2011)

Back in 2012, Time Warner Cable unveiled an optional metered broadband plan: the current iteration gives customers a $5 monthly discount, but caps their usage at 30 GB. It’s not really surprising that customers aren’t exactly throwing themselves at such limited broadband access. What might be a little more surprising is that even the TWC CEO admits it’s a total dud.

As LightReading relates, this week (at the same conference where he called the Comcast/TWC merger a “dream combination“) TWC CEO Rob Marcus acknowledged the very low opt-in rate to “Internet Essentials.”

The number is “in the thousands,” Marcus said. As Time Warner Cable has roughly 11 million current subscribers, some quick math says that even at best that works out to less than 1% of their consumers taking the plan.

Marcus insisted that more consumers than have signed up would be just fine with Essentials, saying that median broadband use among their subscribers is in the “high twenties” monthly. And yet faced with the potential for fees likely outstripping the amount of discount offered for going over an optional data cap very close to their average monthly use, customers balk. Imagine that.

Despite the Essentials plan flopping magnificently, Marcus stands by the principle of the thing: the more bandwidth customers use, the more they should pay, he said.

Meanwhile, even without data caps for most customers TWC has found plenty of other ways to increase the bills their subscribers pay.

TWC started the plan early in 2012, and rolled it out nationwide later that year. At the time, it didn’t seem like a deal that made any sense for the overwhelming majority of TWC’s customers, and two years later it appears that said overwhelming majority agrees. The company’s 2009 attempt to come up with a metered broadband pricing plan also failed.

Of course, all the Time Warner Cable rate plans in the world probably won’t make a difference to consumers by year’s end anyway, if the company’s planned merger with Comcast meets with regulator approval.

TWC Subs Say No to Data Caps [LightReading via DSL Reports]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist