Will Wisconsin's Time Warner Cable customers soon see Road Runner caps?

Here’s news of a chilling change working its way north from Beaumont, Texas. It’s a BusinessWeek item from last week about a new broadband pricing policy from Time Warner Cable — tiered pricing, consumption billing, and bandwidth usage caps:

Time Warner Cable Expands Internet Usage Pricing

This is what they say is coming soon to Greensboro, North Carolina, Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and Rochester, New York:

In the case of Time Warner Cable, customers will be charged from $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan’s cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB. A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.

$200 per month?

Even as my blood pressure is skyrocketing, I am thinking back to a post I wrote in December of 2006, after watching the “The Net at Risk” installment of Moyers on America (The video and the full transcript are both available online.)

“The Net at Risk” pointed out how US Internet speeds already lag behind other parts of the world, how places like Reykjavik and Slovenia have connections 100 times faster than we Americans do, and how in countries like South Korea and Japan, “you can get 100 megabit services in both directions for about $40.”

Also included were interview clips with Bruce Kushnick, who explained how America was “screwed” by the telecom companies that, back in the 1990s, promised to build us out “information superhighway” in exchange for favorable legislation. They got their Telecom Act of 1996, but they failed to build our fiber optic network that was supposed to be part of the bargain.

So now Racine gets its broadband through the TV cable, which is more like a Rustic Road than a superhighway — especially when you have to share it with HDTV bandwidth.

This brings up another issue, addressed in the comments on that BusinessWeek story — like this one from Try Harder: Even though HDTV channels use much, much more bandwidth than the Internet connection, it is the Internet connection that’s getting socked with these new fees.

Other comments there, like this one from Sean Reed, show that a backlash is building. Reed points to an entry at StopTheCap.com, a blog where the opposition is gathering.

Another aspect I remember from that Bill Moyers show is that he talked with Eric Klinenberg, author of Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media, who said this:

Well, sadly, it looks like the FCC has been working in the interests of the small number of companies it’s charged with regulating. We need the FCC to be accountable to the people, accountable to democracy, and responsible for making sure our democratic culture works. This is an issue that transcends party lines. And I have to say, for anyone who’s despondent right now about the state of America’s political culture, pay attention to what Americans from all walks of life are doing on media. It’s incredible to see these bipartisan coalitions. They’re in every city [and] town, Americans coming together to fight for a better media.

One example of citizen action and organization shown in the program was the city of Lafayette, Louisiana, where people put together a viral Internet campaign — Lafayette Coming Together — and 62% of them voted for the city to issue $125 million in bonds and start construction on their own fiber optic network.

Checking back in on that effort today, it appears there was a significant legal battle with BellSouth. Nevertheless, as of this past Saturday, the Lafayette Pro Fiber Blog was reporting the city’s municipal fiber service as up and running:

LUS Fiber is now serving customers throughout the City of Lafayette! Once access to Lafayette’s only 100% fiber optic network is available to your home, you will be invited to switch your video, Internet and phone services to LUS Fiber.

Their services list includes “100 Mbps Peer-to-Peer Community Intranet.” Apparently, Internet speeds in Lafayette are right up there with Reykjavik, Slovenia, and South Korea.

Now, I personally know very little about the complexities involved here, but I do know that high-quality, high-speed broadband service is essential to any community that hopes to have jobs and prosperity from now on.

At a time when Racine is already being squeezed hard by the current economic climate, we have to be alert to the possibility that the main pipe for our productivity could be pinched hard.

Along with stimulus projects and high speed rail connections, is it time for us to start looking a little more closely at our information infrastructure?

(Thanks to Craig Ochs for his tweet yesterday that led me to the BusinessWeek story.)