Time Warner capping bandwidth can have a big effect on gamers

by: John - posted: 4/8/2009 8:14:00 AM

There's one nice thing about where I live and that's the fact I have choices for broadband. I used to have Time Warner but their service degraded in my area immensely and they came out numerous times and could never fix the problem. I had less than dial-up speeds when I should have been getting 2+mbps at the time. So, with that I switched to another cable company and my speeds have been great ever since. Well, Time Warner's testing out a new strategy in capping the amount of bandwidth people can use. You'd pay a tiered service and if you go over you pay a certain amount per gigabyte. Yes, pretty stupid and the fact that they are only testing this out in areas where there is no competition means that those people are screwed and it goes to show how monopolies can be bad.

So many things are brought to you whether you want to or not via streamed ads or purchasing games through digital distribution that gamers would probably hit the allotted cap pretty easily for the month. Gamers with Jobs has a nice little article and some quick numbers on how this can affect them and you. I personally will never settle for a capped service because there are just too many variables out there these days and there's no way I can monitor my usage close enough to make sure I don't go over the cap. I'm not seeing a very good success rate with this and I'd sure love to see Time Warner bring it to areas where there are choices and watch as subscribers leave. I don't buy their reasoning in that they need the revenue to support their infrastructure as well. Thanks Time Warner. You've made me cross you off my list of potential providers for cable and broadband should I decide to change.

Thanks Kotaku.