Lummox JR's BYOND blog

There's more good stuff at Stop the Cap! today. Last night they reported that Time-Warner upped their proposed 40 GB bandwidth cap (still corresponding to a more expensive plan than I have now, mind you) to a still-paltry 60 GB, while upping the overage charge on most tiers to $2/GB/mo. Their top tier will be a whopping $75 for a still ridiculously low 100 GB, with overages at $1/GB/mo and capped at $75, so customers can have "virtually unlimited" (not actually unlimited) access for almost four times their current bill which gives them virtually unlimited access already.

Anyway there's a gem on the site this morning. Phillip Dampier went through Time-Warner's SEC filings and discovered their costs went down in 2008. Time-Warner has told customers it faces cost increases for bandwidth, yet their broadband Internet division was more profitable in 2008 than 2007.

There may be ways of massaging the numbers so things look worse for Time-Warner than they really are, but they won't release any internal data related to bandwidth consumption and network costs, making it impossible to evaluate if there is even a nugget of truth in their claims that they have to do this. However in a couple of statements from their COO Landel Hobbs, I spotted some fairly blatant lies, for which I intend to ridicule him thoroughly over the weekend. There's no reason to put any trust in what they say at this point.

What I can say for sure is that if they tell their shareholders that costs went down, and tell customers costs went up, they're lying to somebody. What should be really fun is if they try to slide this "Our costs went up" hooey by the FTC, at which point they will have officially told two radically different stories to different government agencies.