Basically because of the public outcry they’re “re-evaluating the testing” in favor of providing bandwidth tools so you too can measure the amount of bandwidth.  They are still “testing” just not charging anyone for it, they want you to know how much bandwidth you use so they can charge you for it and that way by the time we get to the point you’ll be used to seeing your bandwidth amount.  It’s not that they are going to stop the program, they still plan on capping bandwidth.  They just want to shift focus because of the bad PR.

(New York, NY) — Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make measurement tools available as quickly as possible. These tools will help customers understand how much bandwidth they consume and aid in the dialog going forward.

Britt added, “We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable.”

I have measurement tools already, its called a router with DD-WRT.

Whose bright idea was this?  Time Warner has spent years pushing their current speed packages – faster internet etc. explaining that faster internet meant we could stream better larger movies and other cool things that take up LOTS of bandwidth.   So someone there came up with the bright idea “You know how we’ve got them all hooked on the higher bandwidth, which we advertised about and told them it was unlimited, lets start charging when they go over 40GB of bandwidth.”

I haven’t been on the site much lately because life has interviened and kept me very busy. That said in looking at the bandwidth to the site, it has nearly tripled from 2gig’s of bandwidth last september to 13gigs of bandwidth to the month of febuary. A lot of this is due to people grabbing images I have stored here. To this I have enabled the protection to stop leeches from using up my bandwidth. Along with that I’m going to be down-sizing the site. There are several unused subdomains I will be turning off, several databases I will be killing, and older files and archives I will be removing. Along with this will be the redesign for the site that I wanted to do back last December but due to time constraints was unable to. I have the images done already, for the most part its just an issue of deciding on how to impliment them and upgrade the version of movable type that I currently have.