I was a little furious with Time Warner Cable when they announced that they were going to test out metered/tiered pricing in certain regions. I live in upstate New York, a couple of hours south of Rochester. Although I wouldn’t be part of the metered boardband test I am in a Time Warner area. And, there are only 2 other options for broadband, DSL and Earthlink (which goes over the same cables as Time Warner does).

I plan on moving about 10 miles away this summer and see this as an opportunity to consider changing around my broadband set up a little bit. I will still have the same options as I have now (except I might not have DSL is an option because the new house is in a more rural area). I was thinking of getting Earthlink, this way I wouldn’t have to deal with caps (at least for a while) and I would be sending a significantly smaller amount of money to Time Warner each month (Earthlink still has to pay Time Warner to use their cables).

I was also considering just staying with Time Warner but making sure not to make any long term commitments just for a lower price per month, this way if metered service does come to my area I could drop them immediately and move to another provider.

But, with recent news of Time Warner (at least) holding off on their plan to meter bandwidth I will be choosing Time Warner for my broadband access.

I will still make sure that I don’t get into any commitments, just in case they decide to reintroduce metering again sooner than I hope they will (I’m sure they will, it’s just a question of how long we’ll have to wait), but in the mean time I’ll save a little bit of money each month by combining my cable and broadband bill.

I do want to commend Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Eric Massa for their disapproval of Time Warner metering their broadband service. I don’t think Massa’s proposal to ban metered bandwidth is exactly the right idea, I actually think Schumer’s plan to instead protect consumers without completely banning it is a much smarter solution. I’m just glad that both of them seem to care about consumers.

By the way, in case the title fooled you, I definitely still hate Time Warner Cable.

Update 6/2/09: Recently Time Warner has changed their terms of service to be little bit more friendly to bandwidth tiers. As a result of this I’m once again, angry at the company.