There's not a broadband provider out there who wouldn't instantly begin billing you by the byte if they thought you (the consumer) would sign off on it. Unfortunately for them, Time Warner Cable's recent PR disaster illustrated that consumers aren't sold on low caps and high overages when broadband delivery costs continue to drop. Many customers may be stupid, but they can apparently read Time Warner Cable's 10-K form, which shows that flat-rate billing has provided Time Warner Cable with very healthy profits.

Meanwhile, Verizon currently doesn't cap or meter their FiOS customers, which acts as a deterrent for competitors in Verizon markets eager to implement metered billing. Pushing metered billing in a FiOS market puts a carrier at a marketing and competitive disadvantage, something Time Warner Cable was well aware of when they hoisted their metered billing trials upon consumers, but only in non-FiOS markets. Even then, Time Warner Cable had to deal with Frontier Communications scrapping their own cap plans to gain a competitive edge.

As we've stated all along, the only way this market sees a shift from flat-rate to metered billing is if the entire industry moves that direction en masse -- leaving customers with no ability to vote with their wallet. Right now, Verizon stands as the finger in the dam. While their GPON fiber to the home architecture currently has the capacity to make such limits unnecessary, Verizon also faces NY-metro area competition from Cablevision, who also doesn't cap and has gone on the record to say metered billing confuses customers.

But things could change, given the temptation of higher revenues. We've spoken to Verizon in the past about the possibility of capped or metered FiOS service, and they've chosen their words carefully -- leaving the option for metered billing open. In conversations this week with the Washington Post, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg makes it very clear that the company is considering the possibility of some kind of metered usage, and is concerned that Google and consumer advocates could restrict the option through legislation:Except Google never said Verizon couldn't charge different prices for different tiers of service, and the strange telco belief that other people should be subsidizing their network builds was precisely the kind of stupid logic that started the network neutrality debate back in 2005. Verizon (and their paid mouthpieces) often suggest Google is a bandwidth freeloader, despite Google's huge investment in architecture.

If you recall, the network neutrality debate truly took off in the States back in 2005, when former SBC (now AT&T) CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week in an article that Google wanted to use Ed's "pipes", for free. "I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," insisted Ed at the time. The comment confused a hell of a lot of people, given that both Google and Google's users already pay for bandwidth. To many, Ed's logic seemed to share a resemblance to the South Park underpants gnomes.

As we just mentioned, copper thieves are getting bolder as the price of copper rises, often stripping live power and phone lines from poles. Time Warner is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of persons involved in a suspected copper theft and fiber sabotage in Texas.:As previously noted, a pound of copper scrap nets thieves around $3.50, so they're stealing it from literally everywhere, including homes, air conditioning units and telecom infrastructure.

The union representing AT&T employees in metropolitan Milwaukee (CWA) has launched a campaign to get users to drop Time Warner Cable service in the city and switch to AT&T's union labor-driven U-Verse. The CWA has this to say about Time Warner Cable at a new website:

In discussions yesterday about the Patent Reform Act of 2007, many users brought up the point that we have to be wary when it’s the companies with big patent portfolios that are seeking reforms. In that same vein, let’s turn our eyes to the Time Warner / IBM agreement to cross-license their patents. IBM owns more than 40,000 active patents, hundreds of which the company says will be useful to Time Warner’s media and entertainment services including “video-on-demand, video search, interactive advertising, multiplatform content distribution, content protection and home networking”. It’s worth noting that the Patent Reform Act of 2007 will make it harder to get patents, which means that if big companies want to cross-license their patents like this, the little inventor guys are going to get left out of the loop.