Buried in a Yankee Group write up of last week's Cable Show conference in DC is an interesting nugget from Cablevision. At a roundtable at the show regarding capping and metered billing, Cablevision's Senior VP of Corporate Engineering & Technology, Jim Blackley, didn't exactly sound enamored by the idea of billing by the byte. Cablevision seems particularly concerned that the shift to metered billing would simply confuse users:
Blackley, noting that the company compete with Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s U-Verse products, came down squarely against the idea saying, "we don’t want to give consumers more to think about." Blackley also had the quote of the day. Speaking of bit caps and not wanting to complicate the issue for consumers, he said, "we think [broadband] is a pretty powerful drug and we want people to consume more of it."
Cablevision of course is doing battle with FiOS in the relatively competitive NY metro market, and can't afford to give Verizon a marketing advantage (perhaps like those old SBC ads). That's in contrast to Time Warner Cable, who is only testing their metered billing model in non-FiOS neighborhoods. Also unlike Time Warner Cable, Cablevision is moving quickly to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0, and is deploying a Wi-Fi network to add additional consumer value.
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