The Pros and Cons of Dealing with Your Cable Internet Customers

This article is by a guest blogger.

The problem with being Time Warner Internet is that you are too popular. You wouldn’t think that having millions of customers would be a problem for anyone, but when your product relies on bandwidth the situation can get pretty sticky.

The Internet is called the “Information Superhighway” for a reason. It’s exactly like a highway not only because it carries traffic (information) to and from a location (your computer, and the servers that web pages are stored on); but because it has a finite capacity for supporting its vehicles. Time Warner internet customers are the vehicles: the width of the highway restricts how many vehicles can run on it at any one time.

The major problem for a cable company is that most of its customers want to be on the highway at the same time. When that happens, everything slows down – just like a traffic jam. The company itself may own a huge bandwidth, capable of supporting a lot of traffic – but if it has more customers than bandwidth it starts to see a slowdown in its services. Not good for anyone who has sold that service based on its excellent speeds.

There are solutions to the problem – and it’s in those solutions that both the pros and the cons of dealing with your cable internet customers really come to the fore. Time Warner Internet, for example, has tried to meter and quota out its bandwidth – sparking reactions ranging from interested debate (on the part of people who can see that internet service, by definition, is not unlimited) to outright fury (usually from aggressive net users who demand more than their fair share of space.

Yes, it’s true – the World Wide Web is no bigger than the real world. Think of the internet service sold by Time Warner Internet as a big city, populated by millions. The same problems apply – not enough space, everyone getting in everyone else’s way and plenty of people who think that just because they “live” there they have the right to own everything in sight. Like a city, or perhaps more accurately like a society, good net use for everyone requires everyone to be socially responsible – to use services with an eye on the fact that everyone else has a right to those services too. And like that city, or that society, actual net use doesn’t do this at all. Individual net users are as selfish in cyberspace as members of society are in the real world.

The real world has a solution to this – laws, policing, taxes. Things that have been put in place to control individual citizen’s use of social resources. Time Warner Internet, like most of the biggest net suppliers, is realising that it needs to become its own police force if its customers are going to have a chance to use its service in the way it was intended.

That means monitoring bandwidth usage and imposing penalties when a predefined amount has been reached. Time Warner itself has pointed out already that most internet service providers do this already, they just don’t tell anyone about it. The real pros and cons of dealing with your customers are contained in this statement. Do you police your service honestly and openly – or do you do it in secret?