Broadband Junkies

Following up on another choice comment that came out of Jim Chiddix’s panel last week at Cable Show ‘09:

Jim Blackley, Cablevision Systems senior vice president of corporate engineering and technology, was explaining that the New York-area operator has no plans to institute bandwidth-usage caps.

In doing so, he compared broadband to a narcotic — and Cablevision to a drug pusher:

“We literally don’t want consumers to think about how they’re consuming high-speed services. It’s a pretty powerful drug and we want people to use more and more of it.”

That’s unlike other big MSOs (Comcast, Cox, Charter) which do place limits on monthly usage.

Maybe sticking with the all-you-can-eat broadband story would be the best bet for Time Warner Cable, which is now seeing its plans to charge customers overage fees of $1/Gigabyte beyond caps being whipped into a political froth. (See Pols Blast Time Warner Cable’s Bandwidth Metering.)