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:

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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."

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We asked Cablevision about their cap and metering plans and as was the case when we asked Verizon last year, the company says there's no plan to adopt per-byte billing but uses language that keeps the option open down the line. There are "no plans at this time to pursue a metered billing strategy for our Optimum Online broadband service," spokesman Jim Maiella tells me. Fear of giving Verizon any edge (aka competition) apparently is a strong deterrent.

The fear that metered billing would drive away confused customers that have grown used to flat-rate billing also has merit. A survey last fall conducted by Zeugma Systems found that 81% of consumers unsurprisingly don't like the idea of a cap and overages. 83% of polled customers either don't know what a gigabyte is, or have no idea how many they use.

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You seem to be tying our position on metered broadband to defensive competitive fear, as opposed to a pro-consumer product philosophy that - in the case of Optimum Online - goes back more than a decade. Don't forget, when our broadband service was first introduced into the market in 1997 it was a 10 Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream service. Those speeds would be highly competitive in today's marketplace, although we've since upgraded our base speeds to up to 15 Mbps down and 2 up. The attractiveness, value and competitive advantages of our products - all of them - become most clear and compelling when our customers use them.

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