We've been reporting on the Time Warner metered broadband brouhaha this week, and the latest news is the company's attempt at concessions to customer complaints — we've got some plan changes including what amounts to an unlimited usage plan topping out at an astonishing $150 a month, but no plans to step back from the concept of metered broadband in general. In fact, COO Landel Hobbs tries to prop up the argument for capped broadband necessity with the old cable industry-spun "exaflood" argument, which attempts to paint a picture of dire consequences for the internet as a whole, whose tubes will be thoroughly clogged by traffic and facing "Internet brownouts" by 2012 "if we don't act."

Yet Time Warner's most recent SEC filing paints a curiously different picture to shareholders, in which broadband revenues have risen while infrastructure costs have actually fallen over the past two years. In other words, we're being asked to believe that either TWC has been so asleep at the wheel since 2007 that they didn't foresee the insanely dangerous usage increases on the horizon until just now, or that the infrastructure costs the company faces are somehow much higher than industry analysis suggests. Here are the proposed new changes to the cap plans:

• A new low tier at $15/month for 1 GB of data, speed limited to 768kbps up/128kbps down, with $2 per GB overage fees
• 20, 40 and 60 GB/month plans will range from $25 at the low to $65 at the top, with $1 per GB overage charges
• A new 100 GB "turbo" package for $75, at 10Mbps downstream/1Mbps up, also with $1 per GB overage
• There will be a total cap on overage fees at $75 monthly. So with the 100 GB turbo you'd in practicality have an unlimited plan if you're willing to shell out an astonishing $150 per month for it.
• A future plan at a speed of 50Mbps down/5Mbps up will be available for $100 a month after they launch their improved Docsis 3.0 network — but no mention of what the cap will be under these plans.

The concessions at this point feel like a weak ploy to appear conciliatory, part of an elaborate strategy to first lowball and subsequently up the ante to make what are still throughly fishy broadband caps appear more reasonable by comparison. Even the new "grandma and grandpa" plan at $15 a month for 1 GB (yes, that's really $15 per gigabyte) carries an overage charge of $2 per GB instead of the $1 per GB overage of the higher tier plans. So the concession is to fleece the granny and grampy whose internet experience is supposedly saved and protected by metered broadband even more egregiously?

Moreover it's clear that Time Warner fully expects its customers to keep climbing that bandwidth ladder over time, ratcheting themselves into sweeter and sweeter profit positions thanks to the tiered strategy plus known usage increases, thanks to a money quote (literally) from Hobbs: "Broadband data is such a great product. I think there will be some customers who don’t use much that will select the lower tier. But over time, they will use more and move up to the higher price plans." This too reveals that metered broadband isn't really about saving the internet or ensuring great customer experience for the more "polite," less bandwidth-hungry users on the network — it's about setting up a tiered scheme in which Time Warner stands to make an incredible amount of bank as general demand for internet usage is increasing.

Thanks also to TW's SEC filing we know it's additionally about thwarting the increasing competition their cable video business faces from competitors delivering video content over the web: "TWC faces competition from a range of other competitors, including, increasingly, companies that deliver content to consumers over the Internet, often without charging a fee for access to the content. This trend could negatively impact customer demand for TWC’s video services, especially premium and On-Demand services." In other words, because the value proposition of one component of Time Warner's business is falling, consumers should be expected to make up the difference by paying through the nose for another part of that business. Because they couldn't solve the problem by outright blocking competitors on their networks thanks to net neutrality advocates, the new cable strategy appears to be putting consumers into a mindset of internet rationing, where the commodity is literally so precious you might think twice about streaming that Netflix movie in high definition.

The good news is, all such plans are still officially in trial mode. And the concessions from Time Warner do show that the company is aware it now has a massive public relations problem to be mindful of. Legislators are as hopping mad as consumers. It's not a done deal yet, which means keep expressing your opinion on the subject. TWC invites your feedback on the issue at realideas@twcable.com, and at least two PR representatives are also responding actively on Twitter here: @jeffTWC and @MsmarTW. And of course, let us know what you think in the comments.

This story around the web: