I have been a DirecTv customer since 1997.. or so. I swore off cable, because back then I lived in a back water city in Minnesota called Blue Earth and in order to get cable in my house it was this huge process the entailed money, which I was in short supply of then.

So as a happy very happy DirecTv customer, I have never seen the need to use cable, or cable related services. That is until Verizon screwed me… again and again and again, until I finally said enough. I canceled everything with them. Both my home and my office used Verizon for DSL and phone service. In all I was giving them 289.99 for the office and another 179.00 for the house… every month..

Now, I use Time Warner cable Internet (10 megabytes per second – consistently) and Vonage for my house phone. With Vonage I get better quality calls, no annoying line checks at two in the morning, and they automatically block anonymous callers so I don’t have to worry about it. Best of all, I can log into Vonage website and forward my phone to my cell, check my voicemail (which are also emailed to me).

For this I pay : 49.95 for internet and 14.95 for Vonage…

So, you would think that I would be happy about this. I am.. HOWEVER. You knew it was coming, stop looking so surprised.

Lately, on all the tech news, they have been talking about how Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox are all looking to go to a “Pay for use” system for their bandwidth.. Meaning I would subscribe to a 5 or 10 gigabyte per month plan and when I went over that much bandwidth, I would be charged for megabyte. So, if I download a couple of iTunes movie rentals over the course of a month, instead of being 4.99 to apple, it is 4.99 to apple and about 20.00 to 30.00 dollars extra for the bandwidth to Time Warner.

This is COMPLETE crap. Comcast has already been in the dog house for throttling bit torrents and now they are all planning this garbage…

My account will be canceled the MINUTE this goes into place. I hope that all my fellow geeks will join me in this. The only way we can send them a message is by not sending them our dollars.

The next question, is after I cancel my Time Warner, where do I go for internet access ? Not Verizon, even though they have started setting up the Fiber Optic in my area… I guess I will have to get a better wifi attennae and start using whatever open nodes I can find..