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The Huffington Post reports
In our Petition for Investigation of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast, we point out that TWC's High-Speed Internet service has a 97 percent profit margin and a number of people asked how that statistic was derived. Simple. Time Warner Cable provides the information, (with some caveats).
Below is the actual financial information excerpted from the Time Warner Cable, 2013 SEC-filed annual report. (Please note that this same mathematics is also used by Comcast and probably Verizon and AT&T, though they do not explicitly detail their financials in this way.)
Moreover, we need to put this financial information in context to what customers are paying, and more specifically with the Time Warner Cable Triple Play bill that's been featured in previous articles.
[...]
Net Neutrality, Competition, and Fees to Competitors
In the current FCC proceeding about Open Internet, commonly known as "Net Neutrality", one of the issues surrounds what the competitors and content providers, such as Netflix, are paying to connect to the cable networks. On the other side, the 'slow-lane-fast-lane' discussion is all about charging end-user customers more or getting your service slowed down in some way.
To put it bluntly, with a 97 percent profit margin for High-Speed Internet, TWC has given its own services 'priority' favoritism, a sweet-heart deal,--call it what you want--but any other company would never, ever [be allowed to pay just] $1.32 a month to use the TWC networks to offer competitive High-Speed Internet, but this is what it costs Time Warner Cable's ISP, the part of the company offering the Internet and broadband service, to offer end users High-Speed Internet service. Competitors would most likely have to pay about 50 percent or more of the 'retail' average price of $43.92 to offer their service as a competitor.
If customers have been 'defacto' investors, paying an extra $5.00 a month since 2001 under the "Social Contract" to fund upgrades of the cable networks for High-Speed Internet, why shouldn't these networks be open so we can choose who offers us Internet or cable service over these wires?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Monday February 09 2015, @04:03PM
And for those that doubt we were robbed? We aren't talking 10 million, 20 million, even 50 million, we are talking about 200 billion dollars [pbs.org] stolen from the American people that was SUPPOSED to be in return for giving us a coast to coast national broadband infrastructure so that every American that wanted broadband could have it. All we got was a low res Goatse while they stuffed the money in their pockets! Hell I've been trying to get high speed to my mother's place for the better part of 20 years and even though you can literally see the end of the line from her front porch (its about a block and a half away) neither will run it to her (cable offered....if she coughs up $14,000 for the line PLUS signs a 5 year contract to take the most expensive package they have) so you can imagine how much that shit pisses me off!
That is why I say we should treat them like any other fraudster, either they give us what we paid for within 90 days (since they have had over a decade and a half) or we take the last mile away from them and open it up to competition. They want to own the last mile? We'll give 'em 15 years for every FTTH they wire up that currently has NO wired coverage available! Its obvious that if we are to compete with the rest of the world we have to have a reliable fast broadband infrastructure nationwide but TFA shows what we end up with without some kind of intervention, jacked prices, cherry picking, and large swaths that have no coverage at all or are considered "covered" thanks to access to some insanely high cost/low bandwidth WISP or cellular network.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.