I feel compelled to comment on this issue. Looking at many of the articles floating around concerning this issue show that TW is only doing this in areas that have little to no competition. (See DSL Reports Article, too lazy to link it right now sorry.)
Like andymadigan I live in the Rochester area and will be effected by this if TW actually imposes these changes. To expand on my point above, the local telephone company in this area (Frontier Telephone of Rochester/Citizens Communications) is a joke and I say this as someone who used to enjoy their services. However, at this point the only thing they're doing is keeping FIOS out of our area. If you happen to live within a block of the CO you might get good service if they haven't totally messed up the loop length. Otherwise, you can forget about it.
When I lived about 600 feet from the nearest CO I was getting comparable speeds to TW and paying slightly less. However, after purchasing a house in a different part of the area (only about 1 mile outside the city border and within 1 mile of the airport where they offer free WiFi) I was lucky to get 1mpbs service and the modem had to be rebooted daily just to maintain any sort of decent speeds without packet loss. They refuse to upgrade lines anywhere outside of extremely densly populated areas and yet wonder why they can't compete with TW.
So TW has no problem trying to screw over their customers as we have very little options to get better service. I will be calling TW to complain about this issue, I will be contacting the State AG about this, and I've already looked into other options. Earthlink at a 7mbps connection for $42/mo is slightly more expensive and a little slower, but lets be honest I never see the full 10mb down from RR and at least my connection won't be capped through Earthlink. If Earthlink gets screwed because they are leasing TW's lines I will move to dish. Good ping times are not that important compared to not being able to use my Internet service the way I want to.
The only thing TW is trying to do here is test the viability of keeping their Internet customers purchasing their cable TV as well. If you don't have the bandwidth to stream/download movies, you will keep buying cable right? At least thats what their banking on. I already pay $80/mo for a cable connection I use to watch 3 or 4 shows regularly and be able to DVR them so I can watch them when I want. If TW isn't making enough money off me that way they will be making no money off me in the short future.
For the record all of the online services I use, I'm paying for. Either via ads for free services like Hulu and YouTube, or via subscriptions for Netflix.