Once one of the biggest advocates for Internet usage caps, Time Warner (News - Alert) cable has now stepped forward and admitted the practice isn’t remotely popular among users. The company took a long time to actually admit this kind of thing, long after taking a public relations beating for pushing for usage caps that would be as low as 5 GB and high overages that would charge the users as much as $5 per each additional gigabyte.

Despite the fact that the company has admitted usage caps aren’t remotely popular, Time Warner is still attempting some variation of the practice. The metered billing option has returned to some markets under a new name, called Time Warner “Essentials.” The company originally offered a $5 discount if customers signed up to the plan. The problem of course is that Internet users are going to be hit with overages quite quickly, unless they almost never surf the web.

The company has actually tweaked that offering a bit, now offering an $8 discount for just about the same kind of caps.  No one is particularly surprised that there haven’t been a whole lot of people actually taking this particular deal. Time Warner isn’t even all that shocked. Speaking at a recent event, the company’s CEO admitted there are few people taking the deal offered.

Rob Marcus said that the number of subscribers who have picked the plan numbers only in the thousands. That’s a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of Internet users the company boasts. Whether or not that means the company will finally abandon the attempts to put on usage caps is yet to be seen. Time Warner has certainly proven to be plenty tone deaf when it comes to corporate policy. This time the company should realize it could actually hurt its bottom line if it keeps pushing a policy no one on Main Street is in favor of.