As top executives at Charter Communications Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. laid out their vision Tuesday for the cable companies' planned merger, their pitch seemed aimed as much at Washington as at Wall Street.

Charter Chief Executive Tom Rutledge, speaking on a conference call after the company announced a $55 billion agreement to acquire Time Warner Cable, pledged to invest in new broadband products and refrain from the sorts of pricing tactics that have triggered a backlash from regulators.

Charter's deal, which also includes a merger with smaller operator Bright House Networks, would create a new U.S. cable giant with about 24 million total customers, second in size to Comcast Corp. The company is trying to avoid the fate of Comcast's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable, which fell apart last month when it became clear regulators had strong reservations about it.

Mr. Rutledge said Charter won't impose caps on the data consumers can use and won't institute usage-based broadband pricing. Regardless of whether the Federal Communications Commission's new tough Internet rules get tossed out after a court challenge, he said, Charter has no plans to block any Internet traffic or engage in paid prioritization on its pipes.

Such promises highlight how much the regulatory landscape has shifted over the past year and a half. Many analysts and industry executives predicted Comcast's deal would go through and were surprised when it didn't. Now, any companies proposing a big cable merger are likely to tread carefully and be especially sensitive to the concerns regulators laid out in the Comcast deal.

"Through Charter we'll offer consumers a broadband product that makes watching online video, gaming and engaging in other data-hungry applications a great experience, including at peak times," Mr. Rutledge said.

Both Mr. Rutledge and Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Rob Marcus sought to make the case that the combined company shouldn't stoke the same fears that led to regulators resisting the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, because it won't have as much clout in the broadband marketplace.

"We will not have market power in high-speed broadband or video," Mr. Rutledge said. Charter will have less than 30% of the market for Internet speeds above 25 megabits per second, which is the FCC's new benchmark for broadband. Comcast-Time Warner Cable would have controlled at least 57% of that market.

He said that Charter's minimum broadband speed tier is 60 megabits per second today—"considerably faster and less expensive than Time Warner Cable's comparable tiers." Charter has been rolling out these speeds as it has pursued a strategy to convert analog TV transmission to digital, which frees up capacity on the cable pipe for faster broadband speeds and more advanced video services. He said Charter would expand these offerings across its new footprint.

Charter and Time Warner Cable executives said a combined company would be a "pure-play" cable company, without a major investment in an entertainment arm like Comcast's NBCUniversal, which controls cable channels and a TV and film studio.

"This is a very different transaction," Mr. Marcus said. "We're talking about a resulting entity that's significantly smaller, without any vertical integration concerns."

Mr. Rutledge emphasized that Charter invests "significantly" in interconnection and capacity, so it would offer customers broadband products that make streaming online video or gaming a "great experience." Among the major concerns of regulators over the Comcast deal was that the company would use its market power to choke off new online-video services.

Charter executives also said increased scale can help the company serve business customers better and expand deployment of Wi-Fi access points.

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com

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