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HissyFitWatch, is Time Warner lying to everyone?

Saturday, April 25, 2009

There is a disturbing report over at Stop the Cap! that leaves me fuming.  According to the report, Time Warner may be saying they are shelving the bandwidth caps for now, but what they are actually doing is worse.  Ryan Howard is saying that his internet stopped working suddenly this week, and after multiple calls to the Time Warner support line, and several new modems purchased at the store, he was eventually directed to the Security and Abuse center for TW.  I wont even get into the pathetic lack of customer service it takes to have a paying customer need to call three or more times to discover the ‘problem’ is due to the company intentionally disconnecting you.

So he calls and has to leave a message.  The return call is reportedly more of a re-education and this is how the world works smack down from the TW rep, in which he informed Brian (that’s Brian the paying customer, Brian the customer who pays extra to be on the Top Tier of internet account speeds) that he used 44 gigs of bandwidth in only one week, and that is just unacceptable.  When pressed, the re-education department representative would not give any hard numbers, but alluded to a percentage of Brians current use that sounds awfully similar to the nof imfamous 40 gig/month cap.  No surprise that they poitned straight to the terms of service that gives them the ‘right’ to cut you off since you are on a shared network.

Now you may be thinking that 44 gigs in a week is a lot, and for some people it is.  But it is far from what I would even think to call abusive or excessive given this is 2009.  The cable providers of the United States have been handed hundreds of millions of dollars to build out infrastructure, and yet they still cry the same lame wolf story about not having enough bandwidth.  A single High Definition movie stream is likely to be 5-7 gigabytes, is Time Warner telling us that they have managed their company in such a way over the past decade, that a preimium tier customer is not allowed to watch one movie a night?  Something is way out of wack here.

Time Warner pulled back on the caps last week under intense pressure, and the threat of congressional intervention, it looks like many of our fears were well founded, nothing changed, they are just paying lip service.

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