news-record.com

If Time Warner follows through on this, I will leave them in a heartbeat. I've been a customer for many years...and have not complained through price increases. BUT - to limit access to the Internet because people watch TV (and don't subscribe to the "RAPE ME PLEASE" Cable programming) shows just where their motivation lies. I'd gladly go to a slower service to avoid TWC. I bet if there were some competition for a similar cable internet product in this area, we wouldn't see such wanton disregard for the customer. Netflix, iTunes, and other similar companies should boycott this. Just think what it will do to THEIR revenue streams. Nice going, TWC.

Wow. Never seen so many comments.

Time Warner has been so inundated with negative emails to employees with public email addresses, they've set up a special email address just for "public opinion." Here it is at realideas@twcable.com.

Personally, I think the original email senders had the right idea. TW's "special" email address is a pipeline to file 13.

I am soooo glad I have Direct TV and DSL. Freedom from cable never felt so good.

I see members of the Austin, TX city council already stepping up and admonishing TWC for this same selective pricing plan in Austin.

Remember most importantly, this surcharge ONLY applies to ONE location in NC..ours..

And this surcharge only applies to 4 Time Warner locations in the ENTIRE USA - our location being one of those 4.

I could see it if this was a nationwide move, but why us?

This isn't going to make us look very technology friendly for companies wanting to relocate here.

Why are we being singled out and surcharged when almost every other Time Warner customer in the COUNTRY doesn't have to even worry about any extra usage fees?

I wonder if our city council will do the same as Austin:

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2009/03/30/daily47.html

Time Warner is the only cable/Internet provider servicing most of Greensboro and surrounding areas, and the company has lobbyists in Raleigh who are presently persuading legislators (and buying them out as well) to enact a law that would limit the ability of cities and counties to set up their own cable/Internet operations, which would mean better services for citizens and more competition for Time Warner. Why aren't the news media giving out the facts surrounding this "metered service" pilot program, and digging deeper into this unscrupulous scheme to hide the real story from the public? Could TWC be using its muscle to stifle coverage, since it also owns a sizeable stake in the broadcasting and movie domains?

Never ending policy and rate increases plus "you are boring me" customer service is THE reason I dumped TW. The minute I had Directtv connected along with Bellsouth DSl,I canceled TW service.Oh what a feeling! Directtv is much better in all facets esp. customer service. Bellsouth was also excellent until they were taken over by another TW wannabe-AT&T. There has been no problem with the internet but their customer service sucks.I'll switch that when something new comes along, if ever.

Anyone using Time Warner should ask them this question before continuing service with them. "Will you refund me any charges caused by botnets". now i bet your asking whats a bot net right? well a BOTNET is a program made to host and serve files from an infected users PC. "Well i have anti virus im protected. Arent I?" NO! Anti-Viruses take years to pick up on these worms and most fire walls leave open ports that the worms use to get in. Sometimes the user yes thats you let these viruses in unknowingly. Well you want to understand more about botnets google dalnet and bararcade and other various irc servers on google but dont bother defining your search to the server rather then to this term "XDCC or DCC Bot Search" what will you find? well im guessing about 10-200 thousand infected computers hosting a wide range of illegal files from movies to cracked programs even porn. files averaging 260-780MBS PS everything on computers are measured in 8's (or 4's but really 8's) 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024mb(1 gig) you do the math. if your infected with a botnet and its forcing you to send lets say 8 files each file exactly 280MB and your sending from a 3MBIT line (roughly 400KB/Second) and you have a queue of 40 people and are sending to 4 at 1ce. your racking a bill up of thousands of dollars you dont even know about. PS most botnet scripts are programed to monitor the computer users uptime and downtime and they usualy activate on times that are most likely to be downtimes. now that were off of botnets. lets talk about the wonderful world of BIT TORRENTS yes you download many files and yet you send many more. same situation with bit torrent as botnets some botnets are converted to bit torrent programs but thats not even the worst part. the legit bit torrents have settings to open when you start your computer and a auto feature enabled that you must manualy disable is autoshare so your sending all your downloaded files to anyone who looks for them.

ok now away from the scarey stuff. lets talk about games!!!!! play World of Warcraft anyone? ever notice how long those patchs take to download or how quick your hard drive fills with useless crap that you can never seem to find? its called packets turned to logs and other such files 4 hours on World of Warcraft can cause anywhere from 100-300MBS of transfer WOW!!!

Anyways im done ranting best of luck to those who stay with backstabing companies like roadrunner time warner who like to take money from an already weakened econemy. AT&T is offering 6mbit Digital Subscribers Lines for as low if i remember as 47/month (no hidden fees or overages) wow how unlike a phone company.

Let me get this straight. TWC customers are able to use the DIGITAL TV services in unlimited amounts 24/7 all month for a flat fee -- but they want to meter the digital usage of the internet, limiting us to a rather puny 40 gig before making us pay more? HAH! I'm switching to the Dish Network. So long, greedy suckers.

Time Warner broadband will eventually suffer the same fate as Blockbuster video and the long distance telephone companies of the nineties. Yes the company makes money now because they are the best choice in broadband service. Technology changes rapidly, though. If a new comparable choice presents itself, people will leave in droves. If Time Warner is not willing to foster some kind of customer loyalty, people will never look back when they leave. It is one of the reason they have lost shares of their cable business. It is never a good business plan to make your customers feel like captives.

I will cancel all TWC products if this happens. I can only hope that a competing internet provider will move into this area, take advantage of the situation, and help us out at the same time. I'm not completely sold on DSL but I will certainly give it a try if that is my only option.

some contact info for you can be found here. Let them know how you feel:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/1/715574/-Time-Warner-Strikes-Back

I had seen the TW "repair" truck going up and down my street for the past two or three days. This morning I caught up with "him" when he stopped at my power pole. When I asked him if there was any trouble on the line, if anything was out of service, he replied, "I'm making an adjustment so the internet with be faster."

Boo to TW pricing policy! TW is retro and it doesn't feel good! Remember the days when we waited to make a phone call till after business hours or waited until the weekend until the rates were cheaper? Well this move by TW to soak us for bandwidth reminds us of those days! If my wife and I could - we would pull the plug on TW now for pulling this stunt of charging more for bandwidth usage. We would like to see other sources for ISP.

I assume this site's owners are in the state of NY since there is talk of getting NY Attorney General involved. In any case, a site that went up on this: Stop Time Warner Cable (http://www.stoptwc.info) has been going around as of late last night.

Mr. Killian, could you write a follow up article(s) to this? I would love to see some sort of facts and figures type of an article. You could use yourself as the average joe so to speak. Monitor your own internet usage for a week, maybe get a couple of other N&R reporters or family members to help. You can use someone who doesn't use the net as much and someone that does. Could you also include thoughts from the city council and other important people from the city? I would love to know their reactions and thoughts to this.

As I understand it, the metered system starts at 5gb and goes to 40 gb. With penalties of $1 for every gb that you go over your plan. One streamed movie from Netflix can run 8gb. So if you watch 5 movies online, not only have you hit the ceiling of the highest priced plan, but you're going to star incurring additional charges.

Most importantly - these charges ONLY apply to 4 TWC locations in the US and nobody else in our state will incur this surcharge - only us in the triad.

I Cannot wait until AT&T UVERSE or VERIZON FiOS comes to the Triad - both services are *FAR* better than Time Warner Cable, and much faster than any DSL service. The lack of options we have in this day and age is absurd.

There are going to be a lot of disappointed people. If TW really only expected 10% of users to be charged for additional use, it simply wouldn’t be worth the hardware, software and changes in billing to deploy it.

Here is what they are not telling you…
• Many of you have VOIP type services for your phones. Those are full duplex communications that use quite a bit of bandwidth. Didn’t see that in their list.
• Most of us have antivirus updates, MS updates, specific software updates, etc that will grab portions of your precious bandwidth. There is a growing trend in software development to verify (online) that the program you are using, is registered to you each time you use it.
• Folks it’s not just what you upload, download but its also all the network handshaking, error correction that happens that they don’t mention. You maybe only downloading a 30meg file but actual bytes exchanged will be much greater than that.. especially on busy networks (TW). Think of it like the gas you use when your car is idleing.
• I don’t know what web pages they are looking at but most sites today are loaded with multiple animated gif files, streaming video and such that doesn’t do justice to their figures. Oh and they didn't include any chat like MSN, Yahoo that many of you and your children enjoy.

Guess what? Software and peoples demand for quality online multimedia will only increase not decrease. More products will be coming out that will need to make use of your internet account.

40 gigabytes per month equals about 1.4 gigabytes per day. I rounded it high. I’ll error on the low side and say there are 3 users per household. Each user gets 467megs of data per day.

You won’t actually get that much because of all the overhead plus If you have any VOIP services and like to talk or have kids that do… well you get the picture. At 467 megs per day… even modest game playing, “youtube” watching, Netflix, WII, etc will make you wonder where all the megabytes went.

Enjoy connecting at your local wifi friendly place? If they use TW they won’t be that friendly once if they get rolled into this type plan.

Gee will they offer roll-over megabytes if I don’t use all my bandwidth?

This is going to make the competition very happy!!

I urge you to fight this by taking action locally. Join savetheinternet.com. The future of free flowing innovation and ideas is at stake. This test market is the part of many battles in a long long fight in Congress. If at and t and time warner have their way we will all be paying through the nose.

Here’s what I find distasteful about the proposed Time Warner internet provider rate change. Our federal government removed most of the responsibility and authority that local governments (LFA’s) have over video cable operators and seemed to have removed entirely their oversight of ‘information services’ and ‘telecommunication services’. The federal cable act provides localities to adopt and enforce customer service standards, require franchise fees, require proposals for updating facilities equipment or services, build/provide institutional and public networks for education and government use and define the boundaries of the service area. The FCC recognizes Congress’ goal to expand broadband connectivity through the use of cable systems and clearly recognizes the trend to deliver internet content previously only provided through television technologies through the use of cable television and other broadband networks. Much effort has been expended by Congress, the FCC, and the service providers to limit the ability of a LFA to impede entry and competition in a local market. Some authority remains with the LFA, however.

In the Piedmont Triad, cable franchise agreements (public documents not found online, nor is a listing of the agreements and their renewal dates) are monitored by the Piedmont Triad Council of Governments (www.ptcog.org) with recommendations provided to the local government LFA for accepting specific agreements and rate changes. The franchise agreements require a formal procedure ‘State of the Art Option’ to be followed that can result in an early cancellation or amendment of the 15 year franchise agreements. While this procedure is lengthy and involved, it is the only process that the local authority has to influence the franchisee.

Here’s what I find untenable about the current situation:
1. The rate hike has been proposed to meet the demands of video programming now delivered through the internet. As such, this video programming is a ‘state of the art’ replacement for the ‘cable television’ covered under county ordinances and the franchise agreement.
2. Since Time-Warner is attempting to charge for the use of their internet services to deliver television, the rate change should have LFA oversight.
3. Our LFA hasn’t issued any statement relative to their intent to review their ability to influence and govern through the franchise agreeement or other means.

The PTCOG has contractual oversight of the cable franchise process. Requests from consortia members for PTCOG to act incurs service fees. Greensboro is represented at PTCOG by Councilman Zach Matheny (http://www.greensboro-nc.gov/citygovernment/council/emailcouncil.htm) while Guilford County is represented by Carolyn Coleman (ccolema@co.guilford.nc.us). The PTCOG website suggests that complaints be sent first to the cable operator (336-379-0200 Time Warner customer service), then if not satisfied after 24 hours, to the local franchising authority (the LFA shown on the front of your Time-Warner bill). If those remedies aren’t satisfactory, then the process is to contact the PTCOG Cablevision Administrator:
David H. Harris
Cablevision Administrator
Piedmont Triad Council of Governments
2216 West Meadowview Road, Suite 201
Greensboro, NC 27407-3480
Phone: 336-294-4950
Fax: 336-632-0457
Email: dharris@ptcog.org

My suggestion is for everyone that is concerned about the rate change and the apparent lack of oversight through the franchise process make their concerns noted to Time-Warner, their LFA and to the PTCOG representatives noted above. The expected response is some explanation of the intent of our government to influence Time-Warner’s intent. Likely, since this area is a test market, other areas of the country served by Time-Warner would be interested in providing some cash to launch a team of lawyers to forestall this seemingly unlawful rate change.

From:
a Time-Warner Roadrunner customer from day one beginning in Columbus, OH

Mr. Killian, a little clarification, if you please. You write that "Time Warner" is making this change. But there are 2 different internet companies hooked to TWC customers through the network: Road Runner and Earthlink. I've heard that this change will only affect RR customers. Is this true?

Please everyone, don't just complain here. File a complaint with the FCC. Also, do as I did go to www.whitehouse.gov and send an email to Obama. Don'f forget to mention how this pricing policy is unfair to lower income people since they will not be able to affort as much bandwidth as others, their access to information/data on the internet will be less. Also if you want to contact the CEO of Time Warner here is his contact information:

Glenn Britt
glenn.britt@twcable.com
203-328-0670

7 hours of low resolution video a month? This is in conflict with industries 'promise' to provide net neutrality. By charging for broadband bandwidth in this small amount - 7 hours of low resolution video a month - Time Warner is charging for content provided by YouTube, NetFlix, etc.

The FCC needs to act. Web content needs to be kept free. I'd be for capping anything that gets into providing business class service at the home - like running a couple of servers - but 7 hours of low res video a month? That is not going to fly.