Net users vent frustration at Time Warner
GREENSBORO — Sue Polinsky had the first cable modem in Greensboro.
Back in the late 1990s, when the Web designer found she needed more Internet speed than a telephone or DSL line could provide, she was happy to pay a premium. She’s been a Time Warner Cable customer ever since — even upgrading to the business-class service to run her company, Tech Triad, from home.
But when she got wind of Time Warner’s plan to begin monitoring and capping how much data its Greensboro customers use, she said it could be summed up in one word.
“Greed,” Polinsky said. “That’s all it is.”
Time Warner has chosen the Triad area as one of four test markets for its new tiered pricing system. In the fall, new customers and those at the end of their contracts will get new plans that treat their Internet use much like cell-phone use. The company will begin charging users for all the data transmitted over their cable lines — everything from Web pages to photos, songs and videos.
The plans range from $29.95 to $54.90 a month and will limit usage to five, 10, 20 or 40 gigabytes of data per month. Going over those caps will cost $1 for each gigabyte.
“Even the highest cap of 40 gigs is just ridiculous,” Polinsky said. “They’re designed so that customers will go over.”
To prove her point, Polinsky downloaded a free program called Freemeter on Thursday night. The program allowed her to monitor her data usage on what she thought of as a light night — watching some “ER” online, a few YouTube clips, sending a couple of e-mails before bed. That activity took about 45 minutes, she said. It cost her almost a gig in data usage.
“I’m one person who just did those simple things,” Polinsky said. “Can you imagine how many gigs a family of people who all get on the Net are going to use in a month? Can you imagine what it’s going to cost them?”
Disgruntled reaction
Polinsky is hardly alone. When Time Warner announced the plan this week, customers blogged, called and visited the local office to complain.
Many customers said they would defect to slower, phone-line based Internet service. Some even complained to city government.
“I’ve gotten a lot of calls about it,” said John Gribble, franchise administrator for the city of Greensboro.
Customers were so angry they asked Gribble if the city could pull Time Warner’s cable franchise agreement for radically changing pricing.
“There really isn’t anything we can do,” Gribble said. “The FCC has made a rule that broadband is not a cable service, and so not regulated in the same way. So through our franchise agreement, the city really has no regulatory authority here.”
Gribble said the city works closely with Time Warner and will let the company know that unhappy customers have complained. That’s all the city is empowered to do.
But, Gribble said, Time Warner could soon see some serious competition. AT&T has been in talks to launch its high speed TV, DVR and Internet services — called AT&T U-verse — in N.C. cities, including Greensboro.
“I hope that a lot of competition comes in for them,” said Charles Petty, a Greensboro customer with Time Warner. “If they go through with charging me this way, I’m going to go somewhere else. A lot of people will.”
With her business-class plan, Polinsky already pays more than residential customers and the usage caps won’t affect her. But as something of an Internet evangelical who pushed to make Wi-Fi available in downtown Greensboro and helped organize the city’s ConvergeSouth tech conferences, she thinks low-price quality Internet access is good for everyone. It helps business, promotes education and creativity and builds community, she said.
“The cheaper we make good Internet access, the fewer poor people have to go without it, the more grandmas and grandpas are going to get online,” Polinsky said. “And Time Warner’s saying that by offering lower-cost plans with very low data caps, they’re allowing more people to get Internet. That’s just not true.”
As Polinsky and other angry customers have pointed out, Time Warner already offers Road Runner Lite for about the same price as its new five-gigabyte plan. The new plan would offer no economic incentive to people hesitant about paying for cable Internet. The only thing new is the data cap.
“That’s not a move to enfranchise people, to bring them into getting quality Internet service,” Polinsky said. “That’s setting deliberately low caps that will end up costing almost everyone more money in extra charges.”
Why the change?
“The data caps are a matter of necessity,” said Melissa Buscher, Time Warner Cable’s spokesperson for the Carolinas. The company’s cable infrastructure simply wasn’t built for the high-quality video and audio now available all over the Internet. Heavy users are causing slower speeds for everyone by taking up much of the bandwidth over which information can travel, Buscher said.
Many customers said they don’t believe that explanation.
“I can watch all the high definition television I want through the same cable service, order on-demand movies and watch all day, and they have no problem with that,” said Jennifer Sanders-Melvin, a Time Warner customer who said she’s looking for other options. “But if I want to do the same thing on the Internet, through the same cable, they have to limit what I can use?”
Sanders-Melvin said the company’s real motivation is curbing Internet television viewing — now free on many network Web sites and video sites like Hulu and Netflix — to preserve Time Warner’s cable television business.
Blogger and News & Record columnist Ed Cone said the problem is more complicated. As a writer and editor for Ziff Davis Enterprise, he’s covered the question of an Internet choked on modern video.
“The core of the Internet is robust and can handle this stuff,” Cone said. “It’s that last mile to your house, in this case the cable lines, where there is a legit problem.”
While the core of the U.S. Internet — government and private cables and servers — is continuously updated, the infrastructure nearest the consumer is maintained largely by cable and telephone companies. Buscher said cable companies did not foresee an explosion in online video and audio and did not invest in the infrastructure improvements need to handle modern demands.
“All cable companies are seeing a 50 percent increase in the amount of data we’re handling every year,” Buscher said. “That’s making it harder for us to continue to offer the same speeds, the same Internet experience that people have become used to.”
Last summer, Cone interviewed Vint Cerf, an executive at Google who was one of the original designers of what we now know as the Internet.
“In the United States, the idea that the Internet might be choking at the edge of the net might have some validity,” Cerf said in an interview published online. “Our delivery capacities are far less than what other countries and other Internet providers have been able to achieve.”
The question is how companies like Time Warner choose to pass on the cost of fixing the problem to their customers. Metered usage and tiered pricing might be necessary, Cone said, but the caps proposed by Time Warner are much smaller than their competitors. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company and Time Warner’s fiercest competition, caps use at 250 gigabytes per month.
“They may have to look at what kind of caps make sense,” Cone said. “But some of it, I’m sure, is just that people don’t like change. I’m sure that the first people to buy early cars were angry when they introduced speed limits, too.”
Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com
Accompanying Photos
Photo Caption: The state sales tax would be applied to more items including software downloaded over the Internet.
1 GB equals
70,000 e-mails
1,344 hours of Web surfing
569 photos
277 music files
7 hours of low-resolution video (average YouTube resolution)
3 hours of standard definition streaming video
45 minutes of high-definition streaming video
Source: Time Warner Cable
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