Public rage stalls Time Warner trials of consumption-based internet

Time Warner's new data capping broadband scheme was never expected to win any popularity contests, and the details of its plans are so frustrating, that this probably should not come as a surprise. Regardless, it looks like the company's plan to further roll out testing of the consumption-based billing method has been foiled, or at least stalled, because it couldn't find enough customers to participate in the testing. TWC had planned to test in several locations, including San Antonio and Austin, Texas, but the response has apparently been so negative, and there were so many complaints, that the company has "delayed" the trials until October. So... maybe if we keep moaning about it the plan will be abandoned altogether? Here's to hoping, anyway.

[Via The Register]

[brendon @ Apr 16th 2009 11:26AM]

squeaky wheel gets the oil

[Dave @ Apr 16th 2009 1:16PM]

Great, as a Time Warner Cable RoadRunner broadband and digital cable user I don't have to worry about switching my provider(s)...for now. However, rest assured if they do make this change they will be losing my account along with my mother's and girlfriend's whom I have influence over. While we're at it TWC stop trying to nickle and dime us on the DVR pricing or I'll be kissing those goodbye too. A good strategy would be actually lowering prices. Also start increasinng your RoadRunner upload speeds or we'll all be kissing you goodbye anyways. Finally, a word about those stupid orange cones you make your employees put out when they park. I want to encourage every TWC customer to subsidize their bill by starting to swipe them and selling them on eBay.

[seamonkey420 @ Apr 16th 2009 1:29PM]

yup, i already said screw you to DVR from cable companies. i just wish that the cablecard infrastructure was so messed up and screwed us DIY HTPC peeps (stupid cablecard certified crap!!!! arggg!!!)

[OneLove @ Apr 16th 2009 3:03PM]

Public rage doesn't seem to work on comcast. :(

- Don't touch our Internets, bitches!

[Nelagster @ Apr 16th 2009 11:27AM]

So they think come October people will suddenly want to jump on board with this?

[Noah @ Apr 16th 2009 11:50AM]

No, they are hoping we will all forget and then they will roll it out as quietly as possible, hoping no one will notice.

[tom @ Apr 16th 2009 3:05PM]

Just like Billy Bob and the Boxmasters ?

[Robert @ Apr 16th 2009 11:28AM]

Time Warner Cable needs to go away.

[tom @ Apr 16th 2009 11:29AM]

still we pay more and get less... fvck TW

[John @ Apr 16th 2009 11:31AM]

I'm lucky. I have three choices in high speed.
1) Time Warner - coax
2) SureWest - coax
3) AT&T Uverse - copper/fiber from the node

The only one I'm missing is Verizon FIOS. I don't expect it to roll out any time soon though. I'm not in a Verizon territory.

So, the second TW tries to pull it's crap I'm jumping ship to one of the other services. I let them know in an email already.

[bk7 @ Apr 16th 2009 11:29AM]

finally power to the people!

[SOOPERGOOMAN @ Apr 16th 2009 11:44AM]

Stand up for your rights, This is bad. Maybe I should start that here or something. Rogers is like that but I get Unlimited Bandwidth for $75/month. Tricked them on their own policies.

[DirtyVegas @ Apr 16th 2009 12:00PM]

Yeah. I'm still shocked our opinions actually count.

Now, world peace?

[ananimus3 @ Apr 16th 2009 1:04PM]

This is has absolutely nothing to do with "rights." Except for your right to not give them your money which is precisely what the people offered testing did. A dollar is a powerful ballot sometimes.

[bk7 @ Apr 16th 2009 2:15PM]

just to clarify.. i said nothing about "rights", i'm all for voting with your money.

[love it @ Apr 16th 2009 11:30AM]

Fi-OS

Up to 50/20 mbps !
Over 200 HD Channels !
Unlimited Bandwidth on All Plans !

Call today!

[sk @ Apr 16th 2009 11:34AM]

Yeah right, not available at your location

[krische @ Apr 16th 2009 11:40AM]

The very second it comes to the Milwaukee area I'll call. Till then its AT&T or TimeWarner.

[Justin @ Apr 16th 2009 11:42AM]

Yeah--in Milwaukee it's 10Mb. TWC, or 6Mb. AT&T DSL. Ugh.

[wat up!!! @ Apr 16th 2009 11:47AM]

yeah.... but one thing.... fios aint everywhere......
last time i heard it was only tampa.... any progress yet??

[Ian @ Apr 16th 2009 11:58AM]

man if they rolled that out everywhere people would be jumping onboard like CRAZY. they aren't even to SF yet so i guess there's no hope for them going to smaller places.

[JamesR @ Apr 16th 2009 12:09PM]

My experience here in Philly is that they are doing the burbs first. So SF might be behind the smaller places.

[love it @ Apr 16th 2009 12:08PM]

There is pretty good availability throughout the northeast, particularly in New York and New Jersey (where I am located). There are about 13 million home with access to FiOS :)

http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

[Brian @ Apr 16th 2009 12:37PM]

i'm in phoenix AZ. the way i understand it, qwest owns all the lines here. verizon is not an option for anything but cell service in this city. qwest is rolling out their own sh!tty fiber to the home netowrk with less than impressive speeds, and i don't see a possibility of FIOS getting here..... ever. so for now and the forseeable future, i'm on cable. till cellular high speed exceeds its capabilities for the price.

[Chird @ Apr 16th 2009 12:46PM]

@love it, Availability in NY is pretty good, but the Rochester city government and Frontier aren't letting Verizon in. That and the fact that we're a huge college town, I'm pretty sure, are the 2 reasons they decided to try to cap us. I can get FiOS an hour drive in either direction (Buffalo and Syracuse), but the city needs to get its act together and realize that Frontier DSL is BS...

[gutier @ Apr 17th 2009 12:10AM]

I have TWC and hate it soooooo much!!!! so tired of their useless internet. I just received a call today from AT&T that uverse (and their internet) is available in my address...switching this week!!!! The money I will pay to TWC to cancell my stupid 2 years contract will be the best money I ever spent!!!

[TomTom2007 @ Apr 16th 2009 11:31AM]

People have spoken. Seriously, Time Warner, stop now before you lose more customers!

[CanOfSoup @ Apr 16th 2009 11:33AM]

(I'm actually in Austin...and was furious when I first read about this in the paper)

I just hope enough people are smart enough, that once this is implemented (and TWC still decides to spread it to all consumers) that people jump to ATT, VIoS, or other alternatives....just something to show TWC that aside from complaints....they're not hollow ones.

[Smacksmackums @ Apr 16th 2009 11:32AM]

Thank God everyone complained. That crap is a terrible idea.

[Bryan @ Apr 16th 2009 11:33AM]

I'll make sure my gf keeps moaning. :)

[Le Big Mac @ Apr 16th 2009 11:33AM]

How did they think this would work?

The only way anyone would sign up is if TWC sends out a letter detailing a user's usage and telling them that they could save money. In other words, a bunch of grannies using email only get letters saying "hey, your usage is less than 1GB a month--you can save by switching to this plan".

For most people first off they don't know how much bandwidth they're using, so they have no idea if they'll save money. And for a large number of people of course they want unlimited service.

[Brian @ Apr 16th 2009 11:35AM]

Hooray! I can keep my TWC cable connection until October.

The day these caps are instated I'm switching cable providers.

Give me 250GB / mo (with some sort of rollover) or give me another cable service provider.

[Brdystyls @ Apr 16th 2009 11:35AM]

All I can say is HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Now that's done. The only way they would be able to even get the public to even consider something this stupid is if their prices were insanely low. Like 10 a TB a month and no fees hidden or otherwise.

[StoneyM @ Apr 16th 2009 11:36AM]

I wish there would be some uproar over the caps Charter Communications started in February. They are more reasonable than TW. 100GB on accounts up to 15mb, 250GB on accounts 15mb to 25mb, and unlimited on the 60mb plan, but the 60mb plan is close to $140 I think. Why is Time Warner the only company getting heat. Probably because Charter hid it in the small print of the Feb bill and didn't bother telling anyone about it. And as far as I can tell (I exceed the cap every month) they aren't enforcing it yet.

[krische @ Apr 16th 2009 11:43AM]

Probably because TimeWarner's has been the most ridiculous. 60GB a month for a 10-15mb plan! That's absurd!

[htd @ Apr 16th 2009 11:37AM]

shutterfly sent me an email after kodakgallery claims they would delete my photos if there's no purchase on account... claiming that they would keep my photos even there's no purchase.

I would imagine competitor of time warner will do that same...

[Nicu @ Apr 16th 2009 11:38AM]

They're not abandoning these plans, they just changed a date. This is no sign of any progress from a consumer standpoint. Time Warner is still going ahead with their horrible plans. People still need to stand up and complain.

[derspiess42 @ Apr 16th 2009 11:41AM]

Excellent. Whatever causes them to change or postpone their plans for the cap is a good thing. I was seriously looking into a DSL alternative, as bad as DSL is.

[Jeremy @ Apr 16th 2009 11:53AM]

What do you have against DSL? I know in some areas you might not get as fast a speed, as cable, or perhaps your uploads aren't as fast as they could be. On the other hand, where I'm at, I get 10 Mbps with CenturyTel for the exact same price my Dad is paying Charter Cable for 2 Mbps!

[derspiess42 @ Apr 16th 2009 1:28PM]

DSL is generally crap in my area. I'm not aware of a service that offers more than 2.5 down, while I am getting 6+ through cable. My dad had DSL & it was dirt slow.

DSL may be the bee's knees elsewhere, but not in Cincinnati.

[Herewegonow @ Apr 16th 2009 2:31PM]

Here in Cincy DSL is fine I get 5mbps down and I live in West Harrison which is a very rural area, and I had 6 mbps down when I lived in Middletown. I think Cincinnati Bell told me I can get 10 mbps down here soon. I know it's not as fast as cable but I'm sure as hell not going to switch to a service that may be capped in the future.

[Josh @ Apr 16th 2009 11:41AM]

The day this is implemented, I will be switching to ATT Uverse.

[mmm...sandwich... @ Apr 16th 2009 11:41AM]

they're still going ahead with trials in NY and NC...dont mess with texas?

[Rufo Sanchez @ Apr 16th 2009 11:42AM]

They're not cancelled here in Rochester. Indeed, they're moved up to August.

I don't think they cancelled anything, they just clarified exactly what their plans are going to be.

[Mike I. @ Apr 16th 2009 1:21PM]

Rochester's getting a rally together about this, on saturday.
http://futureunderground.net/ has some info, there is also a FB event I cant find right now
Hopefully we'll get taken out of their "test" soon.

(The only thing they're "testing" is "can we really get away with this?")

[Wael @ Apr 16th 2009 11:47AM]

I moaned. I moaned loudly. I might be in the non-test market TWC monopoly that is Manhattan but reading that really pissed me off so I moaned. Though in all honesty, I would switch to Fios if I didn't live in a 100 year old building that will get Fios the same year we evolve into a whole new species

[JoeNES @ Apr 16th 2009 11:48AM]

Someone made an excellent point on the radio: they market this as a "fairness" tool to ensure people who overuse thier services are not paying to little, while people who use the service very little are not overcharged. Well, I watch 2-3 shows a week on various cable channels, but I pay the same as someone who keeps 5 HDTVs on all the time and consumes massive bandwidth that way. I don't see them putting any caps on TV usage, nor do I see them offering a-la-carte options so I can buy the 5 damn channels that I watch and not pay for 1000 that I don't. I don't even speak the language of 10 of the channels, why do I pay for that? How is that fair? But apparantly, bandwidth for downloads is a limited resource; bandwidth for TV is unlimited to the point of forcing content on people. BS.

PS, I live in Austin, and the minute they roll out caps at TW, AT&T will get a call from me.

[Noah @ Apr 16th 2009 11:58AM]

Well, the technology is different, and so while the analogy is good, its not perfect.

With regular cable tv, you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth (channels) that are always streamed to your tv's, only watch a certain amount at a time (DirecTV's 8 sports channels at a time mucks things up a bit). If you have the TV on all day, you only consume.......

....screw it, they are both complicated (with OnDemand and multiple tvs and phone and such). You are right. TV takes up way more bandwidth (Comcast is even compressing HD channels even more, they already look like crap). If cable had better infrastructure (like Fios), they could offer more bandwidth, ie no data caps! They are just trying to push people to watch programming on their expensive regular cable. Its content control now.

[krische @ Apr 16th 2009 12:00PM]

Well, not defending TWC, but that is not exactly the way TV works. All TV channels are broadcast all the time to your house. They just charge you more to unlock more of them. So its not like anyone is using more bandwidth to watch 5 channels at once instead of 1 since all of the channels are being fed in the pipe. (However, I do think On-Demand might be actually streamed on-demand, not sure though).

However, it is a good point that if they care so much about the casual user, they don't offer some cheaper "pick your own channels" tv or something.

[JoeNES @ Apr 16th 2009 12:07PM]

I don't claim to know how the magic that makes my TV work actually works, but are you saying that there is the same amount of bandwidth used between TW's local distribution point and my house whether I have the TV off or I am watching a 2-hour HD movie (at about 3GB, I'd guess)? The water in my pipes is waiting just outside my faucet in the pipes, waiting for me to turn it on. But is my episode of Biggest Loser just sitting in the lines, along with 1500 other shows, just waiting to get in, and they've sent it hoping I'll watch? Methinks not, but meknows not...