SubscribeSue Polinski just happened to be Road Runner’s very first customer in Greensboro, N.C., and according to the Greensboro News & Record, she’s hopping mad at Time Warner over their plan to start rationing her neighbors’ Internet.
“Greed,” Polinsky said. “That’s all it is.”
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Polinski started a long term customer relationship with Time Warner in the 1990s, when Road Runner was introduced to the city of Greensboro. She runs a home based Internet business and has a Road Runner business account, which means she’ll not have to deal with the cap. But her anger remains the same.
“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?”
Polinski has been something of an Internet broadband evangelist in Greensboro, advocating for wi-fi access in downtown Greensboro. And she’s wholly unconvinced anyone will ever save a penny on their cable bill from this new usage cap scheme.
“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.”
Way to go Sue! Even as a business customer who isn’t affected she sees the truth of the matter. Even at the lowest tiers people who aren’t “heavy users” will see the effects of a cap even if only on occasion.
I’m interested is seeing how people who think the tiers are fair — people who claim to not use the Internet very much — find the fairness in the degradation of their Internet connection because they’re in the lowest tier.
My mother sends a few emails here & there. Pays a few bills online. That’s about it. She is just as outraged as I am – and I’m a WoW addict/frequent video downloader…
This is a huge step backwards. Don’t these jackasses at TWC remember “pay as you go” pricing from way back in the good ‘ol days of dial-up access, and how it failed once an alternative came along? They need to slice up and ration cable bandwidth simply because they’re wasting so much with all their goofy on-demand TV options, but mostly because they want a slice of the free web-TV pie such as Hulu. They have NO COMPETITION in Greensboro and it really galls me to give them $70 a month for *non-digital* cable and another $50 or so for… Read more »
Just FYI, it’s Polinsky. It’s noted in the quote.
Testing about hour of 256, about half watchable bit rate, music video. Looking at my stats, looks like I pulled 4 gigs testing.
So any thing less than 120 to 150 gigs, I would say, back to dialup.