SubscribeYou just discovered that the center of the volcanic red-hot lava flow of anger that crashed your consumption based billing scheme to the ground was located in Rochester, New York. Customers were burning those annoying mailers they get every day and casting voodoo spells on Mike O’Brian. A congressman had to moderate a debate in a town hall meeting filled with angry customers vs. Time Warner representatives. A senator came to town and put a podium on your lawn. So what do you do to placate the masses?
Send company representatives to people’s homes!
StoptheCap! reader Corrine in Rochester writes:
Hi, Phil. A very nice TWC “Residential Account Specialist” stopped at my house this evening. She said she was visiting the customers in her area to make sure everything is ok with their service. She obviously had a printout of what we subscribe to from TWC and took notes of my feedback. Yes, TW is attempting to overcome the bad publicity. I indicated that I am sure she is familiar with Stop the Cap! and knows that it isn’t the local TW employees that there is a problem with — the comments all indicate that the service is great. The problem is with TW management and tiered service.
She admitted that there has been a lot of negative publicity. The only “propaganda” that she provided was that people don’t understand that it is only the 14% high-end users who are downloading two or three movies a day who would be affected. I said that although I don’t download movies, I will soon be retired and on a fixed income. However, when I am home, my computer is up all the time. With all of that on-line time, I have no idea how many GB I use. Of course her response was that it would not effect me — even on RR Lite.
I asked for and received the representative’s card, which includes her cell phone number and e-mail address. As all TWC representatives I have had contact with, whether on the telephone or as service representatives, she is a very personable lady.
I’m sure she, like the majority of local Time Warner employees are friendly, personable, and professional. We’ve said repeatedly we have absolutely no beef with any of them. None of our issues are their fault, and nobody should blame them or be disrespectful of them over this. They are playing the hand of cards they were dealt.
That being said, I am surprised Time Warner is sending representatives out to homes, unless this person is trying to get people to upgrade service. She obviously has her talking points, and for our statistical department, there is another number – 14%! I remain utterly unconvinced by their numbers parade. If you were on the 1GB Road Runner Lite, I guarantee you if you spend your day online just taking care of a website or doing other non-download/non-video applications, you’d blow way past 1GB in a month.
My usage, doing nothing this month except this website, and I'm already over 50GB in/out just writing articles and answering e-mail.
I want people to see something. My router already tracks usage in this house. I have basically done little more since April 1, the Day of Infamy, than taking care of this website, penning articles for it, and sending and responding to e-mail. I have watched ZERO streaming movies or television shows. The only files I’ve downloaded were the “monthly visits from Microsoft — bug fixes and updates,” backups of this website, and an iTunes upgrade. I haven’t had time to download music and I am so bad at online/videogames, I don’t embarrass myself by even trying to play. You can see my usage on your right. Ten thousand megabytes equals ten gigabytes. I am already past the initial “heavy user” plan and will probably finish the month close to 60GB of usage. This is abnormal usage for me, because I’ve used the Internet for little more than old school browsing and e-mailing, and moving text around. I’ve used Hulu and other services in the past, but not since the beginning of this month.
If you did for two hours a day what I do for many more, you’d be past 5GB by now, not below 1GB.
The numbers just don’t add up, but the bill sure will. Time Warner doesn’t need to send representatives to anyone’s home. Just cut the doubletalk and say, definitively, no usage capping or tiered pricing based on usage. Tier on speed all you want – Verizon does it, as do others. And there are customers waiting to hand you more money for faster speed today!
I can’t wait till my representative comes by and asks me why i switched to Earthlink.
What router are you using that reports your usage in MB? Most I’ve ever seen only give packet totals.
I believe he is using DD-WRT, an open source Linux based firmware which you can flash to compatible routers, such as the linksys WRT54G.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/
Yes… dd-wrt on my Linksys router. Great stuff… and because this is the one with less memory, I can’t use Tomato.
Did you post anything on the main page about DD-WRT and Tomato yet, Phil? I think you really should, since it’ll help people see what they really do.
I have to admit, my usage has been pretty low this month, but the nice weather and a lot of other stuff has kept me off the computer.
Which is why monitoring in the summer months is lame.
Although I have streamed one movie off NetFlix so far, and it netted me about 2 gigs of usage, and the newest World of Warcraft patch netted me another 800 megs (they use bit torrent, so in/out it was about 800 total).
About 10 years ago I worked for a temp agency, one of my assignements was at Time Warner. My job was to enter in the reports from the “field agents” who went around checking who had satellite dishes and who didn’t. It involved some sort of contest/quota for the workers at TW. Many of them did this on their own time to get bigger numbers, so the motivation factor was pretty high.
This is just a guess, but I feel they might be doing the same thing here, casually guaging what people know about caps, while at the same time “educating” the public and those that do the best job win some sort of prize.
(I didn’t work there long thankfully, a couple weeks later I ended up where I am now.)
I wonder if the caps will only be for downloading and not uploads. Maybe that is why they believe no one will use that much bandwidth. In either case it is wrong, I was just wondering that once I saw your stats.
I just installed dd-wrt and will be monitoring my usage too. I will be interesting to see the comparison between our monitoring and TW’s.
About a week after I first read about the coming caps on Consumerist and called TWC here in Austin to tell them we absolutely would leave the company entirely if they did this, I got a robocall from TWC saying that they had technicians in the area for some other reason and that if I happened to have any issue or problem that I’d like checked out or to discuss, I could press 1 and be connected to a service rep who would then send the close-by technicians to my home.
It was implied, although not explicitly said, that this would be a courtesy call and not charged.
I laughed and hung up on the robot. Poor robot.
Well Phillip, they know, TWC, that most people will blow the cap and either have to pay the exorbitant fees per gigabyte or opt for a higher more expensive plan. We all know that more and more things are being more connected than ever before. Your TV, Bluray player, audio equipment, gaming consoles, just to name a few can use bandwidth without you even knowing it. A lot of the gaming consoles now offer video streaming services so you could probably go over your limit even faster if you didn’t keep tabs on your kids or what not. Also, if you buy software or even hardware in some cases, there are almost always drivers, patches, updates, firmware or even interfaces that you need to download too. Lets get it straight people, TWC knows this and they want to capitalize off of it. They know that internet usage won’t ever decrease but increase as time goes on. People will use more and more in the coming years as the internet continues to evolve into more than just mere browsing and checking email. This effort by TWC is an effort to stymie competition and to push their services on their subscribers without any competition whatsoever. The more I think about it, the more it makes me irate to see how greedy some of these corporations are. I am not opposed to people making a buck but trust me these people would gouge you if the government didn’t stand in the way and impose some kind of regulation.
I have had a Time Warner representative drop by. She left her business card. We had a brief email conversation. She stated that only %14 of their customers would be affected by caps. She didn’t respond when I asked how Time Warner came up with that number. I would only trust numbers from an independent auditor. I doubt Time Warner would allow that.
She didn’t respond to my mention of usage caps as being a indirect attack on competitors like Netflix and Hulu.
Nice person. I would never be rude to a Time Warner person. They are just doing their jobs.