Comments on: Damage Control Technique #2: Send “Residential Account Specialists” to People’s Homes in Rochester

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:14:15 +0000

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.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:52:25 +0000

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.

By: Bill

Bill — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:09:21 +0000

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).

By: Kimberly Chapman

Kimberly Chapman — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:18:11 +0000

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.

By: Colin Klapka

Colin Klapka — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:31:04 +0000

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.

By: MMiller

MMiller — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:34:09 +0000

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.)

By: Phillip Dampier

Phillip Dampier — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:24:32 +0000

Yes… dd-wrt on my Linksys router. Great stuff… and because this is the one with less memory, I can’t use Tomato.

By: uks

uks — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:37:48 +0000

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/

By: Jason6787

Jason6787 — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:06:23 +0000

What router are you using that reports your usage in MB? Most I’ve ever seen only give packet totals.

By: Jeffrey_Bays

Jeffrey_Bays — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:02:42 +0000

I can’t wait till my representative comes by and asks me why i switched to Earthlink.