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Once a year, many Time Warner Cable subscribers receive a glossy mailer-newsletter combination telling you how wonderful Time Warner Cable is, and all of the exciting services and values they have to offer. Somewhere towards the end of their mini-magazine, you learn that comes at a cost… an increasing one at that. Yes, it’s annual rate hike time for North Carolina, and Triad area residents are receiving notification this week that Time Warner Cable is back for more of your money.
Regular Stop the Cap! reader Fish writes to inform us of the news, posted this evening on WXII-TV’s website.
“It’s lovely how they keep raising everybody’s rates and yet they’re making a crap load of money as it is and refuse to upgrade their services. If only North State Communications would bring their fiber out to High Point residents faster, I’d tell Time Warner Cable to go screw themselves as fast as [Jamaican sprinter and a three-time Olympic gold medalist] Usain Bolt,” Fish writes.
WXII shares the details:
Customers who bundle Roadrunner high speed Internet, TV and phone services will see a 4.6 percent increase.
Those who purchase those services separately will see the cost go up 15 percent.
Roadrunner Lite service will increase by 12 percent and the cost for customers who have digital video recorders on additional televisions will increase 33 percent.
The company said the cost of programming — especially sports and network shows — is going up and it’s passing that cost along to customers.
Time Warner customers are not happy about the rate hike.
“It’s ridiculous,” Iris Womack said.
Womack said she has TV, Internet and phone bundled together.
Within hours of the news, comments flooded into WXII condemning the rate hike.
- “How can you tell the company cares nothing about customers? There is no option to pick and choose channels.”
- “Yes, I got my TWC bill yesterday and extra $5.00 was added to my Road Runner bill. Thanks for the notice TWC. We see how you do your business.”
- “We have enhanced basic cable, just the 72 channels, and were paying $63 a month. We fall in the 15% increase – that’s almost $10 a month more and we only watch maybe six of all these channels.”
- “The worst that our economy has been in years, TWC decides it’s time to gouge us?”
- “It is just pure GREED.”
Other stories of interest:
- Time Warner Cable Raises Road Runner Rates in Northeast Ohio/Western Pennsylvania Region – $50 for 7Mbps Service
- Time Warner Cable Will Introduce WiMax Wireless Broadband Service This Fall
- Triad Region: Time Warner Cable Introduces Road Runner Mobile WiMax on December 1st
- Time Warner Cable to Rochester: No Faster Speeds for You! — TWC Upgrading FiOS Cities to Ultra-Wideband Service
- Fire Interrupts Time Warner Cable Service in El Paso — Latest In a Series of Problems for Residents in Southwest Texas
We need to elect a mayor in Greensboro or High Point that will compete with Time Warner like how Wilson did.
You would need more than just Greensboro because how many not-small cities Greensboro services. You would have to have GSBO, HP, Winston-Salem, all the way over to Mebane in agreement and do something about it, with how big the area is for the Triad TWC. That is the problem, and why it took Phil’s major amount of help to kill even the meter-billing this area, because you can;t get all these cities to agree, and how much coverage that one office of TWC has. They have already moved many people OUT of Greensboro, and to Winston Salem for customer service, and technical support calls BECAUSE of the meter-billing incident, so people wouldn’t know where to find people to complain next time. Like I just got off the hour and half phone call about this story with a nighttime Technical Support Supervisor for the Carolinas, the administration does NOT listen to technical in both North and South Carolina about service problems. The administration, being multiple people within the Carolinas region, think they know more than the techs servicing the actual software and hardware running not only the TV, but internet, and phone services. They also think this backwater, which they help keep a technological backwater, of states are not smart enough at the administration level to know anything about how their systems work, or how ANY computer system works, and the technicians sent out on service calls has to deal with the disgruntled customers face to face and ease their minds by telling them the left hand really does NOT know what the right hand is doing in the Carolinas.So one mayor in Greensbor won’t be enough to handle this. The state would have to step in, and we know Bev Perdue doesn’t know what she is doing, nor Foxx, and surely that Ty Harrell wasn’t doing his job correctly, so out entire NC government just doesn’t care to do anything, because they probably don’t understand the technology of the 20th century, even though we are in the 21st. Just looking at Moore’s Law they would know that the legislature on every level MUST be kept up to date on these things.
Astral, do you think we could get these 5~8 counties that the Triad TWC services to work together on it, while they are now disputing the Alamance county lines at a cost to over $300k that the taxpayers will have to pay for the surveying of, IF the state decides the dispute needs to be looked into?
They already don’t agree with each other, so please present any Ideas you have to get them to work together, and I will get something started form my county to help fix this problem other than the complaints myself and others have already filed with the FCC, FTC, BBB, and Tourney General’s office about these abusive and predatory practices towards consumers. You may also want to contact those people to file a complaint, as the more they get, the more they will be likely to look into and try to resolve the issues for the benefit of the customers, such as Phil’s excellent work that brought us all together to stop those meter-billing test markets from getting abused by the likes of Glenn Beck, or is it Glen Britt, I am beginning to get those two confused…
Tourney General, should be Attorney General (Consumer Protection Office). Hit the wrong one on my spellcheck, sorry.
I don’t think the poster was even thinking about all the counties banding together to regulate TWC in some manner. Apparently the idea was to launch their own service over fiber at breakneck speeds and reasonable prices. Which is totally possible, albeit a bit spendy to start with.
Also, while I agree that rate increases across the board are not the greatest way t treat customers unless you’re adding value (which TWC isn’t as far as I can tell) Time Warner’s competition (CenturyLink) starts their dry-line DSL service at $30, though it’s available for just $15 with phone service. Competition at work, doncha love it.
I get that, but that is why I mentioned it would take the entire Triad area to get behind it. Greensboro cannot do it itself because they can’t figure out other things right now. Caswell, Alamance, Guilford, parts of Orange….all these counties would have to do something. You would also have to get businesses behind it, and getting that done in any of these counties is harder than getting blood blood from a turnip while pulling its teeth. It wasn’t the idea was a bad one, just won’t resolve the issue in the long run since TRIAD TWC, has such a much larger reach, and TWC uses this to fend off and force out other companies since it started buying up the Cabelvision, and other companies in the area about 20 years ago. They use their strong arm tactics on the customers, local governments, and other businesses to assure their monopoly and prevent anybody from doing anything to defend themselves from TWC.
The current Mayor of GSBO has been trying, but the economy is so screwed up, nothing at this point can help defend against TWC, because nobody has money to dump into it. Too many people losing houses to worry about some new city/county/or region wide plan to do this while TWC sucks up any qualified people that could do it that they can, while others just aren’t in large enough numbers to take them down for less financial backing as a nationwide company. 
They bypass anti-trust laws also by owning little cable companies to offer their services under a different name, like Pepsi owning Taco Bell and KFC. So how do we fight it, other than convince everyone to drop TWC, which many people cannot afford to do.
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