Time Warner Cable changed their billing system for San Antonio residents late last year, and some customers using automatic bill payment services forgot to update their bank with their new Time Warner account number.  The result?  Missing payments and past due notices.

The decision to issue new account numbers has caused delays in posting payments made under the old number, and some consumers are concerned about late fees and payments not posting to their accounts.

Company officials recommend customers double check their online bill payment services to make sure they reflect the new account number.  Time Warner promises to work with customers who are experiencing problems as a result of the billing system change.  Customers in San Antonio can call (210) 244-0500 or check their website for directions on how to correctly make payments on your account.  If you are billed any late charges, ask the company to waive them.

WOAI-TV in San Antonio ran this story about customers running into the “missing payment” problem with Time Warner Cable. (1 minute)

Road Runner Turbo customers in south Texas can expect to receive more speed for their money soon.

Time Warner Cable is boosting speeds for Turbo customers in Corpus Christi, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley and Uvalde.

“We are very excited to offer this upgrade and time-saving feature to our Road Runner customers,” said Gavino Ramos, vice president of communications for Time Warner Cable South Texas.

Downstream speeds increase from 10 to 15Mbps and upstream speeds are doubled from 1Mbps to 2Mbps.

The price for Turbo service remains unchanged.

Although the exact date for the upgrade is unclear, customers can check if the upgrade is completed in their area by following this company-recommended procedure:

1. Unplug the cable modem and wait 60 seconds.
2. Plug the cable modem back in. The lights will flash as it reconnects to the network.
3. When the modem lights are solid again, restart your computer and experience the new faster speed.

GVTC Communications yesterday launched 40Mbps service across its service area — the Hill Country north of San Antonio — marking a new broadband speed achievement for south Texas.

The company providing the service is about to reap the rewards of a $35 million investment in a fiber-to-the-home network reaching 80 percent of customers in North San Antonio and the Hill Country.  The new premium speed tier bests the company’s current 20Mbps service, and also includes 10Mbps upstream speed for $89.95 a month with a contract.

GVTC says it can deliver even faster speeds, upwards of 100Mbps, but wants to see what kind of demand they have for 40Mbps service first.

GVTC’s speeds will leave San Antonio’s Time Warner Cable and AT&T U-verse customers drooling.  GVTC speeds achieve nearly twice the speed of either provider, and leaves them in the dust when comparing upload speeds.  The company provides true fiber connections straight to customer homes, not the fiber-copper systems both cable and AT&T rely on.

GVTC Communications explains the benefits of fiber to the home service.  (4 minutes)

GVTC believes upstream speeds are particularly important for the area’s small businesses, as well as families with multimedia to share.

AT&T U-verse last week announced a speed upgrade to 24Mbps service in San Antonio, but their upstream speed tops out at 3Mbps.  Time Warner Cable currently provides San Antonio customers up to 15Mbps service with 2Mbps upstream speeds.

Time Warner Cable spokesperson Jon Gary Herrera said the company will respond with an upgrade to DOCSIS 3 in San Antonio as soon as the first half of 2010.  The upgrade, dubbed “Wideband” in marketing materials, will provide connections up to 50Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream.

On September 13, 2007 KSAT-TV San Antonio ran this report about Boerne getting new fiber optic access through GVTC.  (2 minutes)

That GVTC Communications was able to handily beat both AT&T and Time Warner Cable in both product offerings and fiber optic deployment may be a result of the company’s status as a non-profit cooperative.  The more revenue the company brings in, the more the company returns to its customers in the form of Capital Credits.  GVTC has always been a major innovator in Texas, being the first phone cooperative in Texas to launch cable television service in the 1980s and the company began using fiber in the 1990s.  The company’s service area spans 2,000 square miles and eleven counties, some rural.  Despite questions about whether wiring rural customers would provide sufficient return, the company went ahead with the project anyway, which today permits the cooperative to enjoy revenue from telephone, television, and broadband service.  It also permits many of their less-urban customers to enjoy the same level of service as the “big city folks.”

Readers of the San Antonio Express-News discovered a blazing headline today on the newspaper website: Time Warner to add Internet meters for San Antonio.

When Bryan Lee wants to see just how much bandwidth his Internet connection gobbles up, he logs on to a Web site that tracks his usage on a daily basis.

The 31-year-old project manager for a Dallas-based software company is one of Time Warner’s proverbial guinea pigs in the cable company’s ongoing test of metered service in Southeast Texas.

Before moving to Lumberton, a small town about 12 miles north of Beaumont, he enjoyed unfettered downloads. Nowadays, his monthly usage is capped at 40 gigs. And there’s an extra incentive in place to make sure he’s keeping downloads and video streams in check: overage fees.

“I look at the meter probably once a week,” he said. “It really changes your mind-set with this whole overages thing. You become fearful of going on the Internet.”

After bowing to backlash from customers and Congress over plans to change pricing for Internet usage, Time Warner Cable is moving forward with plans to outfit customers in San Antonio and three other markets with similar measurement tools.

The cable company is hoping the “gas gauges” will make it easier to eventually try again at implementing a billing structure that charges customers varying rates based on Internet usage.

StoptheCap! readers Jimmy and Sebastian noted the article, and the ranting and raving from outraged subscribers down in San Antonio — more than 65 in just the last few hours alone.  It’s good to see subscribers are just as mad as they were two weeks ago when the cap “experiment” was on before it was off.  And as we have been warning all along, it’s going to be “on” again real soon.

I dropped a comment over there encouraging readers not to simply limit their anger to the comments section on mysanantonio.com, but to also get their butts over here and start getting educated, informed, and prepared to do battle with Time Warner the instant the Time Warner Money Party is back on again.

If you’ve arrived here today because of that comment, welcome to the fight.  We’re ordinary subscribers of broadband service from many different companies and in many different cities.  We share one thing in common – NO CAPS! Many of the folks you will encounter in our own comment section are also victims survivors of the Time Warner experiment in April in Austin, Rochester, San Antonio, and Greensboro/Triad, NC.  We’re all working together to effectively resist money grabs by big cable.

You will find an enormous number of articles, video and audio clips, references, and news here documenting the whole sorry affair.  Please bookmark this site and stay in touch.  We will have calls to action on a regular basis to effectively keep abusive business practices at bay.

If you’re new, you can find the Comments button adjacent to the headline of the article.  Click it and say hello and tell us your story and views.

As we continue our journey across the cities that were originally intended to be part of Time Warner’s experimental caps, it’s not difficult to see that viewers had been complaining long and loud, not just to Time Warner, but also to area TV station news departments.

The temporary suspension announcement reached San Antonio late in the afternoon on Thursday, April 16th.  Same upset customers, same talking points from Time Warner that “education” is all that is needed to cram a rate hike and ration plan on customers.  They still don’t get it.

This was probably a quick report for the late afternoon newscast.  No packaged piece here.  But the anchor makes it clear customers didn’t like it, and also gave Time Warner’s views, making it balanced.

StoptheCap! reader Corey is back in touch this afternoon to say he just completed a phone call with a Level 3 Road Runner service technician in San Antonio.  He asked the technician what he knew about the caps.  Here is what Corey relays back to us:

He told me “as of our most recent meeting yesterday morning, we will be coming out with a meter to show people their actual usage and will be introducing the consumption based billing sometime in October with actual billing beginning in January.”

He also said the billing was required, “because we are coax based and not fiber optic, so we do have problems with people streaming high definition video and causing congestion in large residential areas, especially apartments and mobile homes.”

Now I have no idea whether these kinds of techs have this kind of information or not.  It might be true, it might not.  It sounds a bit like what the original “revised” plan was before last Thursday when Senator Schumer announced the whole thing was shelved for now.  But it would hardly surprise me if this was their actual intent.  I have no doubt that this fight isn’t over.  I also think it’s becoming obvious that the ‘listening tour’ company officials keep putting out there is window dressing.  As I told Senator Schumer’s office last week, I’m fully expecting that Time Warner will bring back the exact same nonsense all over again, except the summer of the gas gauge will be their attempt to placate customers about how much usage they have, if you believe their gauge and if your usage doesn’t fluctuate between the nicest weather of the year and the lousiest.

I will be working this issue behind the scenes next week.  If this is true, it isn’t exactly the consultation with the community the company was promising last week.  It’s just more of the same.  If you are in San Antonio, perhaps you can manage to land a discussion with another Tier 3 rep and get the same, or a different story, and report back in our comments section.

This is why we stay engaged in the fight, and why everyone else must as well.

[Update 3:20pm EDT: Corey writes back with some minor corrections:  "Standard Service is now 15Mbps down/2Mbps up; Turbo is 25Mbps(ish) down/2.5Mbps up" for him.  Don't forget Powerboost may play with your numbers on the download.]

You’ve just alienated the majority of your customer base with a harebrained scheme to Cap ‘n Tier people into the Internet circa 1990, and that didn’t work and a whole lot of people canceled.  So what do you do to placate the masses?

Increase their speed!

Before: Some of our heavy users (a/k/a Turbo tier customers I’ll bet) are using too much of our service and they are costing us too much.  We need to charge more and cap you to invest in better equipment.

Today: “As a valued (San Antonio) Time Warner Cable customer, we have automatically upgraded your download speed from Road Runner Turbo 10 Mbps to our new Road Runner Turbo 15 Mbps speed at no additional cost to you. More importantly, we’ve upgraded your upload speed from 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps for FREE.”

StoptheCap! reader Corey is confused:

“The ONLY thing that makes sense is that by increasing speeds and usage (especially upload speeds), they are trying to create congestion so that they get problems and complaints to base their “facts” on, so that they have ammunition to come back with at a later time.”

It could be that.  Or it could also be the fact the exaflood theory they based their earlier arguments on doesn’t hold a cup of water.  It does seem odd that they would increase speeds for the customers they claim were causing a lot of their “problems.”  Perhaps they also lost a whole bunch of those customers over this Cap ‘n Tier business and they want to get them back.

As we entered the second week of the public firestorm against Time Warner’s broadband usage cap nightmare, the enormous pushback began to make an impact.  Time Warner’s two Texas systems, in Austin and San Antonio, finally decided to back off from the tier experiment for the summer.  This came before the eventual “suspension” of the tier experiment late last week, but for San Antonio, it provided a glimpse of hope that customer reaction would make a difference.

After skeptical reviews from the media (and online groups like ours) about Time Warner’s original proposal to create broadband tiers that ended up not saving any customer a penny, the company quickly announced a 1GB slower tier for the light user. San Antonio learned about the plan in a brief report, but no details about the fact that exceeding that 1GB tier would cost your 200 pretty pennies for each gigabyte that followed.

I have been getting news tips {thanks Carsten, J, and others) about newspapers in Texas reporting that the Texas Internet Rationing Plan from Time Warner has been “postponed” until October, and this represents some sort of consumer victory.

Hardly.

First, this is not exactly breaking news.  Landel Hobbs, Time Warner’s COO, already made mention the cap plan would begin implementation in Austin and San Antonio in October, presumably with a trial period.  It sounds like Mr. Hobbs, bless his heart, already knew about the “consumer victory” that comes “as a result of complaints” before the Time Warner folks on the ground down in Texas knew, because they only started speaking about it this week.

Trials will begin in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., in August. We will apply what we learn from these two markets when we launch trials in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in October, but we will guarantee at least the same level of usage capacity in these trials.

Now, actual billing starts in January, up until they change their minds again.

A trial program intended to charge varying rates depending on usage was slated to begin this summer. The decision to delay the meter program was prompted mostly by customer reaction, said Gavino Ramos, Time Warner’s vice president of communication for South Texas.

“What happened as we’re continuing to listen was we worked in some of the comments and ideas that got sent to us,” Ramos said. “We came to the realization, let’s do this in October.”

Meanwhile, Rochester is the big “lucky winner,” joining Greensboro in starting the Internet Rationing Plan in August.  I suppose it was inevitable our two cities come closer together, considering a whole lot of people exiting Rochester end up moving to North Carolina.  Sooner is better in cities with fewer competitive choices anyway.

If Time Warner was truly responsive to its customers, it would drop this Titanic-like disaster of a rationing plan today.

There is no consumer victory here, and this company is still not listening.  Instead, by putting off the abuse for a few months, they hope you will fall complacent and not continue to engage in a united effort to resist unwarranted capping of your Internet access.  The first step of coping with an abusive relationship with your Internet provider is recognizing you are in one.  Being told you are not going to get hit with punitive caps today, but in a few months, doesn’t change that.  Don’t be a victim.