Sometime overnight, it appears the Rochester division of Road Runner quietly added Powerboost to standard Road Runner accounts. Customers conducting speed tests began seeing the use of the technology starting early this morning.
Powerboost is a temporary speed boosting technology that offers several seconds of improved download speed before returning to normal levels. The technology was licensed from Comcast, which began giving it to their customers in 2006. Time Warner previously only provided Powerboost to its “Turbo” tier of service, which increased upload and download speeds for an additional $10 a month. Powerboost is not a traditional speed increase because it does not sustain the extra speed for very long.
The concession of providing Powerboost may be part of Time Warner’s ongoing “damage control” for the increasingly unpopular tiering and capping experiment they are conducting in several “test cities.”
Adding Turbo speeds to all tiers is a small concession, especially considering the extra speed will now allow you to hit those paltry caps even faster than ever. Customers are unlikely to be mollified:
Current Plan Customers Want to Retain
Standard Service without Powerboost: about $40 a month
Turbo Service with Powerboost: about $50 a month
Coming This Summer, Whether Customers Like It Or Not
Equivalent level of service: $150 a month
Or a range of heavily capped tiers that expose customers to steep overlimit fees of $1-2 per gigabyte
Sorry Time Warner. No customer should be exposed to overlimit charges and 300% rate increases for a product that made the company plenty of money last year. Throwing people scraps like Powerboost still does not give customers what they want: no usage caps, no forced tiers, and no massive rate increases. Powerboost just exposes the reality that customers who don’t want punitive tiering but need higher speeds have absolutely nowhere else to go.
As one of our readers pointed out on Broadband Reports:
We have Speedboost on standard service now. Big deal. When the caps come, I am still off to DSL.
Powerboost is another gimmick I can live without.
Who in gods name was complaining about speed? I have not seen anyone say “I’m leaving because its to slow” its always been about the cap . . .
I am without words.
If this is the case, what’s the point of having Turbo now besides the “constant” better download bandwidth available. If you’re downloading something and you have powerboost on a standard account, it will make up for it….
And for anyone who is confused about how powerboost works, the boost occurs for the first X kB of a session/download and the last Y kB, so although I suppose better than nothing, it is really something of a thinly disguised video bandwidth limiting, because any long lived sessions or large downloads(so all video) gets basically no benefit, whereas short lived(email, simple web surfing…other TW “approved” applications) get the higher speed. So it makes them look like they are giving consumers something while still somewhat discouraging internet video, which is of course their real fear.
This is insulting.
Hey PJ! How are ya? 😀
It looks like Frontier DSL is in my future. I can’t believe this Time Warner crap. I’m so pissed at them now.
Well put, Todd. Seems we have to mine everything they say for anti-competitive motives. Scary how afraid of competition they really are.
Of course it makes sense. It is also insulting.
The dollars are in the overage. They want you to get there faster… So moving the higher speeds into the lower cap tiers makes sense if they are not going to budge on the caps…
Has anyone besides me noticed their new commercials? I snort and laugh, especially at the very bottom of the disclaimer, it says, “Subject to change without notice.”
Yeah. Thanks for nothing, Time Warner.
What about all those customers who actually PAY the extra $10 a month for Turbo? Are they getting even higher speeds? Now that everyone is monitoring their bandwidth and speeds, TWC actually has to pretend it has been preforming. They are unbelievable!
What gets me the most is that Dudley says “Presumably we’d retract it if there were enough outrage over it,” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229181/page/2/
HOW MUCH OUTRAGE IS ENOUGH FOR TWC?!
I am a Turbo customer. Never thought to check that out. I have to get ready to go out, but Turbo folks, if you can do some speedtests and report back, that might be mildly interesting.
Don’t forget, Turbo people also get faster sustained downloads and uploads.
Yep, that bit at least is valid. I am also a turbo customer(more for the better upload rate than download, as my last house was in a FIOS area and that was the only way I could try not to miss FIOS). I work from home most of the time and develop network performance monitoring and security apps, so I tend to be looking at my connection more than most. That being said, during the day when most people are not using RR, I get the 15/1 as advertised or better(I just did a test and got 17/1). Before I… Read more »
Considering that all of Syracuse traffic goes through Rochester gateway, rr-roc, does that mean Syracuse gets powerboost as well?
I used to make that mistake myself. I was corrected. “rr-roc” actually means Road Runner Regional Operations Center. I think a lot of our traffic goes your way, not the other way around.
Anyway, Syracuse folks need not be too greedy. 🙂 You have FiOS coming and TW already gives you a better standard service speed than we get.
ah i see. I never really checked, but now that I look, the whole 24.93 block of IP addresses is registered to Rochester headquarters under whois lookup.
24.95.168.0 – 24.95.168.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-Baldwinsville (NETBLK-TWCNYBALMCR1-2)
24.95.169.0 – 24.95.169.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-Ithica (NETBLK-TWCNYITHMCR1-2)
24.95.170.0 – 24.95.170.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-SyracuseMain (NETBLK-TWCNYSYRMCR1-2)
24.95.171.0 – 24.95.176.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-SyracuseHeadEndII (NETBLK-TWCNYSYRHE2)
24.95.177.0 – 24.95.181.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-BurdickII (NETBLK-TWCNYBUR2)
24.95.182.0 – 24.95.186.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-DavisRoad182-186 (NETBLK-TWCNYDAV2)
24.95.187.0 – 24.95.191.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Syracuse-Geddes-3-Network (NETBLK-TWCNYGED-3)
24.95.192.0 – 24.95.196.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Rochester-MountHope-MCR1-2-3-192-196 (NETBLK-TWCNYSROCH192-6)
24.95.197.0 – 24.95.201.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Rochester-Gates-197-201 (NETBLK-TWCNYSROCH197-01)
24.95.202.0 – 24.95.206.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Rochester-Brighton-202-206 (NETBLK-TWCNYSROCH202-06)
24.95.207.0 – 24.95.212.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Rochester-Perinton-207-212 (NETBLK-TWCNYSROCH207-12)
24.95.213.0 – 24.95.218.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Rochester-Webster-213-218 (NETBLK-TWCNYSROCH213-18)
24.95.219.0 – 24.95.223.255 TimeWarnerCable-Road-Runner-Rochester-Irondequoit-219-223 (NETBLK-TWCNYSROCH219-223)
I don’t know if we have it in the Austin area or not, but I really could care less about this. If it’s not sustained speed, it’s not worth it.
I live off-campus at University at Buffalo, and at the house, we can get TW’s Road Runner and Verizon’s FiOS and DSL. The house has 5 college student occupants. Originally, we did have Road Runner, and our bandwidth usage exceeded 100GB a month, considering XBOX live, University VPN access, streaming lectures, and just general internet usage. The reason we dropped Road Runner for FiOS was regional saturation of the network at peak hours. The speeds would drop well bellow 5Mbps and splitting 1Mb per person for $50 bucks was not enough at peak hours. We switched to FiOS and for… Read more »
Same goes for all the RIT students…as RIT shuts down more of its on-campus housing, students are forced to live off campus and deal with Time Warner. Also, what about students taking online classes?
Rochester is a hub for colleges. There is U of R, RIT, Naz, St. John Fisher, Monroe Community College, Medaille, Roberts Wesleyan, and Bryan and Stratton…and that is just colleges. High schools are becoming more tech advanced as well.
The caps are threatening students’ ability to recieve an education.
Fuck Time Warner Cable. I went to Verizon FiOS the second I heard about this. I’m not fucking going back, I don’t give a shit what TWC says or does. In the last month Verizon’s been better to me than TWC ever was.
If time warner were to properly manage their network, the need for the bandwidth caps becomes unnecessary. Let’s face it, you’re never going to know the difference between 3mbps and 10mbps when browsing the internet. Mathematics will prove that. If they want to cap bandwidth, they should learn from comcast since they did it right and just hit the excessive users bandwidth. Two things that this doesn’t take into account is all of the “junk traffic” out there from hackers trying to get into your system and there is no mention of how “broadcast” traffic will be treated under the… Read more »
Seriously? “If they want to cap bandwidth, they should learn from comcast since they did it right and just hit the excessive users bandwidth”. You kidding me? On this site we are against any cap. We know that it is a bunch of nonsense to lump anyone into an “excessive users” group. Nobody should be hit. Either TWC provides 10mbps or they stop advertising that they can. That’s the right thing to do. …”that they shouldn’t run the business like a bunch of tax and spend liberal politicians.” Do you even know what that means? TWC is taxing, but they… Read more »