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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.”
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,… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »