My Road Runner service was basically inoperative as of this morning. I have worked my way through two levels of support personnel, who confirmed there is a problem here. The support people have been professional and courteous at every turn, but suggested if I needed to drop by the cable store in Rochester today, to do it early, because things are expected to be “hectic” from around 11:30-3.

A service call has been scheduled for tomorrow. I am hoping this problem can be resolved quickly. It has been our first service call for Road Runner service in several years.

Date: Saturday, April 18, 2009
Time: 11:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Time Warner Cable
Street: 1813 Spring Garden St‎
City/Town: Greensboro, NC

Date: Saturday, April 18, 2009
Time: 11:00am – ?
Location: Highland Park, Rochester, NY – Corner of Mt. Hope/Robinson Drive at 11:00am.
Speakers begin talking at 11:30am.
Marching to 71 Mt Hope at 12:00pm.

More details on Rochester rally.

Beautiful Beaumont, part of the Golden Triangle with Port Arthur and Orange, Texas.  Home to Lamar Univerity, the Texas Wildcatters, and the South Texas State Fair, the city is also known to online enthusiasts as the unlucky epicenter of broadband usage capping.

Time Warner’s Golden Triangle Division rolled out the first broadband caps on Beaumont residents last summer, implementing service plans ranging from 4-50GB of usage for new customers, or those intending to change their Road Runner service plan.  Company officials rolled out the usual dog and pony show about how the change wouldn’t really affect most people at all.

1GB gets you about 70,000 e-mails, 34 hours of gaming or 1,344 hours of Web browsing; or, it’s the approximate equivalent of downloading 569 photos, 277 music files, 7 hours of low-resolution video (YouTube), 3 hours of standard definition streaming video or 45 minutes of high-definition streaming video.

As StoptheCap! reported last summer, the “experiment” was met with mixed reaction.  Many customers felt the tiers had paltry limits, many didn’t like the fact an unlimited tier was no longer available, and the whole thing was too expensive.  Notably, nobody asked for this kind of rationing, and nobody seemed to advocate for it outside of the company itself.

Alex Dudley, corporate spokesman for Time Warner, used most of the same rhetoric about the Beaumont “test” he used about those to be conducted in Rochester, the Triad of North Carolina, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas.

Dudley argues that the usage cap issue is not a foregone conclusion at Time Warner.   Dudley told GigaOm that TWC’s experiment in Texas was just that “a test.”

A test that has now become indefinite, and today Beaumont is the only city in Time Warner’s national service area still under the thumb of usage caps.  Dudley, bless his heart, added this familiar proviso:

“If consumers don’t want it, the company is going to back away from it.  I think this is a trial and we are going to learn from this trial,” he said.

Consumers in Beaumont don’t want the cap.  Consumers in Rochester don’t want the cap.  Consumers in the Triad don’t want the cap.  Consumers in San Antonio don’t want the cap.  Consumers in Austin don’t want the cap.

Executives at Time Warner want the cap.

Beaumont is stuck with the cap.

It took thousands of protesters from all of these cities, a United States congressman, a United States senator, and pressure from investors, the media, and who knows who else to get them to “temporarily suspend” the cap nightmare, but with the allusion it will be back later.

The only thing they have learned from the trial is customers don’t like it.  But they’re going to get it anyway.  Just like in Beaumont.

I have been carefully contemplating the last 48 hours of roller coaster riding, and I hate roller coasters.

I wanted to reflect on and consider all of the information, announcements, public statements, press releases, and industry reaction to yesterday’s announcement that Time Warner was withdrawing its Internet rationing nightmare.  I’ve talked to a number of players, folks in the media, some of the groups in other cities, and have been in touch with many of you.  The one thing that seems fundamentally clear: nobody is picking up what Time Warner is putting down — this fight isn’t over.

I am convinced that Time Warner is stalling.  They haven’t really changed their minds about anything.  They still think they’re right: the problem isn’t draconian usage caps, it is that people weren’t properly conditioned to accept them first, and after a mind-numbing “education campaign” with the gas gauge, the OPEC of the Internet will be back by the fall, probably with almost the identical plan they “shelved” yesterday.  They hope that with a summer of their gauge, you won’t stay engaged in this issue, if you don’t hit their caps… yet.

They crumbed the play in their press release.  One of my favorite films, David Mamet’s House of Games, says it all:

Oh, you’re a bad pony. And I’m not gonna bet on you.

So we resume the battle.  It’s time for more competition.  This would have never been tried had the company not felt confident their customer base wouldn’t evaporate.  We need to see an end to “exclusives” in this marketplace.  It’s time for regulation when there is no competition.  If you want to act like a monopoly, get regulated like one.  And it’s time to start helping push, where appropriate, municipal broadband solutions run in the public interest, to ensure equity of access and an end to the limbo dancing to see how low caps can go while your bill goes up.

I continue to appreciate the efforts of Senator Schumer and Congressman Massa.  Both are watching this company very closely, and I think further action needs to be taken, and a watchful eye kept.  I truly believe they are on our side and will drop the hammer if this company comes back with the exact same plan dolled up for resale.  But I just do not believe they can do it all.  Time Warner has still not gotten the message from its customers yet.  They need to understand that another definition of Cap ‘n Tier is CANCEL.

If they run an “education campaign,” that is what we need to do as well, to educate our friends, families, and neighbors that a profitable company is advocating a ridiculous rationing plan that costs too much, offers too little, and thinks that you’ll be their biggest advocate if they get you to believe you are going to save money.

As I’ve said over and over again, when is the last time your cable bill ever went down from year to year?  How much more do you need to know?

Since this site started, I’ve always promised to share my honest thoughts about the fight to keep usage caps off of broadband services.  We don’t take advertising, we don’t take industry money, and nobody gives me a thing for spinning in one direction or the other.  I’m you – a subscriber, a consumer, just an ordinary guy.  One of my talents just happens to be the ability to type very fast and produce a lot of information in a hurry.  I’m also passionate about the things I care about, particularly when I get ticked off about them.  Messing with my Internet service is a sure fire way to get my dander up.

Wednesday afternoon, I learned and alluded to the fact that Senator Schumer was headed to town.  Their office had been in contact with me, apparently because they, like several others in DC, had found this site full of interesting things to read.  It’s also probable that several of you had been calling and writing the senator’s office about this issue, and perhaps a few name-dropped, I don’t know.  Senator Schumer coming to town to do what it takes to make sure New Yorkers are taken care of is a sight to see.  He’s passionate and a real fighter.  And I was invited to come down and watch.

Almost two weeks before, Rep. Eric Massa was already fully engaged in the fight, and I think it’s important to say that because he stepped up, this issue got national attention, fast.  Without Congressman Massa, there is no way we would have gotten as far as we have.  When he announced he would take on this industry with legislation to ban these kinds of usage caps, this website crashed from the traffic stampede.  That brought us an entirely new audience who have gotten up to speed on our issues and have joined the cause.

Many of our readers wrote me privately to say how pleasantly shocked they were when they called his office, asked to speak to him, and were put right through!  A lot of us never get farther than the office staff that takes down our message and promises to pass it along.  I have never seen a member of Congress get so involved in an issue so quickly and instantly know what is at stake.  We’re incredibly lucky to have him in our western New York delegation.  We need to make sure we keep him, if you ask me.

I heard the frustration from our friends in North Carolina and Texas that had trouble getting their own members of Congress involved in these issues.  I am just glad that at least for the time being, the New York one-two punch of Eric Massa from the House and Chuck Schumer from the Senate extended not only to Rochester, but also into the Triad of North Carolina as well as Austin and San Antonio, Texas!

Thursday morning, I got word Sen. Schumer would be moving the event from Irondequoit to the heart of “enemy territory,” in front of Time Warner on Mt. Hope Avenue in Rochester.  There was rumblings of an announcement forthcoming.  I have to say I was a bit fearful it was going to be a concession of another expansion of the sizes of the tiers.  We got that last week along with claims it somehow represented proof the company was listening to customers.  Of course, they weren’t.  Nobody is clamoring to have gas gauges attached to their Internet access at OPEC-like pricing.  Been there, done that last summer with the real thing.

I cautiously park in Time Warner’s cable store parking lot and then wander down to a podium I see being set up over on the corner of the property.  By now, the local media had started filtering in and also made a beeline for the podium with cameras and microphones in tow.  At least R-News didn’t have far to go to cover this story!  In addition, WROC, WHEC, and WHAM were there for television, WXXI and WHAM-AM were there for radio, and Kate Perry was there from the Democrat & Chronicle.  It was great to finally meet Kate Perry who has been doing amazing work covering this story since April 1st.  Rachel Barnhart from WHAM was there, and we got to spend a few minutes talking about her online life with AT&T wireless broadband that she wrote about in her blog a few weeks ago.  Jeremy Moule from City Newspaper, the alternative newsweekly, was there as well.  Jeremy was the first reporter to get Rep. Chris Lee, the last Republican congressman in western New York, on the record about the cap issue.

The event started late because up until the last minute, the senator and his staff were hard at work trying to get an agreement hammered out with Time Warner executives, presumably on the phone from New York City.  Suddenly, the senator appeared along with some of the local Time Warner executives that you may have seen on television the last few weeks, and a press release was handed out.

I have to say I was stunned to learn Time Warner seemed to capitulate on the issue and withdraw their tiered usage plan experiment.  The first thought I had was, “just for Rochester?  What about North Carolina and Texas?”  I was assured that the plan was shelved in all of the test markets.  Whew.  There is no victory here if one city escapes but the others get to sink, so I was relieved it seemed to be to the benefit of all (I learned later in the day Beaumont was not a “test” anymore under this definition, and they’re still stuck).

The senator approached the microphone and read a statement.  I was standing next to him on one side, two Rochester Institute of Technology students were on the other.  What you may not recognize is that the media usually shows you around 10-20 seconds of sound bites from a 10 minute statement.  Senator Schumer lambasted Time Warner for potentially tripling consumer bills, for using its market domination to extract extra cash from consumers’ wallets, and that Rochester was in a tough spot with Verizon FiOS unable to provide their extremely competitive alternative.  He also applauded Time Warner for acting responsibly in pulling this thing back, and spoke with Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable CEO.  He claimed Mr. Britt admitted to him the plan was handled badly.  He then confidently stated the plan was shelved for good.

Victory achieved.

R-News interviewed me, Kate got my reaction, WHEC and WHAM asked me how I felt.  Pretty good at the time.  At that moment, it seemed we’d achieved a 180 on this issue from Time Warner.  Finally I get my life back and don’t have to spend endless hours fighting the company that provides me with my Internet access.

Heading home, I was dictating our victory over the car phone to be posted here in one or two sentences.  When I sat down to write a longer version, everything went crazy.  Suddenly I couldn’t access this site, along with virtually everyone else, as traffic rapidly brought the server to its knees.  We spent a good part of the afternoon rebooting the server, tinkering with the settings, yanking this or that feature to reduce the load wherever possible.  By around 5pm, we had finally found a workable solution and server response began to pick up, and the comments system was also restored online a little later.  If it was frustrating for you to reach the site, it was even more frustrating for me knowing that.  I also couldn’t finish my thoughts in their entirety because the site’s editor kept going offline.

Meanwhile, the phone started ringing as more reporters sought reaction.  I had finally gotten a chance to sit down and read the promised Time Warner press release which we were told “would be forthcoming later.”  I expected something that more or less mirrored what Sen. Schumer’s release had said.  The company heard the voices of the masses and had done what Alex Dudley had promised all along, to yank the experiment if enough people indicated they didn’t want it.

But to tell you the truth, that is not what I was reading.

In fact, the more I read, the more concerned I got.  What we heard earlier in the day was the shelving of the plan was by the mid afternoon something entirely different from Time Warner.  Now, the plan itself was not the problem, it was just that it was “misunderstood.”  It wasn’t an acceptance that the plan was wrong all along.  It was that the plan was the right thing to do, but needed “customer education” in order to make it palatable.  In fact, by the end of the statement, it was clear the consumer equivalent of Count Dracula was not, I fear, staked through the heart, but rather threatening to rise again, intact, from the dead.  It would just take a few months more before it resumed its attack, after the “gas gauge” turns up.

Now we’ve seemingly gone 90 degrees back towards where we were.  We’re not 180 back to where we started, but we might be headed that way.

The media reports on this also are picking up on the apparent disparity between the two statements, by tempering reports with mentions that the plan is dead “for now.”

I intend to get to the bottom of this pronto.  I will be in touch with the relevant parties between now and Monday and will get a more definitive response as to exactly where we are right now.  If I’m not happy with what I hear, StoptheCap! will fully re-engage in all out war against this project.  This site feels that victory comes only with an assurance tiered usage plans with draconian caps are dead and buried permanently, not simply delayed for a few months for an “education campaign” only to return largely intact.

Those of you who were visiting this site every few hours throughout the day will need to continue to do so.  We have achieved a tentative victory in this battle, but we have not come close to winning the war.  We’ll have a weekend to relax and recharge and then see where Monday takes us.  I’ll be covering how the news media is reporting this matter over the weekend, so there will still be plenty to see here.

Maybe the Frontier DSL stuff will also arrive tomorrow, giving me something to work with and review over the weekend.

Thanks for staying loyal to the fight and hang in there.