5:48pm: John Passaniti, our tech guru, has made a change to help improve performance.  I am turning comments back on now to see how we handle the load.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and I stood side by side this afternoon in front of Time Warner headquarters in Rochester to announce that Time Warner has shelved its broadband tiering nightmare.

“In the face of enormous community opposition and at Schumer’s urging, Time Warner will shelve the plan for all of their test markets,” Schumer wrote in a prepared statement.

StoptheCap! confirmed with the senator’s press secretary that this was supposed to end tiered pricing in EVERY Time Warner market. However, I have just heard from one reporter that Time Warner is retaining the cap in Beaumont, Texas.

Here is the statement from Senator Schumer:

U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today announced that Time Warner Cable will be shelving its plan to implement a tiered broadband plan in the Rochester area. Time Warner’s decision came in response to Schumer’s and others’ call, shortly after Schumer announced his opposition to the plan. Schumer spoke to Time Warner CEO, Glenn Britt, to discuss overwhelming opposition. Schumer will be working with Time Warner Cable going forward to make sure that any future changes in internet pricing are in line with what the community wants and needs. If the pricing scheme was implemented, it would have raised rates for many users. Schumer’s office has been in contact with TWC, expressing to them the Rochester community’s outrage over the proposed change.

“By responding to public outrage and opposition from community and elected officials, Time Warner Cable made the right decision today,” said Schumer. “I will make sure that any changes going forward are in line with what Rochester’s families and small businesses need.”

Time Warner Cable (TWC) recently announced its plan to switch its 8.4 million cable broadband customers to metered internet billing. The plan would essentially cap internet usage and charge users by the gigabyte. Local leaders and politicians have opposed the plan saying usage caps will cost users more and hurt innovation on the net as subscribers begin to scale back on their internet usage to save money.

TWC’s new tiered pricing structure for its internet service would have started at $15 for a plan that allows 1 gigabyte (GB) a month with an overage charge of $2 per GB. A gigabyte is approximately 1,000 megabytes (MB) and equals about three hours of online video, about half of a rented online movie and approximately 250 songs (at 4MB a song).

In the face of enormous community opposition and at Schumer’s urging, TWC will shelve the plan for ALL of their test markets.

Now originally I spent the earlier part of the afternoon thanking everybody for fighting the battle and hoping this nonsense would now be behind us. But Time Warner has released a statement which hardly makes me as optimistic as I was earlier today:

Time Warner Cable Charts a New Course on Consumption Based Billing

Measurement Tools to be Made Available

(New York, NY) — Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make measurement tools available as quickly as possible. These tools will help customers understand how much bandwidth they consume and aid in the dialog going forward.

Britt added, “We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable.”

Time Warner has been piloting the S.S. Titanic of consumption billing plans when they announced this mess on April 1st, and here comes the official press release which says they are “charting a new course.” That doesn’t mean this is dead and buried.

Indeed, it now turns out that this out of touch company still thinks their consumption billing was the right idea all along, but they didn’t explain it right! With “customer education,” they seem to believe consumers will suddenly sign on to this plan and embrace it. If that is what they honestly think, they are as out of touch with consumers now as they were two weeks ago. The hated “gas gauge” that nobody wants is still on the way, and from the tone of this statement, they’ve already made up their minds that their plan is still the best, but they’ll “consult” with customers first. If that’s been anything like the Twittering Tweets from Time Warner for the past two weeks, consultation equals “you tell us what you want and we give you what we want.”

Senator Schumer may need to get back on the phone.

However, and this point cannot be understated: This is a victory today for all of us, if only a temporary one. More than 35,000 of you have come to this site in the last 15 days, more than 11,000 in the greater Rochester region alone. You have just seen an example of what can happen when people use the Internet, a tool more vital than some might allow you to believe, to become informed, educated, organized, and effective in fighting back and winning a victory. This is the first battle, and we won it. But the war is by no means over. You are not allowed to withdraw, assuming all will now be fine. It will not.

But we have others to thank as well:

Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), who remains my hero because he was the first one in Congress to step up, and if anyone knows how to fight, he does. And it’s becoming clear to me that we are going to need the congressman to stay engaged on this issue, because I don’t believe for a second we’ve heard the last of this nonsense from Time Warner (not with that press release anyway).

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who personally intervened and made it clear that what happens in some other test market somewhere will not stand in this state.

Sen. Schumer has a very long history of fighting for the little guy, and fiercely representing the interests of the people of this state. You saw a perfect example of that at work today right here in Rochester. And Sen. Schumer wasn’t content with simply securing a victory for Rochester. He successfully also got one for the people of Austin and San Antonio, Texas and the Triad of North Carolina. He deserves our support and thanks.

YOU, whether you fought this battle on StoptheCap!, Facebook, or one of the other protest sites launched to engage in this battle.

I am one person. I have lived and breathed this story for the last two weeks and it has been exhausting, to say the least.

Some have asked me why I do this. I think this comes from my late mom, who I watched fight many battles as I was growing up. She was among a small group of people that helped fight for and found the Brighton Volunteer Ambulance Corps here in my town of Brighton. She battled with a for-profit ambulance company that tried for years to keep a volunteer ambulance from establishing roots in this community, and threatening their revenue. She pounded doors all over this town to get signatures, attend hearings, and fight every step of the way for what she felt was right. I think that’s where my energy and tenaciousness comes from.

In this battle I, among others, am the spark, but you guys are the gasoline. Without the hundreds of calls, nobody would have noticed. Without people lining up to cancel service, nobody would have cared.

So this is our victory today.

But the war is not won. The good people in Beaumont are apparently still under the oppressive cap. And AT&T has their own little plan in store for innocent consumers. And our neighbors to the north are stuck with caps from British Columbia to Newfoundland. Unfounded, unreasonable, profit grabbing usage caps starve innovation, kill jobs, and retard the growth of the Internet. Until we can convince every provider that there are better alternatives to punitive caps and overpriced tiers, and competition from many providers is commonplace across the broadband industry, this fight cannot stop.

One last note to Time Warner employees, especially those on the ground in these communities. I don’t hate you. You are not the problem. Your record of delivering excellent service and a product I’ve remained loyal to for nearly a decade is a testament to the hard work you do for your customers. And I recognize local management must play the cards they are dealt from above, and because of that, none of this is personal. You should not have to bear the burden of corporate decisions, and I continue to urge every reader here to give the local Time Warner employees in your area the respect and courtesy they deserve.

But let this also serve as notice to those management teams who are simply out of touch with what consumers want and demand. We don’t want caps. We will not accept caps and tiers that require us to think twice about every thing we do online. Usage caps are not a solution to the problem of broadband growth. They are a Band-Aid. If you try to impose them on us, education campaign or not, we will cancel our service.

We stand ready to offer new thinking on ways to manage broadband traffic, through win-win solutions that provide the greater speeds that power users seek, and being more than willing to pay a reasonable extra price to obtain them. That’s a better approach than penalizing every user, and will bring new revenue and even more loyalty from your long-standing customers. We will explore these ideas in the days ahead.

And so, until this war is won, the battle will continue.

I don’t have time to expand on this at the moment, but my only question is, what more hostility do you need to understand customers don’t want usage caps and they should be abandoned.  Do customers have to self-immolate in front of the Road Runner kiosk at the cable store?  Seriously.  How many signatures, phone calls, cancellations, and protests will it take?  Give us a number and we’ll be happy to oblige.

Thanks to Meghan, and others, for sending this along.  Go read it, leave comments there and leave comments here.  I will be back later this afternoon.

“Some of the population for whom the Internet buffet has been a very filling proposition are concerned,” he said. “We could charge everyone more, or create a plan that charges more to those who use more. The concept of paying for consumption is fair.”

Both Time Warner and AT&T stressed that the trials, though they have no announced end dates, are just that: experiments. They’ll be modified, or even abandoned, if they meet too much hostility, Dudley said.

“Overwhelmingly we’ve seen positive results, but we’ll see what happens. Presumably we’d retract it if there were enough outrage over it,” he said.

I’ve been asked by several people if we have a mailing list for the action alerts and other important matters. I’ve taken that into account and think it’s a good idea.  Therefore, if you are interested in receiving occasional e-mail containing only the most urgent and important updates (we will not share your e-mail address with anyone), please take a few seconds and register for an account on StoptheCap! It also makes it a lot easier to enter comments, without having to re-enter your name each time.

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.

Frontier Communications officially put to bed the notion of its 5GB usage cap in an interview with the Associated Press yesterday, but that’s old news for readers of StoptheCap! Sources told us on April 5th that Frontier had elected to drop its usage cap and would begin a marketing effort to recruit disaffected Time Warner customers upset about the company’s bandwidth limiting plans.

“We have gotten hundreds of calls from Time Warner customers into our call centers,” said Ann Burr, the head of Frontier’s Rochester unit, in an interview with The Associated Press. “I guess it’s been a public relations crisis for Time Warner.”

No kidding.

Now the DSL provider is signing up customers faster than it can send out the equipment.  Our DSL self-install kit here at StoptheCap! is now nearly a week overdue.  Customer service representatives told me last night they are being flooded with calls in the greater Rochester area and have been working at full speed to process orders from customers dropping Time Warner.

Frontier is currently the best option available for broadband customers in the Rochester metropolitan area.  It offers speeds of “up to” 10 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads, but real world experience reported by readers indicates the actual speed is closer to 7 Mbps and around 650 Kbps for uploads.  Additional information on plan pricing and terms can be found in our Alternatives section. Unfortunately, DSL service is not available in all areas where Time Warner provides service, due to telephone equipment limitations, and in areas where another telephone provider may not be able to extend service.

Frontier Communications and StoptheCap! have had a contentious history.  This website was launched last summer when Frontier was seriously contemplating a bandwidth usage cap of 5GB per month, an extraordinarily low amount more commonly found on wireless data plans offered by cellular providers.  Consumers throughout Frontier’s service areas in multiple states joined forces with StoptheCap! to reject the usage caps, and the company eventually backed off, leading to a de facto truce last fall.

The specter of the 5GB usage cap lives on in the Acceptable Use Policy of Frontier, although company officials have publicly stated they will not even consider enforcing a cap through the end of 2010.  The company reserves the right to revisit the need for usage caps, but customers can sign up for two or three year term “price protection agreements” which have been exempted from any cap imposition for the length of the contract.

From the Associated Press:

Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime broadband industry newsletter, said the Obama administration is also likely to be tough on metered billing. Traffic limits of 10 gigabytes or 40 gigabytes like the ones Time Warner Cable is testing aren’t justified by the cost of providing that data, he said.

“Anybody who thinks that’s not an attempt to raise prices and keep competitive video off the network — I have a bridge to sell them, and it goes to Brooklyn,” Burstein said.