[Update: See our updated piece with important new details about how to great the best possible deal from Time Warner Cable.]

Your cable bill now exceeds your electric and landline phone bill combined.  You’ve dropped the multiple premium channels, dumped the extra add-ons like Road Runner Turbo and even considered turning in your DVR box.  But your bill after the 2011 rate increase is still sky high.

Stop the Cap! has spent the last week working with several Time Warner Cable customers looking for a better deal from the nation’s second largest cable company.  It was a learning experience for all of us, with different “best offers” extended to different customers, deals some employees insisted simply weren’t available… until they were, and confusion galore as employees had to navigate their way around corporate roadblocks.

The good news: The quality of customer service from most Time Warner employees we worked with was generally excellent — professional, generally helpful, and even irritated when they couldn’t get some of the best deals in place for customers.  The bad news: As Time Warner moves more towards a regional corporate bureaucracy, new rules and pre-conditions frustrate all concerned.

When it comes to this cable company, the less business you give them, the better the offers.

As Scott, our reader in Brighton, N.Y., tweeted to Time Warner: “It would be nice to toss your longtime customers a bone now and again.”

Step One: Review Your Bill

The first way to save is to scrutinize your current bill.  Know what you are paying and consider dropping services you no longer use.  Most Time Warner customers purchase a bundle of two or three services, usually cable-TV and broadband.  The Watch N Surf bundle in the Rochester area now runs $118.99 per month.  Below the bundle (shown in bold on the bill) are breakdowns of equipment charges — set top boxes and remote controls, and add-ons such as movie channels or Road Runner Turbo.

Before Time Warner Cable will authorize a lower price, expect them to question any add-ons, such as premium movie channels or Turbo.  They’ll attempt to get you to drop services before they’ll extend a deal.  We found it more difficult to convince the company to give price breaks to customers who subscribe to a number of extra services and want to keep them.

Be prepared to temporarily drop services if you want the best possible deal.  You can always add them back later.

Step Two: Prune Your Package

Think carefully about the services you are getting.  Are you still watching premium movie channels these days or downloading your movies from Netflix or other services?  A few years ago, Time Warner only charged $7 a month for each additional premium channel.  Now that price has nearly doubled in many areas.  Are you really watching them enough to make the price worthwhile?  At upwards of $13.95 per month — $167 a year, it may be time to ditch them.

Time Warner told us subscribers routinely confuse the “Digital HD Tier” with the cable company’s standard HD channels.  The package, priced at $4.99 in most areas, is on many customers’ bills because it used to include HDNet and HDNet Movies, two of the earliest HD channels a number of early HDTV set owners craved.  The company dropped both networks more than a year ago, replacing them with Smithsonian and the improbable RFD-TV.  The latter channel has no business in a premium-priced package — it’s like charging you extra to receive C-SPAN 3.  If you can do without those channels as well as MGM HD and Universal HD — you just saved $60 a year.  Time Warner does not charge extra for other HD channels.

Some Time Warner customers also have several set top boxes they originally got for free or at a discount.  Today those boxes run $7 per month.  If you have cable in a bedroom or kitchen and can manage with channels 2-99, you can turn in the set top box and save $84 a year per box.

Broadband customers with Road Runner Turbo, now $9.99 per month, may find little value from that add-on in areas where speeds increased in the past year.  In Rochester, for example, Road Runner Turbo turns 10/1Mbps service into 15/1Mbps service — hardly much of an improvement and certainly not worth the price.  Save the $120 a year for something else.

Step Three: Negotiating a Better Deal

Now that you’ve reviewed your services and pruned your package where necessary, it’s time for Time Warner to do their part and meet you halfway.

Getting the cable company to approve the best possible deal depends on a number of factors:

1. How long you have been a customer and how well you pay your bill;
2. How serious you are about canceling service;
3. How many services you have;
4. Who you talk to.

The fewer services you have, the better the deal you can get from Time Warner’s retention department.  For example, a recently-ended promotion offered a year of free DVR service — but only for customers who don’t have a DVR box already.  If you already have phone, broadband, and cable service from Time Warner, scoring the most aggressive Triple Play promotion was a lot harder than it was for a customer with a single service.  But not always.  More often than not, deals that were not available from one customer service representative were available from another.

Let’s get started.

Call your local Time Warner Cable office and request to cancel your service.  You want to be transferred to a Retentions Specialist, authorized to extend special deals to departing customers.  Ordinary customer service representatives won’t have access to the best deals.

There is no reason to beat around the bush with the representative.  Just tell them “it costs too much” when they ask why you want to cancel.  You don’t need a sob story.  When you focus the representative on the money issue, you won’t have to navigate around their arguments about how bad satellite TV is or why the phone company offer isn’t as good.

The best savings and least red tape are won by new customers.  Judging from a few “shopping deal” websites we explored, it isn’t unprecedented for customers to cancel service and sign up under a family member’s name as a new customer.  But that method can be a major hassle.  Orders cannot be taken until an existing customer schedules a date to disconnect service.  Customers will also have to pay installation costs in some areas, and will lose their current Road Runner e-mail accounts.  We often found taking this drastic measure was not necessary — some existing customers managed to win deals just one or two dollars greater than a new customer would pay.

Time Warner’s most aggressive current offer is their triple play/$99 month offer, including cable-TV, phone, and Internet service.  Equipment costs extra, and that price comes before taxes and fees.  Virtually any customer currently taking broadband and cable-TV service can manage to score the $99 price when threatening to cancel service.  It also costs nearly $20 less per month than Time Warner’s price for just cable and broadband.  If you disconnect your landline, you will save another $20-50 a month and get unlimited long distance calling across North America.

Tweet Your Way to Savings.

Our reader Scott grabbed the $99 offer, and all it really took was a tweet to @TWCableHelp:

@twcablehelp Getting ready to cancel my #timewarnercable and take my $ elsewhere if they want new customers more than old.

After exchanging phone numbers, Scott was talking to a retention agent near Buffalo, N.Y., who secured a deal for him in about 10 minutes.

Time Warner says the national retention team has the keys to some of the best retention deals around — deals the local agents can’t always offer.

We did things the hard way — by phone, talking to multiple representatives, each who pitched us different deals, and rejected or accepted our counteroffers.  The diversity in responsiveness surprised us.

We spent time with Gennifer near Buffalo who ended up with a stubborn representative who refused to deal, and the call ended with a scheduled disconnect.

“I am not paying their higher rates,” Gennifer tells us.  “I’m switching to Verizon FiOS after this.”

Time Warner insisted she downgrade her add-on services before they would extend a deal her way.

“I am not going to have a cable company tell me what channels and services I should get, especially when the ‘other guy’ is cheaper,” she told us. “They obviously don’t want to keep me as a customer after years with them, so goodbye.”

Just an hour later, we were back on the phone with Time Warner easily scoring the $99 triple play promotion Gennifer couldn’t get, this time for a relative in Rochester, no questions asked.

“It is a great deal and we’re happy to extend it to you,” the representative told us.  (Gennifer eventually got that same offer talking to a different representative, but she’s still headed to Verizon FiOS regardless.)

Time Warner’s recently finished “12 months of free DVR service” promotion was much harder to get.  Representatives repeatedly told us the offer was not available to customers with existing DVR service, right up until they told us it “sort of was,” with some creative effort and the approval of the right supervisor.  Instead of that particular deal, another was offered worth nearly as much, with a one time credit making up the difference.  That works for us.

A particularly excellent representative, Tim, has gone all-out working on our account over the past three days trying to keep us happy.  Apologizing not less than two dozen times for various frustrations he encountered along the way, he’s still manning the wheel as he navigates around headaches thanks to a somehow-corrupted account and an obstinate Frontier Communications who is stubbornly trying to block the request to switch providers.  He continues to impress us as that journey continues, even offering a year of Showtime gratis to make up for all of the inconvenience.  Our “out the door” price will be around $132, including Turbo, a DVR box, a HD set-top box, Showtime, and a one time credit of around $25.  We were paying around $40 a month more, and will also save another $35 a month dropping our landline from Frontier Communications.

Seeing the back of Frontier Communications.

Time Warner’s willingness to deal gives us the chance to see the back of Frontier Communications, dumping their landline service.  In the process, we actually expanded the number of services we are buying from the cable company, and earning the chance to say goodbye to a phone company that has done little for this community in recent years.

When Frontier asked us why we possibly would want to cancel, we unloaded:

• The company’s insistence on Internet Overcharging schemes;
• The fact Frontier’s DSL service is at least a decade behind Time Warner’s broadband speeds;
• Frontier has done nothing for the Rochester area except provide slow and lousy DSL service — satellite TV as a triple-play afterthought doesn’t cut it;
• They charge too much and stick customers on term contracts that are expensive to cancel;
• We don’t have much confidence in Frontier’s long-term future with the ongoing exodus of customers.

Other Deals and Promotions

Not every customer will want a triple-play deal from Time Warner.  For those who want cheaper standalone broadband service, we recommend Earthlink’s six month promotion (available on Earthlink’s website), which is billed directly by Time Warner with no equipment changes:

• Standard: (equivalent speed to Road Runner Standard, without PowerBoost): $29.95/month for six months, $41.95/month thereafter;
• Turbo: (equivalent speed to Road Runner Turbo, without PowerBoost): $39.90/month for six months, $51.90/month thereafter.

After six months, switch back to Road Runner.  It should run $34.95 a month for the first year on a commonly-seen promotion.

We found a lot less savings for customers trying to lower the price of cable and broadband, without phone.  In fact, we found it was actually cheaper to take the bundled offer with phone service than finding a retention deal without it.  You are not obligated to use the phone service, of course.  They can assign you a new number you may or may not care to use.

Some other promotions to ask about:

• DVR Service: Rent one box at the regular price, get one free.  For homes who want two DVR boxes, ask if you can get the second one for free for the first year;
• Road Runner Turbo: This $9.99 add-on can be had for free for one year in some areas.  Ask the representative what they can do for you;
• Starz! $25 mail in rebate: Starz! is running a $25 mail-in rebate for new customers who keep the movie channel active for three months;
• Free Showtime: Although not promoted any longer, a year of free Showtime might still be available to those who ask and sign up for the $99 offer;
• Installation/Start Up Costs: Ask for free installation, if you are a new phone customer.  You will probably still pay the one-time $20 fee phone customers are charged, but let the cable company install the service for you for free.

If you are uncomfortable with the agent or the offers you are getting, tell them you still want to go ahead and schedule a disconnect.  Suggest a date a week in advance.  Then, a day later, call back Time Warner and again request to “cancel” service, telling the representative you want to confirm your disconnect date.  Often, they are amenable to reopening negotiations at that point.  Yesterday’s “no” may turn into today’s “yes.”

Don’t be intimidated if a representative tells you he’s unlikely to get a supervisor to approve a counteroffer you make in response to theirs.  Go ahead and tell them to check anyway.  More often than not, the supervisor will “surprisingly” approve your request or provide a better offer.  If you live in an area with “price protection agreements” and think something better might come along in the next year or two, fight to stay off of one -and- get the retention deal price anyway.

Step Four: Gratitude Expressed

If you got what you called for, be sure to thank the representative and get their name.  You might want to drop a message to the president of your local Time Warner Cable office to thank the company and mention the representative that helped you remain a customer.  Good employees deserve recognition and in the future, these are the people you will want to talk to when you call about something else.

In the end, it was a hassle to spin the “Wheel of Retention Deals” to see where it landed.  It sometimes took multiple calls to get the best deal, and we agree with Scott’s assessment that treating your best customers to the worst deals is not a great way to win customer loyalty.  Calling and asking for discounts is a necessary annoyance these days but we’d rather never have to do it.  The next step is outright cancellation of services like cable-TV, so Time Warner gets something out of the process as well.  We just wished the representatives were given the tools to be more consistent.

As we’ve always said here — we have no complaints about the quality of the local employees who manage and maintain the service we’ve subscribed to for well over a decade.  Our beef has been and probably always will be with the corporate decision-makers who conjure up the rate increases, experiments of Internet Overcharging schemes, and other annoyances.

More than 160,000 ordinary Canadians have signed a petition telling telecom companies to back off their Internet Overcharging schemes.  The NDP has adopted an anti-Overcharging position, and now Openmedia.ca, an ally of ours, is spearheading an effort to get the larger Liberal Party involved in the fight against Internet ripoffs.

Deep pocketed cable and phone companies have invaded Ottawa with their lobbyists and friends to try and keep your broadband bill as high as possible. We can trump their hand, but only if you get involved.

With Canadian government pressure, the CRTC will fold like a wet newspaper.  Openmedia is trying to collect a historic 200,000 signatures, and starting today every signature will send e-mail to the inbox of Michael Ignatieff and Liberal Party Digital Critic Pablo Rodriguez, encouraging them to join the fight.

If you don’t want to pay through the roof for your broadband, hurry and add your name to the petition.  Ottawa has been surprised by the backlash from everyday consumers from BC to PEI.  Now let’s deliver the death blow to Internet Overcharging and tell Bell, Rogers, and Shaw to enjoy the fat profits they already earn, and stop the gouging.

Tell your friends:

• Email the petition link: https://openmedia.org/en/ca/look-back-our-stop-meter-campaign
• Share it on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fopenmedia.ca%2Fmeter&t=Stop%20The%20Meter%20On%20Your%20Internet%20Use%20%7C%20OpenMedia.ca&src=sp
• Tweet it: https://mobile.twitter.com/session/new

Stop the Cap! would like to welcome Gertraude Hofstätter-Weiß  as our latest contributing editor. 

Born near Cologne, Germany — she came to the United States when she was 20 years old back in 1974 with her parents and extended family and now lives in West Virginia.

Gertraude found us because Frontier Communications found her.

“I found Stop the Cap! while I was trying to understand what was going on with our phone company, Verizon.  We were notified the telephone company that had served us for many years was leaving, to be replaced by this other company called Frontier Communications,” Gertraude says.  “I was at first confused just by the name — West Virginia isn’t an urban state by any means, but I thought we were getting a phone company operating for pioneers.”

Gertraude followed our coverage of the Frontier broadband usage limits and the subsequent takeover of her landline.

“Verizon was bad, but Frontier is worse.  Their DSL is bad enough, but now they want to ration it?”

Gertraude believes that the best way to honor a fight is to join it and give something back.

“I have learned so much about the telecommunications industry and how it relates to American politics in ways I could have never envisioned before reading your articles,” she says.  “I was relieved to read nobody here is paid to express a particular point of view, and there is open disclosure about where the money comes from — consumers like you and I.”

Gertraude believes expanding coverage to include consumer-friendly advice about telecom matters can bring a larger audience to other issues, like Internet Overcharging and Net Neutrality.  Showing consumers the big picture about today’s Big Telecom companies can bring more allies in the fights to come.

Her only request in return — spell her name correctly, which in this case meant finding the “ä” and “ß.”  Otherwise, she would be “Gertraude Hofstatter-Weiss.”

“I didn’t even ask Frontier to put my name in the phone book — how could you trust them to get it right when they get so much wrong?”

It takes a lot of chutzpah to vilify a community’s proposed fiber to the home network when you’ve managed to completely screw up the one you’ve acquired from another company, but Frontier Communications tries anyway.

Instead of relying on Frontier’s overpriced (and soon to be rationed) slow speed DSL from an earlier era, Sibley County, Minnesota is proposing a municipally owned fiber project that will bring much needed connectivity to area businesses, homes, and farms.  Community Broadband Networks found a certain phone company in strong opposition.  Frontier warned county officials not to make the mistake of delivering better service than they can provide themselves:

As a provider of telephone, internet, and video services to our customers in the Green Isle, Arlington, and Henderson areas, Frontier Communications is obviously interested in the “fiber to the home” proposal that has been presented. As a nationwide provider, Frontier is aware of other efforts by municipalities of various types to build and operate their own telecommunications network. While these proposals are always painted in rosy tones, it is important for officials to carefully review the underlying assumptions and projections that consultants make when presenting these projects. Unfortunately, history tells us that the actual performance of most of these projects is significantly less positive than the promises. Often times, these projects end up costing municipalities huge amounts of money, and negatively impact their financial status and credit ratings.

Frontier even “runs the numbers” on the county proposal.  But Sibley County should carefully consider the source.  This is the same company that couldn’t manage its fiber to home network it acquired with landline purchases from Verizon Communications.  Instead, this month it dumped $30 rate increases on its fiber customers in the Pacific Northwest and Indiana.

Frontier has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, which means leaving many rural Minnesotans with one choice for broadband: Frontier.

Of course the company opposes the county’s fiber project — they would be crazy not to, considering it will cost them many of their customers.

Cherry-picking a small percentage of the municipally-owned networks facing difficulties is just a scare tactic, and doesn’t prove their case.  County officials should consider the growing number of projects that are a breath of fresh air for the communities they serve, all at no risk to taxpayers: projects like EPB in Chattanooga, Greenlight in Wilson, or Fibrant in Salisbury — both North Carolina.

Those projects all faced the same provider-financed campfire scary stories, too — just because incumbent cable and phone companies didn’t want the competition.

When wild claims about failing projects don’t work, Frontier officials hilariously offered up this absurdity in a story in the Arlington Enterprise that ran Dec. 16.

“What we can do is provide the same speed of service as fiber can provide,” said Todd Van Epps, Frontier’s regional manager.

Really, on Frontier’s pre-existing, decades-old copper wire network?  The same one that Frontier currently sells “blazing fast/up to” 3Mbps DSL service on for $50 a month?

In comparison, the fiber network proposed for Sibley County would deliver at least 20/20Mbps service for less than $50 a month.  That fiber network is infinitely upgradable as well, with service up to 1 gigabit per second if a customer needed that much.

Our advice when dealing with Frontier’s promises: get them in writing.

When a company tells customers to throw away their Frontier FiOS fiber and switch to a competitor’s satellite television service or else pay $30 more per month for basic cable, their helpful advice about how to manage the fiber business should be taken with a grain of salt.

A major ongoing Internet Overcharging campaign by Canadian Internet Service Providers to extract more revenue from consumers has sailed under the radar for more than two years now in most of the Canadian press.  Although some newspapers have occasionally covered various telecommunications atrocities related to cell phone pricing, lagging broadband speeds, and an overall lack of competition in the country, specifics about efforts to curtail broadband usage (or monetize its claimed “overuse”) has been a topic mostly discussed on online forums.

No more.

As Stop the Cap! turns more attention to Canadian Internet Overcharging schemes, let this be an object lesson to our American readers about how the game is being played.  What starts in Canada could finish American flat rate broadband as well.

CRTC Ruling Lights the Flame

This week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) finalized rules that will effectively end unlimited broadband service in the country.  Remarkably, the Commission’s ruling completely ignores the one group such “usage-based billing (UBB)” impacts the most: individual customers.

The game-changing rules, found in the obliquely-named “Telecom Decision CRTC 2011-44,” effectively establish false usage-based pricing on both the wholesale and retail levels.  No provider will actually sell broadband packages that charge only for what a consumer actually uses.  Instead, each provider will set arbitrary usage allowances — usage limits — on their broadband accounts.  Any remaining unused allowance is forfeit at the end of the month, but “overuse,” at the discretion of the provider, will be penalized with overlimit penalty fees running several dollars per gigabyte.

The CRTC acknowledges, and big providers admit, these Internet Overcharging schemes are all about getting consumers to change their online activities.

[Providers] submitted that UBB rates shape end-user behaviour and that different UBB rates would lead to different behaviours by carriers’ and competitors’ end-customers.

Perish the thought.  Without such pricing, Canadian broadband could ultimately offer an alternative to overpriced cable-TV and telephone packages sold by the very providers that advocate limited use plans.  Providers insist on predictable, uniform usage.  The Commission apparently agrees.

The Commission even acknowledges today’s unlimited use plans in Canada almost always recover the actual costs incurred to provide them, and then some:

The Commission also notes that the flat-rate component of the carriers’ retail Internet service rates recovers most, if not all, of the associated retail UBB costs. In the Commission’s view, this situation provides carriers with the flexibility to adjust or waive retail UBB rates on a promotional basis.

With this in mind, why the CRTC felt radical changes were warranted is only a mystery until you realize most of the commissioners were former employees of the various telecommunications companies themselves.

Birds of a feather….

All of the falderal about the merits of UBB aside, in the end the CRTC threw a small bone to independent service providers not affiliated with super-sized players like Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron — the Commission ordered they be given a “whopping” 15 percent price break off wholesale rates.

Major carriers were outraged even by this token amount, arguing that providers forced to charge correspondingly higher prices (higher than major carriers charge) could still eke out a place in the market by offering other services or better support.  They didn’t need, or deserve a discount.

But independent competitors warned without discounts approaching 50 percent, many will be gone within five years.  Many providers argued the major companies, some who received taxpayer subsidies to construct national telecommunications networks, would be able to set wholesale prices artificially high to drive them out of business.

Canada’s Media Reacts

The effective end of flat rate service across Canada finally sparked significant national media coverage of the imminent death of Canada’s broadband revolution, soon to be relegated to a nickle-and-dime metered pricing scheme that will give providers the monetary power to control usage, limit innovation, and have their hands into picking marketplace winners and losers.  Don’t like Netflix?  Slash usage allowances.  Want to protect your cable-TV revenue?  Exempt your own online content from the meter as long as you keep your subscription.  Want to drive down Canada’s broadband standing in the world?  Turn the marketplace over to a handful of companies dreaming of revenue opportunities afforded by monetizing broadband usage.

The Globe and Mail — A metered Internet is a regulatory failure: The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges. The move is sure to stifle digital creativity in Canada while the rest of the world looks on and snickers.  […] So there you have it. Just as the world is ready to feast on what Canadians might cook up in the way of multimedia 3.0, Canada decides to meter the Internet, tilting the table sharply towards old-school TV networks and big corporations that can absorb the higher cost of doing business.

Canadian newspapers have covered the story in the greatest detail, but now — finally — Canada’s television news has discovered the story, which for many media critics mean the story is actually “real.”

“If you don’t see it on television, it didn’t really happen,” writes Jim from Halifax, Nova Scotia.  “A lot of Canadians don’t read newspapers, and the magazines certainly are not covering this story, so it has been an online-only event  until CBC, CTV, and Global put it on their newscasts.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC News Extra Billing for Internet 1-18-11.flv[/flv]

CBC Television reports on the Internet Overcharging controversy.  (2 minutes)

Some critics say much of Canada’s commercial media is already in the hands of a tightly controlled, vertically integrated empire.  Most of the cable and phone companies have ownership in many major commercial broadcasters, cable networks, and even newspapers and magazines.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Vertical Integration.mp4[/flv]

30 Rock’s Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy explore the concept of “vertical integration.”  Then see how it relates to Canada’s media.  (3 minutes)

But even a controlled media environment cannot stop outrage over UBB going viral, as ordinary Canadians realize they are about to pay much higher prices for a service they depend on more and more.

Outrage Commences

While these pricing schemes have been around awhile, now that they are getting well-publicized exposure, consumers have realized the implications of counting how many YouTube videos they watch.

Tens of thousands have signed Openmedia.ca’s online petition, others are complaining to the media and writing their members of Parliament, demanding action.

That will only get louder when consumers start receiving bills for double, triple, or even higher for the exact same quality of service they used to pay less to receive.

“There will be a huge wake-up call for many customers,” said Jared Miller, president of Youmano, a provider based in the Town of Mount Royal.

Charlie Angus, the NDP member of Parliament who speaks about digital issues, said he he thinks the entire pricing scheme is a ripoff that will lead to huge increases in customers’ bills.

“What we need to have is clear and transparent rules so it’s being used in a measured capacity, and it’s not just instituting the principle that every time you turn on the Internet, they can ding you for fees like they do with cell-phones,” Angus said. “We’ve seen this before; when we were told that deregulating cable rates would give customers a big benefit. We were paying 60-to 100-per-cent more in no time.”

“Canada is already falling behind other countries in terms of choice, accessibility and pricing for the Internet,” Angus added.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CTV British Columbia – Canadians rank among most enthusiastic web users 12-28-10.flv[/flv]

CTV British Columbia explores Canada’s love affair with technology and how its integration has dramatically changed the social lives of many families.  That’s no surprise, considering Canadians are North America’s most enthusiastic net users.  (2 minutes)