Senator Chuck Schumer and StopTheCapare thrilled to announce that Time Warner has suspended tiered pricing in all of their markets. Developing…

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.