Local progressive blogger Tom Belknap gets six minutes of airtime on WHAM-TV’s morning show to expand on, and educate viewers about some of the ancillary issues surrounding the Time Warner usage cap experiment.  Belknap, who runs DragonFlyEye, also gets a chance to debunk some of the misunderstandings some people have about the cap issue, and also deals with conservatives who reflexively objected to Senator Charles Schumer’s involvement in the Time Warner debacle.

“The company still plans to bill by usage once people understand the concept.” As I explained to readers before, some of the most telling statements about the future of this entire debacle have come from the Triad division of Time Warner from North Carolina.  Company officials seem to be a little more forward about what is going on down there than in many of the other impacted divisions where we hear far more vague statements.

This is a quick report, but if you compare and contrast it with the News 14 Carolina reports, it’s easy to see the difference.  One report tells viewers customers weren’t happy with the experiment, the other did not.  One report has an anchor that steps back and reports the company position, the other is closer to a “team play” to press the company point of view.  And viewers absolutely picked up actual news from this report, instead of a recitation of talking points and press releases.

The anger over Time Warner’s rationing plan for the Internet was so persistent, Rochester TV newscasts began running out of adjectives to describe the seething customers here felt about the whole thing.  It had been a top story for day after day in this area.  Calling it “a plan that has been slammed from nearly every corner,” WROC covered the press conference that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) held April 16th announcing the cap program was suspended.

“The final nail came from Chuck Schumer.”  “Time Warner’s plan was … nothing short of a PR disaster.”  “Time Warner was taking advantage of a near monopoly.”  “It seems they could try it again, though.”  All statements from WROC reporter Evan Axelbank.

Customers get it.  StoptheCap! readers get it.  Our elected officials get it.  Time Warner’s competitors get it.  The media get it.  The cat next door gets it.  The only ones who still don’t get it appear to be Time Warner executives in New York and a few of their friends in the industry or trade press who get paid not to get it.

Finally.  We were beginning to wonder if anyone was conscious to what Time Warner was doing to customers down in Beaumont.  No wonder Time Warner found “success” with the program.  Of all of the cities Time Warner proposed testing this rationing plan, Beaumont has always been the quietest and least likely to make noise about it.  But residents have started to change their tune once they realized other Time Warner “experiment” cities managed to successfully get the cap plan dropped, at least for now.  So why are they still stuck with it?

Check out Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) being interviewed and using the slam-it-home point that Time Warner is already making a ton of money on broadband priced just the way it is right now.

A pretty powerful piece.  Time Warner comes across as exceptionally arrogant in Beaumont.  They would not provide anyone to talk on-air, and their written statement, while acknowledging the program was driven back in other cities, is working just fine for them in Beaumont, whether customers like it or not.  Pretty chilling and smacks of arrogance.  Of course, in Beaumont, AT&T is experimenting with caps of their own, so the point that customers have no uncapped alternative is particularly powerful in this part of Texas.

Argh…  Lauren MacDonough, WROC Web Reporter, what were you thinking?  MacDonough adds to WROC’s highlighted coverage of the Time Warner service outage, with a follow-up explanation that belies belief.  She gets the first part of the explanation correct: a router failed in Syracuse which affected domain name servers, among other things.  That assured any connections made through the Syracuse Operations Center would end up getting no further if they were relying on Time Warner’s equipment to route the traffic properly.

But then MacDonough wades out into the deep end, and gets into trouble.  She posits the theory it could have been a “strain” on its network which caused the hardware to fail, and then quotes Time Warner’s earlier press release about “Internet brownouts could be on the horizon,” and then draws a line between the events on Sunday and Time Warner’s exaflood theory.  [Shudder]

Generally speaking, traffic on an electronic piece of equipment does not wear it out, leading to a failure.  Routers have failed since Road Runner began service.  It happens.  Sometimes it’s heat related, other times a power supply stops functioning properly.  A pesky spider spinning a web inside the case might be indictable.  There are lots of reasons.  Heavy traffic, on a Sunday morning yet, causing the thing to flame out is unlikely to be among the first theories I’d come up with.

Some readers have asked why I’ve been covering this story in the first place.  Today you know.  It’s not an intention to pile-on any negative bad news about Time Warner, but rather to be sure we are on guard against media misinterpretation of unrelated events which lead to any inappropriate tie-ins to Time Warner’s kooky theory of broadband management.

As you’ve just seen, that’s precisely what Lauren MacDonough did.  It’s likely unintentional on her part, but it doesn’t change the fact we will need to help correct the record and not allow debunked exaflood theories to be used as “evidence” for usage caps and rationing tier plans.