After a week of catch-up, I’ve finally gotten to last Thursday, when the cap program finally fell apart (for now).  With the sheer quantity of new material constantly reaching us, I’ve been remiss in keeping as up to date with the news clips as I’d have liked.  But I want people to see this moment of victory, for several reasons:

Several people have inquired if I have a copy of Senator Schumer’s entire remarks from that afternoon. Unfortunately, I do not, but over the course of most of the Rochester-based media accounts you will be seeing, at least 75% of what he said is included over the entirety of the reports from the Rochester stations.  The most important statement I want people to hear in the senator making it emphatically clear that “Rochester will not be part of any tiered pricing plan period.”  Should Time Warner renege, that will be a major point of contention for this community, at least.  I have spoken with the senator’s office and they are clearly and carefully monitoring this situation on an ongoing basis.  An attempt to simply dress up the same old scheme and bring it back this fall is not going to go over well.

Senator Schumer’s importance in this entire affair cannot be downplayed or underestimated.  A United States senator means business, and Time Warner knows it.  When the CEO picks up the phone and calls the senator himself, that’s a recognition we have their attention. If you haven’t thanked the senator yet, please consider doing so.

For those in other communities, you have only heard parts of how this story all went down in Rochester.  Thankfully, all of us benefited together, with the exception of the people of Beaumont, who I’ve never forgotten about.  These reports will bring you fully up to speed on the events that transpired here in western New York.  For those in Rochester, you need to pay careful attention to the language being used by Time Warner spokespeople in the other cities, particularly in the Triad, North Carolina.  It was one of the major reasons I came to believe the cap plan has not been staked through the heart at all.

All of these video clips will be stored in our reference library here, so that any other communities that face a cap announcement can learn from our own experiences, and plan strategies to combat them accordingly. You can access them from the Category menu, choosing Video from the list.

And we’re off….

A number of the Rochester clips will be unrated, as I have traditionally done with media reports, because I am in several of them. That would be too cute by half. I’ll just say that most of them are quite good, and it’s better for me when those long shots are avoided. Violet Beauregard in her finest Willy Wonka moment and I may have been separated at birth. If you don’t get it, use The Google: “violet blueberry willy wonka.” And for several seconds, I get to be the bobblehead too.

We’ve been here before.  Back in 2007, opposition to municipal networks by big cable and telephone companies led to a state bill that would have essentially killed off projects with an endless array of obstacles.  That’s where this story comes from.  Back then, Google got involved then to help fend off the anti-consumer legislation.  But as readers of this site know about big cable and big telcos, once defeated, never twice shy.  They’ll be back.  They always come back.  That’s the lesson everyone must remember.

It’s remarkable this is a story from two years ago and the facts have largely remained unchanged during this new go-around.  WRAL covered the issues well, and it’s ironic they’d be back two years later to cover the whole thing all over again.

As we entered the second week of the public firestorm against Time Warner’s broadband usage cap nightmare, the enormous pushback began to make an impact.  Time Warner’s two Texas systems, in Austin and San Antonio, finally decided to back off from the tier experiment for the summer.  This came before the eventual “suspension” of the tier experiment late last week, but for San Antonio, it provided a glimpse of hope that customer reaction would make a difference.