Here’s a shocker.  When the city of Wilson’s Greenlight fiber optic system was getting prepared to go live, Time Warner began flooding customers with special deals and offers to keep their business, including Road Runner, as low as $24.95 a month for two years, good only in the Wilson/Goldsboro service area of course.  Road Runner customers were also offered double their existing speeds if they agreed to lock into a two year contract (making a switch to Greenlight prohibitively costly with early cancellation penalties).  That offer wasn’t available to residents in nearby Raleigh, according to Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Manager of Wilson, a claim Time Warner disputes.

Needless to say, both sides claim they welcome competition, but only one of them is being honest about it.  You can guess which.

Well-balanced.  WRAL seems to be consistently producing excellent reports on this issue, always remembering to provide time for both sides.  Good journalism.

Back during the first week of April, when all of the Time Warner drama hit, I promptly signed up for Frontier DSL here in Rochester.  I will not have an ISP in this house with usage caps, period.  Not now.  Not ever.  I realized I was hedging my bets, because if we were successful, Time Warner would back down and I’d effectively have two ISPs here (Frontier has term contracts).  Since I work from home, I figured it was a good idea to have a backup provider in case of an Internet outage, and I have always kept my Frontier phone service (I refuse to pay Time Warner for an overpriced VOIP “digital phone” service that is only a little less expensive than what Frontier charges for a real phone line).  Adding DSL onto a Frontier residential line isn’t actually that much more expensive, so it was a good option.

But let me tell you, even when you do Frontier right, they manage to screw it up and do you wrong.  As devoted readers will have noted, I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the self-install kit to arrive.  It was supposed to ship days after placing the order.  Earlier this week, I followed up with Frontier again and got two different answers:

• We forgot to ship it.
• It got lost.

The representative promised to overnight a replacement on Tuesday.  Wednesday came and went, and now Thursday came and went.  Apparently the definition of “overnight” with Frontier bears no resemblence to my reality, or the rest of the planet Earth.  Anyway, come to find out, they never shipped the replacement either!

One of our readers recommended using Twitter to contact Frontier.  I’ve been messing with Twitter mostly since I got this site re-fired-up after Time Warner stepped in it, and I honestly have a lukewarm-hate relationship with the thing.  I’m not as bad as Maureen Dowd, NY Times columnist, who wrote she “would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account.”  I opened one and used it a few times.  But I just don’t get it.  Who the hell cares what I am thinking and doing from moment to moment.  I don’t even care that much, and I’m me!  As a group “pager” about new articles here, I suppose it might be useful, but I’ve discovered our Twitter addicts seem to already be doing a lot of that work for me.  I love to delegate.  I should get someone else here to take it over and handle it for me.

Anyway, Twittering Frontier made a friendly contact with an employee, but by this time Frontier was already working my last nerve, because nobody would tell me, “can’t I just drive 10 minutes away and pick up the damn thing at the Frontier store?”  So silly me, I waded around Frontier’s terrible website (Carmen Sandiego would get lost permanently on there) and finally found the Frontier Store number and called them.  How 1980s of me.  “Sure, we have tons of them here, just come on down.”  Twitter, indeed.

Oooooh… it makes me so mad.  I’ve been paying for a service I don’t have for three weeks, while those DSL modem things are just minutes away while I wait for some UPS guy to bring me one.

So they did it to me again.

I just don’t understand how a company gets run this way.  I really don’t.  But I have the gosh darn thing, and later tonight I will begin documenting my experiences with it for our readers who might want Frontier as an alternative.  I’m already unhappy about the glorious waste of time I’ve had thus far, but perhaps I’ll be surprised with what will come next.  We’ll see.

Wilson, North Carolina first got attention on the state level about two years ago when they were well on their way to constructing a municipally run fiber optic network to deliver fast broadband, television, and telephone services to area residents.  Time Warner, the incumbent provider, had bypassed Wilson for some of the highest speed upgrades.  This is a situation not unknown to StoptheCap! readers like those in Rochester who face their own slower speed Road Runner service.  Competition in nearby cities Buffalo and Syracuse have prompted Time Warner to upgrade speeds in those communities, but not in Rochester.

When Wilson city officials didn’t listen to the warnings from Time Warner officials, legislation introduced in the North Carolina legislature suddenly appeared which would essentially shut down Wilson’s project, and others like it, across the state.

The story below, from 2007, illustrates the divide, and the pro and con positions.  Now, two years later, the same issues are back, along with a new industry-sponsored bill to once again find a way to get rid of municipal networks in North Carolina.  Why StoptheCap! focuses on this issue is to help educate you about how this industry works, what alternatives are available, and give you the power to articulate to everyone why competitive, uncapped broadband service is essential to every community, at reasonable prices.  This isn’t a right or left issue.  It’s also one that should concern every person, no matter how much broadband service the use at the moment.

WRAL back again with another comprehensive and fair report.  This one is about two years old and focuses on the last round between Time Warner and the city of Wilson, North Carolina.  The exact same battle was renewed this spring, and we’re watching.

After skeptical reviews from the media (and online groups like ours) about Time Warner’s original proposal to create broadband tiers that ended up not saving any customer a penny, the company quickly announced a 1GB slower tier for the light user. San Antonio learned about the plan in a brief report, but no details about the fact that exceeding that 1GB tier would cost your 200 pretty pennies for each gigabyte that followed.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle produces some edgy video targeted to younger people who probably aren’t getting home delivery of their newspaper everyday (shame on you), but are still plugged in to high technology issues.  So it didn’t take long for the paper to track down two young entrepreneurs running small businesses in the area who would be directly impacted by usage caps and punitive overlimit fees.  One, Justin Kirby, has been well known in the telecommunications circles I travel in for a very long time.  He’s out in Albion, a small town in Orleans county northwest of Rochester.  Albion is served by Time Warner for cable service, and Verizon for telephone.  It will be several years before Verizon FiOS ever reaches into the smaller towns well outside of the urban/suburban communities Verizon now targets for fiber optic cable.  DSL would likely be the next best choice, assuming it is available.

In rural areas, the impact on small business and residential customers is even greater, because these are the communities most unlikely to see robust competition from multiple providers.