Subscribe[Updated Tuesday 10:12am: Added city of Rochester, although I do not know if Mayor Duffy is invited to these gatherings.]
This Friday, there will be a closed meeting of the county’s supervisors, and Time Warner has been invited to come speak on the issue of usage caps and take questions. The meeting is informal, and not open to the public, but that doesn’t mean you cannot make a direct influence on how this meeting transpires.
I have received direct input that many town and village officials are not hearing from constituents about Time Warner Internet Rationing, and are woefully under-informed about this issue. Therefore, it is OUR responsibility to help inform, educate, and directly lobby them with our firm opposition to usage caps of any kind, and the complete lack of proven justification for their usage cap experiment, its tiers, and pricing. Winter is over here in Rochester, but there is a real risk of a Time Warner Snowjob if we do not make it absolutely clear to each and every town that caps are absolutely, unequivocally, unacceptable in any amount.
To not protest means that locally elected officials will be at risk of believing the propaganda they are about to receive and assume it must be accurate because nobody is complaining. That must change, and preferably before this Friday.
While local officials have no regulatory enforcement power to deny Time Warner the ability to launch their “experiment,” the more opposition on every level, the better. And don’t you believe this won’t be an issue at franchise renewal time.
Simply put, we must fight this battle on every front at the same time. So tomorrow morning, start the phone calls, e-mails, and faxes! Some towns, like Brighton, have already had their constituents ringing the phones at the town hall off the hook, and town officials are on board. Those folks need to hear our thanks and support. Other towns have not heard as much, and they need to.
Here are the points you need to raise:
- Time Warner is conducting this experiment in the only upstate city not served by Verizon and their expanding FiOS (fiber to the home) network, which provides formidable broadband competition and a simple alternative for dissatisfied customers to head elsewhere. They know here in Rochester, you really have nowhere else to go if you want uncapped cable modem-like service.
- Frontier Communications, while being an honorable corporate citizen by promising not to cap their DSL service, cannot currently compete on the same level as Road Runner for consistency of speed, availability, and price unless a consumer signs a long term contract with a steep cancellation penalty. If DSL isn’t even available to your home, tell them!
- Time Warner has consistently refused to publicly release their raw data on which they base their “need” to impose usage caps, tiers, and overage charges. We are asked to take their word for it.
- Time Warner just increased rates in Rochester two months ago. Let them know how much you are already paying, and ask how much more does this company need from us?
- Ask them what other company would get away with raising the price for unlimited broadband service by 300% with no improvement in service, and only vague promises about a future upgrade. How can any company ask a customer who wants the same level of service they enjoy today for $39.95, to pay $150 tomorrow?
- Tell your supervisor their “experiment” is being imposed against your wishes, and that at no time do you want to participate. Tell them you are concerned they may not understand that by this fall, the higher cost tiers and overage fees are hardly an “experiment” because you are going to be billed for them.
- Tell them other cable operators like Cablevision do not impose ANY usage limits and don’t want to, because their current pricing is already profitable! Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, charges every standard broadband customer the same price, and simply requests they do not exceed 250GB of usage per month, more than six times the amount Time Warner’s paltry standard service tier would offer.
- Ask why should Time Warner impose tiers on the customers they claim aren’t even a problem? Those with lower consumption are being asked to choose a plan that offers as little as 1GB of data, and then they face a $2 per gigabyte penalty for each additional gigabyte!
- Tell them talking about sending tens of thousands of e-mails and looking at simple web pages is not the real issue. Using online file backup programs, watching online video, making phone calls over the Internet, and the future services that are forthcoming in our high technology future are what’s at issue, and punitive usage caps retard those services and new businesses from ever getting off the ground, all while a virtual monopoly broadband provider rakes in fat profits.
- Tell them Time Warner has a vested interest in protecting their core video business – selling you cable TV packages that, ironically, you have to take on an all you can eat basis, while they want to take away that currently affordable option for their broadband service, which now let’s you watch TV and radio programming that could reduce your need to keep your cable TV package.
- Tell them you don’t want to have to watch a gas gauge and have Internet service rationed to you in small portions at high prices while Time Warner’s own SEC filings show their broadband division continues to grow in profits, all while the bandwidth costs for them are on the decline! Where is the crisis?
- Ask them, above all, to not simply accept the statements from interested company officials as fact. Let them know you’d be happy to provide them with copies of challenges to their assertions, point by point, as well as industry observations which suggest the company is making a spectacle of itself, has tiers bordering on the “obscene,” and are so out of whack with the rest of the American broadband industry, the company has to try and compare its broadband rationing with foreign countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Remind them this is Monroe County, New York, United States of America!
- Finally, let them know that people affected by this include: financially stressed families with teenagers, small businesses run from the home, workers conducting company business from a home office, the large deaf community in our area that depends on broadband video phones to help communicate with friends, families, and business associates, and frankly, your own town’s ability to offer services like online video of town board meetings and functions.
Always be polite, persuasive, and professional in your communications. You need not raise every one of these issues – pick the few that are most important to you, but make it clear this issue is so important to you, your town official’s position on it will be a major factor for you in the next election. Your choice of arguments should also consider the political environment in your town. In some communities, you will be more effective when you stress the lack of competition and need for more players in this market, and that there is nothing wrong with pushing back against job-killing, innovation wrecking, unjustified capping experiments in our hurting economy. In others, reminding them of Rep. Eric Massa’s involvement in this issue and that there is a groundswell of consumer opposition visible in every form of local media and online.
This site is ready and willing to answer any question from any government official looking for additional information or resources on this topic. And those answers won’t just be coming from me, but from independent news sources, researchers, and industry trade publications that do report on and explore capping alternatives. This is an issue that will have a profound impact on this community. In all my conversations with consumers, government officials, and businessmen, I’ve yet to find one that has been looking forward to their community being the “chosen ones” for this “test.”
Finally, simply ask, “who wants this?” Outside of Time Warner executives talking to other Time Warner executives, practically nobody. And just last fall, International Data Corporation asked the same question I did of 787 U.S. consumers. And remember these results:
- 81 percent do not like the idea of establishing a bandwidth cap and charging for use above the cap.
- 51 percent would try to change service providers if their BSP imposed bandwidth caps.
- 83 percent say that do not know what a gigabyte or have no idea how many gigabytes they use.
- Even light users are opposed to the whole idea of bandwidth capping.
- Only 5 percent said unequivocally that “those who use more should pay more.”
Gigaom, a respected online publisher double checked the results with their own poll. Ninety-one percent of 1,159 voters said that they would switch to another ISP, while 6 percent said they would not switch.
What will consumers pay for? Improved service today, not vague promises about tomorrow! Instead of relying on punitive usage caps to finance the next generation of broadband systems, why not create new levels of premium tiers to appeal to the very heavy users Time Warner wants to pay for improvements? How about faster tiers of service priced higher than the current standard service. Time Warner themselves had success doing this with the introduction of its Turbo tier for an additional $10 a month. How about SuperTurbo for $20 more a month? ExtremeTurbo at $30 more a month? Sit back and rake in the profits, but make everyone happy, from your lightest consuming customers to the heaviest of them all, who will happily pay for a better level of service today to make an even better and faster level of service available tomorrow. Caps are for bottles, not for broadband, not in the United States of America.
Here is a comprehensive contact list. Find your community in the list below and get busy. (Thanks so much to everyone who helped contribute to getting this list together so fast!)
