Shaw’s wallet-biting usage billing shark finally gets the net, at least for some of the company’s broadband plans.

After a firestorm of protests from customers across western Canada, Shaw Communications this week unveiled new Internet packages and pricing that dramatically increases usage allowances and introduces unlimited use plans.  Stop the Cap! reader Mark shares the good news that consumer pushback can make a difference:

Today we are excited to share our new direction on Internet pricing and packaging with you, our customers. With your help, we’ve created a model that we hope you’ll agree is fair, flexible and offers a variety of options for customers today and into the future.

We’d like to thank the hundreds of customers who took time to come out to the 34 sessions and those who shared their ideas online. Many of those who participated are the technology innovators who told us they wanted an Internet experience that worked not only today, but for the needs of tomorrow. We also heard that our customers wanted transparency, more choice of internet speed and data options, increased flexibility to meet their varied needs, and above all, fairness.

The decisions we have made coming out of those sessions are far reaching. We went into the session thinking it was a discussion about pricing and packaging, and came out with a new vision for the future. Put an end to your struggles, as the perfect packaging solution to enhance your product is available at https://www.andex.net/blister-cards/.

One of the biggest decisions we have made is to undertake a major upgrade of our network by converting our television analog tiers to digital. In making this move we will triple the capacity of our network, freeing up space for more Internet, HD and On Demand programming. This conversion will start in June and will take sixteen months to complete. As a result of this upgrade, it will open up opportunities for Shaw to offer industry leading broadband performance.

While it is unlikely many Shaw customers clamored to see the cable company convert to an all-digital system (which requires a set top box on every connected television), the aggressive move to expand DOCSIS 3 technology will provide Shaw the option of pitching faster Internet speeds to customers — exactly what they intend to offer:

1. Increased Data Consumption with our Existing Model: Customers can choose to stay with their existing packaging and pricing except with much higher data levels. Our existing acceptable use policy will remain the same as it is today.
   

   Package	Speed	Current Data	New Data	Bundle Price	Standalone Price	With Personal TV (SPP)
   Shaw Lite Speed	1 Mbps	15 GB	30 GB	$27	$37	$64.90
   Shaw High Speed	7.5 Mbps	60 GB	125 GB	$39	$49	$74.90
   Shaw Extreme	25 Mbps	100 GB	250 GB	$49	$59	$84.90

2. New Broadband Packages: We have created new packages featuring industry leading performance and greater value. These broadband packages will come bundled with TV and will roll out in two phases. Phase 1 will be available in June, 2011 and Phase 2 will become available as the network upgrade occurs. Our advanced digital network will be activated neighbourhood by neighbourhood over the next 16 months starting in August, 2011.Customers who choose one of the new packages will enter into an automatic upgrade program. Those who go over their data consumption will be placed in the next higher package for the remainder of the month. The following month’s data will be reset and customers will return to their original package unless they choose to stay at the higher level.We have also created unlimited data options for our customers, an Unlimited Lite and Unlimited 100. As the new network becomes available, we will also offer Unlimited 250.
3. Phase 1 Broadband Packages (Available June, 2011)
   

   Package	Download Speed	Upload Speed	Data	With Legacy TV	With Personal TV (SPP)
   Unlimited Lite	1 Mbps	256 kbps	Unlimited	Add $59.00	$84.90
   Broadband 50	50 Mbps	3 Mbps	400 GB	Add $59.00	$84.90
   Broadband 100	100 Mbps	5 Mbps	500 GB	Add $69.00	$94.90
   Broadband 100+	100 Mbps	5 Mbps	750 GB	Add $79.00	$104.90
   Unlimited 100	100 Mbps	5 Mbps	Unlimited	Add $119.00	$144.90

   Phase 2 Broadband Packages (Rolling Launch Starting August, 2011)

   Package	Download Speed	Upload Speed	Data	With Legacy TV	With Personal TV (SPP)
   Unlimited Lite	1 Mbps	256 kbps	Unlimited	Add $59.00	$84.90
   Broadband 50	50 Mbps	5 Mbps	400 GB	Add $59.00	$84.90
   Broadband 100	100 Mbps	10 Mbps	500 GB	Add $69.00	$94.90
   Broadband 100+	100 Mbps	10 Mbps	750 GB	Add $79.00	$104.90
   Broadband 250	250 Mbps	15 Mbps	1 TB	Add $99.00	$124.90
   Unlimited 250	250 Mbps	15 Mbps	Unlimited	Add $119.00	$144.90

While this represents a welcome change for Canadians long weary of stingy usage allowances, the pricing for the company’s unlimited use options is on the high side, and is not an available option for the most popular lower speed tiers, with the exception of the company’s 1Mbps “Lite” plan, where it carries a ludicrous monthly fee of $59, the exact same price customers will pay for a 50Mbps plan with a 400GB monthly limit.

We would have liked to see Shaw introduce unlimited options for all of their usage plans (or better yet simply drop the limits altogether).  As it stands, they are effectively charging an extra $20-40 a month to be free from a usage cap on some of their new highest speed tiers. For most customers, the effective result of Shaw’s changes is a more generous usage package.

Shaw’s pricing for high speed plans is aggressive.  For what Americans would pay Time Warner Cable for 50/5Mbps service, a Shaw customer will eventually get 250/15Mbps with a 1TB limit (add $20 for unlimited).

Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor, suspects the looming hearings by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) over usage-based-billing has a lot to to with this week’s changes by Shaw, which just months earlier was lowering usage allowances.

“Shaw is doing this because the writing was on the wall,” Geist says. “When you’re in a position to offer such better pricing and data caps than what you were offering before, it highlights just how uncompetitive this market has been.”

Eastern Canadians in Ontario and Quebec will be waiting to see what companies like Rogers, Videotron, and Bell do in response to Shaw’s new pricing model.  As it stands, western Canadians will nearly get double the speeds and usage allowances those in the eastern half of the country endure from cable and phone companies.  That could be a political nightmare at the CRTC hearings, and would continue to call out the highly arbitrary nature of Internet Overcharging, whether it is found in Calgary, Toronto, or Montreal.

Phillip Dampier

Time Warner Cable has completed their DOCSIS 3 upgrade of the Rochester/Finger Lakes region and their new Road Runner Extreme and Wideband services should now be available throughout the region.  Stop the Cap! HQ will receive its upgrade to Road Runner Extreme late this afternoon, primarily for the 5Mbps upstream speed, which will make uploading content to our servers much easier and more efficient.

The cable company is insistent on their installation fee, which amounts to nearly $68 (unjustified in my personal opinion).  Some details for our local readers:

• Customers in the Rochester & Finger Lakes region almost never own their own cable modems — they are provided with Road Runner at no extra charge;
• Upgrading to Extreme or Wideband will mean either a modem swap or a second piece of equipment if you have Time Warner phone service.  The new equipment includes a built-in wireless router;
• You are not obligated to use the cable company’s equipment as your primary router if you favor using your own existing router;
• As part of the installation fee, you have a right to insist they spend the time to configure service the way you want it, especially if you want to continue using your own router;
• It is also a good time to ask them to check signal levels and clean up any wiring or service issues.  Western New York has endured a record-breaking deluge of rain this spring, and degraded outdoor wiring can create havoc for broadband and cable service.
• If you are currently receiving a promotion such as free or discounted Road Runner Turbo service, you will lose the value of that promotion when you upgrade service and will pay full price going forward.

Beyond the installation fee, Road Runner Extreme (30/5Mbps) costs $20 more than Road Runner Standard (10/1Mbps) service.  Road Runner Wideband (50/5Mbps) is priced at $99 a month, but is a much better value bundled with the cable company’s Signature Home ($199) package, which includes complete packages of digital cable, “digital phone,” and broadband service.  For most in the Rochester/Finger Lakes area, the only alternative is Frontier Communications’ DSL combined with an unlimited calling plan and satellite television or a similar package from Verizon or much smaller Windstream.  Verizon’s fiber to the home service FiOS is not available anywhere in this region.

A Time Warner Cable customer in Whitefield, Maine has filed a complaint with the state’s Attorney General charging the cable company is selling customers a product it cannot deliver in parts of the state, and bills customers for it anyway.

The broadband add-on, Road Runner Turbo, is supposed to provide customers with a faster broadband experience, but in communities up and down Maine, it apparently does not, and has not for nearly three years.

The cable company hotly disputes the accusation, made by Michael Panosian, that the company has been overbilling him $10 a month for three years.

Andrew Russell, a Time Warner Cable spokesman, told the Kennebec Journal that the company does not charge for services it cannot provide.

But the cable company’s argument lost a considerable amount of credibility when evidence emerged Time Warner has admitted the problem, and quietly agreed to reimburse Panosian $328.35 for Road Runner Turbo service all the way back to June 2008.

The admission has also become a point of interest inside the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, which is engaged in discussions with Panosian and the cable company.

Despite Russell’s denials, Time Warner officials admitted there was a problem and told state officials it would be corrected sometime this month.

Panosian thinks the cable company is ripping off Maine residents pitching faster Internet it does not deliver.

Panosian said a Time Warner Cable technician told him Turbo is not available in his area and possibly others in Maine.

“From what the tech told me, it isn’t just Whitefield,” Panosian said. “I went down (to Time Warner’s Augusta office) and talked to them about it, and they’re aware of it.  I said, ‘If you’re aware, why are you taking everybody’s money?’  If they don’t charge for services they don’t provide, why are they reimbursing me?”

Stop the Cap! reader Frederick, who lives in nearby Windsor and shared the story with us, says it is a classic case of Time Warner Cable overselling its service.

“The truth here is actually in the middle; Time Warner actually does deliver a Turbo service in Maine, it’s just that their network is so overcongested, nobody benefits from it during peak usage times,” Frederick reports.  “They have too many customers trying to share the Internet, and Turbo cannot help resolve this problem, only upgrades can.”

Frederick reports he identified the source of the problem running a series of speed tests on his Time Warner Cable connection.  He subscribes to Road Runner Turbo himself.

“The truth is revealed when you examine the upload speed of your connection,” he says. “Even when the network is busy, I can still get nearly 1Mbps upload speeds, a sure sign Turbo is on my account.”

The download speeds are another matter.

“In Windsor during peak usage times, you will easily see even a Turbo connection drop to 5Mbps in download speeds, only returning to normal after people go to bed,” he says.  “That means Time Warner has oversold their network, putting too many people on the same ‘node,’ one inadequate in capacity.”

Frederick suspects the “fix” Time Warner refers to is an upgrade to DOCSIS 3 technology.

“Maine is treated like a backwater by Time Warner Cable,” Frederick charges.  “What other cities got a year ago we just start to receive, so instead of performing periodic upgrades, they are just waiting for DOCSIS 3 to solve all of their problems.”

Frederick thinks customers should be compensated for the poor service, and is considering demanding a refund himself.

“I pay more than $50 a month for my broadband service with Turbo and they deliver what their ads claim only when I’m asleep or at work.”

The Triangle -- North Carolina

Just a few days after Gov. Bev Purdue declined to veto an anti-consumer, anti-community broadband bill sponsored by Time Warner Cable, the cable company announced the imminent availability of its Road Runner Extreme and Wideband products — made possible with an upgrade to DOCSIS 3 technology.

The newly available service is officially being rolled out across the Triangle, including the cities of Raleigh-Durham and Chapel Hill over the next several weeks.

“We are empowering our customers with pure online power to save time and boost productivity when multitasking with multiple devices,” said Christine Whitaker, area vice president of operations for Eastern North Carolina. “As customers expand their use of the Internet, our services are evolving to meet their needs.”

Time Warner noted it had spent $8.5 million to upgrade the region to DOCSIS 3 service, and has already rolled out the upgrade in the Charlotte area.  In the Triangle, the company also announced free speed upgrades for existing customers that took effect last week:

• Road Runner Turbo with PowerBoost 15 Mbps/1Mbps
• Road Runner Broadband with PowerBoost 10 Mbps/1 Mbps

North and South Carolina Time Warner Cable customers are among the last to get the speed upgrades Time Warner has completed in many of their service areas.  Some customers formerly received upstream speeds of 512kbps or less.  The cable company said recent fiber upgrades made the faster speeds possible, but DOCSIS 3 upgrades are responsible for allowing the cable company to offer its Extreme (30/5) and Wideband (50/5Mbps) products.

Despite the upgrades, Time Warner Cable still offers slower broadband service than many of its community-owned competitors, and the cable operator has made investments in broadband upgrades across most of its cable systems nationwide as a matter of course.

With Time Warner Cable’s broadband now running as high as $50 a month for standard, stand-alone service, getting the best deal possible can save you as much as $20 a month off those prices.  Time Warner Cable has been repricing their services to deliver the most value to customers who bundle all of the company’s products into a single package.  But if you don’t want television or telephone service from the cable company, you are going to pay a lot more than your service-bundled-neighbors for Road Runner High Speed Internet.

Stop the Cap! presents our strategy to help broadband-only customers get the best possible prices from Time Warner Cable:

Choose Earthlink

Customers paying Time Warner Cable’s regular prices for broadband service are paying too much.  Time Warner currently charges just short of $50 a month for Standard 10/1Mbps service (speeds are slower in some areas).  That’s up from years of charging $40 a month, slightly higher if you were a broadband-only customer.  But with the help of Earthlink, you can cut that broadband bill to $29.99 a month for the first six months.  Earthlink co-exists with Road Runner, Time Warner Cable’s own broadband service.  With just a few mouse clicks and a quick phone call, Time Warner can switch your regular price Road Runner to Earthlink without any equipment changes.  Billing and service will continue to be provided by Time Warner and the change literally takes less than five minutes by phone.

Earthlink’s broadband service is indistinguishable from Road Runner — same speeds, same level of service, with two exceptions:

• Earthlink does not benefit from PowerBoost, which delivers temporary speed increases during file downloads
• You will forfeit your rr.com e-mail address

We recommend you avoid using ISP-provided e-mail addresses when possible, because they help tie you down to an existing provider.  Instead, sign up for a free e-mail account from Google’s Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail, or any of the dozens of other web-based e-mail providers.  Or, purchase your own domain name from GoDaddy or 1and1, which includes e-mail, and either read it on those sites or forward it to a web-based e-mail provider.  Domain names can be had for under $10 a year and deliver maximum flexibility for those who want the freedom to change Internet providers.

After Six Months, Switch Back to Road Runner

When your Earthlink promotion expires at the end of six months, your price will increase to $41.95 per month.  Just before that happens, switch back to Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service.  You qualify for new customer pricing promotions.  As of this week, Time Warner Cable in western New York is offering one year at $29.99 per month for 10/1Mbps service.  Other areas may have different pricing promotions.

After the year is up, you can start all over again, heading back to Earthlink for another six month promotional term.  Earthlink has offered its promotional plan for more than two years, and it shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Promotional Half-Truths

Promotions come and go from Time Warner Cable, so it is wise to check with them often if the $29.99 deal is not currently running in your area.  Start by checking Time Warner Cable’s website, and remember if you are using Earthlink, you will want to select pricing for new customers.  If you find a good price on the website, you may be able to complete your order online.  Otherwise, call your local office and ask about currently running promotions.  Some common ones:

• Road Runner Turbo at 50% off for the first year;
• Road Runner Turbo free for six months;
• Road Runner with wireless router/modem free for six months to one year;
• Road Runner with free installation (especially useful if you want Road Runner Extreme/Wideband service, which carries a pricey installation fee);
• Road Runner for $29.99 for six months;
• Bundled promotions — $99 for all three services, $79 for broadband/cable or broadband/phone

Not every promotion delivers the best deal for customers, and some have been slightly deceptive, such as this speed comparison we found on the cable company’s website this morning:

Our View:

1. Time Warner Cable has been spanked before for their claims about running a “fiber network.”  In fact, their “Fiber Rich Network” is a marketing stretch.  All modern cable systems use fiber optics to help distribute their service into various communities, but coaxial copper cable delivers the signal through neighborhoods to your individual home.  Cable companies still cannot match the broadband speeds available on an all-fiber network.
2. “Powertasking” is a meaningless marketing claim.  Any high speed network will allow the entire family to effectively share a broadband connection.
3. We’re glad to know Time Warner Cable has “massive bandwidth” — more than enough to go around.  We’ll remember that if and when the company ever entertains bringing back their experimental Internet Overcharging scheme they claimed was necessary to pay for equipment upgrades to cope with broadband traffic growth.
4. It would be simpler to install Time Warner’s DOCSIS 3 upgrade if we could do it ourselves, but the cable company currently requires a mandatory service call ($67.98 fee) to install it.
5. Time Warner is being cute comparing their broadband speed with Verizon FiOS.  In fact, FiOS is faster because of what isn’t mentioned here — upstream speeds.  Time Warner tops out at 5Mbps, Verizon offers 20Mbps for uploads.  But Time Warner’s pricing is better at that download speed.  Verizon is more aggressively priced when they bundle services together.  For example, Time Warner’s $99 triple play bundle only offers 10/1Mbps service.  Verizon offers up to 25/25Mbps service for the same price.  Both include phone and television service.