Effective today, I am making some policy changes affecting our Comments section.  It is important for everyone to understand that organizing a pushback against usage caps means putting aside non-germane issues that really don’t help to keep people focused on the issues here.  Therefore,

1. This is not a “right” or “left” issue.  We have people from all political points of view here, each concerned for their own reasons or beliefs why caps are bad.  Some feel this is a slippery slope towards controlling what people do online, others see it as a corporatist agenda to reduce competition and abuse market power.  Some seek a regulatory approach, others want competition in the free market, and many more want a combination of the two.  They are all valid, and it’s okay to offer different solutions.  But this is not the fault of any political party, past or current president, or federal official.  After 20 years of watching this industry, there are both Democrats and Republicans who support or oppose our views on these issues.  It’s remarkable how bi-partisan the good and the bad ideas are.  A Democrat in the North Carolina legislature is pushing the anti-municipal broadband legislation.  Republicans in Texas have largely not been receptive to appeals from constituents about usage caps.  In short, you’ll find good and bad all over, and we’ll need all of the good we can find, no matter what political party one aligns with.
2. Resist flame wars in the Comments section on other writers.  I am going to start purging the more egregious ones.  Argue and debate the issues, not each other.  It’s okay to have different opinions, and people should expect they might be debated about them, but let’s keep it above the belt.

The Comments system is now configured to allow you to edit your comments for up to 30 minutes after they are written.  If you are particularly annoyed with someone, you might consider writing the reply in a text editor, saving it, and waiting a few hours/next day before you paste it into the comments editor and send it.  Heat of the moment replies are often regretted later.

Thanks for helping out.

Road Runner service is once again intermittent here at StoptheCap! headquarters.  After another round with the National Help Desk, who got Tier 3 local Road Runner support on the phone, we’re hearing that once again we have about 50% packet loss.  The tier three people are monitoring the connection during the day — the last time this happened it seemed to improve as the day wore on.  A service call is scheduled for tomorrow morning, but might occur sooner.  The support people are conducting themselves professionally and have expressed concern for our problems, which is appreciated.  They are assigning a senior technician to our case.

Frontier has two service trucks out here beginning work on our DSL problems, so it’s going to be an interesting day. If Time Warner dispatches repair crews here early, then I’ll put a cooler with soda out back and they can share with the Frontier people.

Just another Manic Service Call Monday for us….

It’s 81 degrees in Rochester. Finally decent weather. One of the New York elected officials we’ve been talking to about the Time Warner usage cap issue somehow found out today is my birthday and arranged to have a cake dropped off. You’ll notice the caps stuck on all four sides. Very funny. It looks like a Wegmans cake. Mmmmm…. Funny Masks would have made the surprise even more entertaining. You don’t know what a real supermarket is until you have a Wegmans in your town. There is no other supermarket like it. Period. The next closest thing, and even that isn’t as good, might be a Whole Foods. Wegmans is a Rochester-based institution.

Ars Technica is beginning to worry about us. 🙂

A number of Texans are writing in to report their Time Warner Internet service has also been cut off.  We’ve had more than a half dozen so far, and they are still coming in.  The pattern seems to be that if you exceed 40GB in one week, your account may be at risk.

When it is cut off, you have to hope you reach a knowledgeable representative who understands the flag that indicates your cable modem is “in quarantine.”  You then call the Security number, which is almost always answered by voicemail, and then wait for a call back and a lecture on your “excessive use.”  They then turn service back on.

I will be writing a follow-up piece on this problem shortly.  If you can continue to report instances of this, that is helpful.  If you are comfortable, please let me know if I can use your real name, which helps with giving this story added credibility.  It’s getting obvious these are not isolated incidents.  We’ll be seeking broader coverage on this and believe it needs some review by regulatory authorities.

I have received an informal response from someone “in the know” up here in western New York who tells me the home residential visits conducted up in the Rochester area are not unusual and started last fall.  Two people reported they were “prompted” by their complaints about the cap issue to Time Warner, because, as they wrote, the representative brought the issue up.  He’s concerned I’ve jumped to conclusions about why Time Warner does what it does.  Perhaps.  I’ll keep that in mind going forward.  I don’t mind getting the constructive criticism.

An upgrade has been completed to our comments section.  I will need to tinker with some settings, but you will have a window of time to re-edit your comments after posting them in case you find a spelling or grammar error after the fact.  The window will be set to 15 minutes later today.

I am still testing a different theme for StoptheCap! to help people find articles more readily.  You’ll know if/when I elect to use it when the site looks considerably different than it does now.

Inquiries have been arriving about my Frontier DSL service.  It’s complicated.  Very complicated.  It seems the original representative who processed the order completely and totally botched it, leading to layers and layers of confusion.  Follow-up calls to customer service representatives apparently resulted in additional confusion because the entire account was messed up.  Frontier has now assigned an account specialist who is now working with us on getting all of this resolved.  He seems to be doing a good job so far, but the jury is really still out on Frontier at the moment.  We are 10,000 feet out from the central office, and there is a line problem, so our service is currently speed capped to perform at around 256kbps down (and around the same up).  Obviously that’s ridiculous, but they wanted to leave us with something over the weekend.  On Monday, line technicians arrive to work on improving things.

The Rochester Frontier DSL speed for this particular area maxes out at around 6.5Mbps, but they are not currently certain they can do better than 1-2 Mbps in our neighborhood.  I am withholding judgment, because I know line technicians around here can get very creative in resolving issues, so I’ll wait and see what they can do.  But I definitely would not keep the service if 1-2Mbps was as good as it got.

It’s an illustration, again, of why DSL is not always a competitive solution in every instance.  The further away you live from the telephone company switching office, the slower the speeds get.  If you are in a rural area, there are lots of places that will never be able to get DSL because of how far away they are from the exchange.  Even in suburban locations, which is where I am, aging equipment and the quality of the copper lines can make or break DSL as a serious competitive contender for a lot of people.

I will be writing up and documenting the entire adventure for a future article.  I am impressed with Frontier assigning an account specialist to work with me on this and ensure my satisfaction to the best of their ability.  That has gone a long way to tempering my frustration over this entire affair.

I am going to enjoy the rest of my birthday.  I still have a ton of video to post here, and I’ve had good response from a lot of you that enjoy the fact we are multimedia-oriented, even if that eats into your “usage allowance.”  I’ve also had response from the media and some politicians.  The former seems to appreciate when I compliment good reporting (and two had a hearty laugh over the catastrophe in journalism on News 14 Carolina — they felt the same way); the latter appreciates they can sit back and watch condensed reports without having to read through all the text I am capable of producing in short periods of time.

And the folks at Ars Technica can relax.  I get out now and again, especially with the improving weather.  A few readers here have recognized me and honked as they realize I’m that power walking guy they’ve seen on Elmwood for the past several years.

Finally, I encountered a hackathon last night when browsing about online seeing who had linked to us.  I have been drafting rebuttals to two articles that link back to us, one coming from an industry insider who isn’t too plussed with our objection to Internet rationing plans, and another that, charitably, seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid, perhaps unintentionally.  We’ll see.

The Messenger Post newspapers, which include several suburban weeklies and the Canandaigua Daily Messenger, printed an editorial Thursday celebrating the victory by consumers over Time Warner and its usage cap scheme.  It suggested the company is out of touch with its customers:

The Internet isn’t optional anymore. It’s not the exclusive domain of illegal downloaders and World of Warcraft gamers. Whether you’re looking for information on school closings or — ahem — researching your cable provider options, it’s ubiquitous, and that won’t change anytime soon.

True, the tiered pricing could have meant short-term savings for some light users, although savings would be minimal for customers already using a cheaper “light” service at a slower connection speed. Tech experts point out that computers are using bandwidth even when users aren’t online — and the computer is turned off.

The editorial, “The Battle May Be Over, But the War Is Not,” recognizes this website’s contribution to the victory against Time Warner, but also shares our sense that this is by no means over.

Ultimately, that opposition worked. Grass-roots activism among a crowd devoted to “Net neutrality” — the idea that Internet access shouldn’t be restricted — drummed up a fervor, largely through a constant flow of posts on sites like www.stopthecap.com. Schumer took the issue to Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt and the company halted the plan.

For now.

Advocates quickly realized this, noting on blogs like Stop the Cap! that while last week’s announcement was a “tentative victory,” “we have not come close to winning the war.” Indeed.

The groundswell of furious consumers has demonstrated its power. Now it must follow through on that enthusiasm.

We absolutely agree.  This website has already embarked on a comprehensive education campaign to give consumers ammunition to understand the broadband industry, learn surprising facts about some of the true costs to provide service, and steel themselves to resist the Time Warner Re-Education campaign we are likely to see over the spring and summer.  An informed consumer is an empowered one, well prepared to confront and debunk talking points that are designed to obfuscate the fact the cable broadband industry remains enormously profitable.  There is no legitimate reason why Time Warner cannot embark on necessary technology upgrades to keep up with the demands of the next generation of Internet users, without resorting to massive rate increases or rationing plans to drive usage (and their costs) down.  In competitive markets, they already have a track record of matching the competition.

We intend to explore every avenue open to us, starting with our desire that Time Warner will recognize the problem here was not about how they explained their plan — it was the plan itself.  If they refuse to listen, customers will cancel their service.  If they get to the point where their franchise in this area no longer meets the needs of the citizens here, then perhaps it’s time to consider not renewing that franchise.  If they redline communities like Rochester, among others, with punitive caps and lower quality service, than perhaps our future lies in advocating for a municipal broadband platform as found in Wilson, North Carolina.  One way or the other, our region’s destiny should not lie in the hands of one or two companies that have the power to dictate terms that turn our area backwards, while others move ahead.  We can’t afford to let this happen.

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.