American Salt Company's salt pile in Hampton Corners, just south of Rochester, N.Y.

Faithful Stop the Cap! reader Lance dropped us a note this afternoon alerting us that Syracuse is the latest Time Warner Cable city getting the benefits of increased speed from Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3 Wideband upgrade.

While those in the Salt City can now sign up for 50Mbps broadband service, Time Warner Cable tells residents of the Flower City to go pound salt — there are no upgrades for you!

Why?

Thank Frontier Communications anemic (read that barely-existent) competition against Time Warner Cable in Rochester.  While the rest of upstate New York is being wired for fiber-to-the-home service from Verizon, Frontier Communications is relying on decade-old DSL service… indefinitely.  For residents like myself, that topped out at a whopping 3.1Mbps. That fails the FCC’s newly-proposed minimum speed to even be considered “broadband.”

Buffalo has been Wideband ready since early this month, and New York City launched service last year.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle must have noticed nearby cities were getting speed increases, but Rochester was not, so they contacted Time Warner Cable to find out why:

While those DOCSIS 3.0 products — called Wideband and Road Runner Extreme — are being made available in Buffalo and Syracuse, the company “has just begun its national launch of this product across its entire footprint, but with no additional locations determined at this time,” said spokesman Jeff Unaitis.

The company, however, does plan to roll out a wireless broadband product for the Rochester market before the end of 2010, he said.

(*) - As long as you don't live in Rochester, N.Y.

That’s the nice way of saying Rochester isn’t getting the speed increases because there is no competitive reason to provide it.  With Rochester left off the upgrade list, and no real incentive to run to Frontier (which can’t beat Road Runner’s existing speeds), this community falls behind the rest of the state in broadband speed.

To think last April Time Warner Cable was promising dramatically upgraded service, if the community agreed to accept their Internet Overcharging usage-based billing scheme.  Apparently no other upstate city was required to commit to ripoff pricing, and speed upgrades came anyway.  The fact Rochester is bypassed this year proves our contention their pricing experiment came to Rochester only because they faced no real competitive threat from Frontier then, and they still do not today.

As for the wireless product coming to Rochester, that will come courtesy of rebranded Clearwire service, which has had very mixed reviews.  Time Warner Cable and Comcast are both major investors in Clearwire, and are using their service to provide a wireless add-on.  It won’t come cheap, however, if North Carolina’s pricing also applies here:

• Road Runner Mobile 4G National Elite gives unlimited access to both Time Warner Cable’s 4G Mobile Network and a national 3G network (Sprint, presumably), for use when traveling.
  o $79.95 per month for Road Runner Standard or Turbo customers.
• Road Runner Mobile 4G Elite gives customers unlimited access to the Time Warner Cable 4G Mobile Network.
  o $49.95 per month for Road Runner Standard or Turbo customers.
• Road Runner Mobile 4G Choice gives light users 2GB of service on the Time Warner Cable 4G network each month.
  o Available for $39.95 per month to customers of at least one other Time Warner Cable service.  Additional $5 off if you have a  bundled service package.

As for Wideband pricing, Syracuse residents should expect to pay:

• 30/5Mbps: $25 more than standard Road Runner service;
• 50/5Mbps: $99 per month, but ask about promotional pricing, which may be available.

In Syracuse, Road Runner speed now matches Verizon FiOS on the downstream side, although Verizon can deliver better upload speed at 20Mbps.  Formerly, Road Runner maxed out at 15Mbps in central New York.

About 30 percent of the central New York division of Time Warner Cable is now Wideband-ready, including the entire city of Syracuse.  By October, the company expects to have the faster service available in 70 percent of the central New York area.

Time Warner Cable chief operating officer Landel Hobbs told investors at a recent conference Time Warner Cable can increase broadband prices whenever they want, and the company is following through with another $4 monthly rate increase for customers in select cities with standalone broadband service.

A Stop the Cap! reader in Lewisville, Texas shared the news straight from his mailbox:

We hope you are enjoying your Road Runner High Speed Online service with blazing-fast speeds from Time Warner Cable.  Effective with your April statement, your monthly rate for standalone Road Runner High Speed Online service will increase by $4.

Time Warner Cable offers to waive the increase if customers sign up for one of their bundled service packages.  For residents of Lewisville, northwest of Dallas, Time Warner suggests the Surf ‘N View Package with Digital Cable.  Signing up for that will increase your bill even further, but the company is offering a 12-month promotional rate to standalone service customers, charging $79.99 a month for both cable television and 7Mbps broadband service.

The rate increase is not limited to customers in Texas.  Customers in California are also being notified of upcoming rate increases.

Some half million Time Warner Cable customers in the Los Angeles area can expect rate increases averaging 4.5 percent.  Most of those customers are in the San Fernando Valley, according to a Time Warner Cable spokesman.

Los Angeles Times‘ columnist David Lazarus was unimpressed with yet another rate increase from the company.

There’s definitely an art to informing customers that you’re about to smack them upside the head.

About 500,000 Time Warner Cable customers in Southern California probably knew they were in for trouble when they received a letter the other day that began:

“At Time Warner Cable, we strive to bring you the best products and services available.”

Does a sentence like that ever signal anything except bad news?

Time Warner takes two full paragraphs to clear its corporate throat before it finally gets to the point:

“We are making some adjustments effective with your next billing statement. Certain services, packages and equipment prices will change.”

Even then, the company can’t quite bring itself to clearly state that prices are going up again. The letter refers only to “price adjustments,” and nowhere does it say that your cable bill is about to get more expensive.

You have to make your way to the back page of an enclosed pamphlet to finally learn that the cost of the typical cable package is rising by as much as $3.04 a month.

That’s a more than 4% increase, or nearly twice the inflation rate last year.

Although residents of Rochester will have to wait, other cities in upstate and downstate New York are now getting Time Warner Cable’s Wideband broadband service, which provides faster upstream and downstream speeds thanks to DOCSIS 3 service upgrades.

Time Warner in Buffalo yesterday signed its first Wideband customer, according to Broadband Reports.

The Hudson Valley will be the next:

• Walden Available March 30, 2010
• Wurstsboro Available March 30, 2010
• Rhinebeck/Saugerties Available March 30, 2010
• Poughkeepsie Available March 30, 2010
• Port Ewen/Kingston Available March 30, 2010
• Liberty/Monticello Available March 30, 2010

Time Warner Cable is deploying Wideband first in communities where they face competition from Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-verse.  Communities like Rochester, which face only token competition from slower-speed DSL service, are pushed way back on the upgrade list.

Customers in Albany, Buffalo and Syracuse who live near, but not in a FiOS-upgraded community, will also benefit from the DOCSIS 3 upgraded-Wideband service.

Two types of Wideband service are commonly available according to BR:

• 30 Mbps downstream 5 Mbps upstream tier that costs $25 over Time Warner Cable’s standard Road Runner plan (which can vary in price and speed by market depending on competition).
• 50 Mbps downstream 5 Mbps upstream tier for $99 a month.

A major service outage impacting Road Runner and Digital Phone service from Time Warner Cable began early this morning is ongoing.  Customers contacting Time Warner Cable in Maine, New York, and western Massachusetts are being told there is a service outage ongoing with both services, resulting in no dial tone and slow/no Internet service.

Presumably, there is a problem at the Regional Operations Center in Syracuse.

There is no estimated time for service restoration.

Cable television service is not affected.

[Update 2:00pm EST — Time Warner Cable blamed the outage on a defective router, which we heard was in the Binghamton area.  Service was “restored” at 9:45am although we’ve noticed that meant they shifted traffic onto other regional networks and that was still causing some page loading problems until late in the morning.

The outage was acknowledged on Time Warner Cable’s customer service lines in New York, Massachusetts, and Maine.  Rochester had the first recorded message up very early this morning, with the others coming by 8:45am.]

[Update 4:36pm EST — Customers impacted by the outage can obtain one day of Road Runner service credit, but only if you call or write to ask.  You can use the online customer form on Time Warner Cable’s website for your area or call your local customer service number.  The outage began around 5:20am this morning.]

Today’s quote comes courtesy of Landel Hobbs, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable.

Speaking at an investor conference in San Francisco, Hobbs said broadband has replaced cable TV as its anchor product, meaning subscribers increasingly refuse to part with it, no matter the price.

“Consumers like it so much that we have the ability to increase pricing around high-speed data,” Hobbs was noted saying by the Wall Street Journal.

Hobbs also reports the cable company continues to grow its Road Runner service at the expense of telephone companies and their lackluster DSL product lines.  Much of Time Warner’s broadband growth these days comes from disaffected DSL customers switching providers.  Broadband remains a profit center for the cable industry even as revenue from cable television flatlines in a difficult economy.

So let the Money Party begin… your broadband bill is going up, especially in areas where subscribers don’t have many alternatives.