Time Warner Cable's usage meter.

Time Warner Cable today relaunched usage-based billing, offering customers a $5 monthly discount off Internet access when they confine their usage to a maximum of 5GB per month.

Stop the Cap! was at the forefront of protesting Time Warner’s last Internet Overcharging experiment in 2009, which would have allowed unlimited access for $150 a month — a major rate increase to be sure.  Other customers had usage allowances that originally would have ranged from 40-60GB per month, with overlimit fees of $1/GB or more.

Time Warner Cable’s Jeff Simmermon, director of digital communications, admitted the 2009 experiment attempted in Beaumont, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas, Greensboro/Triad, N.C., and Rochester, N.Y. was unsuccessful.

“Yes, we did try this before, a few years ago,” Simmermon said. “And yes, pretty much everyone agrees that it didn’t go so well. So we listened to customer complaints. A lot.”

The cable company is trying again in southern Texas, including the cities of San Antonio, Laredo, Corpus Christi, the Rio Grande Valley and the Border Corridor.

This time Simmermon says the usage-based pricing program for Time Warner Cable customers will be optional. He also promised Time Warner Cable customers will always have access to unlimited broadband at a flat monthly rate.

This is a major change for the cable company, because earlier statements from both CEO Glenn Britt and the chief financial officer Irene Esteves called usage based billing inevitable.

Simmermon admitted Time Warner Cable is making plenty of money selling unlimited access to customers today.

Simmermon

“We profit from unlimited consumption, and a free, open Internet is the sort of Internet that has gotten us this far,” Simmermon wrote on the company’s blog.

“All participation in the Essentials plan is opt-in, with the opportunity to save a few dollars each month,” Simmermon said. “It’s not going to be for everybody, and that’s fine — all Time Warner Cable customers will still have the option of selection an unlimited broadband plan.”

The details:

1) Up to 5GB/month of data transmission for a $5/month discount from one’s current monthly bill. All Standard, Basic and Lite broadband customers will be eligible. Turbo, Extreme and Wideband customers will continue as always, with access to unlimited broadband and no optional tiered plan or discounts.

2) The ability to opt-in and opt-out of a tiered package at any time.

3) A “meter” that tracks usage on a daily, monthly, weekly or even hourly basis, enabling customers to accurately gauge usage.

3) A 60 day/2 billing-cycle grace period to allow customers to adjust usage patterns. During this time the company will notify customers of overages but won’t charge for them.

4) Overages will cost $1 per GB, not to exceed a maximum of $25/month.

This presents the opportunity to save $5/month from a monthly broadband bill.

Time Warner already has the TV Essentials plan for $39.99/month that offers low-income households to have access to cable, in a stripped down package. Simmermon says this is meant to be the broadband equivalent.

[Stop the Cap! will publish our own views on this development in a separate editorial.]

AT&T flipped the switch Sunday on its new 4G-LTE wireless data network, and the resulting next-generation wireless speeds now available to customers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, Texas are impressive, averaging 23.6Mbps on the download and 15.2Mbps for uploads during a three-day test.

Mobile World reports initial testing by Signals Research in Houston delivered a peak data rate of a massive 61.1Mbps.  The researchers transferred nearly 90GB of data back and forth during the weekend tests, almost always at data rates above 5Mbps.

AT&T intends to compliment its existing “4G” HSPA+ network with a gradual rollout of LTE service in their major markets, eventually covering 44,000 nodes over a three-year period.

AT&T will first introduce its LTE service to wireless mobile broadband customers who will find the USB modems on sale with a two-year service commitment.  Support for the network on smartphones will come later.

A few important points to consider before becoming too excited with AT&T’s speed ratings:

1. Signals Research conducted the tests on an effectively empty network.  Since AT&T hasn’t started selling LTE-capable smartphones yet, the only ones using the network are AT&T’s mobile broadband customers, most of whom are using AT&T’s older HSPA+ service.  AT&T doesn’t guarantee any particular speed, and it’s a safe bet speeds will slow considerably when smartphone customers eventually pile on board.
2. That speed comes at a significant price.  AT&T is charging $50 a month for mobile broadband service with a 5GB usage cap.  Each additional gigabyte runs $10.  Signals Research is lucky they didn’t pay AT&T the going rate during their tests.  That 90GB of data would result in a bill from AT&T amounting to $50 for service, and $850 in overlimit penalties.

Despite a soft launch weeks earlier, Time Warner Cable officially began selling faster broadband packages in San Antonio Tuesday.

Made possible by DOCSIS 3 upgrades (and not by “Time Warner’s fiber optic network” to quote one San Antonio news outlet), the cable company will now sell 30/5Mbps service for $20 above the current price of Standard Service.  Customers looking for more speed can spend a lot more to get it — $99.95 a month buys you 50/5Mbps service, although the sting seems less if you bundle all of your Time Warner services through their $199 Signature Home package, which includes digital cable, broadband, and phone service.  Signature Home includes 50/5Mbps as part of the package.

About 70 percent of the San Antonio market can get the new speeds immediately.  The rest will be upgraded by September.

The upgrades are seen with some amusement by customers of GVTC, a former telephone cooperative that today provides fiber to the home service in parts of the Texas Hill Country and other rural areas to the north of San Antonio.  They recently received speed upgrades from 40Mbps to 80Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream as part of a comparably-priced triple play package.  GVTC’s truly fiber optic system was built to accommodate broadband usage growth.

“Consumers obviously enjoy streaming video and downloading HD movies, but these applications use a lot of bandwidth and can slow down other Internet devices in your household,” CEO Ritchie Sorrells said. “The reality is bandwidth consumption will continue to increase. We’re once again ahead of the curve with our 80 Mbps connection, and this tier will be popular with the growing number of households that realize they have a need for speed.”

One thing GVTC customers don’t need and won’t get is the kind of consumption billing Time Warner Cable is reconsidering for their customers in San Antonio and the rest of the country.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WOAI San Antonio Getting Charged to Pay Bills 5-30-11.mp4[/flv]

Warning: Loud Volume Alert!  Adjust your volume controls before playing.

An increasing number of phone and cable companies are introducing new “convenience fees” for customers making payments by phone or using the company’s online website.  That is the finding of a new report from WOAI-TV in San Antonio.  While few companies currently charge for payments scheduled well in advance, an increasing number are asking for fees ranging from $1.99 to $25 for using online bill payment systems or making last minute payments over the phone.

If your provider charges a fee, be sure to ask for it to be waived, especially if you have a good payment history.  If you are charged the fee anyway, file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, which should get the attention of the executive customer service team empowered to refund it back to your account.

Paying to pay is just another way for providers to reap more revenue from customers, even when they are trying to make payments on time.  (3 minutes)

Time Warner Cable is probably changing your channel lineup, or already has — removing several analog channels you used to receive as part of your Standard Service subscription and moving them to digital.

For customers with digital set top boxes, the change happens without most noticing the difference.  The formerly analog signal still shows up in the same place, only the transmission format has changed.

But customers without set top boxes will notice as channels disappear forever from their lineups, replaced with… nothing.  But their cable bills will remain exactly the same, despite the loss of channels.

For Stop the Cap! readers like Bev, today spelled the end of Animal Planet and The Travel Channel, among others.  For those in Rochester, N.Y., last night was the last chance to watch C-SPAN 2, The Travel Channel, TruTV, Discovery Health, and Shop NBC in analog.  In Buffalo, it was bye-bye to The Travel Channel, C-SPAN 2, TV Guide Channel, and CMT.

It some states, particularly Texas, Time Warner Cable is sticking it to Public Access, Educational, and Government channels, moving them all to digital.  In some cases, cable companies and AT&T U-verse have managed to forever bury these PEG channels in Digital Channel Siberia with channel numbers in the high hundreds or even thousands.  For many subscribers, a search and rescue team couldn’t find their new channel positions.

It’s all a part of a larger plan to slowly erode away analog channels in favor of digital service, which takes up far less bandwidth on Time Warner Cable systems.

As cable systems are nearing capacity and do not wish to spend millions to commit to further upgrades, switching out analog service in favor of digital can provide enormous new capacity to accommodate HD channels and forthcoming DOCSIS 3 cable modem service upgrades.

Unfortunately, these channel changes will irritate subscribers who do not want to pay for set top boxes and do not want them on their televisions.  If you are among this group of box-haters, Time Warner Cable will continue to slowly drop more and more of the channels you used to watch without bothering to reduce your bill for the channels you no longer get.  Eventually, virtually all analog channels will probably disappear, replaced by digital versions you will need a set top box to view.

In many areas of upstate New York, Time Warner is trying to placate angry subscribers by offering one set top box at no charge for one year.  But here comes the tricks and traps — Stop the Cap! confirmed with Time Warner Cable this evening that only those customers without any set top boxes in their home can take advantage of this free offer.  If you already have a box, you’ll continue to pay for it even though your neighbor is getting one free for a year.  After the year is up, pony up — each box costs $7.80 a month ($7.50 for the box, $0.30 for the remote).

At least Texans are getting a better deal from Time Warner Cable — Broadcast Basic subscribers will get their boxes free for five years, Standard Service customers will get them for one year.  But beware — if Time Warner needs to roll a truck to install your box in the San Antonio area, be prepared to cough up $39 for the service call.

For broadband customers, there is some good news.  Virtually all major Time Warner Cable service areas facing channel changes like this will receive DOCSIS 3 upgrades and the chance to obtain faster Internet service by the end of 2010, even those communities bypassed for earlier upgrades.  You will also get additional HD channels.  In western New York, for example, Time Warner Cable plans to add a large number of HD cable channels by mid-fall:

On or About September 2, 2010:
Style HD
BBC America HD

On or About September 9, 2010:
National Geographic Wild HD
MTV HD
Comedy Central HD
Nickelodeon HD
Spike HD

On or About September 16, 2010:
History Channel International HD
CMT HD
Hallmark HD
VH-1 HD
Cooking Channel HD
DIY HD
TWCSN HD
YNN HD

On or About October 1, 2010:
Womans Max HD
HBO Latino HD