While Time Warner Cable trumpets upgraded broadband services in many of the states it provides service, South Carolina and some other southeastern areas are the exception.

Stop the Cap! reader Brett writes Time Warner’s broadband experience in South Carolina is so four years ago.

“Check out the paltry speeds that Time Warner Cable offers in Columbia. As far as I can tell we are the slowest region around.  The very best package they offer, with PowerBoost, is 10Mbps for downloads, 512kbps for uploads,” Brett writes.  “How sad.”

Most Columbia customers get less than that.  The standard Road Runner package has been stuck at 7Mbps down and 384kbps for some time.

While broadband speeds have not changed, the rates have.  Time Warner Cable announced rate increases throughout the Carolinas in December, boosting prices for many services.

Time Warner Cable spokeswoman Rose Dangerfield said needed upgrades were part of the reason for the rate increase.

“The company spent $380 million in the past year to upgrade equipment in South Carolina and North Carolina,” she said.

A review of Time Warner Cable’s speeds in the Carolinas and the states of Virginia and Alabama makes one wonder where the money went, because Brett shares company with other customers across most of the region.

Last year, Stop the Cap! told you the story of Mark Williams, the Lee, Massachusetts resident that was quoted an installation fee of $12,000 from Time Warner Cable.

The town intervened, claiming the cable company was violating its franchise agreement by not providing standard cable installation for any customer who also received electric and phone service.  Time Warner agreed to reduce the fee to $4,000 — still unacceptable to Williams.  Months later, and after a threat of sanctions from the Board of Selectmen, Williams got his cable-TV, broadband, and phone service installed for $35 — the same rate other Berkshire customers pay.

Williams did have to spend around $1,500 to bury an underground cable that runs some 600 feet from the nearest utility pole to his home.  Williams wasn’t interested in overhead wiring and didn’t mind paying the additional fee to have the cable buried where he wanted it.

Lee, Massachusetts is located in broadband sparse western Massachusetts

Cable companies routinely deny cable television services to customers who live in sparsely populated areas, where the company is not expected to earn back its wiring investment within a short period of time.  In such cases, either the customer (and other interested neighbors) split the wiring costs or they go without service.  But Lee’s franchise agreement insisted the cable company wire any customers in its franchise area who also have access to other utilities, which includes nearly everyone.

Other communities trying to get their outlying residents cable service could find providers amenable if they insist on similar clauses during franchise renewal negotiations.

Williams tells The Berkshire Eagle he is grateful for the support of his town government, especially patent attorney Malcolm Chisholm of the Lee Cable Advisory Committee for taking on Time Warner on his behalf.

“He’s a real terrier and sinks his teeth into something until it’s done right,” Williams told the newspaper.

If you are a Time Warner Cable “digital phone” customer living in New York or western Massachusetts, you can get a few dollars of your money back thanks to serious outages that have plagued the cable company for the past two weeks.

The worst problems occurred yesterday, when customers across the entire region couldn’t make or receive calls in many instances.

“My wife said it was like the whole system crashed,” reports Stop the Cap! reader Marcus, who lives near Syracuse.  “A lot of people here are very upset.”

Marcus reports he couldn’t even work around the outage by trying to set up call forwarding to send calls to his cell phone or another Voice Over IP provider.

“I tried to forward my Time Warner calls to a Vonage number I have and that didn’t work either,” Marcus writes.

We heard from several readers in Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, and even into western parts of Massachusetts that calling a Time Warner Cable customer from a cell phone or a landline from Verizon or Frontier was nearly impossible without getting a recording or busy signal.

Small business customers using Time Warner’s phone service were also impacted in some cases.

Lakeview Deli in Saranac Lake posted a message on its Facebook page just before noon, advising its customers to call in their lunch orders using a cell phone number because of the problems with its main phone line. Owner John Van Anden said he normally gets 30 to 40 calls around the lunch hour; he got only four on Tuesday.

“It hurt (business) quite a bit just because you can’t get phone calls from customers,” he said.

The outage, which lasted more than 12 hours, was reportedly finally fixed by the cable company last evening at around 11pm.  No explanation for the outage was given by Time Warner Cable.

This is the third major service problem for Time Warner’s phone service this month:

1. Time Warner misdirected 911 emergency service calls to a call center in Colorado;
2. Time Warner underestimated call volumes, leaving customers in central New York with “all circuits are busy” recordings or busy signals;
3. Yesterday’s collapse of Time Warner’s phone network.

“Wow, this is starting to make Frontier look good again,” says our Rochester reader Kevin.  “I’ll be dropping my phone service with the cable company when my promotion ends and sticking with my Verizon cell phone.”

With all of these service outages, you know what that means — it’s time to go grab those service credits.  Customers in central New York can apply for at least a week of service credits because of the ongoing problems the company faces handling call volumes.  Everyone else in the region with “Digital Phone” service qualifies for a day’s worth of credit.  But you won’t get it unless you ask.  We’ve made asking simple, with our cut and paste process:

Stop the Cap! Presents Your Easy Service Credit Request Menu

Customers in the northeast can request one day of credit for yesterday’s phone outage.  Residents in central New York, including Syracuse — can ask for one week of credit for ongoing call congestion problems.

Sample Request You Can Cut and Paste:

I am writing to request one day service credit for the phone service outage that occurred in my area yesterday, Tuesday Jan. 18th. Please credit my account.

[Central NY Residents ONLY]: I am writing to request a credit for one week of telephone service to cover the company’s ongoing intermittent call connection problems in our area as well as yesterday’s (Jan. 18) more widespread service disruption.  I am concerned about the repeated problems Time Warner seems to be having in correctly servicing my telephone needs.  Please credit my account.

Use the Online E-Mail form, select Billing Inquiry, and send a message requesting credit.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSYR Syracuse Another Phone Outage 1-18-11.flv[/flv]

WSYR-TV in Syracuse is spending plenty of time covering Time Warner’s phone outages and other problems.  Here’s the fourth report this month, covering yesterday’s widespread problem. (Warning: Loud Volume) (2 minutes)

Hours before a two-week extension on contract talks was set to expire, Time Warner Cable and Sinclair Broadcasting announced they had a deal to avert the loss of dozens of Sinclair-owned stations on Time Warner Cable.

No terms were disclosed, but industry watchers predicted Sinclair held the weaker hand and probably made some concessions to the cable company, especially on issues related to Time Warner’s focus on expanding cable programming to portable devices and allowing more shows to be “started over” or made available on-demand.

The length of the new agreement was also not disclosed, but many believe a 12-24 month extension was likely.

Time Warner Cable also negotiates programming deals on behalf of Bright House Networks, and a separate, similar agreement was anticipated to be reached sometime this week.

Despite hours of threatening video crawls on several Sinclair-owned stations and full page ads purchased in local newspapers by the cable company, no programming was ultimately impacted by the threatened blackout.

This most recent retransmission consent battle could be among the last if the Federal Communications Commission manages to write new rules to keep customers out of the middle of such disputes.

The FCC plans to consider drafting reforms to current regulations as early as next month.  The Commission seems to be leaning towards the cable, satellite, and phone companies’ view that would leave stations and networks on the cable dial while negotiations are underway, preventing the kinds of blackouts that left suburban New York Cablevision subscribers without access to Fox programming for two weeks in 2010.

Just a week after exposing serious insufficiencies in a 911 emergency services database, a report from a Syracuse, New York television station finds Time Warner Cable’s “Digital Phone” service has a new problem — incoming calls increasingly are not getting through.

Callers using Verizon, Frontier, or cell phone lines are getting recorded messages indicating “all circuits are busy” when trying to reach customers using the cable company’s Voice Over IP phone service.  Time Warner officials are well aware of the problem.

The cable company tells WSYR-TV the problem is on inbound calls only, and is being caused by an unusual spike in the volume of calls to the company’s customers.  When all incoming lines are in use, callers will hear a recorded message.

The company says it is working to expand incoming call capacity in the next week to ten days, and until then advises callers to simply keep trying — once another customer hangs up, a line will be available for your call.

Time Warner says they routinely expand call capacity based on predicted call volumes, but this winter the number of inbound calls went beyond expectations.  Time Warner bundles its “digital phone” service with cable and broadband packages, and has picked up a significant percentage of customers who have cut the cord of their traditional phone company.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSYR Syracuse Time Warner Cable Phone Problems 1-13-11.flv[/flv]

WSYR-TV in Syracuse covers Time Warner’s latest glitch — problems with their ‘Digital Phone’ service.  (Warning: Loud Volume) (2 minutes)