Time Warner Cable customers in Austin, Tex. excited to learn DOCSIS 3 speed upgrades have finally arrived in the state capital are less than thrilled to learn the rug has been pulled out from under some of the high speeds the company was promising customers just one week earlier.

At issue is Road Runner Extreme, the DOCSIS 3 upgrade that delivers faster speeds at a “sweet spot” price of just $10 more than Road Runner Turbo.  In most Time Warner Cable markets, Road Runner Extreme delivers 30/5Mbps service, and so it was to be for Austin customers as well:

Captured from Time Warner Cable website - July 1, 2011 (click for screenshot of entire web page)

But Broadband Reports reader “SunnysGlimps,” who signed up for Extreme expecting those speeds, discovered “bait and switch” broadband instead, as the resulting speed test (and subsequent advertising) showed a much less impressive 20/2Mbps result.

“I was actually getting faster speeds with the Turbo then I am now with the capped Extreme package,” says Sunnysglimps. “My speed clearly hits a cap when it goes to 20/2Mbps on speedtest.net.”

This reader feels Time Warner Cable is engaged in false advertising in Austin.

“You cannot advertise 30/5Mbps, sell the service, charge more, and then change your advertising a few days later and say it won’t be what you just purchased.”

Captured from Time Warner Cable website - July 5, 2011 (click for screenshot of entire web page)

A Time Warner Cable online customer support employee is out of a job after sexually harassing a Charlotte, N.C. area woman looking for help with her Time Warner Cable account.

“Hello my baby,” was the opening “Bobby” gave to Denise when she began an online chat to learn more about the cable company’s products.  “Yes baby I here to ———- you,” came soon after.

“It is unacceptable,” said Denise’s son Shaun Poland, who didn’t get much of a response from Time Warner until he took the story to a Charlotte-area television station and the cable company’s Facebook page.  “It is sexual harassment.”

Poland’s mother thought it must have been a mistake, but as the comments continued, Poland told her to take a “screen grab” of the online chat.  Despite calls to Time Warner, Poland didn’t hear anything until taking the story public, and to a much wider audience.

Time Warner Cable spokesman Dan Ballister issued a statement denying the online chat agent was a direct employee of Time Warner Cable.  But the agent involved was working for a cable company vendor and had access to Time Warner customer phone numbers and home addresses.

“Within 24 hours of this incident, the agent was no longer supporting Time Warner Cable,” Ballister said.

Poland is still concerned.

“We have a crazy person with access to all of our information saying sexually harassing things,” Poland told the station.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSOC Charlotte Woman Receives Inappropriate Messages In Time Warner Cable Chat Room 7-1-11.flv[/flv]

Charlotte station WSOC-TV talked with Shaun Poland about his mother’s disturbing experience chatting with Time Warner Cable.  (2 minutes)

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.

Here in western New York, the impact of more than two years of deep recession has delivered record high unemployment, wage freezes and cuts for many still holding onto middle class jobs.  Only now does it appear that the wage deep freeze is slowly coming to an end.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle notes total wages earned in the nine-county Rochester/Finger Lakes region for the first nine months of the year were up 2.2 percent over the same period in 2009, according to state Labor Department figures.

But while things are incrementally improving for worker bees, many of America’s corporate “queen bee” executives have maintained compensation packages that would leave one to believe the United States is enjoying double digit growth and a blazing economy.

CEO pay at large U.S. companies has risen from 80 times as much as rank-and-file workers made in 1970 to more than 260 times what they made in 2009.

Stock market gains — the S&P 500 index rose almost 13 percent in 2010 — and improved profitability were key reasons why many executives made more last year than they had in 2009. Of the 86 executives on the Democrat and Chronicle list for both 2009 and 2010, compensation increased for 66.

Take Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.  He spent much of June talking up raising broadband pricing on his company’s customers, many of whom live in upstate New York.  While Time Warner has faced challenging economic results in their core cable television business, one would never know it from Britt’s newest compensation package, handing him a 25 percent pay raise and another $2 million in his non-stock incentive pay.  That’s a pay package worth almost $10 million dollars.  The D&C notes four other Time Warner Cable executives listed in the company’s proxy statement made from $1.2 million to $3.8 million.

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Frontier Communications’ DSL service delivers abysmal results for customers looking for quality time with Netflix.  For the second quarter running, the independent phone company’s ability to keep up with Netflix’s high quality video is about on par with a garden slug in a triathlon — yes, it may eventually reach the finish line, but you’ll be dead before it happens.  Even more embarrassing for Frontier, their service is occasionally beaten by Clearwire, a wireless ISP with a bandwidth throttler that can reduce your online experience to the painful days of dial-up if deemed to be using “too much.”

“Frontier sucks,” writes Stop the Cap! reader Doug in Charleston, W.V. “After they took over where Verizon fled, my ability to watch Netflix online became a source of endless frustration, so now I limit myself to mailing DVD’s back and forth.”

Remarkably, Charter Cable, which does poorly in customer satisfaction surveys, is again the runaway winner, followed by Comcast, the heavily usage-capped Cable One, Time Warner Cable, and Cox.  Verizon and AT&T only deliver middling performance.