[Update 1:34PM EDT: The problem was traced to a failure in the Northeast Regional Office in Syracuse, New York.  The outage impacted service from Maine to the east, Buffalo in the west.  Time Warner in Albany was quoted as saying the failure was “widespread.”]

[Update 12:50PM EDT: Service is restored in Rochester.]

A major service outage has taken out Road Runner and Digital Phone services from Time Warner in the northeastern United States. In the New York area, the Road Runner outage extends throughout Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, to name a few. The outage began at around 10:00am EDT.

Digital Phone is out in several areas as well, including in Rochester.

Time Warner does not know what is causing the problem, nor is there any estimate for service restoration.

As usual, the “Network Status” section on Road Runner’s home page shows nothing about an outage that has jammed local Time Warner phone lines with upset customers.

StoptheCap! reader Corey is back in touch this afternoon to say he just completed a phone call with a Level 3 Road Runner service technician in San Antonio.  He asked the technician what he knew about the caps.  Here is what Corey relays back to us:

He told me “as of our most recent meeting yesterday morning, we will be coming out with a meter to show people their actual usage and will be introducing the consumption based billing sometime in October with actual billing beginning in January.”

He also said the billing was required, “because we are coax based and not fiber optic, so we do have problems with people streaming high definition video and causing congestion in large residential areas, especially apartments and mobile homes.”

Now I have no idea whether these kinds of techs have this kind of information or not.  It might be true, it might not.  It sounds a bit like what the original “revised” plan was before last Thursday when Senator Schumer announced the whole thing was shelved for now.  But it would hardly surprise me if this was their actual intent.  I have no doubt that this fight isn’t over.  I also think it’s becoming obvious that the ‘listening tour’ company officials keep putting out there is window dressing.  As I told Senator Schumer’s office last week, I’m fully expecting that Time Warner will bring back the exact same nonsense all over again, except the summer of the gas gauge will be their attempt to placate customers about how much usage they have, if you believe their gauge and if your usage doesn’t fluctuate between the nicest weather of the year and the lousiest.

I will be working this issue behind the scenes next week.  If this is true, it isn’t exactly the consultation with the community the company was promising last week.  It’s just more of the same.  If you are in San Antonio, perhaps you can manage to land a discussion with another Tier 3 rep and get the same, or a different story, and report back in our comments section.

This is why we stay engaged in the fight, and why everyone else must as well.

You just discovered that the center of the volcanic red-hot lava flow of anger that crashed your consumption based billing scheme to the ground was located in Rochester, New York.  Customers were burning those annoying mailers they get every day and casting voodoo spells on Mike O’Brian.  A congressman had to moderate a debate in a town hall meeting filled with angry customers vs. Time Warner representatives.  A senator came to town and put a podium on your lawn.  So what do you do to placate the masses?

Send company representatives to people’s homes!

StoptheCap! reader Corrine in Rochester writes:

Hi, Phil. A very nice TWC “Residential Account Specialist” stopped at my house this evening. She said she was visiting the customers in her area to make sure everything is ok with their service. She obviously had a printout of what we subscribe to from TWC and took notes of my feedback. Yes, TW is attempting to overcome the bad publicity. I indicated that I am sure she is familiar with Stop the Cap! and knows that it isn’t the local TW employees that there is a problem with — the comments all indicate that the service is great. The problem is with TW management and tiered service.

She admitted that there has been a lot of negative publicity.  The only “propaganda” that she provided was that people don’t understand that it is only the 14% high-end users who are downloading two or three movies a day who would be affected.  I said that although I don’t download movies, I will soon be retired and on a fixed income.  However, when I am home, my computer is up all the time.  With all of that on-line time, I have no idea how many GB I use.  Of course her response was that it would not effect me — even on RR Lite.

I asked for and received the representative’s card, which includes her cell phone number and e-mail address.  As all TWC representatives I have had contact with, whether on the telephone or as service representatives, she is a very personable lady.

I’m sure she, like the majority of local Time Warner employees are friendly, personable, and professional.  We’ve said repeatedly we have absolutely no beef with any of them.  None of our issues are their fault, and nobody should blame them or be disrespectful of them over this.  They are playing the hand of cards they were dealt.

That being said, I am surprised Time Warner is sending representatives out to homes, unless this person is trying to get people to upgrade service.  She obviously has her talking points, and for our statistical department, there is another number – 14%!  I remain utterly unconvinced by their numbers parade.  If you were on the 1GB Road Runner Lite, I guarantee you if you spend your day online just taking care of a website or doing other non-download/non-video applications, you’d blow way past 1GB in a month.

My usage, doing nothing this month except this website, and I'm already over 50GB in/out just writing articles and answering e-mail.

I want people to see something.  My router already tracks usage in this house.  I have basically done little more since April 1, the Day of Infamy, than taking care of this website, penning articles for it, and sending and responding to e-mail.  I have watched ZERO streaming movies or television shows.  The only files I’ve downloaded were the “monthly visits from Microsoft — bug fixes and updates,” backups of this website, and an iTunes upgrade.  I haven’t had time to download music and I am so bad at online/videogames, I don’t embarrass myself by even trying to play.  You can see my usage on your right.  Ten thousand megabytes equals ten gigabytes.  I am already past the initial “heavy user” plan and will probably finish the month close to 60GB of usage.  This is abnormal usage for me, because I’ve used the Internet for little more than old school browsing and e-mailing, and moving text around.  I’ve used Hulu and other services in the past, but not since the beginning of this month.

If you did for two hours a day what I do for many more, you’d be past 5GB by now, not below 1GB.

The numbers just don’t add up, but the bill sure will.  Time Warner doesn’t need to send representatives to anyone’s home.  Just cut the doubletalk and say, definitively, no usage capping or tiered pricing based on usage.  Tier on speed all you want – Verizon does it, as do others.  And there are customers waiting to hand you more money for faster speed today!

Apparently not being sufficiently warned off by Time Warner’s earlier statements that municipal broadband would be expensive and a pain for the community of Wilson to administer, they found some friendly legislators in state government and helped push a bill that would effectively hamper, if not terminate the Wilson community’s broadband initiative. In a well orchestrated lobbying effort, cable industry officials began claiming that taxpayer funds were being used to leverage the public sector’s broadband product at the expense of “the free market.” But as Wilson city officials explained, their Greenlight project is firewalled from using public tax revenue. The project was paid for by a bond offering and is expected to be self-sustaining through ongoing customer receipts.

Cable industry officials continued to attack municipal broadband projects as failures waiting to happen, pointing to earlier projects that often relied on wireless networks, wi-fi, or older technology. Many cities with these projects have been unable to scale them to grow with expected demand, or have had difficulty expanding their network into other areas of the community. Others outsourced them to be administered by private providers in return for public considerations, such as free/discounted access in certain areas.

Fiber optic broadband projects are new to most municipal broadband projects, and come as a result of a lack of comparable service from private providers unwilling to meet the needs of communities. So having not succeeded in dissuading municipal competition, they now seek to effectively kill it with handcrafted legislation passed into friendly hands.

WRAL continues its in-depth coverage on the challenges Wilson, NC faces in building their municipal fiber network.  Time Warner officials, among others, make some unproven accusations and statements in this report that go unchallenged, but overall it provides a balanced look at the growing controversy.

[Update 3:20pm EDT: Corey writes back with some minor corrections:  “Standard Service is now 15Mbps down/2Mbps up; Turbo is 25Mbps(ish) down/2.5Mbps up” for him.  Don’t forget Powerboost may play with your numbers on the download.]

You’ve just alienated the majority of your customer base with a harebrained scheme to Cap ‘n Tier people into the Internet circa 1990, and that didn’t work and a whole lot of people canceled.  So what do you do to placate the masses?

Increase their speed!

Before: Some of our heavy users (a/k/a Turbo tier customers I’ll bet) are using too much of our service and they are costing us too much.  We need to charge more and cap you to invest in better equipment.

Today: “As a valued (San Antonio) Time Warner Cable customer, we have automatically upgraded your download speed from Road Runner Turbo 10 Mbps to our new Road Runner Turbo 15 Mbps speed at no additional cost to you. More importantly, we’ve upgraded your upload speed from 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps for FREE.”

StoptheCap! reader Corey is confused:

“The ONLY thing that makes sense is that by increasing speeds and usage (especially upload speeds), they are trying to create congestion so that they get problems and complaints to base their “facts” on, so that they have ammunition to come back with at a later time.”

It could be that.  Or it could also be the fact the exaflood theory they based their earlier arguments on doesn’t hold a cup of water.  It does seem odd that they would increase speeds for the customers they claim were causing a lot of their “problems.”  Perhaps they also lost a whole bunch of those customers over this Cap ‘n Tier business and they want to get them back.