Angelakis

Comcast says it admires Time Warner Cable for risking subscriber wrath over plans to introduce usage-based billing Time Warner says will be optional for customers in southern Texas.  But Comcast admits it is not brave enough to try similar pricing schemes themselves, fearing a customer backlash.

“We have a very high customer satisfaction rating and we don’t really want to rock the boat on [our broadband product],” Comcast chief financial officer Michael Angelakis told an audience Tuesday at a Wall Street bank-sponsored media and telecom conference in San Francisco. “I give them credit for trying different things, [but] we have real momentum in that business and the goal is to keep it.”

Comcast was a spectator of the consumer and political backlash against Time Warner Cable when it last experimented with usage pricing in April 2009.  Within two weeks, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt shelved the plan under pressure from both customers and lawmakers.

Now Time Warner Cable wants to reintroduce the concept as an option for customers of a new “Internet Essentials” discounted broadband tier that would include a $5 monthly discount if customers kept usage under 5GB per month.

Some veterans of the 2009 battle suspect Time Warner is trying to slowly slip usage pricing past customers waiting to fight its return by first suggesting it is only an option, but later herding broadband customers into usage based plans by substantially raising the price of flat rate service.

“Looks like a trial run the company could easily expand to all of their Internet customers,” shares Stop the Cap! reader Jeff in San Antonio, Tex., one of the cities that will participate in the upcoming usage-based plan. “I have a hard time believing Time Warner is going through all the effort developing usage meters and billing support for usage pricing just to market a handful of customers a $5 discount.”

Jeff, who helped fend off the cable company’s original Internet Overcharging experiment in 2009, suspects Time Warner’s earlier attempt to market a “flat rate” broadband option at $150 a month could still be a blueprint for how the company could push customers out of their unlimited plans.

“They can claim they want to keep unlimited Internet, but have remained silent about how much they will charge for it,” Jeff says. “We need something in writing that this company will not gouge customers with the fine print going forward.”

Stop the Cap! posed several similar questions to Time Warner Cable’s Jeff Simmermon, director of digital communications, through the cable company’s blog.  The company, to date, has offered no response.

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.]

Billing problems, promotions-not-honored, and passing the buck are all common complaints from cable and phone customers, especially when employees of large providers don’t communicate with each other and saddle customers with the role of “go-between.”

Two recent examples of Customer Service From Hell reached our desk this week, one involving Verizon which has the “not my job” mentality firmly entrenched in their call centers, and the other from Time Warner Cable, where “Diego” told a new customer he couldn’t install their service until they disguised themselves as an old customer to cancel someone else’s service first.

The Case of the Persnickety Promotion – You Don’t Qualify Because We Never Added It to Your Account

You can't touch this Verizon offer when the company forgets to apply it to your account for eight months.

Anthony Caruso received an offer he couldn’t refuse from Verizon FiOS: $69.99 a month for a triple play package of phone, Internet, and television service good for 12 months, with a reduced discount of $89.99 per month for the second year — still a great deal over what Comcast was selling.

He signed up for service in June and was happy with the installation and the service… until the bill came.

Over the last eight months, Caruso has never received a single bill that reflected the offer he signed up for, resulting in monthly calls to customer service lasting between 30 and 75 minutes each.  Every month, Verizon told Caruso the promotion he received never existed, but they would issue certain credits as a gesture of goodwill.

The Star Ledger exhaustively details the entire debacle, but suffice to say, Caruso was a victim because nobody at Verizon applied the promotion to his account.  The company also never bothered to investigate why a customer had to keep calling (eight times in the last eight months) to receive those credits.  The newspaper illustrates how complicated it all got:

In early July, Caruso received the first bill, for $176.44.

It was more than a little confusing: $470.32 in “Current Activity” charges minus $289.96 in “Specials & Promotions” minus $21.24 for a partial month. The bill also included a “Showtime Starz Entertainment Pack” for $16.99 and “Multi-Room DVR Package” for $24.99, neither of which Caruso ordered.

The bill also included a “first bill estimate” showing monthly charges would be $139.31.

“Very confusing collection of charges and credits,” he said. “I paid the full amount to avoid billing issues for my first payment.”

He called Verizon on July 29 to discuss the bill. Caruso was transferred three times, and a rep named Sandy helped. Caruso said she dropped the “Showtime Starz” package and applied a one-time $30 credit. Caruso decided to keep the “Multi-Room DVR Package,” so his future billing should be $104.43. Because of the overpayment on the first bill, the amount due on the August bill would be $43.21.

“I was also told I was getting $9.99 “Epix” movie channel free for three months,” he said. “The FIOS lineup shows Epix is included in my package, but I decided not to fight this.”

Caurso said he paid the August bill, but there were still problems. It showed the normal monthly price to be $133.63.

He called again, and this time spoke to a rep named Jason, who said he had never heard of a $69.99 bundle offer. Caruso faxed a copy of the offer letter to the rep, who then recomputed the bill to reflect the correct package amount.

But the September bill was for $127.26.

Caruso called Sept. 7 and spoke to two different reps. The second rep also denied the existence of a $69.99 bundle offer, but asked Caruso to again fax a copy of the offer.

The rep applied another one-time credit and said the correct amount would now be $92.16.

This continued for the next several months. The bill would be wrong, Caruso would call and the reps would apply credits.

Got it?

After months of endless frustration, Caruso had to appeal to the newspaper’s Bamboozled column for Star Ledger readers seeking a solution to their endless customer service nightmares.

Tom Maguire, a senior vice president for Verizon, figured out what at least 10 Verizon customer service representatives couldn’t — the company never applied the original promotion to Caruso’s account because the service order was not written in a way that would allow the promotion to be applied.  Instead of the two year promotion, Caruso was signed up for month-to-month service, at a price of $129.99 a month, not $69.99.

“They basically dropped the ball from my perspective,” Maguire admitted.

What irritated Maguire (and Caruso even more) is that repeatedly-faxed copies of the promotional offer made no difference.

Caruso’s consolation prizes for his eight month ordeal:

• A direct number to a senior customer service representative already aware of Caruso’s service history;
• A restart of Verizon’s promotion, effectively extending it for nine additional months;
• A multi-room DVR package at a discounted price for the life of his service.

Tips for Living With Verizon:

Keep a copy of the promotional offer you select until it expires. If Verizon does not apply it correctly, or it mysteriously drops off your account at some point, you will have evidence the offer existed.  If you experience a repeated billing problem, ask the representative that answers to transfer you to a senior customer service supervisor.

Time Warner Cable’s Mind Games Threaten Our Relationship

Courtesy: Jacobson

Julie Jacobson chose Time Warner Cable over AT&T for her new Carlsbad, Calif. condo located to the north of San Diego.  The deciding factor: no cable box required for extra sets hooked up to expanded basic cable. (Unfortunately for Jacobson, that won’t be true much longer as Time Warner embarks on a nationwide conversion to a virtually all-digital lineup, which will require extra equipment on most television sets.)

Unfortunately, ever since Jacobson signed up for service, Time Warner has been playing “hard to get.”

Jacobson painfully details her encounters with Time Warner customer service, who had no idea what a CableCARD was (much less an “M-Card” which allows multiple signal streams).  She was also not impressed to discover the “free” HD-DVR promotion on offer evidently only applied to the cardboard box it came in.

“Your ‘free’ HD-DVR comes with an additional $11/month box-rental fee and $11/month service fee,” Jacobson discovered. “The HD-DVR is free + $22/month, which puts TWC pricing into U-verse territory.”

But even that wasn’t enough for Jacobson to declare Time Warner Cable “sucky.”  It was this:

Julie,

Thank you for placing your Time Warner Cable order online. We were unable to complete your order with the information you provided.

Please call us at 855-889-4113 so we can proceed with your service order. Be sure to have your order confirmation number (########) and the four-digit PIN you created during your online order ready when you call. We look forward to hearing from you so we can complete your order as soon as possible.

Thank you for choosing Time Warner Cable.

So I called the number on a Sunday at 3:15 p.m., using the phone number in the email. The office was closed by then. Believe it or not, I started pining for Comcast back in Minnesota. At least their customer service is 24/7.

After being bounced from offices in Wisconsin and North Carolina, she was finally transferred to California, where Diego (with his barely decipherable English) was waiting to not provide customer service:

I’m sorry, but I had a really tough time understanding him. As it turns out, it didn’t really matter because he was flat-out wrong. He told me the old tenants returned their TWC equipment, but they didn’t call to cancel their service; my order wouldn’t go through because there was already an account associated with the address.

“You need to call them to cancel their service,” he said.

“What?! I don’t even know who they are!”

In that case, he said, I could go to the local TWC office and bring them a copy of my lease.

That’s real convenient, given we’re only in town for one day.

So I ask Diego for the store phone number, and he provides it.

“Where is it located?” I ask.

“I don’t know … somewhere in the LA/San Diego area.”

Thanks, that narrows it down.

A more encouraging experience with another representative later on seemed to have everything worked out, until a new message from the company reached her e-mail box earlier today:

3rd Attempt: Please call us to avoid cancellation of your Time Warner Cable order.

Tips for Living With Time Warner Cable:

Time Warner’s system for dealing with new customers always hangs up when it finds existing service already established at an address. We encountered this ourselves and had to arrange for the old owners of our home to arrange for a service disconnection before Time Warner could complete our order for new service. Usually it makes better sense to call and establish service directly with a Time Warner representative over the phone when a complication like this arises. The representative would have identified the problem immediately instead of dispatching cryptic e-mail messages about a generic “problem with your order.”  Calling the local office nearest you is also a great way to cut through red tape and stop your call from being transferred to different call centers.

If your order went horribly wrong and you were inconvenienced, ask a representative to throw in free installation or some other extra promotion for your time and trouble. 

We also suspect that “third attempt” notification was probably associated with the earlier e-mail and not the more encouraging, later experience with another representative by phone.

Both sides agree Time Warner Cable needs to add a new music channel, one owned by MSG parent Cablevision Industries, to your cable lineup.

Some suspicious Buffalo hockey fans suspect the real reason for the sudden focus towards a weekend resolution of a nearly two month dispute that kept MSG off Time Warner Cable customers’ screens since Jan. 1 is the fact the New York (City) Knicks are winning some basketball games and player Jeremy Lin is enjoying his “15 minutes of fame” in the national media spotlight.  Both companies announced the latest round of negotiations, held in New York City, have brought an end to the dispute.

Now that MSG is back on Time Warner Cable, neither company is getting a round of applause for finally reaching a deal.  In fact, a key provision of the settlement requires that the cable company add a new network — Fuse — to the cable lineup.  That means Time Warner Cable customers will eventually pay for a music channel they never asked to receive.

The New York Daily News is just the latest newspaper to put fans’ frustrations into print:

[MSG and Time Warner Cable] don’t give a damn about you.

[…] Fans once apathetic over the blackout and the lethargic Knicks are now fired up and vocal. They are calling TWC and MSG. They are making their feelings known inside the Valley of the Stupid, too.

At this point they are having little impact. The two sides said they recently met. How long? Five minutes? The response from the suits at both companies is the same. Their propaganda never changes. They are more interested in gift-wrapping their problem.

Instead of locking itself in a room for around-the-clock negotiating, TWC is taking fans to a Knicks game in Charlotte. Or MSG, catering to the Asian market it suddenly discovered, is throwing a Knicks viewing party at a Chinatown restaurant. This is known as manipulation. These are nothing more than visuals. They don’t change a damn thing.

The song remains the same: TWC says MSG is looking for a 53% increase in subscriber fees, which now, according to industry analysts, average just over $2.63 per customer. MSG responds by saying TWC is lying. TWC says in September MSG agreed to a 6.5% increase. MSG says that’s a lie, too.

Someone is lying. Everyone is lying. That’s part of the spin. Instead of taking it out on both sides for shafting you, they want you to choose sides, identify a bad guy. Don’t. When two lying swines are fighting in the slop, only a sucker would try to intervene.

After nearly two months of cable subscribers complaining they were paying for a sports channel they were not getting, everyone –and– the governor got involved.  But perhaps nothing motivated a resolution more than the sudden media spotlight on Knicks’ player Jeremy Lin, dubbed Linsanity.

“Linsanity helped,” Chris Marangi, a portfolio manager at Gamco Investors told Bloomberg News.  The investment firm owns about 5 million MSG shares and 500,000 Time Warner Cable shares. “Time Warner Cable realistically couldn’t have dropped MSG — it’s too important to too many fans in New York to not be carried. Both sides probably gave a little.”

While state politicians thanked each other for a “job well done,” Time Warner Cable subscribers won’t be getting a refund for a channel missing from their lineup for eight weeks.  But they will likely face a higher rate increase in 2013, in part to pay for a music channel few knew existed and even fewer wanted.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WIVB Buffalo Fans React to MSG Deal 2-19-12.mp4[/flv]

WIVB in Buffalo explores the fallout of Time Warner Cable and MSG’s near-two-month dispute.  (2 minutes)

CenturyLink runs specials on their website that offer extra savings when ordered online.

Your $50 monthly broadband bill has been burning a hole in your wallet and you think there should be a cheaper price available somewhere, right?

The answer is, for most of us, there is.  You just have to look.

The most expensive Internet access around comes when you buy broadband-only service from a provider.  Both cable and phone companies have been incrementally punishing their “broadband-only” customers for years, tacking on $5, $10, even $15 to the price because you have chosen not to bundle broadband with other services the company sells.  It is not unusual to see some cable companies charging $55-60 for standard Internet service.  When you call to inquire, they are sure to begin aggressively upselling you to a bundled service package, arguing you can add cable TV and phone service for $20-30 more a month.  That sounds like a better deal, unless you honestly don’t care about either service.

Welcome to the world of marketing, where the “value perception” is key to driving the average revenue collected from each subscriber higher and higher.  You end up buying services you probably would not have considered, but because they seem so inexpensive when compared with the price of the service you are interested in, why not?

Phone companies do the same thing, but many of them also love to bury hidden charges in the fine print and commit you to 1-3 years of service to guarantee the advertised price.  Companies like Frontier Communications may pitch DSL service for just $15 a month, but keep reading and you will discover the taxes and fees raise that price substantially.  In fact, that particular phone company is notorious for charging substantial modem rental fees and what they call a “High Speed Internet” surcharge.  To get the lowest price from them, you will be a Frontier customer for at least a year, depending on the promotional offer selected.

Frontier redefines "value": This attractive looking offer "fine prints" the $6.30 modem rental fee, is for service "up to" 1Mbps (so much for "high speed"), has a one-year service commitment with a $50 early termination fee, and does not include unspecified "taxes and surcharges" which run extra.

You can break free of the marketing circus by concentrating on finding the best possible deal for the service(s) you really care about.

1. Check advertising offers on television and in newspapers, but always read the fine print;
2. Visit the website of each local provider and look for “Internet-only” offers that may deliver extra savings, but only when you order online;
3. Call providers and ask them about their various deals and inquire “is this the best offer you have right now?;”
4. Use search engines and type in your provider’s name and words like “deals,” “offers,” or “promotion.”  Third party authorized resellers may have an offer that works better for you.

Sometimes you can get excellent results playing providers off each other.  Try contacting the social media representatives of different providers in your area to unlock hidden deals, and more importantly, customer retention offers.  One Rochester reader of ours got Time Warner Cable to open negotiations to keep his business with this tweet:

Getting ready to schedule my @TWCable disconnect after rate increase – should I go with @dishnetwork over @DirecTV or vice versa?

He received a substantial retention offer within hours of alerting Time Warner of his discontent (he’s also a rabid hockey fan, and the ongoing MSG-Time Warner Cable dispute made satellite an attractive alternative.)

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KNXV Phoenix Which broadband provider saves you the most money 2-7-12.mp4[/flv]

KNXV in Phoenix helped residents in that Arizona city figure out who was cheaper, CenturyLink or Cox Cable.  And what about using mobile broadband for a home broadband replacement?  (3 minutes)