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Reader M got a rate increase on her latest bill from Time Warner Cable:

As I received no prior notice, I called FCC, who told me they do not regulate Time Warner, I should call the Franchising Authority listed on the bill. I called City of Greensboro, who is listed on the bill as the FA, who told me they are no longer the FA, it is the state.

Time Warner tells me the FCC is who I should call with this concern. They also told me they sent a letter advising of a price increase. They may have sent it, but I never received it, though they are sending a copy at my request. (I only have internet with TW.)

My complaint is not the 12+% price increase, it is with the fact that I got no notification, and subsequently got the run-around, and I think they are required to give a 30 day notice of price increases.

Letters get lost. The real problem this illustrates is the lack of accountability with which Time Warner operates. 

The outgoing City Council vowed action on this issue, but little or nothing seems to have happened. Maybe the new Council will recognize the seriousness of the problem.

Marketing call from Time Warner Cable, wanting me to upgrade services and switch my internet from Earthlink. I said that until they resolved the tiered pricing plan, I was looking for ways to give TWC less money, not more.

She said, can you educate me on that issue a bit, I'm not really familiar with it. That sounded like a scripted answer, and, after I gave her a thumbnail version of my concerns, she said, well, that's down the road a ways...I politely asked her to put in her notes that I don't trust the company and hope to find an alternative. She politely tried to sell me one more thing, then politely accepted and returned my wishes for a nice weekend.

Consumers’ new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet television’s steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snail’s pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favourite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte.

Yet the measures to suffocate internet television being taken by the cable companies may already be too late...

Thnx to alert reader DE for the link. Our local provider is called out by name: "Time Warner Cable remains in the dark ages with its Road Runner service dribbling out three megabits a second (if you are lucky) for $35 a month."

Time Warner Cable has a new way of dealing with its best customers people who use too much bandwidth: disconnecting them.

TWC is not the first company to play this game. Dave Winer wrote last year, "As long as I've been a customer of Comcast I've been writing how much I wish they'd sell their Internet business to a company that doesn't hate its customers so much."

A report (PDF) on the state of online media, which "shows why Internet Service Providers and telecommunications equipment vendors are increasingly demonizing video. It consumes a lot of bandwidth, and could compete with an ISP’s existing video businesses, but the worst part is that it's rapidly becoming more popular to the average consumer."

"Time Warner Cable, by the way, is the parent company of News 14 Carolina." No, really?

Strong numbers for AT&T's U-Verse, a prospective competitor for Time Warner Cable broadband in this market.

Coming soon?

Welcome to the party, Kay.

"I am pleased to see Time Warner announce that they will not be testing their consumption based billing plans in Greensboro, due in large part to widespread public opposition," Hagan said in a statement to the News & Record. "Access to affordable internet and bandwidth is vital to the growth of small businesses, which are integral to North Carolina’s economy and the Greensboro community." 

Say, you haven't seen Brad Miller, have you?

U.S. representative Eric Massa (D, N.Y) said the public doesn't need education about data caps - they need legislation to prevent them. Massa began drafting that legislation after a group of radiologists from Rochester told him the plan would raise their Internet costs enough to put them out of business...

...Massa said he'll be talking with Triad Representative Brad Miller (D) next week about how the issue affects the Triad. Massa said he hopes to have Miller's support for his legislation to block the sort of caps proposed in by Time Warner in both their districts.

Killian stays on the TWC case, noting that the tiered plan is delayed but not necessarily dead.

Where the heck is Brad Miller on this, anyway? And isn't Kay Hagan from Greensboro?

Time Warner Cable's tiered-usage plan was not just poorly marketed, it was a bad deal for users -- especially when you consider where usage is headed: "YouTube created a new area of its site devoted to premium content, with the addition of hundreds of full-length movies and thousands of full-length TV episodes to fill it."

TWC wants to "educate" you about your current rate of usage. Look ahead, and things are very different.

Time Warner Cable's backdown on tiered pricing was a big win for customers and test cities, but that was a battle, not the war.

The TWC plan was really bad, which made it relatively easy to defeat. Other tiered usage plans will emerge over time; some of them might even make sense.

Educated, connected consumers made a difference, in part by bringing about political pressure. Don't let up on your elected officials.

TWC seemed unprepared for the intensity of the reaction. That won't happen again.

Competition is critical. This is the time to pursue more service options, not to relax because a single battle is won.

Stop the Cap: "Time Warner has shelved its broadband tiering nightmare."

Schumer press release. "Time Warner will shelve the plan for all of their test markets."

Competition works: "Frontier Communications Co., whose DSL broadband service competes with Time Warner Cable's modems, has shelved its own plans to introduce metered billing."

Meanwhile, TWC doesn't want the FCC to talk about network neutrality, which, it seems to me, is an explicit area of concern in the tiered pricing plan.

A protest of Time Warner Cable's tiered pricing plan will be held Saturday, April 18, from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM at TWC's offices, 1813 Spring Garden St, Greensboro.

Seems like the Division Office on a weekday might be a more logical choice, although corporate HQ is probably where the real decisions are being made.

Many Time Warner customers [cited] the company's plan to continue offering its own digital phone service customers unlimited service at a flat rate but count any data used on competing digital phone services such as Vonage or Skype toward data caps, which could lead to overage fees.

"It’s the same amount of bandwidth if you use their service or someone else's," said Stephen Matlin, a self-employed Greensboro Web designer who uses Skype for phone calls through his Time Warner Cable Internet service. "Why would they charge only the people who choose not to pay for their digital phone service? It's to discourage competition, to penalize you unless you subscribe with them."

Privileging its own service in this way makes this a network neutrality issue, doesn't it? More good coverage from Killian.

What Time Warner Cable fears:

Consumers typically have only one cable company available to them, and that company often chooses its channel lineup based on business relationships instead of on what people want to watch. The customer service would shame Stalin. Plus, cable costs too much—and the price keeps rising.

So why not replace it with all the free video available on the Internet?

Technology that lets you watch your web video on a TV is already here, and will only get easier to use. Previously.

I've gotten several email responses to yesterday's column about Time Warner Cable's tiered pricing plan. Most ask what can be done. I think it makes sense to contact elected officials at every level of government, politely of course, and let them know your concerns. Local government has limited power, but it does have some moral authority and a pretty big megaphone.

One guy says tiered pricing is not an inherently bad idea, but then he adds that details of this plan are all wrong. That's the closest thing I've seen to support for TWC.

My newspaper column is about Time Warner Cable's tiered pricing plan -- what it means for Greensboro, and what we might do about it.

TWC modifies pricing plan. The low-usage tier and slightly higher caps are improvements, but not game-changers.

Meanwhile: "A close look at Time Warner Cable's books shows no significant link between its high-speed data costs and network usage."

My Sunday newspaper column is on this topic. The TWC changes came too late to include, but the substance of the piece is unchanged. The column was a group effort -- in addition to Vint Cerf, I spoke with Stacey Higginbotham and TeleGeography's Alan Mauldin, and poached from Killian, Roch, Ged, and Sue, as well as comments and emails. Thanks for all the help.

Vint Cerf says that beyond the ridiculously low usage tiers proposed by Time Warner Cable, the metering plan is flawed because it meters the wrong thing.

Measuring usage volume alone doesn't make much sense, says the Google exec, who is famous for his pioneering work in designing the Internet's basic architecture.

"People are not making a distinction between rate, and rate times time," he says. "It's like traveling in a car -- it's not how far you go but how fast you go that gets you in trouble."

Which is to say that you can consume a lot of bandwidth over the course of a month without putting any stress on the system. The Time Warner plan, Cerf says, could easily penalize users, "even if people aren’t demanding much of the network."

Just got off the phone with Vint Cerf, who calls the TWC tiered-pricing plan "ridiculous." More TK from him, here and in Sunday's column, on the impact of the cap, and the best ways to price usage, engage the feds, etc.

I described GSO to him -- active blog and newspaper coverage of the issue, early interest from City Council -- and said TWC might have picked the wrong place for its test. Viewed from the non-TWC perspective, he said, "Maybe it's the right place."

Killian moves the Time-Warner Cable metered bandwidth story ahead in today's N&R. Previously.

Key points: planned cap is shown to be ridiculously low; city can't do much about it; and competition may be on the way.