When I said the last post was the last post about Time Warner…I lied.  Sorry.  Forgive me.  But as you know the only way to get something done in this country is by mass force.  The mass being the people, and the force being those people dropping their worthless TW service.  The latest chapter in the ongoing story with TW and their stubborn refusal to flat out dump caps, tiers, and kicking people off of the unlimited accounts for actually using them deals with just that.  Ryan Howard of Austin, Texas found out first hand that Time Warner’s caps are still being enforced even though they publicly announced that they were backing down for now to “re-educate”.  The “announcement was nothing but a PR move.  So what Time Warners exact strategy?  

Again, poor Ryan found out first hand of Time Warner’s anti-American policies when his service was recently cut off.  After spending over sever hours on the phone with company service trying to trouble shoot various pieces of hardware, he was finally told to contact the “Security and Abuse” center where a Time Warner employee proceeded to lecture Mr. Howard on his usage of 44GB in one week.  While 44GB in one week is certainly a nice chunk of data, if you stream music, download *legally* tons of music, 44GB isn’t too lofty of a goal to attain.  Bring video into the equation and 44GB is a cake walk.  Per Time Warner:

After his lecture, the representative suggested that he stop using so much data (because an unlimited plan doesn’t really mean unlimited) and cut it down to one half to one quarter of what he was using.  And now you can see their tiers coming through that they “backed off” of because of “a small vocal minority”.  10-20GB per week is only 40-80GB per month!  Last time I checked a dictionary or any other reference material, unlimited meant at least a tad more than 40-80GB per month.  Hell, Time Warner makes Comcast’s 250GB look like a god send.  Maybe Time Warner just has an aversion to customers.  I wish we could get a class action lawsuit or any suit really testing the legality of marketing and advertising an “unlimited” plan that they can monitor and kick you off whenever you go over “acceptable limites”.  Either do away with the term “unlimited”, or stop cutting customers service off for actually using the service that they are over paying for.  Meh, you never know…  For those of you wondering, below is Time Warners ToS for the Roadrunner (“high speed/unlimited”) service plan.

Road Runner Terms of Service — Austin, Texas

The Internet is known as a “shared resource,” and Road Runner accounts operate using these resources. Excessive use or abuse of these shared network resources by one customer may have a negative impact on all other customers. Misuse of network resources in a manner, which impairs network performance, is prohibited by this policy and may result in termination of your account.

You are prohibited from excessive consumption of resources, including CPU time, memory, disk space and session time. You may not use resource-intensive programs, which negatively impact other customers or the performance of Road Runner systems or networks. Road Runner reserves the right to terminate or limit such activities.

So what does all of this ongoing saga mean for you the customer?  Well, for one, if you have Time Warner as your provider for anything, drop them now!  Drop them and run as fast as you can to another provider.  If they are your only choice, go without or move.  Time Warner cannot steal more of your money while short changing you service wise.  Even if you only use 1-2GB per month, caps and tiers of any kind are not beneficial to the customers.  It isn’t right.  Have some respect for yourself and kick these jerks to the curb.  If you are a Time Warner user, how has your service been?  Do their current actions disgust you or make you want to change to another provider…whoever it is?  

Source: Tech Dirt, Stop the Cap, *Image Source: Amy Stein Photo*