By Chris Scott Barr

I’d hoped that I was done writing about Time Warner Cable for a little while. Unfortunately it seems that they are already back up to their same old antics, only this time they’re being a little more sneaky about it. At least before they were up-front and honest about their decision to screw their customers. When too many people raised a stink about it, they backed off, or at least they pretended to.

One TWC customer in Austin hopped on his computer to do a little surfing only to find that his internet connection was down. A quick call to the ISP revealed that his service had been intentionally disconnected due to excessive bandwidth use. Apparently this guy had the audacity to use 44GB in a week’s time on his unlimited internet plan. What a jerk.

The next logical step was for the guy to ask just how much bandwidth was “acceptable” so that he didn’t get his service shut off again. The lovely rep at Time Warner couldn’t give him any exact numbers, but said that it would be somewhere between a quarter and half of the bandwidth he was currently using.

11 to 22GB per week is acceptable on an “unlimited” plan? In this day and age, that’s just bat-shit retarded. I downloaded GTA IV from Steam the other day, which was a whopping 15GB, which would put me in the red with TWC. God forbid that I’d want to stream a couple of Netflix movies or watch something on Hulu. If I were a Time Warner Cable customer, I can guarantee my service would be shut off pretty quick.

I really feel bad for this guy, and the countless others that have no other option but to use Time Warner Cable as their ISP. Instead of their tiered plans, they’re just going to keep disconnecting users until they start begging to pay more for extra bandwidth. Thankfully customers can use the very same internet provided by TWC to spread the word of these underhanded practices. Comcast finally came around and set a (comparatively) decent bandwidth cap, hopefully it’s only a matter of time before Time Warner does the same.

VIA [ StopTheCap ]

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5 COMMENTS

  1. Welcome to Australia.
    For years we've had throttling, excess fees and complete cut-offs.
    In fact, there is not a single real unlimited plan in all of Australia and all the plans that claim to do it are lying.
    I myself have to be content with a 20 Gig plan. That's about as much as we can get with our major providers.
    We've been fighting our case for ages, and nothing's been done.

    Good Luck, America.

  2. I have followed each one of these Time Warner reports with the suggestion that people drop them. Every time the article is written to imply that Austin Texas and their surrounding areas are only internet accessable via Time Warner. This is about as far from the truth as you can get. There are 122 listings for ISP's in the Austin area yellow pages which is going to be hard to prove that Austin doesnt clearly have dozens of competitive options to Time Warner for ISP.

    http://www.yellowpages.com/Austin-TX/Internet-S…

    Im willing to bet there isnt one single area in the US the size of Austin thats only covered by Time Warner for ISP. Make the switch NOW.

  4. I have followed each one of these Time Warner reports with the suggestion that people drop them. Every time the article is written to imply that Austin Texas and their surrounding areas are only internet accessable via Time Warner. This is about as far from the truth as you can get. There are 122 listings for ISP's in the Austin area yellow pages which is going to be hard to prove that Austin doesnt clearly have dozens of competitive options to Time Warner for ISP.

    http://www.yellowpages.com/Austin-TX/Internet-S…

    Im willing to bet there isnt one single area in the US the size of Austin thats only covered by Time Warner for ISP. Make the switch NOW.

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