Time Warner Shutting Off Austin Accounts For Heavy Usage

mariushm writes "After deciding to shelve metered broadband plans, it looks like Time Warner is cutting off, with no warning, the accounts of customers whom they deem to have used too much bandwidth. 'Austin Stop The Cap reader Ryan Howard reports that his Road Runner service was cut off yesterday without warning. According to Ryan, it took four calls to technical support, two visits to the cable store to try two new cable modems (all to no avail), before someone at Time Warner finally told him to call the company's "Security and Abuse" center. "I called the number and had to leave a voice mail, and about an hour later a Time Warner technician called me back and lectured me for using 44 gigabytes in one week," Howard wrote. Howard was then "educated" about his usage. "According to her, that is more than most people use in a year," Howard said.'"

Comments

Re:She was right

[downix]

A single hulu show is roughly a gigabyte if you have the bandwidth. 44 hours a week is not unusual for television watching in some circles.

And then imagine

[transporter_ii]

Every house on every block doing it.

And wait until boxee, netflix, tivio, etc., finally have that killer set-top box and everyone wants one.

There was just an article a week or so ago that everyone using bandwidth at the same time didn't cost comcast a dime more than if nobody was using it.

But there are parts of the Backbone that are oversold, and it would be physically impossible for every customer to use 100% of the bandwidth at one time and get the speed they were advertised.

I know that may not be true for some large ISPs, but if it is a smaller ISP, they oversell bandwidth. And they HAVE to in order to survive and make a profit. You could not sell 3 meg down for 29.95 a month and built out an infrastructure that would deliver 3 meg to every customer at the same time...or maybe you could, but it would take a hell of a long time to pay it off. Might be different in socialized countries, but that is the reality here.

transporter_ii

Re:WTF ?

[SirLurksAlot]

Read the article, they were paying for it. The customer in question had the premium "turbo" service.

Re:Two words

[Columcille]

Probably not. Terms of Service would generally allow a company to do whatever they please. I imagine somewhere in there it says they reserve the right to terminate any customer account at any time for any reason.

Re:Two words

[DavidTC]

Agreed. Even under the laxest consumer protection laws, companies do not have the ability to disconnect you and then not inform you, and certainly don't have the ability to not tell you when you call in trying to fix the problem, which is what happened to this guy...they didn't bother to inform their own technical support.

So their tech support jerked him around for hours trying to fix the problem, including multiple trips to the stores. It probably wasn't tech support's fault...if the tech support drones knew he'd been disconnected, they'd happily tell him and make him someone else's problem over in customer service.

He has, at minimum, a lawsuit for his time, his gas, and his lost productivity of not having an internet connection (Because he could have spent that time getting another ISP.) they wasted with that nonsense. Sadly, he's probably already returned the cable modems, or he could stick them with that bill too.