Time Warner Boosts Broadband Customer Speed — But Only Near Google Fiber

An anonymous reader writes " Rob is a Time Warner Cable customer, and he's received two really interesting things from them lately. First, a 50% speed boost: they claim to have upgraded the speed of his home Internet connection. That's neat. Oh, and they've also cut his bill, from $45 to $30. Wow! What has prompted this amazing treatment? Years of loyalty and on-time payments? No, not exactly. Rob lives in Kansas City, pilot site for Google Fiber. Even though they have shut off people in other states for using too much bandwidth. Is Google making them show that it's not that hard to provide good service and bandwidth?"

Comments

Good

[stewsters]

This is what healthy competition is supposed to do to the market. Now, we need google fiber in more cities and the average speed and price of internet will get better for everyone (unless you live in a rural area).

Re:Good

[bmo]

>This is an unsustainable race to the bottom.

Bullshit. It's been established that caps and rate limiting are just a cash grab. And the customer has been raped enough through billing ever since we threw billions of taxpayers' money at the network providers in the 90s only to watch it go out as dividends to shareholders and board bonuses.

Competition is *always* good.

--
BMO

Re:Good

[wvmarle]

And that is why infrastructure is a government task (either direct or by government appointed company - which is how the POTS got rolled out and why it's available pretty much anywhere there is a public road), and everyone should be allowed to use that infrastructure at a fixed cost.

You want to run your car on a public road? You can do that, after you pay your vehicle taxes and get a driving license. You want to run a bus service? Sure, go ahead, just make sure you pay the vehicle taxes and have the proper licenses. Where those taxes are the same for everyone, and licenses are available for anyone who qualifies and passes certain exams. It's a level playing field.

I come from areas where data infrastructure is treated like that. Result? Excellent service at rock bottom price.

Re:Good

[afidel]

Yep, look at the cost per Mbps for colo bandwidth versus last mile, they were on a roughly parallel trajectory until the media companies bought up the cable companies and decided to increase costs to protect their existing models, they can only do that because in most markets they have a monopoly/duopoly position, give them some real competition and suddenly things get back on track.

Re:Good

[firex726]

Exactly, we already paid for these upgrades, but instead of doing them, the companies just pocketed it and claimed people were using too much and capped us.

They either need to do the upgrades or give back the tax money.

Re:Good

[SilentStaid]

They either need to do the upgrades or give back the tax money.

Could you imagine if the world worked like that? How awesome would that be? Unfortunately, their lobbying pockets are a bit deeper than yours or mine will ever be.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny part is that how much government is involved with a particular part of infrastructure is based directly on how old that kind of infrastructure is.

Roads, water/sewage, and postal service? Those date to at least the Roman Empire, so of course they're run directly by the government as a general rule. The Post Office is specifically enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, and "Postmaster General" used to be a cabinet level position.

Electricity? Heating gas? Ah, now we're only going back a little over a century, so we have heavily-regulated private companies providing the infrastructure.

Telephones? Less time still, with a commensurately less-regulated industry.

Cable TV? Even more recent, very little regulation. And, of course, residential Internet access is done on the incumbent phone and cable networks, so it ends up there on the spectrum.

Cell phone service? It's completely Wild West, with the government just divvying up spectrum. Is anyone surprised at predatory contracts and usurious rates and terrible service?

Here's the revelation: you go on that list in reverse order, newest and least regulated first, and I bet you're reading it from worst customer service to best. I've literally never had problems with my water utility, and rarely had problems with my electric service, but Comcast and Sprint? It is to laugh.

Re:Good

[mea_culpa]

I agree so long as the government doesn't choose winners and losers like they have done and still currently do.
AT&T prior to the breakup is a good example of how far this cronyism can go. Don't get me started on the industrial media complex. Right now it is cellular carriers and cable companies. Both are using public resources unfairly.
Your public road analogy is good, but if you were to accurately compare it to the telecommunication industry there would be roads that only Ford, Chevy, and Crystler vehicles were allowed to drive on. Chevy would make and agreement with Ford to allow eachother's cars on their roads but not Toyota, KIA and many others. The barrier to entry would be so high that newer better cars would not be allowed in.

When Cox bought out our local Cable America in Phoenix all they did was switch subscribers over, and charge 20% more. Did they use any of the infrastructure of the competitor that they bought out? No, they systematically dismantled it. All of those years of negotiations with various municipalities to get access to easements, poles, alley ways, etc. all gone. The millions of dollars spent to install that mostly redundant infrastructure also gone. There is no possible way now, unless you are Google, to come in and compete with them.

It's called competetion

[Dyinobal]

It's called competition, which is something that has been sorely lacking in the broadband market. It's actually missing in just about any market that is dominated by a few large corporations. See the publishing industry etc.

Competition is overrated

[SpeedBump0619]

I mean, look, it lowers corporate revenue and increases operating expenses! Competition lowers tax revenue and taxes are how corporations support our troops. This competition thing has *got* to stop!

Old Comparison

[Bill Hayden]

I'm not at all one to defend the Cable/Internet/Cell monopolies that currently exist, but the linked story about people getting shut off is 4 YEARS old!

Cancelled today

[methano]

I was one of the first Road Runner customers in the RTP, NC area. I've been a good customer. TW recently upped my rates and their remote is terrible. Unfortunately for TW, some real competition recently showed up for what once was a monopoly. I switched and just got off the phone to tell them that I am canceling. Amazingly, some promotions, that I was previously unaware of, became available to me. No way. A little competition can be a good thing.

Not just Google.

[MachineShedFred]

I had my Time Warner Cable bandwidth increased without asking about a month ago here in Cincinnati because of competition from Cincinnati Bell laying down their fiber service all over town. That being said, if I could kick Time Warner to the curb and get Cincinnati Bell's Fioptics service where I live, I would in about three shakes of a lamb's tail.

This isn't only happening where Google is doing their fiber experimentation.

Re:I got that message too

[PlusFiveTroll]

Yeah, I got that message a while back. They claim a 50% boost, but I haven't seen it. Even after resetting the modem and router, everything seems to download at about the same speed as before. I suspect BS (hardly atypical for Time Warner).

Since you don't list what kind of router you have, what kind of firewall rule processing it's doing, and if you're using wireless it's hard to tell who the weakest link is.

I never use a ISP integrated modem/router(/wireless gack), too many of them suck and lock out too many options. If a regular router you can stick your own server on the WAN port and run something like http://www.speedtest.net/mini.php , across the LAN you should see 100Mbps (or more if it's Gb the entire way). If it's slower then 100Mb on wired your routers performance sucks. Test wired first then add your WLAN in, I have seen many wireless setups that where showing a 150Mbps (good) connection not even perform 30Mbps transfers.

Even more advanced tests would be to try to run 2 speed tests locally at the same time. Most equipment will starve one stream (one 99Mbps/one 1Mbps), some equipment will give bad jitter and the total speed will be less then 75% of line speed, and latency will be high, and very rarely the equipment will have decent queuing and the two streams will be close to even at around 95% of total line speed and latency will be decent.

Actually getting 20Mbps+ from the random internet host is not very common. Testing a close, fast host inside the TW network is the best way to tell. This might help.

http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/residential-home/support/speed-test.html/

how such low prices?

[Jodka]

So I live in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. Google fiber is not in offered in Overland Park yet, but because it is close by and spreading I checked out the prices and signed up for email notification when their service becomes available in my area.

The prices. Holy cow. It's free. A one time $300.00 installation fee but then it is free. So I was wondering for months how is that possible? Is Google taking a massive loss? Did Google invent a new technology which allows them to undercut their competitors?

Then on a drive across town to the local Fablab I was listening to the local public radio station which just happened to be interviewing Susan Crawford, author of the recently published book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. As the summary at Amazon states:

This important book by leading telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford explores why Americans are now paying much more but getting much less when it comes to high-speed Internet access.

Well as you might guess from the subtitle of the book, what she finds out when she explores is that internet and cable service in the U.S. are regional monopolies. Even when multiple internet and cable service providers operate in the same city they divide up the city into regions of monopolistic coverage and only overlap on small percentages of territory.

So Google offers such spectacularly low prices by undercutting monopolists, having enough clout to overcome barriers to entry which block startups, and Moore's law has reduced the cost of providing internet service to something pretty close to free. The inflated prices for internet broadband service which we have paid in the U.S. have not followed Moore's law because service provider are monopolies. Now with the disruption of that monopoly in one regional market prices are back on track with Moore's law there.

of course!

[tilante]

Of course they're doing it because of Google.

Where I grew up, we were close to a military base. The town allowed a cable company to have a monopoly. The base didn't, and had competing cable companies. Guess who got much lower prices and a broader selection of channels? Thankfully, the town council at least had enough sense to notice that the base was getting better deals, and to apply pressure to the cable company each time their monopoly came up for renewal. Thus, while they didn't have quite as good prices and selection as the base, my parents still get better prices and selection than I do, even though I now live in a city with about five times the population.

Competition does wonderful things to markets.