Time Warner Cable Suspends Broadband Upgrades After Merger (dslreports.com)

Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReport: Time Warner Cable has confirmed that the company has suspended its "Maxx" broadband and TV upgrades while the dust settles from Charter's $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Time Warner Cable's Maxx upgrades not only deliver faster top speeds up to 300 Mbps, but a notably overhauled improvement to the company's set top box interface. But Time Warner Cable has been telling company support techs and engineers that the upgrades were actually put on hold as of May 26. "[...] All speed increases and customer communications were placed on a temporary hold beginning Thursday, May 26," states the internal communication. "Once the updated launch schedule is determined, updated hub schedules will be posted to KEY and area management will be notified. Customers will continue to receive notification when the new speeds are available in their hubs."

Comments

Not News

[jratcliffe]

Charter management said they'd be doing this back in April. The broadband upgrades are part of a general system upgrade, which includes going all digital for video (freeing up the spectrum that was used for analog video), which requires putting some sort of box on every TV. Time Warner Cable had been using very simple digital-to-analog adapters for this. Charter's being putting a full-fledged digital set top on every TV. So, they're putting the Time Warner rollouts on hold until they can restart the process using the full set tops (i.e. the Charter model).

Re:Not News

[Shatrat]

This is true even of over the air digital TV. A digital signal has to buffer to the next I-Frame before it will start playing, and will never change as fast as an old analog TV. TWC might have worse delay than usual depending on their multicast / unicast setup and whether they are using D servers for quick channel change and where those D servers are located.