New York Sues Charter Over Slow Internet Speeds (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: New York filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Charter Communications Inc of short-changing customers who were promised faster internet speeds than it could deliver. The lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan accused Charter's Spectrum unit, until recently known as Time Warner Cable, of systematically defrauding customers since 2012 by promising and charging for services it knew it could not offer. At least 640,000 subscribers signed up for high-speed plans but got slower speeds, and many subscribers were unable to access promised online content such as Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and various gaming platforms, the complaint said. The lawsuit seeks "full restitution" for customers, as well as hefty civil fines. Among the allegations in the complaint was an accusation that Time Warner Cable leased older-generation modems to 900,000 subscribers knowing that the modems could not achieve faster internet speeds.

Comments

Better Summary for Nerds

[bengoerz]

We're nerds. Lets summarize like it:

Charter customers with 100+Mbps plans were leased old-spec modems that couldn't support those speeds. Charter promised the FCC that it would swap the modems, and the FCC excluded speedtest results from these users from national averages. Fast forward: Charter didn't switch the modems. Now NY State is suing it for defrauding customers.

Re:speeds "up to"....

[jxander]

Yeah, but "up to" implies that the possibility exists, even if you'll never actually see it.

An old DOCISS 2.0 modem has a hard cap of 38 Mbps down, 27 Mbps up. That's simply the spec. Giving someone that modem and promising speeds "up to 100 Mbit/s" is flatly incorrect and false advertising.

Or, to take things to their hyperbolic ends, imaging promoting a 56k dialup service with "speeds up to 10 Gbit/s." All the semantic loopholes wouldn't let that fly.