Me and the Cable Guy 
So, after reading the news this week about Time Warner Cable in Austin playing with the idea of enforcing bandwidth caps on their Internet service, and friends of mine feeling rather emphatic about it, I called customer service to cancel.
The guy who answered the phone asked why I wanted to cancel, and right away, he said Time Warner was not planning to impose bandwidth caps. But to keep me as a customer, would I accept a $10 discount on my service?
You can understand my surprise when he went on to say that AT&T had supposedly been making the plans to impose the caps instead. Was he looking at where my browser was pointed? I ended up telling him that the BusinessWeek article was a day old, yes it was online, you could put “Texas Time Warner Businessweek” into any search engine and find it, and here are some choice quotes including one from your CEO.
He insisted it wasn’t true, the caps were for business service only, yada yada.
I hadn’t wanted to cancel service right away, and knowing full well the guy could have been talking out his ass, I accepted the discount.
On word alone, and I don’t know the guy’s name.
I guess someone here knows how to do customer service, and it possibly isn’t me.
We’ll see what my bill’s like at the end of the month.
Edit: Scott’s got a new post about the matter, and several other prominent Austinites have weighed in, including mayoral candidate and City Councilman Brewster McCracken. Bottom line: “It is not good for Austin. It is bad for the principle of an open Internet. It undermines the public interest.”
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[...] whatever. Interestingly, J. talked to someone at Time Warner who insisted that Business Week was liars liars pants on fire. Guess they didn’t get the memo from their CEO. By charging a premium to the heaviest [...]
Pingback by Broken Toys » Internet Griefing — April 2, 2009 #
Dude, you got rolled. Why would they impose 5GB/month caps on their business class customers (who pay at least twice as much as their residential customers) but not on the residential service? Why would they have put those caps into their menu for Texas residents checking their rates (attempting to do so with an Austin zip now triggers an error, and they ask for full contact info so they can call you).
I think they’ve been inundated with cancellations from Austin, and are trying to stem the bleeding while they figure out how to spin this. AT&T *is* following course, however, trialing the caps in the same utility-friendly test-market (Beaumont) as TWC was 6 months ago. But I think they may have to change their minds in a hurry.
–Dave
Comment by Dave Rickey — April 5, 2009 #
Shrug. Like I said, I wasn’t ready to cancel service right away. We’ll see what’s on the bill when it comes.
Comment by j — April 5, 2009 #
I guess I should say that after 10 years in newspapers with flirtations toward the game industry, I’m very used to people boldfaced lying to me, and resolved to the notion that it’s often more instructive just to roll with the punches and see just how big their lies can get.
Comment by j — April 5, 2009 #