I am not a fan of blogging. I did it years ago, but tired of it quickly. I can happily say that I have never had a twitter or facebook account. I do work in the "industry", however, and am online more than I'd care to admit.
This blog serves one purpose - it is a sincere open letter to all ISPs in the country, asking them to please, please come to Greensboro and provide an alternative to Time Warner Cable. TWC, to me, now stands for The Wrong Company and The Wrong Connection, and any company willing to come in and treat their customers fairly, will easily take more than half of the current subscribers away from them.
To be completely on-the-level, I never had any problem with TWC until they started floating the idea of caps on internet usage. I pay more than $50 a month for my connection. My friends who live overseas - Europe, Asia - all pay the same or less, but their connection is much faster and more reliable. Hell, my friends who live in major cities are currently paying an average of $40 a month for their connection and many of them have fiber running to their homes.
I did contact TWC and spoke with them about this plan. They said that there has been no decisions made at this point (of course) and that they are just in the "testing" phase. However, how they would even get to a "testing" phase I have no idea.
The only reason that even makes a small amount of sense to me is that they are trying to hold onto their dying cable TV business, and this is a way to do it. By keeping people's internet bandwidth to a minimum, we will be forced to purchase their television service. If that is the truth, however, it is a desperate act, and says a lot about this company that - if I were a shareholder - I'd pay real close attention to.
The other arguments that they've put out just do not make sense... They don't cap television usage. They don't cap phone usage. All of these things run over the same line at this point.
They do have different service levels for television and phone - you can get more or less channels and more or less calling features - but you can use the service as much as you'd like without running up your bill.
If infrastructure is a problem, that is not something that should be passed along to the customers at this point. I did hear one TWC executive say that no one could have foreseen online video taking off the way it did and that is why some are unprepared for it now. If this is the case at TWC I would again perk up my ears if I were a shareholder.
I've worked on the internet since the early 90s and I can honestly say that even the secretaries at the companies I was at knew where online video was heading. If the people running TWC weren't able to see that, they should probably let their secretaries take over.
If infrastructure is a problem at this point for a company like TWC it is because they did not invest their profits wisely over the last two decades. We've seen more and more money go to the idiots who site at the tops of these companies, and that does have an effect over the long term.
Another reason that I have heard coming out of TWC for this new direction is that it is not "fair" to customers who may only use the internet rarely for them to pay the same as someone who is downloading torrents all day, while playing WoW online and streaming the entire season of House at the same time. Well, is it fair for the basic cable subscriber who watches two hours a week of television to have to help support the system that allows their neighbor to tune six televsion sets to HD programming and leave them running 24x7? I hate the telephone and use it rarely... is it fair for me to pay the same as someone who uses it twelve hours a day to make a living?
I use the word "shareholder" often when it comes to the topic of TWC and their idea for capping bandwidth. The reason is that when companies start making crazy decisions, it is a sign of something rotten in the organization. The books may look Ok, and everything appears to be humming along fine, but it only takes a couple of batshit crazies to bring down an entire organization.
There is no way that the industry as a whole is going to be moving to a cap system, so for TWC to associate themselves with this idea, have all this bad press written, and piss off so many customers is somewhat shocking to me.
It is cheaper today to provide internet service than it has ever been. The user base is growing every day. When technology costs drop and your customer base grows, the service fee - using economics 101 logic - should become lower for your subscribers.
If the rates, instead, go up under those circumstances, it points to a problem in your management, or flaw in your business plan - maybe you haven't kept up with the times, or you're trying to subsidize some other area of your business, or maybe you're just greedy and want to take in more revenue.
So, as of today, I remain a TWC subscriber who will happily pay my bill for each month of service. However, if there is any high-speed ISP out there who would be willing to take a chance on the citizens of Greensboro, I will happily be your first customer and am ready and willing to take the good with the bad. No provider is perfect - there will always be some downtime, slowness at times on the network, and every once in a while a bill gets screwed up.
I am always understanding of these types of issues, and not someone who is going to jump ship just because the networks down for a day because a tree limb came down on a wire.
The saddest part of this whole TWC fiasco is that the people who work for the Triad office of TWC are wonderful people and I have always enjoyed interacting with them. Even the contracted installers are, generally, great people who know what they are doing.
These people did not have anything to do with this decision. This came down from on-high - just like when the poor people at banks have to end the call with some stupid tagline that some moron in the marketing department came up with but will never have to use.
But, as an added bonus to any company that would decide to come to Greensboro and rescue us from the madness that is TWC management, you have a pool of talented, hard-working, and already trained people who would be very willing to work for you doing the same great job they've been doing for TWC over the years.
If anyone has any links to relevant stories on this subject, information on how the "test" phase is going, or any other data that may be helpful in us all understanding what the hell is going on, please post a comment.
I doubt that I will post much more to this blog. I am not sure that there is much more to say about it.
Friday, April 10, 2009
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