Last fall, the office of New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began investigating whether broadband providers in the state were providing the connection speeds they promised. And while New York City’s biggest broadband provider, Time Warner Cable, promises “blazing fast” speeds in its ads, the preliminary results of the AG’s investigation are more snail-like.
As part of the investigation — headed up by Tim Wu, the person who coined the phrase “net neutrality” — New Yorkers were asked to use an online tool that measures the speed of users’ actual upstream and downstream connections.
“The results we received from Time Warner Cable customers were abysmal,” writes Wu in a letter [PDF] sent this week to Tom Rutledge, CEO of Charter Communications, which recently acquired TWC. “Not only did Time Warner Cable fail to achieve the speeds its customers were promised and paid for (which Time Warner Cable blamed on the testing method), it generally performed worse in this regard than other New York broadband providers.”
Wu describes the results of these tests as “troubling,” noting that “it appears that the company has been failing to take adequate or necessary steps to keep pace with the demand of Time Warner Cable customers — at times letting connections with key Internet content providers become so congested that large volumes of Internet data were regularly lost or discarded.”
As a result of this poorly maintained connections, customers seem to have experienced service — especially during the busy prime-time evening hours — that does not provide the quality promised in Time Warner Cable’s advertising.
“Customers have been frustrated, as movies freeze, websites load endlessly, and games become non-responsive,” reads the letter. “In addition, it appears that Time Warner Cable has been advertising its WiFi in ways that defy the technology’s technical capabilities and has been provisioning some of its customers with equipment that simply cannot achieve the higher bandwidths the company has sold to them.”
Wu concludes that Time Warner Cable — which will change its name to Spectrum when the Charter merger is complete — “has earned the miserable reputation it enjoys among consumers,” and that it will require more than a name change” to alter consumers’ perceptions of the product.
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Charter — which has similarly low customer satisfaction scores to TWC — will bring “greater value and more consumer friendly policies” to its acquired customers. The company says subscribers will see improvements like minimum broadband speeds of 60 Mbps, along with no data caps (though that is part of the company’s agreement with the FCC to win approval of the mega-merger).
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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