Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > April > 13
Monday, April 13, 2009
(UPDATED) TWC update: Price Lock Guarantee not so price-locked after all?
I reported on this blog last week that Time Warner Cable’s new tiered broadband pricing will not affect its Price Lock Guarantee customers.
Did I speak too soon or did TWC simply not tell me the whole story?
After a reader sent me a link to this blog item (go to the very bottom of the post), I did some Googling and found what appears to be an early version of last Thursday’s Time Warner statement via a Google cache.
At the bottom, under Answers to Your Questions, we find the following text:
How will this impact my Price Lock Guarantee?
The plan will not impact your Price Lock Guarantee price, but it could mean a small incremental fee that will vary by month depending on how much you exceed the megabit usage that goes with your level of Road Runner service.
“Incremental fee,” huh? Not good, Time Warner.
Not good.
Waiting to hear back on whether this was some sort of mistake or if that fee is still part of the plan.
Edited to add (3:55 p.m.): Melissa Sorola of Time Warner Cable called me and said that there absolutely will not be incremental fees for Price Lock Guarantee customers and reiterated that PLG customers will not be affected by tiered pricing.
Curiously, the page is no longer the top search result in Google when you enter, “plan will not impact your price lock guarantee but could mean small incremental fee” and seems to have disappeared. Now the top result is this blog post. But the Google cache page still exists if you click the link earlier in this post and still appears to point to the official Time Warner Cable Web site.
The date of the Google cache is Friday night, which places it after the statement was released on this site, but possibly before it made its way to the official Time Warner Cable site.
I’ll let you know if I get back an official word on how that text made its way online.
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Post-Easter Time Warner Cable update
It seems like only yesterday (give or take four days) that Time Warner Cable made its last statement on the matter of its controversial, water-roiling tiered broadband pricing plan.
Besides the mysterious weekend appearance of a large, egg-bearing rabbit, the only other news to report has largely been reactionary. Last night, I sent a short list of questions to Time Warner for a piece airing today on NPR’s “All Things Considered” (which I’ll link when it’s available), but was told that the answers to my questions were not readily available and couldn’t meet my deadline. Maybe we’ll hear more later this week.
Here’s what’s new, related to the bandwidth caps on other parts of the Internet:
- New York congressman Eric Massa is drafting legislation that would target the bandwidth caps.
- Gaming/gadget sites are latching on to the last statement’s mention of a $150 unlimited Turbo-speed plan, which sounds not so bad until you remember that $60 gets you that right now on Road Runner. That’s a bit of a jump.
- Tom’s Hardware asks, is ISP capping the new DRM?
- Web sites against the cap (or providing info about it) that have popped up include Stop The Cap!, Meter This! and the blessedly exclamation-point-free Austin Broadband Information Center.
- In this very clever article, Network Performance Daily looks at how much common Internet activities will cost in real dollars. Luckily for all Time Warner Cable customers, getting Rickrolled will only cost a penny.
Did I miss anything? Add it in the comments. Apparently Amazon.com got involved in a spot of trouble over the weekend, but I’m not sure I going to be able to cover two Internet trainwrecks at the same time.
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