Hey AtA!
Commodore64 here to report on a finding of mine that is pretty unfair. And since I'm up against a giant of an ISP, there seems to be a partial monopoly of sorts, and seemingly few options, since my whole building is wired with TW Cable.
This is where the pen is supposed to become mightier than the sword. Mightier than even the giant that is Time Warner and it's plethora of constituents, conglomerates, divisions, sectors, departments, acquisitions and branches. This is why I must rant and vent and do whatever I know how to do to make sure that, at the very least, other people ahead of me will know what they are getting into as they get into it, rather than after they're knee deep. And this is the perfect forum to do it in. A geeky, giggidy AskTheAdmin forum for sharing new ideas and sometimes even bringing to light some of the unfair practices rampant among interactions between big business and the singularity such as myself.
This is proof that ISP's today simply feel entitled to customers that are hapless sheep who don't do anything besides watch funny videos and download stupid joke emails. But I'm a little more advanced than that. I'm a web developer, graphic designer, fiance', son, brother, uncle and general go-to-guy in my family, and a few others. At times my net connection is idle for a week, and at other times I need to make use of the full spectrum of upload speed. What use is a one way pipe to me? Don't make me feel like Mario TW!!
When my internet is idle, I don't call Time Warner demanding a refund or a prorate. I pay my bill quietly, complacently. I expect that I'm getting what I pay for, is that too much to ask? In my case apparently it is. I have a cable modem, and I'm only seeing about 60k upload speed. This is far less than I was promised when I signed up. Now granted, the burst speeds can reach 300k, but I'm not dealing in bursts. If I need to push a 2 gigabyte media file to my computer at work, it would literally take me all day!
The phone call to the Time Warner customer service department yielded no results. When I asked the gentleman about why they lowered their upload speed considerably, he didn't even try to deny it. He didn't even try to push the burst speed at me. He simply said
"Our customers aren't interested in higher upload speed, so we lowered it".
Nobody called me to tell me they were about to lower their speed, and nobody called me offering me a discount from the price I'm paying for what is now safely considered to be LESS SERVICE. At the prospect of losing a customer, the service rep simply shrugged me off apologizing that neither he, nor anyone else there neither can nor has the desire to either raise my upload cap, which I know they can do, if they wanted to.
So I am left with dial up speeds for uploads and a blazing fast download speed. It's like a brand new sports car standing on cement blocks rather than wheels.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there that has been affected by speed caps by the almighty ISP's.
Anyone out there been screwed by the big TW? We'd love to hear your rants no matter what ISP screwed you. Hit the comments and maybe someone will notice that can actually do something about this.
Commodore64 (The one who used to have better upload speeds on a 2400 baud modem)
