The City of Angels decided it was fed up with Time Warner with its (very) poor customer service for pay-TV support and slapped a 25-page lawsuit against them. City attorney stated TW violated California law with false and misleading statements, ripping people off and must be held accountable for it.

Time Warner is the #1 pay-TV service in L.A. and has held that “distinction” for 2 years. This occurred when when they joined with Comcast (d’oh!) in ‘06. But then TW had to upgrade a bunch of equipment in the merge and evidently cut a few corners (a lot of corners) during this upgrade. Now it seems they’ll be paying the price for it.

[Source: Los Angeles Times]

Time-Warner is testing out a new ISP pricing schema in Beaumont TX whereas people would be given a monthly data usage cap between 5 and 40GB. Anything over that amount and the customer is charged $1 per GB.

This has “bad idea” written all over it because it restricts customers as to what they can do on the internet. With the advent of video-intensive (and thereby bandwidth-intensive) services like internet television and the like, putting a cap on people’s bandwidth does nothing but get in the way.

TW, if you happen to read this, here’s my suggestion: Give people the option of whether they want this or not. Price the “capped” plans lower than the regular non-capped plans and people will go for it. You know this would work. If you completely switch over the pricing schema to metered-only you’ll not only have customers but businesses going after your throats.

Going 100% metered is short-term gain, long-term loss. Don’t do it.

[Source: washingtonpost.com]