Time warner cable charges make no sense - a rant by MrBishop

[mrbishop]

I'm going to try and keep this short....

Precursor:
we have Time Warner Cable
we have home phone (sister uses it for work, she works from home and its required, also dumb)

So the journy begins with my bright idea of saveing myself 10$ a month by buying my own modem from Ebay for 20$. in my head the math and trouble seemed worth the risk. I purchased the modem which did both phone and internet and had it shipped 
The modem arrives with in a week and i'm excited to install it....this doesn't last long. I call in and get a customer service rep, give them the modems MAC and CMAC, all is smooth at this point and the rep on the phone is very pleasant. we get it all working and what not, SWEET no more charges....but wait whats this? Time Warner Cable does not allow customers to use their own equipment for home phone....soooo what am i supposed to do now? The rep on the phone informs me that i can just keep the modem owned by TWC and use it for my phone. I wont be charged a lease fee for this..........i start getting this sick feeling in my stomach as my brain begins to whirl into over drive..... vtech kicks in.... smoke pores from my ears..i then ask the rep, in the nicest way i possibly can..."wait...soooo i can keep the box you were charging me for.... for free as long as i use it for phone and not modem....now i have 2 devices one mine and one yours so that i can use your service and there isnt' a charge".... at this point all my grey matter had oozed from my ears as the Rep began talking in circles... long story short thats the way it is if you dont like it tuff nuts.

we are all being charged for what amounts to nothing other than TWC being greedy. i'd be happy to BUY a modem up front or as part of my bill over time to own it. i dont like having 15 things to use one service provider (well 2 but you get the point)

as an open letter to TWC... make this make sense to me if you can at this point im so dumbfounded i can't see straight.

on a sad note the modem i bought had some issues so i'm returning it. you win TWC.... you win......i r defeated and utterly disgusted in my service provider. a slave to their service am i.

[tp4tissue]

This is the transition to service industry..


It is overall better economic organization, because capital accumulation isn't reallllly valuable without the productivity of PEOPLE behind it.

So Service charge is more realistic.


You're not paying much for the --modem--, 

As for ways to charge you as much as possible..  That's the bargain with Every costumer.

[mrbishop]

i'm going to say no.... i cough them doing something dumb and i'm calling them out on it.

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

time warner is horrible and every last one of them can eat a bag of ****s

i've had one of their business connections dropping 2/3rds of all data and they tell me they can't escalate it as an outage because the connection isn't completely down

**** off, how about you try running your office on 1/3rd of an internet connection and let me know how that works out for you

[fohat.digs]

Consolidation has made internet/phone/CATV one of the worst industries in the country. All of the big ones are approximately equally bad.

How else could they get the hundreds of millions of dollars that they spend lobbying Congress for deregulation and opposing net neutrality?

Like medical care, we in the US pay the highest prices for the worst coverage in the civilized world.