The Code Bender

Time Warner has been rubbing me the wrong way for an extended period of time now.  Firstly, I couldn't sign a 12 month contract because they were taking forever to get out to my residence, I only intended to live here for a year and wasn't sure where I would be headed next.  My rate has been steadily crawling up by about $3 month after month while my QoS has been getting worse and worse.  I'll be the only one on my network and un-able to stream Twit-Live from twit.TV from time to time.  I'm paying for Road Runner Turbo, I shouldn't be complaining about bandwidth issues....  I've also been subject to a wonderful policy of throttling if my traffic appears like it might be file sharing.  Just so you know, the PS3 when grabbing data for online games and market place purchases can look like P2P traffic.  This results in it taking me about 4 days to pull down a movie off the market place.  I've called repeatedly with these complaints, I've been assured they'll be resolved, and of course NOTHING happens.

And then comes even more fun.  I hear that on top of over charging for down right shitty service they want to LIMIT how much I can use it.  Since WHEN does technology get MORE expensive over time? Something is going wrong here...

During the time of the 40GB cap scare I started looking at other "free" (as in speech) and open ISPs.  I stumbled on this awesome project by a neighboring city.  Wilson NC (I live in Raleigh) has a service called "Green Light" in which the city buys up a massive bandwidth pipe and distributes it at cost as a public service.  This means 20meg symmetrical pipe for $60.  I would give ANYTHING to have that kind of connection to my door.  This has been a large project but the people of Wilson are rightly content and impressed with the service.

So what does Time Warner have to do with all this?  They're afraid of community based efforts like this.  They can't compete (surprise surprise).  This is a bit confusing to me, here's one town, buying their own internet, putting it on their own backbone, and coming out ahead of a nationwide (and world wide in the case of Embarq who is also involved in this stupidity) ISP.  Something about scale isn't making sense here.

So what does a corporate giant do when it can't compete with an emerging market? They don't compete, they eliminate the competition.  Right now Time Warner and Embarq are pushing for a bill in NC that would protect them from this kind of competition.  PROTECT them from COMPETITION.  Sounds a bit... anti-competitive I'd say.

Some more information on the bill can be found here: http://savencbb.wordpress.com/about/

The latest development is that now the ISPs are falling back to Push Polling to try to get the bill passed.  Information on this development can be found at http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86081/big-us-isps-roll-out-push-polling-to-stop-cheap-internet/