RSSTime Warner Cable sued for causing 'major distress'
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published June 5, 2008, 5:50 PM
Time Warner Cable is being hauled into court by a Los Angeles city attorney over complaints of Internet and e-mail outages, TV line-up changes, and service delays. This while the head of TWC's regional office was given the heave-ho.
"Hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles residents were ripped off," said City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo in a statement. The city's lawsuit -- which accuses Time Warner Cable of creating "major havoc and distress" -- could cost the cable company tens of millions of dollars in civil fines.
At one time a minor player in Southern California, TWC emerged as the number one cable provider in the area a couple of years ago after partnering with Comcast to purchase the assets of Adelphia Communications, and then engaging in system swaps with Comcast.
But Time Warner Cable's business machinations required upgrades to the old Adelphia and Comcast systems along with integration of the three networks, including customer e-mail migrations from Adelphia and Comcast domains to Time Warner.
The accompanying network crashes, delays in repairs, and billing and TV programming changes spurred customers to flood call center lines with phone calls, causing hold times to leap to an average of nine minutes.
In the lawsuit, the city attorney's office alleges that in late 2006 and early 2007, TWC failed to live up to a franchise cable agreement requiring the company to answer subscribers' calls within 30 seconds and to start repairs on service interruptions with 24 hours of notification in 90 percent of calls for service.
The city also claims that the cable provider produced brochures and TV commercials during this time which gave the false impression that pricing would remain the same under the new ownership.
Now leaving Time Warner Cable is Roger Keating, who first took charge of the company's regional office in 2003. Keating's responsibilities included Internet and e-mail services, systems integration, TV programming, and billing.
Replacing Keating is Barry Rosenblum, an executive VP for the company who will work out of both Los Angeles and New York. Also, Stephen Pagano, who previously headed TWC's Albany, NY office, will now move to southern California to deal with day-to-day operations there.
In mid-May, Time Warner Cable and its parent firm, New York-based media giant Time Warner Inc., announced their their respective boards of directors have approved an agreement that will lead to the "complete legal and structural separation of the two companies."
Sorry folks, but the whining about the lousy service reminds one of the McDonald's coffee defense "Oh my, but it was hot!"
I mean, reading so many complaints that begin similarly to "Its customer service is so awful that only last month I could not find anyone at their billing center...", etc., seriously makes you question why such folks identify themselves here as being so stup0id as to subscribe to that which they maintain is SO bad. Yup, I feel SO sorry for those who lack the insight to change service from something they whine is SO bad. OK, let me rephrase that...I will feel sorry for them as soon as I can stop laughing AT them.
Land based powered distributed plant has an amazingly large number of points of failure due to either literal breaks in signal distribution, or from a disruption in power to supply various distribution amplifiers.
And for those who claim that it is always down and that there are a plethora of problems yet REMAIN customers? Take your own advice and either chose an alternative service, or drop it and learn to live without and/or with an alternative method of delivery, be it the sneaker net with rented or purchased material, or with a competing service with their own service variables.
But to listen to so many whine as they continue to subscribe to what they yell so loudly is a sh!tty service - we aren't the one who needs to grasp the meaning of what you are saying - perhaps you need to listen more closely to your own complaints and assume responsibility for your market choices.
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|I commend the LA DA for taking action. I think more communites should look out for its citizens than take contributions from big fat cats funding the re-election bids.
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|MONOPOLY.
I can't believe the FCC & FTC is allowing all these mergers to go on, break up the baby bell's 20 years ago just to allow them to become a monopoly. Allow mergers so now I have a choice of Comcast or try to fight the landlord for a dish permit and deal with outgages in winter / severe weather due to storms.
We have no more choices as a consumer. Once you get the service you have to live with the inferior support, quality and programming.
Look at Europe and Asia, they have tons of channels, some really great speeds and 1/2 the cost and a lot of choices.
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|Time-Warner really, really, really sucks. Poor customer service and ridiculous prices.
Its customer service is so awful that only last month I could not find anyone at their billing center who was available to take my money!!! This went on for 3 days!
I couldn't leave a message for them to call me back because its voicemail was full and simply hung up on customers. (I finally called someone *outside the billing department* who helped me in less than 5 minutes.)
No other utility charges as much money as Time-Warner and then delivers less service than other basic utilities which cost half as much. This lawsuit should not stop in California.
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|And hence why when you drive down any given street in Sherman Oaks you will see nearly every home and apt with a DTV dish.
CABLE SUCKS. (here anyway) The gear sucks, the guide sucks, the service sucks, the DVR sucks, the signal sucks.
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|twc from what i hear is buying up in south cali. I hope they do in Seattle. or maybe this is a nice wakeup to comcast they they could be next. We have had cable server for close to 8 years now, first excite@home then att, now comcast, until this past year the service has been great. Now we experience outages all the time and comcast does nothing except replace equipment in the house then cause more outages. As of yesterday they said 72-96 hours till we will get it again.
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|TWC failed to live up to a franchise cable agreement
Revoke it or renegotiate. Fine for failure to deliver.
Problem solved.
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|This seems to be the new business model now, "Don't give a hoot about customers, we're going to get their money no matter what anyways." Profit above all. [rollseyes].
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|Finally. Ever since the change from Comcast to TWC, it's been horrible. Internet always down at all times of the day and night for days even. Cable tv periodically down and we'd have to unplug it to reboot the cable box. Long phone hold times. 4-5 hours, then sometimes the line would just die. We'd always have to reboot our computer again, reboot the modem, usually ending up with no success until hours later after we had already made a tech support appointment.
Comcast was so much better in retrospect. Too bad we don't have any other choice in cable unless we switch to satellite.
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|I have TWC. I got rid of the TV cable for DirecTV (extremely happy)but I still have Cable Modem and Digital Phone. I'm satisfied right now with both because DSL is slower and Verizon has yet to offer FIOS. However, if TWC decides to impose internet caps I'm gone in a flash. I don't believe in paying more for less and if TWC continues on their destructive path I think I'm not the only one who will bail.
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|Second that. If TWC starts capping bandwidth I'm out on principle alone.
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|"causing hold times to leap to an average of nine minutes."
Wow, I wish that most companies that I call for tech support has such a short hold time.
Did the merge cause trouble?, I'm sure it did. I can remember similar problems when Cox bought out or merged with @home or whatever it was a few years ago. My father-in-law had email issues for months.
Not saying it's OK. It's happened before, and they should plan for it better so it doesn't happen again.
As for Cox? or TW or Comcast or any of the other cable, satellite, FIOS TV services. For the most part, most of them seem like they are more concerned with putting money in their pockets than helping their customers.
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|Time Warner Customer Web Pages - a downgrade for Los Angeles cable users
Los Angeles Time Warner is being phased out by me after at least eight fruitless contacts with Time Warner.
Time Warner told me "Your existing web pages will be transferred in their entirety." (email March 14, 2007 6:48 AM, received in April). Comcast had a web space allocation of 182 megabytes, I was using about 160 megabytes
Time Warner technical support phone contact and email response is "You are offered 25 free megabytes of web space!"
I am now told that only one of my email accounts qualify for Road Runner Personal Home Pages. Comcast gave personal web pages to all my seven screen names. If I had a teenager, he or she would not be able to publish at all on Roadrunner.
They say: "Sorry for the inconvenience". I say I'm leaving after assuming that I would be locked into cable for the rest of my life. Now free to go DSL or any other ISP.
All my thousands of URLs originally on Comcast were deleted with no notice. On every visit, things like this "Personal Home Page Account Details - Temporarily Unavailable" I will move my webpage to: edhiker.googlepages.com/
They say the customer "must manually edit the absolute references to point to your images or pages using a relative path. Absolute references to links or images in your html files will need to be edited and changed to relative links referring to your directory structure (see image below for an example of a directory structure). Editing the html to change to relative references in your directory structure means that you should change absolute links to images and files within your Personal Home Pages" (My web pages, if migrated from Comcast will have thousands of these issues)
I see no good reason that personal web page URL structure needed changing in the first place, especially that the host server name is ftp://upload.comcast.net ( from General FTP Setup )
Which best describes the Time Warner adventure in taking over Comcast's Los Angeles franchise?
1- A thousand monkeys... on a thousand keyboards can't get the hosting service working
2- How to keep a Pollock (the hapless user) busy
3- Gross incompetence
4- A Scam on the city of Los Angeles.
Last August, I asked them in an email, .... "My home page alone has "Comcast" embedded 53 times, and that's just a start. Your TV ads and welcome page ignores this problem. Advise as how to proceed". I got no answer till April when my thousands of URL's containing "edhiker.home.comcast" went dead.
Try Google search "home roadrunner.com", then try search "home.comcast.net" Results count shows web page usage on Roadrunner (Time Warner) and Comcast - how about 2000:1 Looks like I'm not the only one that can't make Time Warner's site work.
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I have called twice about my emails getting lost, gave up, now have them double sent to Gmail.
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|They are the biggest pain in cable and the cable industry itself is a pain.
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|TWC = TOTAL s***
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|TWC = TOTALLY WORTHLESS CR*P
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