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New York Country Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has filed a lawsuit (PDF) confronting Time Warner Cable, accusing the company of lying to both its customers and the FCC. The suit alleges that TWC "Systematically And Knowingly Failed To Evangelize The Reliable And Fast Net Access Information technology Promised To Subscribers Across The State" (capitalization original) and seeks to compensate all New York State TWC customers for their trouble. (Disclosure: The author is a TWC customer because he viewed the visitor as a better bet than Verizon.)

The suit alleges that TWC (now operating as Spectrum) has been defrauding customers for at to the lowest degree five years. Spectrum-TWC is accused of conducting " a systematic scheme to defraud and mislead subscribers to its Internet service by promising to evangelize Cyberspace service that information technology knew it could not and would not evangelize. As described below, this scheme had 2 separate components: first, Spectrum-TWC promised Net speeds that information technology knew it could non evangelize to subscribers; 2nd, Spectrum-TWC promised reliable access to online content that it knew it could non deliver to subscribers."

Spectrum-TWC-PromisedSpeed

The more performance you lot paid for, the less of that performance you got (in percentage terms)

Commencement, Spectrum-TWC promised consumers high performance, simply leased them modems and routers that were incapable of delivering the performance they were paying for. Several years agone, cable companies began rolling out loftier-speed Internet services that required the use of a cable modem compatible with the DOCSIS 3.0 specification standard. Older modems that were limited to DOCSIS one.0 or 2.0 compatibility can withal operate on DOCSIS 3.0 networks, just at significantly reduced speeds.

The conform alleges that Spectrum-TWC aggressively upsold 900,000 customers on DOCSIS 3.0 performance, still failed to provide hardware that could deliver it. Considering that customers are currently charged a $x monthly fee for modem rental, that'southward an estimated $108 million per year in fraudulent revenue collected from New York Country residents. The company is accused of leasing substandard wireless routers that were incapable of providing 802.11n operation to 250,000 customers who were paying a rental fee for those devices as well.

Even loftier-finish customers didn't receive the service they were owed. I'll quote the lawsuit directly on these points:

Spectrum-TWC failed to provide the promised Internet speeds to even those subscribers who leased current-generation modems and wireless routers from Spectrum-TWC. This was because Spectrum-TWC managed its cablevision network in a style that did non evangelize the promised Internet speeds over whatever type of connexion. Information technology cut corners past packing too many subscribers in the aforementioned service group, which resulted in slower speeds for subscribers, especially during summit hours. It also failed to add more channels for each service group, which similarly resulted in slower speeds for subscribers.

Spectrum-TWC fraudulently induced at to the lowest degree 640,000 subscribers in New York State to sign upwards for high-speed plans that information technology knew information technology could not provide. SpectrumTWC knowingly failed to allocate sufficient bandwidth to subscribers, which it could have done either by reducing the size of its service groups or calculation more channels to each service group. Based on several Internet speed tests, including those run past the FCC, subscribers on the 300 Mbps program generally received but 10% to 70% of the promised speed; subscribers on the 200 Mbps plan received but fourteen% to sixty% of the promised speed; and subscribers on the 100 Mbps plan received only 24% to 87% of the promised speed.

As for the accusation that it lied to the FCC, that requires some unpacking. Dorsum in 2022, Spectrum-TWC was actively avoiding replacing older modems that were unable to offer DOCSIS 3.0 functioning, merely it didn't want to look bad in the annual broadband report that the FCC creates. The FCC'southward reports are based on data gathered from 4,000 subscribers across the United States, but to goose its ratings, Spectrum-TWC promised the FCC it would supervene upon all of the substandard cable modems of its subscribers. In reality, information technology treated the subscribers on the FCC's panel equally VIPs, replacing their hardware (and only their hardware), and over-provisioning their modems to temporarily boost their speeds by up to 20%.

One Spectrum-TWC employee wrote the following:

Our Sam Knows scores [more than on that in a moment] are like watching a irksome-motion train wreck. We demand to become in front of this. One thing I recall we may need to exist prepared to practice is just requite more than ports to Denoting during sweeps month [when FCC results are measured for purposes of the MBA report]. We don't have to make whatsoever promises, we just accept to make it work temporarily.

The FCC'southward broadband tests are administered by Sam Knows, a federal contractor that measures functioning by attaching its ain network product to the modem. The box then runs speed tests when the modem isn't already in utilise. Spectrum-TWC offset its poor performance in some tests by deliberately providing boosted bandwidth and capability to the FCC'due south panelists at times when their network wasn't crowded, thereby hiding its poor overall results. The company candidly best-selling this in its own internal communications, stating: "We recommend increasing over-provisioning our modem speeds to around 20% to drive our Sam Knows scores > 100% and then to market place that we deliver more than than promised speeds."

A 2022 presentation by engineers at Spectrum-TWC noted that by gaming the organisation in this fashion, the company was able to hide the impact of using older, unmarried-channel modems, network congestion, and the poor country of network cable lines. Finally, the company is accused of deliberately lying to customers nigh the potential speed of its wireless network, promising that it could deliver wire-line-equivalent functioning and giving customers who called to complain near their network performance the run-effectually. Internal advice records show the visitor was perfectly aware of these bug, but did nil.

The company continued to publish information claiming the following:

  • That maximum wireless broadband operation would not be impacted past how many devices were attached to a router or modem.
  • That in 'real-world testing' users could connect to a wireless modem from 150 feet abroad, pregnant anyone in a house could wait maximum router performance, no matter where they were.
  • That having multiple users on the same cable network would have no impact on the service's performance.

Combine this guidance with the fact that the company was renting substandard modems and routers with performance well below advertised speeds, and you accept a recipe for hundreds of thousands of angry customers. Once more, internal communication shows Spectrum-TWC was absolutely aware of these issues and did nothing to either resolve them or to alter its own marketing.

Spectrum-TWC is likewise defendant of faux advertising due to promising access to various content services that it failed to deliver due to high lag, bandwidth throttling, and the service problems consumers encountered during its various spats with content providers similar Netflix. One Chartered executive's communications on that topic seem especially relevant to the give-and-take of who should be paying for Net service.

Our interconnect strategy these days, is more about how we manage our backbone and especially edge resources with the enormous growth in content. The transit costs are rounding errors compared to impacts to the edge of making the wrong decisions. We actually want content networks paying the states for access and right now we force those through transit that practise not want to pay.(Emphasis added by lawsuit)

Every time this topic comes upwardly, in that location are those who argue that Netflix et al are freeloaders trying to steal funds from the noble ISPs that heroically evangelize service at extremely loftier prices. Quotes like the to a higher place should put balance to such sentiment. Spectrum-TWC explicitly notes that its costs are a rounding error — what it cares about is making content networks pay for access to drive up its own profits — without ever bothering to laissez passer those profits along to consumers by either improving their service or delivering on its own promises.

Level3

Incredibly, when ISPs throttle services past unplugging parts of their routers, everyone's service gets worse.

The epitome to a higher place is from Level 3 and concerns that company's spat with Verizon in 2022 — simply it also references precisely the same claims this lawsuit makes. Spectrum-TWC and other ISPs engineered their networks to ensure that traffic would be congested, and so "fixed" the trouble only for the services that were willing to pay to play. The lawsuit notes that Spectrum-TWC's specific strategy for forcing companies to pay for transit was to refuse to add additional ports, thereby forcing content providers to either move content through other networks (increasing latency and reducing customer satisfaction) or limiting the performance of services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime — thereby increasing latency and reducing client satisfaction. Games like League of Legends were as well impacted.

This chart, created by Spectrum-TWC, shows the bandwidth improvements delivered once Netflix started paying, and the forecast conditions the company was planning to impose if Netflix refused to pay.

This nautical chart, created by Spectrum-TWC, shows the bandwidth improvements delivered once Netflix started paying, and the forecast weather the company was planning to impose if Netflix refused to pay.

New York Country has asked for a judgment that would crave Charter (at present the parent visitor of TWC) to pay a $5,000 civil fine per violation and provide a total refund to all customers on superlative of that. It is unclear whether the FCC will take any action at all — the new head of the FCC, Ajit Pai, is by and large hostile to the organization's ain mission, the concept of net neutrality, and customer protections in the form of clear billing rules and laws.