Time Warner Cable Suspends Broadband Upgrades After Merger (dslreports.com) 72
Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReport: Time Warner Cable has confirmed that the company has suspended its "Maxx" broadband and TV upgrades while the dust settles from Charter's $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Time Warner Cable's Maxx upgrades not only deliver faster top speeds up to 300 Mbps, but a notably overhauled improvement to the company's set top box interface. But Time Warner Cable has been telling company support techs and engineers that the upgrades were actually put on hold as of May 26. "[...] All speed increases and customer communications were placed on a temporary hold beginning Thursday, May 26," states the internal communication. "Once the updated launch schedule is determined, updated hub schedules will be posted to KEY and area management will be notified. Customers will continue to receive notification when the new speeds are available in their hubs."
A few more mergers (Score:5, Insightful)
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A few more mergers and they can begin rolling speeds back until netflix is unusable and nobody has any choice on how to consume media.
It really is insane to think that the same companies that supply the pipes can also supply the content.
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I have no problem with that as long as they don't actively hamper competition.
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The problem with those that supply the infrastructure being allowed to supply content, is that they will always strive to hamper competition, subvert legislation and run that infrastructure as cheap a manner as profitable, to the point of collapse as long as this quarter looks good and the network collapse occurs after they run with the money. The only thing that makes sense to actively limit their activity to network connectivity only by law.
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Burn the Communist!
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More to the point: a company with a government-granted monopoly to supply the pipe should be forbidden as part of that grant from providing the content. Make last mile a public utility, and Net Neutrality becomes a non-issue.
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You know that none of these companies have a government granted monopoly, right?
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Depends on what you consider a monopoly, and where you live. I know in some regions I have lived previously, my low-latency internet options, as allowed by city ordinance, were ADSL (128kbit) from a single company allowed to operate phone lines in the area, or cable service from a single company allowed to operate in the area. My high bandwidth options were satellite (download bandwidth only, as upload would have been via a phone-line modem of some sort through the above-mentioned single phone company allow
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as allowed by city ordinance, were ADSL (128kbit) from a single company allowed to operate phone lines in the area, or cable service from a single company allowed to operate in the area.
Monopoly franchises haven't been legal since 1992. If another provider wanted to enter your market, it certainly would be allowed to (subject to reasonable requirements that they show sufficient financing to actually build the network, and agree to the same buildout requirements as the incumbents, i.e. not cream skim only rich areas).
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Most people live someplace that the cable is provided by a cable company with a government-granted monopoly. I was talking about cable companies. What are you talking about?
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Most people live someplace that the cable is provided by a cable company with a government-granted monopoly. I was talking about cable companies. What are you talking about?
There are (virtually) no "government-granted monopolies" for US cable companies (there may be a very few for developments where the HOA is a quasi-gov't).
If Comcast wanted to start building cable plant in New York City, or Time Warner Cable wanted to build plant and deploy service in Chicago, there's no legal barrier to doing it. There are several providers (RCN being the best known) that have had this (overbuilding) as their business model. It proved to be a terrible business model, but there's no legal
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Say what? Local governments control the right-of-way that cable companies need in order to offer service. In many places, that local government has made a deal with one cable company or another granting them exclusive access. It's corrupt local politics at its finest, and its very common.
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Say what? Local governments control the right-of-way that cable companies need in order to offer service. In many places, that local government has made a deal with one cable company or another granting them exclusive access.
It's not common in the slightest - exclusive deals haven't been legal for over twenty years. Cable companies are natural monopolies, but a new entrant can get pole attachment and RoW usage rights on comparable terms to the incumbent anywhere they want. Of course, they have to agree to the same deal (i.e. pay franchise fee, etc.), but there's no significant legal barrier to cable overbuild. It's an economic barrier.
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... nobody has any choice on how to consume media.
Fuck that piglet-on-the-teat nonsense.
I'm old-school. I read, or listen to music, or watch video.
Merge merge merge (Score:1)
the bigger you are, the bigger is your dick to ass rape your customers with!
customer communications (Score:2)
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Discuss.
Okay! You're an asshole.
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Thank you for that dazzling insight, (((Anonymous Coward))).
We gotta recount the beans!! (Score:3)
OMG! Our beans and their beans got put into a newer, bigger pot! We cant trust those other bean counters, or their balance sheets! We have to recount all the beans!!
Nevermind the already outstanding obligations we have, or the cost studies conducted showing the upgrade would be fully funded, and would make us money in the long run-- Those could all be lies!!
We have to recount all the beans, first and foremost, then decide who gets what, and how many! That's what's really important here! Providing promised service comes second! ........
God I hate corporate culture.
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Always remember, no matter who gets screwed, senior management and the lawyers always get paid.
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> and would make us money in the long run-- Those could all be lies!!
More importantly, those studies were done before the merger, when there was a greater threat of competition. Change one of the base assumptions, and you change the optimal course of action. As for those "obligations", so what? Worst case they get fined a few million bucks for squeezing extra billions out of the market. Like Microsoft's repeated anti-monopoly penalties - until there's a real threat of the cost being greater than the
Not News (Score:5, Informative)
Charter management said they'd be doing this back in April. The broadband upgrades are part of a general system upgrade, which includes going all digital for video (freeing up the spectrum that was used for analog video), which requires putting some sort of box on every TV. Time Warner Cable had been using very simple digital-to-analog adapters for this. Charter's being putting a full-fledged digital set top on every TV. So, they're putting the Time Warner rollouts on hold until they can restart the process using the full set tops (i.e. the Charter model).
Re:Not News (Score:4, Informative)
This is true even of over the air digital TV. A digital signal has to buffer to the next I-Frame before it will start playing, and will never change as fast as an old analog TV. TWC might have worse delay than usual depending on their multicast / unicast setup and whether they are using D servers for quick channel change and where those D servers are located.
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Correction - a cost-cutting system not designed for fast channel changes will never change as fast. There's no reason you couldn't preemptively buffer one I-Frame gap worth of signal for the next several channels while channel surfing. Needs a more sophisticated (or multiple) tuners though, plus enough additional memory to hold the buffers.
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There are several dozen reasons why you, in fact, couldn't practically do that.
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Oh? Name one, other than cost.
In the most wasteful extreme you just build multiple complete tuner/decoder systems into the TV and cycle through them. If the gap between I-FRames is one second, then ten tuners will let you cycle through ten channels per second.
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You can't "buffer signal" at all.
You don't just need 10 tuners, you need 10 full decoders running.
The delay time switching between those multiple tuners would be non-zero.
You need a decent bit of very fast storage for those 10+ HD channels constantly buffering.
Picking the 10 channels would be impossible. You're assuming a few above/below, but ignoring Favorites/Customization, channels being keyed in, guide usage, etc.
Scaling up the decryption modules to 10+ would be extremely difficult. Would require mult
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Hand-waving away the actual, difficult problems involved doesn't get rid of them, no matter how frequently you repeat the assertion. Still, I'll take a quick stab at just a FEW of the ignorant assertions before I give up on this ignorant lot, entirely...
Not by just tuning the frequency. There are quite a lot of demodulation and decoding steps to recover the correct digital bitstream. That requires a lot more hardware than is bei
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"No, it's actually called being knowledgeable about the subject at hand."
Then you've got zero knowledge, so let a former cable tech chime in.
Nothing you say makes much sense excepting PPV channels.
No 10 channel DVR? Mine handles 50 simultaneously. Ever hear of SnapStream? Hell, you can buy 64-channel simultaneous DVRs from Alibaba for $3,000 and they work as long as you have ONE SINGLE CABLE CARD.
Increased power consumption? The set top boxes of today are WAY MORE EFFICIENT than the old Scientific Atlanta a
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Maximum HDTV broadcast bitrate in the US is 19Mbit/s. Times 10 channels = 190Mbit/s = 24MB/s Encryption isn't going to effect that much, so you could actually buffer a full second of encrypted content from over a hundred channels in one 256MB stick of RAM costing less than $10. The tuners to capture the individual channels simultaneously might be a bit expensive, but there's no technical limitation, and no additional load on the distributor - every channel is simultaneously broadcast to every subscriber
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Ah, good old Khyber spouting nonsense again. Don't remember seeing you since you got kicked off of SoylentNews.
Being a minimum wage, cable installing subcontractor, doesn't give you any insights into designing demodulators, MPEG decoders, buffers, etc. Yeah, I believe you've opened up a STB and swapped a fan or two, but that's about it.
That's actually a very significant and expensive amount of power... particu
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You'd need several times larger storage, actually.
Attempting to decrypt a stream even just a couple seconds later would not reliably work.
I explained to the loud-mouthed AC in a decent bit of detail why decoding later is very, very difficult and not realistically possible. Saying "just use a faster one" is about as good a solution as saying "just sprinkle some fairy dust on it."
Getting your technical information from Khyber is the batshit crazy nutjobs leading the blind...
I'm now very tired of this worthles
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Not unless I completely misunderstood you you didn't.
Buffer the raw digital signal, which will be, at most 19Mbit/s. Don't decrypt it, don't decode it, just buffer it raw. That part is easy.
Then, when you need to, feed it through the decryption/decoding engine. It's not doing anything else, because you just cut off it's previous feed, just as though you had switched channels. It has no idea it's dealing with buffered data - it's just a data stream. You don't have to forge any metadata - it's being fed
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Yes, it does seem you completely misunderstood.
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This is true even of over the air digital TV. A digital signal has to buffer to the next I-Frame before it will start playing, and will never change as fast as an old analog TV. TWC might have worse delay than usual depending on their multicast / unicast setup and whether they are using D servers for quick channel change and where those D servers are located.
You should check out AT&T U-verse IPTV (sometime before it goes away completely in favor of the DirecTV). They somehow figured out a way to do digital channel changing that's nearly as fast as analog cable. The picture quality wasn't the greatest due to bandwidth limitations, but the channel changing speed was surprisingly impressive, especially since it was having to join multicast streams from external servers.
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There's nothing complicated about it. You can arbitrarily increase or decrease the GOP size quite easily. Decrease the GOP size and the video will start sooner, but at the expense of requiring a higher bit rate for video. If you want faster channel-surfing, at the expense of lower picture quality, you can have it.
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I didn't know that. I'd observed that signals didn't quite sync between a tv in my dad's house with a DVR and one with a converter box and didn't know why. Learn something new every day!
Now I wonder why my Uverse boxes in different places in a house weren't synched. Perhaps because it's run from a central hub to other receivers.
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With no OTA channels in here, we're at their mercy. This doesn't sound like a positive development.
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In Central New York, we were just forced to get the boxes with the promise that it would free up bandwidth for upgraded internet speeds. The upgrades were supposed to happen in June. It looks like we are double screwed... we get to pay for the boxes after the first year and will probably never see the speed increases...
We'll see if Spectrum does the right thing or I think i'm headed to FIOS. Just can't stand Verizon...
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Today's youth won't know what static is, either. You're acting that that's a bad thing. I only wish I could have hit a button on the TV remote to get a full listing of what shows are on all available channels right now, and coming up for the next several hours...
Hell, pretty soon kids won't understand what a "TV Channel" or "commercial break" is, either,
Re:Not News (Score:4, Funny)
But your rational, fact-based explanation doesn't match my outrage as to what is obviously a conspiracy theory based on my preconceived notions of anti-competitive behavior! How can I get all paranoid and weird about this now?
Wait, I know. First, I'll call you a shill, and then post my fanciful rants anyway!
Paid shills are here in full force, huh? (Score:2)
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Charter management said they'd be doing this back in April. The broadband upgrades are part of a general system upgrade, which includes going all digital for video (freeing up the spectrum that was used for analog video), which requires putting some sort of box on every TV. Time Warner Cable had been using very simple digital-to-analog adapters for this. Charter's being putting a full-fledged digital set top on every TV. So, they're putting the Time Warner rollouts on hold until they can restart the process using the full set tops (i.e. the Charter model).
Translation: Your new set-top box will cost three times what it used to.
Per TV of course, monthly recurring. Don't think for a second they'll let you actually own a fucking thing in the future.
It's times like this I'm rather glad I cut the cord long ago and enjoy life outside the boob tube.
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I prefer my TiVo, though it was like pulling teeth to get Charter to give me a cable card that mostly works.
They're still not done with that yet? (Score:2)
They upgraded my area almost exactly a year ago, I figured they'd be done with the rollout by now.
Apparently it helps a bunch to have Google Fiber as a competitor.
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They upgraded my area almost exactly a year ago, I figured they'd be done with the rollout by now.
Apparently it helps a bunch to have Google Fiber as a competitor.
Oh yeah. Competition really helps.
I got Verizon fiber run to every unit in my condo complex (>70 units), to give Time-Warner some competition.
It took a couple of years, but it's working. And with Verizon selling its fiber-service to Frontier (in some States), prices are getting even better. So far, Frontier call-center staff have been very good. Frontier also provides un-bundled services for reasonable rates – unlike Time-Warner or Verizon.
Cable Companies are fucked (Score:3)
Informative Murder P*rn (Score:1)
TWC customer in Yuma (Score:2)
I just got a new Arris cable modem in the mail from TWC. Has a dual band wireless internal network @2.5 Ghz and 5.0 Ghz, and a 2.5 Ghz outward facing wireless network. I assume they are aiming at a Comcast/Xfinity style network. During the self install setup I disabled all the wireless stuff, and changed the internal address to what fit my needs, and then followed the online activation procedures using the mac address and serial number which worked flawlessly. Once configured I can no longer access the exte
The best part (Score:4, Funny)
If you don't like your ISP because of their offerings or service then simply switch to a compeititor.
With a vast array of high quality ISPs to choose from I fail to understand the constant complaining here on
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I have lived in a few Cities where the only options are TWC and usually AT&T DSL (there has been times when that wasn't even an option). AT&T DSL is garbage compared to TWC. This is not an endorsement of TWC but thus far they have not had any data caps, so I will give them that.
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I live is South Texas, with a city monopoly, sorry City Franchise, who is TimeWarner.
And soon to be Sabotage, or what ever the new overlord will call it.
That on the other hand does not modify the Franchise.
Yes, by politics, we have choice-----
Why all the mailers, then? (Score:2)
So why do they send me a speed-upgrade offer in the USPS mail at least once a week?
Something is not clear to someone in their marketing department, or perhaps by the Poster in interpretation of the announcement.