If you believe the pitch for Time Warner's "Road Runner Broadband Turbo with PowerBoost," it should provide download speeds up to 10 Mbps and 1 Mbps for uploads.
And by "up to" I mean not likely ever.
So lets be generous, very generous, and give TWC some leeway. I don't even need 10 Mbps that often. I can get by with much less, but there is a point at which an active connection becomes unusable for the Internet of today.
When I can't even get .40 Mbps that is huge problem. Thursday night I couldn't even get a 5 minute YouTube video to load. It was a throw back to dial up. Twitter revealed a few reports of other issues locally.
If I fork over $60.00 at a gas station that advertises $4.00 per gallon, I expect 15 gallons in return. Not 5 gallons, not 10 gallons and not just whatever the pump can manage at the time.
If the electricity goes out, should I calculate the power I would have consumed and throw that in on top of my billed usage?
This isn't just a Time Warner problem though. It is not hard to find frustrated customers of any ISP.
The price of broadband is no small commitment for consumers. Providers will have hiccups. It happens, but ISPs need to live up to their part of the bargain and find someway to compensate users.
Oh, about that up to 1 Mbps upload speed, I've yet to see more that 50 Kbps uploading files via a lightweight FTP client.
