Folks, listen up. If you have a wireless modem provided by Time Warner Cable you might want to have a look at it. No it won’t catch fire. But some 65,000 of them have a security hole –

Time Warner acknowledged the problem to Threat Level on Tuesday, and says it’s in the process of testing replacement firmware code from the router manufacturer, which it plans to push out to customers soon.

“We were aware of the problem last week and have been working on it since,” said Time Warner spokesman Alex Dudley.

The vulnerability lies with Time Warner’s SMC8014 series cable modem/Wi-Fi router combo, made by SMC. The device is one of several options Time Warner offers to customers who don’t want to install their own modem and router to use with the company’s broadband service. The device is installed with default configurations, which customers can alter only slightly through its built-in web server. The most customers can do through this page is add a list of URLs they want their router to block.

But blogger David Chen, writing at chenosaurus.com, recently discovered he could easily gain remote access to an administrative page served by the router that would allow him greater control of the device.

Chen, founder of a software startup called Pip.io, said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable modem and discovered that Time Warner had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router’s configuration file.

If you have a SMC8014 in your home network PROVIDED by TWC you might want to inquire with TWC as to whether your particular device has had a patch applied. Oh, and don’t take their word for it. Ask for the work order record. If they don’t have one for your account they probably did not do it. Keep in mind that somebody could drive up to your curb and be manipulating your device. Do not take this issue lightly.

Linky.

6. Special Provisions Regarding HSD Service

(ii) I agree that TWC or ISP may change the Maximum Throughput Rate of any tier by amending the price list or Terms of Use. My continued use of the HSD Service following such a change will constitute my acceptance of any new Maximum Throughput Rate. If the level or tier of HSD Service to which I subscribe has a specified limit on the amount of bytes that I can use in a given billing cycle, I also agree that TWC may use technical means, including but not limited to suspending or reducing the speed of my HSD Service, to ensure compliance with these limits, and that TWC or ISP may move me to a higher tier of HSD Service (which may result in higher monthly charges) or impose other charges and fees if my use exceeds these limits.

(iii) I agree that TWC may use Network Management Tools as it determines appropriate and/or that it may use technical means, including but not limited to suspending or reducing the Throughput Rate of my HSD Service, to ensure compliance with its Terms of Use and to ensure that its service operates efficiently. I further agree that TWC and ISP have the right to monitor my bandwidth usage patterns to facilitate the provision of the HSD Service and to ensure my compliance with the Terms of Use and to efficiently manage their networks and their provision of services. TWC or ISP may take such steps as each may determine appropriate in the event my usage of the HSD Service does not comply with the Terms of Use. I acknowledge that HSD Service does not include other services managed by TWC and delivered over TWC’s shared infrastructure, including Video Service and Digital Phone Service.

That ladies and gentlemen is the modification that will appear in a TWC bill at your domicile sometime soon. The jest of this legalize is to prepare YOU for metered service. Without the change TWC could lose in court in a challenge under the old contract.

Metered service is nigh!

Linky.

Having been looking for a buyer for the ailing AOL unit, TWC has finally decided to spin the unit, er sucker, off. Considering its falling fortunes and revenues, AOL represents a $124Bn gamble that never made sense and might as well be a write off. –

“A separation will be the best outcome for both Time Warner and AOL,” Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Bewkes said in the statement. “The separation will also provide both companies with greater operational and strategic flexibility.”

Bewkes is getting rid of AOL, which has confronted falling ad sales during the recession, to focus Time Warner on its film and cable-television businesses. AOL has dealt Time Warner a series of setbacks since the 2001 deal: shareholder lawsuits, a regulatory probe and declining sales. The parent company wasn’t able to sell or find a partner for the unit after talks last year with Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

“The obvious implication of spinning out all of AOL in one entity is that Time Warner’s efforts to sell AOL failed,” Fred Moran, a Boca Raton, Florida-based analyst at Benchmark Co., said in an interview. “Now, as a last resort, Time Warner is looking towards spinning the whole company out.”

At one time having a horizontal entity that could provide all services would seem to have made sense. But AOL was never marketed as part of a package deal, nor was AOL tool set ever leveraged to the benefit of the cable delivery unit. (eg. Cable internet uses its own portal rather than utilize AOL’s).

Fortunes fall sometime through no fault of their own. But I am afraid that the TWC-AOL deal was just a reason to be big for big’s sake. Under that guise the purchase was a fools errand. They are $124Bn poorer for it.

Linky.

It appears that TWC having been slapped around is not only rethinking their DOCSIS3 plans but now slapping customers around for that always vague ‘heavy usage’ moniker. –

Austin StoptheCap! reader Ryan Howard kicks off our premiere edition with a report that his Road Runner service was cut off yesterday without warning. According to Ryan, it took four calls to technical support, two visits to the cable store to try two new cable modems (all to no avail), before someone at Time Warner finally told him to call the company’s “Security and Abuse” center.

“I called the number and had to leave a voice mail and about an hour later a Time Warner technician called me back and lectured me for using 44 gigabytes in one week,” Howard wrote.

Howard was then “educated” about his usage.

“According to her, that is more than most people use in a year,” Howard said.

Howard questioned the company representative about what defines an acceptable amount of usage so he doesn’t get cut off again. He pays extra for Road Runner’s premium Turbo tier, so he already hands more money to Time Warner than average subscribers for his broadband service.

“All she would commit to is less — perhaps half or as quarter as much,” he said. Time Warner is taking their DOCSIS 3 toys home with them after customers reject Caps ‘n Tiers.

Convenient, considering that amounts to 40-60 gigabytes a month, which falls right in line with the now-temporarily-shelved tier pricing.

Ryan felt concerned that the Time Warner representative had such detailed information in front of her about his usage, although the representative reiterated repeatedly that they were not monitoring what he was doing with his account, just how much and when he was using it.

I would really have to question TWC’s long term motives here. I understand why they are doing it. But the gameplan is going to back fire. They already have the ire of the House Rep in Rochester, NY. If they continue along the lines they are going they will have about 8 other House members looking into this as well.

TWC, just remember next year IS an election year. Having your customer base running to Congress rarely does one good.

Linky

The plans are canceled for bandwidth caps by TWC in the Rochester, NY service area. I presume the huff and puff of a CongressCritter probably helped, but I don’t know –

Time Warner Cable is canceling plans for a new Internet pricing plan for the Rochester area that would have billed people according to how many gigabytes they use each month, Sen. Charles Schumer announced today.
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The company had unveiled the new consumption-based pricing plan at the beginning of April, with the plan due to take effect in September.

But the reaction by Web users was overwhelmingly negative. They accused Time Warner Cable of trying to reap profits at the expense of consumers who were accustomed to flat-rate/unlimited usage service.

As the protests increased, area politicians joined in criticizing the company, and Schumer, D-N.Y., today announced the decision in front of Time Warner Cable’s local headquarters on Mt. Hope Avenue.

The moral of the story? Get a bunch of people together, start a campaign drive, call your congressman and write letters to the FCC and you just might get those spineless jerks on Mahogany Row to back off implementing caps in your area. It is the only conclusion that can be drawn from this.

Linky.

Emboldened by no resistance from regulators in it s Beaumont, TX test, Time Warner is readying new caps and overage charges for more of its broadband customers. While the market is starved for real competition, the cable guy will continue to ration while charging more at will. The new caps will come in tiers.

They will create a “super tier” that offers up to 100 GB before overage charges apply, but they haven’t yet decided how much it will cost. Also, Time Warner will monitor downloads starting in April but the actual metered billing in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, will begin in September. Three months before they plan to charge folks under the tiered plans, they will notify customers, offer them a meter and let them see how the metered billing will affect them. Read the official statement.

Time Warner is joining other ISPs in trying to squeeze more money from their broadband pipes, generally in the name of needing to upgrade the network or to stop bandwidth hogs.  But in truth, caps and tiered plans are about limiting competition (especially from online video), and squeezing customers, because a lack of competition means they can. Here’s the money quote from the BW article:

“We need a viable model to be able to support the infrastructure of the broadband business,” Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt says in an interview. “We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension.”  (Giga Om)

Now, by the virtue of maximum speeds the service was already sold in tiers with limits. In effect TW is adding a new tier of charges. Perhaps they should open a customers pipe to a maximum speed and just charge by the bit if usage is really the issue. The reality is that it’s not. Infrastructure keeps getting cheaper and needs ever fewer people to keep it working. New subscriber growth is slow, and this is a predictable reaction by the cable guy to grow revenue. When there’s no real competion it’s easier to raise prices instead of creating new value or winning new customers with better service.

Yes Sir! Time Warner is really thinking ahead. Over in the SouthEast Corridor of Texas TWC has instituted a 5Gb cap as their base level service. Years ago 5Gb would have been considered ample. Now? I can daily reach 5Gb of use just doing daily testing and evaluation of packages doing the downloads. –

Time Warner Cable is running a pilot program in Texas where they’re metering your bandwidth usage and charging extra if you exceed your monthly allotment. This also gives them the opportunity to create a tiered system where you pay more for more bandwidth. Richard is a TWC Texas customer, and his story is a good example of how things work in a tiered, metered system like this. The bottom line: if metered broadband comes to your area, get used to paying extra to take advantage of things like Hulu (which is free) or Netflix video streaming (which you already pay for).

If this is the world we are going to see in the future then we really need to rethink the government spending all that money as part of a stimulus.

Linky.

Time Warner and Charter are preparing to expand their cap based services to other cities. Time Warners plan is especially ornerous with the top cap being only 40Gb. They are not fooling anyone. Caps are just a disguise for metered revenue stream based pricing model. TWC even more so at such a low bandwidth threshold. –

Yesterday, Time Warner trumpeted plans to expand its “consumption based billing” brainstorm beyond the tiny Gulf Coast town of Beaumont, Texas and into a few other unnamed cities. And just hours later, fellow cableco Charter Communications confirmed it will soon put caps on users across the country.

Since June, Time Warner Cable has forced Beaumont customers to choose from one of four monthly caps: 5, 10, 20, or 40GB. Pricing plans range from $29.95 a month for a 5GB cap and 768Kbps download speeds to $54.90 for a 40GB cap at 15Mbps. And if you exceed your cap, you’re charged an extra $1 per gigabyte.

Time Warner announced the expansion of this “trial” during yesterday’s quarterly earnings call, but it did not specify which cities would be affected.

Meanwhile, Charter has told Broadband Reports that it will soon update its Acceptable Use Policy to include “residential bandwidth consumption thresholds” - aka caps. Users whose service runs at speeds of 15Mbps or slower will be capped at 100GB a month, and those at 15 to 25Mbps will be capped at 250GB.

TWC I think has totally lost their minds. Their cap puts them in the same boat as many a WISP in their operation. Fact a WISP would give me similar bandwidth capability and I would not have to worry about metered pricing beyond that.

Linky.

To the tune of a $25bn write down. funny thing is it all over the place. Loss of revenue for Lehman Bros dying and hence not paying in their leases. (They share a bldg TWC owned.) Legal losses in the multiple hundreds of millions from its Turner unit. And a big $15bn loss on its TWC cable operations. The troll is afoot and the bleeding has not been stemmed yet –

Naturally, it blames the Meltdown. “The economic environment has proved somewhat more challenging than the company previously expected, particularly for the advertising businesses at the AOL and publishing segments,” Time Warner said in a statement released this morning.

But that’s just a start. The company was directly affected by the demise of Meltdown poster child Lehman Brothers. The bankrupt investment bank was a tenant in Time Warner’s flagship New York office building. After a restructured lease, the company will stomach another loss of between $50 million and $60 million.

It also expects roughly $40 million in credit losses from bankrupt customers like Circuit City. And there’s that recent court judgment against the company’s Turner Broadcasting System (related to the sale of its winter sports teams), which could result in a $281 million charge.

For 2007, Time Warner - which owns CNN, Time magazine, and the Warner Brothers film studio as well as AOL, Time Warner Cable, and the Turner Broadcasting Company - reported an operating profit of $8.9bn. It last reported a year-end loss in 2002, when the bottom fell out of AOL.

This time around, Time Warner Cable is the biggest disappointment, representing $15bn of the company’s $25bn write-down.

You have to ask yourself, when a company gets to a certain size does it lose it’s mind? Or is it that the professional management types are just not worth the money they are paid??

Linky.

I’ve often postulated here that the cable guys are feeling threatened by streaming video. New web only original programming is becoming more common, and is taking some viewers from their closed systems. They’ve been heavy handed about “managing bittorrent” claiming it consumed 80% of its capacity to deliver illicit content. Not only is the claimed 80% out of line with reality, but the fact is legitimate programming from services like Revision3 and Joost are delivered via bittorrent and traffic is growing as more viewers discover them. In the last year, the cable guys’ premium content providers have begun to offer ad supported streams free to anyone with broadband access. People like consuming content on demand as opposed to on a schedule, prior success of the VCR and Tivo proves it. With greater convenience, more programming will eventually find a larger audience. With content going directly from producer to consume , the long term viability of the closed content distribution system model is not viable. In other words, the cable guys’ 150 channel set top box business will be on life support soon.

Naturally, the cable guys are not going down without a fight. While publicly, they have stated network management and tiered service levels are needed to evenly distribute scarce resources, it’s only a small part of the bigger picture:

….given the fact that the company (Comcast) previously promised that it only managed traffic during times of congestion, only to have those claims disproved, we might have to take the term “network congestion” with a grain of salt. Also unsettling is the fact that the company hasn’t revealed any further details about what constitutes a high-bandwidth user and how limited those users will be during times of congestion. If Comcast chooses to roll out this type of technology, it will have to be upfront with its customers about what the exact limitations are. And given the company’s secrecy throughout the Bit Torrent fiasco, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that kind of transparency.

So, we’ve established that while technically “neutral,” both Time Warner and Comcast’s new network management techniques are not without their share of issues. There is still, however, one very large elephant left in the room: the fact that both Comcast and Time Warner are cable television providers. And as we all know, despite the industry’s constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video. Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they’re effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it. But is it anti-neutral? Technically, no. While Time Warner and Comcast both deliver video and Internet service via the same pipe, the two services live on separate networks. (Public Knowledge)

I am sorry to repeat myself so often, but if the cable guys had any real competition, none of this would be happening.