Time Warner Cable first took heat recently by announcing a new $4 modem rental fee, then they took heat for being unprepared to support users looking to swap out their rented modems for customer purchased gear. As an interesting addendum the New York Times noticed that if you have Time Warner Cable digital voice service you'll still need a second modem from Time Warner even if you bought one for broadband, though you'll pay no fee for it. That means running two modems at once, since no commercially available modems support Time Warner Cable's digital voice service.

The Times amusingly tries to get the operator to explain why one set of users needs to pay a fee while the other doesn't, which would seemingly run contrary to last week's claim that the fee's necessary to cover the cost of repairing and replacing cable modems over time.

The company struggles to bridge the logic because, as we all know, existing prices already more than covered the cost of relatively-inexpensive hardware and this is just a price hike. But since you can't just be honest with your customers about it, the Times gets a string of nonsense:

quote:

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Justin Venech, director of public relations at Time Warner Cable, acknowledged the disconnect between the company’s explanation of the fee and the inconsistent billing methods. When asked whether the decision to charge a rental fee for Internet use but not voice service contradicted his previous statement about the reason for the fee, Mr. Venech responded, “It does. But the way we have decided to charge this fee is, we’re charging it for use of the Internet portion of the modem.”

“It’s a business decision,” Mr. Venech added. “It’s a matter of starting to treat this equipment the same way we treat our other equipment.”

But why treat the same equipment differently for voice and Internet customers? Mr. Venech repeated that the company’s business decision was to charge for using the modem for the Internet, not voice.

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In other words, Venech couldn't really justify the disconnect, but gave a half-hearted attempt by claiming the company is billing differently for different modems "to treat this equipment the same way we treat our other equipment." Make sense? Time Warner Cable probably just wishes they'd been charging this fee all along (like AT&T U-Verse or Comcast) so they didn't have to suddenly justify a rate hike on already expensive service using total nonsense.