Tag Archives: customer

Time Warner says you don’t want high speed Internet

After all, if all the people had fast Internet connections, they might provide their own content, ranging from local sports vidoed by fans to parties to local government meetings, and then they wouldn’t be “consumers”, would they? The people would be participants in their own community, ranging from local to state, national, and global. And the big cablecos and telcos wouldn’t be able to monopolize access to information, which is their cash cow now. It will take more than wishful thinking to get TW to help with affordable local high speed Internet access.

Klint Finley wrote for Wired 28 February 2013, You Don’t Want Super-High-Speed Internet, Says Time Warner Cable,

Time Warner Cable chief technology officer Irene Esteves says you don’t really want the gigabit speeds offered by Google Fiber and other high speed providers.

On Wednesday, at a conference in San Francisco, Esteves downplayed the importance of offering a service to compete with Google, as reported by The Verge. “We’re in the business of delivering what consumers want, and to stay a little ahead of what we think they will want…. We just don’t see the need of delivering that to consumers,” she said, referring to gigabit-speed internet connections.

Esteves thinks only business customers will need that kind of bandwidth, and she noted that Time Warner already offers gigabit connections for businesses in some markets.

Right, “in some markets”. How many of you around here can get a gigabit Internet connection? And

Time Warner Cable says Irene Esteves is the Chief Financial Officer, which makes more sense than a Chief Technical Officer spreading this doubtfire.

No, it’s TW CTO Michael LaJoie‘s job to argue against net neutrality. Paul Rodriguez wrote for cabletechtalk at some unknown date, Cable’s internal and external technology picture,

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Private prison is like biomass —Ashley Paulk

A deep silence came from the Industrial Authority yesterday, but GDOC board member Ashley Paulk compared the private prison to the biomass project.

I asked Lowndes County Commission Chair and Georgia Department of Corrections (GDOC) board member Ashley Paulk if he had heard whether the private prison contract had been extended past yesterday’s deadline. He had not. However, he did volunteer that he had asked the GDOC board whether they had had any discussion about such a prison and they had not. Further, GDOC just last year approved a CCA prison in Jenkins County, Georgia, so why would another one be built here? Prison populations are decreasing in Georgia, Paulk said. He even said, “It’s like the biomass situation,” in that there’s no business model. It was Ashley Paulk who signaled the end of the biomass project. And he already signaled the end of the private prison project on the front page of the VDT and he told Eames Yates of WCTV 29 Feb 2012,

Until you have a customer, you won’t see a prison, and they don’t have a customer.
He said several times yesterday he did not expect the private prison to be built. And he went beyond what he had said before in explicitly likening the private prison project to the biomass project.

After last Thursday’s Valdosta City Council meeting, two different Valdosta City Council members and Mayor John Gayle all told me they had talked to various people and they didn’t expect CCA’s private prison to be built.

I hope they’re all correct about that.

But we all still wait for the Industrial Authority to tell us. They’re missing a huge potential positive PR opportunity by not holding a big press conference and taking credit for ending the private prison. They still could do that this morning.

Or they could keep claiming that community activism has no effect, even though it is activism that got both of those projects in the news and got people like Ashley Paulk to speak out. Maybe the Industrial Authority likes people to laugh at them. Me, I’d prefer an Industrial Authority that stood up for the people of this community.

-jsq