back to article US cable giant tries to wriggle out of 'crap ISP' legal battle now that net neutrality is dead

Charter still has to answer for selling New Yorkers short on their internet packages, a judge has decided, rejecting the cable giant's argument that the repeal of net neutrality rules in the US means the case is moot. Judge O. Peter Sherwood issued 26 pages of No [PDF] in a lawsuit that has been running for over a year. …

  1. kain preacher

    bout time some did some thing to these vultures . Multi million dollar fines is the only thing that will fix this. But I would love to see fraud charges brought against management as they sought to use fraud to make money .

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Unhappy

      "Charter knew that it wasn't able to offer the speeds it advertised,"

      Note that word.

      Knew.

      Not (for example) "may have difficulty meeting" or " will be challenging without investment" but knew they could not meet their claims and instead of investing to better meet them actively hid the fact and engaged in deceptive behavior (and investment) to do so.

      That's what makes it fraud.

    2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      fraud charges brought against management

      Not going to happen - after all, it was the hoi polloi that werre affected, not the 1%..

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

    Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

    It looks like the NY state attorney is trying to clock as many pro-consumer points as he possibly can. While I would love to give him the benefit of the doubt, I suspect he is simply gunning for a higher office.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

      He may indeed have high aspirations but in the mean time, more power to him. I do wish the other AG's in rest of the States would follow his lead for consumers.

      1. Agamemnon

        Re: Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

        Bob Ferguson in Washington State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ferguson_(politician)

        This guy's a machine: Value Village, Motel 6, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, Monsanto, Comcast.

        It's very strange, watching someone actually do their Jobs.

    2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

      Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

      Or, the answer could be more simple - he's trying to actually do his job.

      Occams Razor and all that..

      1. jelabarre59

        Re: Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

        Or, the answer could be more simple - he's trying to actually do his job.

        From a New York politician? Never gonna happen.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is Eric gunning for Congress or aiming higher?

      I hope so.

  3. Mark 85

    I'm surprised more states haven't jumped on this. We're on Charter/Spectrum here (west coast) and it is crap. Sadly, our only other choice is DSL and it's even worse by a large margin.

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge

      "We're on Charter/Spectrum here (west coast) and it is crap. "

      Good question.

      Was this a "New York" thing, or was it a company wide policy?

      And of course does your state AG have the balls to take them on, or are they more "business friendly" ?

    2. Killfalcon Silver badge

      I think the AG intentionally running parallel, democratised speed tests to get around any intentional fiddling by Charter may be a significant factor. That takes resources, and certainty that not only are they *bad providers* they're actively trying to fiddle the tests, VW style.

  4. Nate Amsden

    When is the bandwidth good enough?

    Pretty much all consumer broadband ISPs in the U.S. anyway advertise speeds "up to". These aren't committed rate lines(even if they were, there are still caveats). So I am curious if there is any guidelines as to what the speed must actually be, or what the over commit rate is allowed on a given pipe ? (as far as I know there is no such rules or guidelines).

    Certainly it's reasonable to expect during peak times at a minimum you probably won't reach your peak speeds if there are a lot of other active users on the same network segment. But dragging everyone's average speed to below say 30-40% of their peak speed isn't acceptable either.

    So what is a reasonable level of over subscription for consumer broadband?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: When is the bandwidth good enough?

      Of course, but there's other tomfoolery going on here as well.

      For one, they were aware of customers being oversold plans that they didn't have the kit to support. I'm guessing the 200-300 plans mentioned, but routers that only ran at 100. Looking at my current router, there's nothing on it that indicates its speed, but it's blindingly obvious to a techie it isn't going to hit 200mbps.. there are only 4 pins in the ethernet port!

      Would Joe Public realise this? Unlikely. Doesn't bother me - my VDSL would max out at 80mbps - but if I'd been encouraged to take up 200mbps service, and had been paying for it, I'd be pretty miffed to say the least!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: When is the bandwidth good enough?

      The issue is not with oversubscription.

      The issue is with elements in their network being incapable of supporting the headline rate. That is fraud. Plain and simple.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: When is the bandwidth good enough?

      Definitely not when the provider describes their actions as putting lipstick on a pig in internal memos.

    4. Just Enough

      Re: When is the bandwidth good enough?

      If I know you are paying so much for "up to" speed X, and then sell you a plan for twice your current price for "up to" speed X*2, when I know for a fact that you cannot possibly get speed X*2, and only occasionally even get speed X, then that's fraud. Plain and simple.

      Worrying about the "up to"s is beside the point.

  5. Baldrickk

    Oh no FCC...

    Of course cable companies can be trusted to be play nice if you give them free reign...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    When I did tech support at ATT unwritten rule was any thing below 80% is considered a fault. any thing below 70% was grounds to get out of your contract.

  7. elDog

    The comm industry learned from the auto industry learned from the banking ...

    Dieselgate for the Comcasts/Charters/etc. Improve it when you're being tested, screw the customer at all other times.

  8. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

    Please Screw Virgin Media Too

    They're no better than 'Charter' in my opinion, over selling services that they know their network can't meet, over subscribing users in the same areas causing massive contention ratios and ridiculously low speeds. Blocking and throttling encrypted traffic such as VPN's and so forth, prioritising traffic to sites like speedtest, but not the Netflix fast.com so you get wildly different results done just seconds apart... and then trying to upsell you to a faster package.

    I signed up to the last April.. I've been arguing with them since Nov about the speed issue that went to utter shit... and in some cases the 100mb service was registering just 68kbps... But rarely ever gets above 20Mbps and it crawls to a halt if you attempt to use a VPN at all (required for a lot of work from home types like me).

    Contract is up in April, and I'm trying to get out of it early due to the shite service.

    They need taking to task and fining heavily to such a degree that it makes it far to costly to do ever again... Because that's the only thing these 'screw the customer' companies understand... Bring them to their knees financially, revoke their licences. Force them to be honest or force them out of business.

    1. travellingman_us

      Re: Please Screw Virgin Media Too

      yep -- packet shaping/QoS is a huge issue.

      I use VPN for work, and also for some personal things (such as region shifting so I can see my LEGAL and PAID FOR subscriptions to european media services)

      I'm supposedly on a 200Mbps plan (COMCAST) that speedtest reports as between 120 & 250Mbps (ok

      so far -- I recognize that 60% is low, but it's mostly in the 80%+ range).

      When I use VPN, that same speedtest returns rates around 10%-20% of the non VPN traffic. I've run speedtest on two computers simultaneously -- one VPN, one not. the difference is stark.

      My personal VPN provider is not that slow.

      My CORPORATE VPN provider should impose, at worst, a 50% slowdown.

      But Comcast denies their packet shaping is at fault and simply shift blame to my VPN providers.

      As consumers we can do nothing (our choices are hugely limited). We need our AGs to act, so kudos to Schneiderman and his team for pursuing this to aggresively

  9. Johnny Canuck

    Please Screw Virgin Media Too

    "Bring them to their knees financially, revoke their licences. Force them to be honest or force them out of business."

    You forgot to add "and jail the board members too."

  10. Kev99 Silver badge

    Oh, how I wish someone would hang Frontier for now claiming 6Mbps DSL when you're lucky to get 2.5Mbps. And that's only at 3 AM in the middle of a very dry August.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Oh, how I wish someone would hang Frontier for now claiming 6Mbps DSL when you're lucky to get 2.5Mbps. And that's only at 3 AM in the middle of a very dry August."

      You are going to have to get in line behind their creditors, as Frontier has a massive debt and steadily declining revenue. The debt is described by some as "insurmountable": https://seekingalpha.com/article/4088846-frontier-communications-uninvestable

      And you'd have to get in line behind the Minnesota AG: http://kstp.com/business/minnesota-public-utilities-commission-asks-attorney-general-and-commerce-department-investigate-frontier-communications/4793980/

      You'd better finding a new ISP ASAP.

    2. kain preacher

      What no burnt offerings , no flaying your self with cat5 cable ?

  11. mtnrbq78
    Joke

    --> dry <-- August

    Ahhhh, there's your problem '... middle of a very DRY August' - check out https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/13/adsl_signal_passed_through_wet_string/

  12. Mephistro

    "... that the alleged activity happened before it took over Spectrum/Time Warner Cable."

    Even if this statement is true I was under the impression that when a company is sold, the buyer doesn't get only the assets, but also the liabilities. Was I being too optimistic?

    1. kain preacher

      Nope in the US you can buy just the assets. Some is getting screwed. Technically what happens is two companies are formed .One has the assets and the other buys the debt. The company with the assets is sold the other goes under.

    2. Killfalcon Silver badge

      They're saying that less to escape the trial, but to negate some of the PR hit. "Under New Management" signs are popular for a reason!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    wrong pig analogy

    "A related presentation acknowledged that this approach was similar to 'putting lipstick on a pig.'"

    Umm, no cable dudes. The correct analogy would be "selling a pig in a poke". You didn't dress up a pig, you demonstrated one product and then delivered another.

    Been going on forever in the industry. We had a local cable ISP many moons ago that was one of the bleeding edge cable ISPs. Their lead cheerleader/salesman talked up how you could get something like 50 Meg service from them (keep in mind, this was back when 38.8K dialup was typical, and 56K was just showing up). We toured their headend during an open house event and noticed that their cable head end box had a single 10 Base-T Ethernet port to connect to the network.

    Yes... 10 base-T, as in just a step better than 10 Base-2 coax . I think it even went into an Ethernet hub, not a switch.

  14. Omarosa
    Alert

    AT&T is much worse than Charter and the rest

    Two years ago I had AT&T was my ISP to whom I paid monthly for 16 Mb/s (I believe). At peak business hours, I was getting 3 - 4 Mb/s, rarely I would get more than 10 Mb/s internet speed. To make a long story short, AT&T was throttling data speeds. When I complained to the Ohio Attorney General about being ripped off by AT&T, AT&T told the Attorney General's office that "electrical interference" is what causing my data speed to slow down, which was hogwash. The current article - had it been published a few years ago - would have helped me prove the Ohio Attorney General that indeed I was right, AT&T was cheating its customers deliberately.

  15. Milton

    Moral difference?

    And the moral difference between that parasite of a Charter executive and the scumbag with a cosh in the alley?

    Both are sick examples of the human species we could so easily do without.

    One wears a suit.

  16. rh587

    Recruited Sam Knows or Games Sam Knows

    The ISP even recruited the same company the FCC hires to test internet speeds – Sam Knows – to build out a parallel testing system with the same white boxes ... It had 1,200 such boxes distributed across its network and, according to the lawsuit, specifically manipulated its systems to give faster speeds to testers using readings from these devices.

    ...

    "We recommend increasing over-provisioning our modem speeds to around 20 per cent to drive our Sam Knows scores > 100 per cent and then to market that we deliver more than promised speeds," one executive wrote in an email.

    ...

    Charter also identified FCC testers, made sure they had the most up-to-date modems, and told its call-center staff to give them the "VIP treatment."

    I'm unclear, is El Reg stating that Sam Knows were complicit in the fraud - i.e. selling ratings - or that Charter gamed the Sam Knows system by identifying Sam Knows white boxes/testers and giving preferential service to those users?

    1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Recruited Sam Knows or Games Sam Knows

      Charter gamed the Sam Knows system by identifying Sam Knows white boxes/testers and giving preferential service to those users

      This. Sounds amazingly like what the car industry (and the computer games industry) did - detect when performance is being tested and slant the results.

    2. k317
      Mushroom

      Re: Recruited Sam Knows or Games Sam Knows

      Would be nice if said executive could also be charged with fraud.

      Hell, just charge the whole company with racketeering.

    3. David Austin

      Re: Recruited Sam Knows or Games Sam Knows

      Were Sam Knows complicate or unknowingly duped?

      Really hoping the latter. Have a lot of trust and respect for those guys...

  17. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Happy

    Sam Knows

    Get one if you can. Your service will improve.

    Mine went from sub-MBps at School home time to >60Mbps on VM after a week or two!

  18. Cubical Drone

    Judge: "includes no language purporting to create, extend or modify the preemptive reach of the transparency rule."

    Ajit Pai: "Hold my beer."

  19. Nimby
    Trollface

    putting lipstick on a pig

    That is such a derogatory phrase! I cannot believe that Vulture Central would even dare to repeat it! It should definitely be changed to "putting unrequired but socially expected (sigh) visual enhancement on a pig." Because it is important these days to be politically correct.

  20. IGnatius T Foobar
    FAIL

    Regulation FAIL

    Attempts to regulate connectivity are always doomed to fail because telecom technology moves faster than the regulatory process. This problem could have been solved (in the US) in 1984 with the divestiture of AT&T, if they had done it correctly. They could still do it now if they wanted to.

    Made simply:

    The only regulation that is needed, is one barring providers of last-mile fiber/copper from providers of *any* service -- voice, data, video, or whatever -- on the network. Then there's no such thing as local or long distance, voice or data, nothing of that sort. Anyone who wants to provide network services simply obtains the last mile of copper or fiber from one of the two or three competing last-mile providers in each service area.

    At that point there's no need to police the network operators, since the network operators won't have monopoly lock-in power. Any operator who tries to be "non-neutral" will simply be rejected in the marketplace.

    1. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

      Re: Regulation FAIL

      Attempts to regulate connectivity are always doomed to fail because telecom technology moves faster than the regulatory process

      Except in this case, we see regulation happening without needing rules updated for the latest tech. Specifically, this case isn't about regulating what the provider provides, but simply regulating that they supply what the customer bought.

      Ie, much the same as prosecuting a petrol station owner for tweaking the metering screw to over-report what's been delivered - but resetting it to be correct whenever anyone comes to check. Went to a talk a few years ago by a local Trading Standards officer - he said the very first thing they look at when checking a petrol station is to make sure their seals are still intact.

      if the political will is there, a lot of "high tech" issues can be dealt without "high tech" laws.

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