Bad News: We Can’t Get Rid of Time Warner Cable Just Yet
- Marvel Comics, “Spitfire” New Invaders #5
- Time Warner Cable is the vampire baby here. Drinking the blood of BROOKLYN.
Does anyone actually like Time Warner Cable? Is anyone really happy with this company or do we all just deal with life under the looming shadow of the TWC monopoly, knowing that we’re getting screwed but also knowing that if we want to continue hosting our Sunday night “Homeland” celebrations then we just need to suck it up and continue to fork over tons of money every month for sub-par WiFi speeds, not enough DVR space, and weird action-vocal synch issues on most of our favorite shows? I don’t think I need to answer that.
But, wait! Is there hope on the horizon? Is Google coming to rescue all of us who are under the thumb of our evil TWC overlords?
No. No, Google is not coming to do anything for any of us except go through all of our emails and search history in an effort to profit from all the times that we mention frozen yogurt in Gchats, which is not that much, but still. Somehow this translates into ads for real estate in San Jose. It’s strange.
Gothamist got our hopes up though—albeit briefly—that the new Google cable/Internet service might swoop into New York and save the day. Google—which, in this case, would be David to Time Warner’s Goliath, an analogy that is, I’m aware, HIGHLY FLAWED—has started to roll out its new cable/Internet hybrid in Kansas City, Missouri, of all places, in what Google calls “Fiberhoods”. But don’t let that stupid name turn you off from the service! Gothamist reports that Google’s new service “is fast: 1 gigabit per second, which is around 100 times faster than Time Warner’s wares.” And, also, that it “will cost $70/month, while the cable TV service, which has a laudable amount of channels and add-ons, and gives customers a DVR with a ton of space and an Android tablet for a remote, costs $120/month.”
An Android remote? That sounds so much better than my Time Warner-issued remote that requires me to stand approximately ten inches away from my cable box or else it doesn’t work. But I am going to have to wait a while, perhaps a very long while, for a new remote, because Google isn’t coming to New York anytime in the near future. The Google Fiber spokeswoman, Jenna Wandres, told Gothamist, “We’re really busy building 180 fiberhoods in Kansas City. We’d love to consider other communities in the future, but right now our focus is building out more areas in Kansas City.”
Kansas City: 1; Brooklyn: 0
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen
