Connection speeds for New York City Time Warner Cable subscribers are abysmal, according to the state’s attorney general. And his office wants something done about it. A top aide sent a letter to Tom Rutledge, president and CEO of Charter Communications, requesting that he reform Time Warner Cable’s business practices in the city.

“You promised to ‘redefine what a cable company can be,’” Tim Wu, senior enforcement counsel and special advisor to New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, wrote in a letter to the company this week. “We hope your company will take the opportunity to work with NYAG to clean up Time Warner Cable’s act and deliver the quality Internet service New Yorkers deserve and have long been promised.”

Degraded Broadband Performance

Charter Communications recently acquired both Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks for a combined $65.5 billion, making the new entity the second-largest broadband provider in the country. Following the acquisition, Charter said that Time Warner Cable would be rebranded as “Spectrum”.

“We write now to underscore our hope and expectation that this announcement reflects more than mere branding -- and signals your intent to substantially improve the reliability, performance, and speed of the Internet delivered to customers, as well as how Time Warner Cable markets its services,” Wu said.

The state’s attorney general’s office began an investigation into Time Warner Cable several months ago, focusing on the company’s apparent inability to deliver connection speeds consistent with what it had marketed to New York customers.

Wu accused the company of failing to take adequate steps to ensure it could meet the demand for Internet connection speeds, with data from content suppliers becoming so congested at peak times that large amounts of data were either lost or discarded.

“This translates into degraded performance for customers, including those using popular on-demand video services, like Netflix -- despite specific promises from Time Warner Cable that they could stream video content reliably and with ‘no buffering,’” Wu said in his letter.

'Abysmal' Results

Connection problems for Time Warner Cable customers have been particularly bad during peak hours, with streaming video freezing, Web sites taking forever to load, and gaming networks becoming non-responsive, Wu claimed in his letter.

Meanwhile, the company appears to be advertising that its Wi-Fi technology is capable of almost impossibly high levels of performance, although it is providing customers with hardware that is incapable of handling the higher bandwidth speeds that it has advertised.

The attorney general’s office also recently asked customers to test their connection speeds and submit their results. According to Wu’s letter, the results from Time Warner Cable clients were “abysmal.”

“Not only did Time Warner Cable fail to achieve the speeds its customers were promised and paid for (which Time Warner Cable blamed on the testing method), it generally performed worse in this regard than other New York broadband providers,” Wu wrote.

Wu said that he hoped Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable would provide an opportunity for new management to significantly improve the situation.

"What we have seen in our investigation so far suggests that Time Warner Cable has earned the miserable reputation it enjoys among consumers," Wu said. "Overcoming this history will require more than a name change; it will require a fundamental revolution in how Time Warner Cable does business and treats its customers."