Universal Service Home Page The goals of Universal Service, as mandated by the 1996 Act, are to promote the availability of quality services at just, reasonable, and affordable rates; increase access to advanced telecommunications services throughout the Nation; advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas. In addition, the 1996 Act states that all providers of telecommunications services should contribute to Federal universal service in some equitable and nondiscriminatory manner; there should be specific, predictable, and sufficient Federal and State mechanisms to preserve and advance universal service; all schools, classrooms, health care providers, and libraries should, generally, have access to advanced telecommunications services; and finally, that the Federal-State Joint Board and the Commission should determine those other principles that, consistent with the 1996 Act, are necessary to protect the public interest.
Every month, Time Warner Cable has a separate line item on my bill for this item. But apparently, this federal initiative is not working as I’m still a TWC customer with no real option on providers. I still have sub-par service, expensive costs for lower medium bandwidth at best. Since TWC implemented their broad net of reigning in costs by implementing QoS, legitimate services are now affected. I use mozy.com for online backups and I have the turbo charged RoadRuner which is supposed to give me ~460kb/s upload speed which I was receiving when my MacBook Pro backs up. But since the service implementation or "service degradation", my maximum up upload speed is now just ~60kb/s or less. That’s almost 1/8th the bandwidth that I used to have. So what are my options? Realistically…none….
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