Every once in a while in this industry you come across a story about one of the big cable companies that just makes you shake your head. There is such a story right now where the New York State attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has sued Charter on behalf of its 2.5 million data customers in the state.

The issue goes back to 2012 when the company was still Time Warner Cable. At that time there were a lot of complaints from customers saying that they were not getting the data speeds they were paying for. In 2013, in association with Internet speed tests conducted by the FCC, it was determined that Time Warner had widely deployed cable modems and WiFi routers that were not capable of delivering speeds of even 20 Mbps.

In July of 2013, Time Warner promised the FCC that it would replace and upgrade all customer modems in the state and would also make other system upgrades that would increase speeds, such as reducing the size of the neighborhood nodes.

Here is where the puzzling part comes in. The FCC never retested, which is normal, and instead relied on Time Warner’s promise that they would fix the problems and increase speeds. But it turns out that Time Warner didn’t make any of the promised upgrades. They didn’t replace customer modems. In fact, they routinely recycled the bad modems back into service when they were returned by customers.

Since then Time Warner (and now Charter) has advertised even faster speeds, yet none of the customer modems are able to deliver the speeds that the company is selling. The lawsuit says there are now over 250,000 customers who are paying for speeds between 200 Mbps and 300 Mbps, but who still have the old inadequate modems that get speeds under 20 Mbps.

To add insult to injury, the company has been charging $10 per month to customers to lease the old modems (at least that’s the current lease rate). Considering that these modems don’t generally cost the cable company even $100, these customers have paid enough to have replaced these modems multiple times since the problem was first caught.

Time Warner is also being accused in the lawsuit of manipulating the FCC speed tests in 2013 to show faster results. They did this by taking speed tests at times when there was not much demand on their networks, like the middle of the night.

Finally, the company has been accused of purposefully providing inadequate backbone so that Internet traffic was delayed and slowed down getting onto their network. This means they did not provide big enough data connections to the outside world for things like Netflix or for general Internet access.

Here is the lawsuit filing. It’s an interesting and easy read and is not overly technical. I know that big companies hate to spend capital dollars that they don’t think are necessary. But in this case they got caught providing old and inadequate modems five years ago and since then did nothing to fix the problems. We know from experience that even when companies are caught like this that they don’t usually undertake a crash repair program. But if Time Warner would have implemented some reasonable plan to upgrade the network and to replace the bad modems over time there probably would not be this big lawsuit today. What’s puzzling is how the whole management chain at the company decided to do nothing. They denied a direct FCC order and also continued to get piles of customer complaints.

The lawsuit does not name a specific amount of damages, but one has to think it’s going to be a big number. The lawsuit asks for ‘injunctive and equitable relief’, meaning the return of customer payments, as well as civil penalties, meaning extra damages. If Charter has the same kind of customer penetrations we see elsewhere with cable companies – 60% to 70% of the market – it’s going to be interesting to see how they find a jury for this trial.