Title: TV Cabo

Date: Second week of July 2000

Story:

TV Cabo is a portuguese TV and Internet provider, over cable and satellite. They are known for their terrible customer support and for an investment politics that could NOT be more easy-money oriented.

Having Portugal Telecom as a sister company, TV Cabo only moves when it is convenient for both parties; so, for example, when it comes to Internet access over cable, they usually sell a solution that allows you to download stuff via their network, but requires you to upload, via a regular phone line, meaning you'll be billed for using two services.

By the end of 1999, TV Cabo's Internet service provider - NetCabo - only had products with no surfing limits, so they weren't interested in going bi-directional, in order to profit from the simulatenous use of the aforementioned services. However, there was so much international data travelling across their network, that they soon concluded that the "no limits" products had to be killed.

In 2000, they killed the "no traffic limits" products, and - guess what - the install dates for the bi-directional sub-networks, were revised and much antecipated. For example, my zone was previewed to have full cable coverage by the end of 2000 (31 December 2000!), but the service arrived this month, after digging some holes on the road.

Why the antecipation? Easy! A product with limits and requiring a phone line is too much of a robbery, so they disguised it on a product with limits, but no phone line, and a high premium for every byte that goes over the 1 GB / month.

The funny bit is that by this time in 1999, they were stating that "having bi-directional service everywhere was too expensive and technically hard to accomplish". Check the pictures to observe how hard :)

The situation has many legal issues; unfortunately no one is checking on sharks like TV Cabo, and these issues don't develop to serious problems. I am writing about pré 2000 customers having signed contracts that do NOT state the existence of the now imposed traffic limits...

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