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By going over a long thread on Apple.com’s support forums users having slow connection speeds with the iTunes Music Store have discovered that they all live in the same general area and all have Time Warner’s Roadrunner broadband service.

According to the forums the problems started about January 31st with slow downloads of music and podcasts.  Some on the forum vented their frustration at Apple for slowing down the connection speed.  It was then realized that connection speeds on other online services (web browsing, e-mail, etc) were running just fine.

It wasn’t until later on in the discussion that people started putting down the area where they live.  It first started with “Texas” then “Roadrunner”, then towns started pouring in: Plano, Arlington, Austin, and others.  In the past few months other companies like Comcast have been accused of capping off bandwidth but not for just one service.

Some customers were able to unblock port addresses on their computer.  By turning off blocking of the data going into and out of the ports some users expressed better download speeds.  What about people who don’t know how to do this and just want to watch their iTunes movies?

Since Apple announced video rentals over iTunes last month much has been discussed online of how the competitors will react.  Is this just Time Warner’s answer for pulling people away from Pay-Per-View movies?  Is TWC in bed with the RIAA?  Or are people just over-reacting to a thread on an online forum?  Time will tell…still downloading, please wait.

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