Diana Thibodoux documents Comcast's shoddy work in her rented home.

The city of Savannah, Georgia is at the mercy of Comcast Cable, and city officials and local residents are fed up with high bills, the “don’t care” attitude from customer service, and cable and broadband that fails repeatedly, sometimes extending for weeks.

The fervor came to a head in December when city council had accumulated more than 150 complaints from local residents, deciding public hearings were warranted to deal with the city’s dominant cable company, Comcast.

“Comcast Destroyed My House”

Diana Thibodoux called Comcast to deal with a cable issue in her Ardsley Park home and never expected the service call would turn into an expensive nightmare.

Thibodoux says the Comcast technician who showed up decided on his own to rewire the house for cable and began drilling through brick and expensive plaster, stringing easily visible black coaxial cable along outside walls, inside baseboards and up over doors, all in plain sight.

“My house looks like a frat house,” Thibodoux complained to Comcast officials who were on hand to listen to customer complaints at the first of four public “town hall” meetings.

“I’ve never dealt with a company so incompetent,” another local resident said.

WTOC in Savannah shares the horror story of Diana Thibodoux, who says Comcast destroyed her house thanks to an overzealous, incompetent repairman.  (3 minutes)

At least everyone knows she has cable.

Residents used the public sessions to vent about long hold times which can extend to as much as two hours, poor quality service, and what city officials call the predictable outcome of a company that has “a stranglehold” over Savannah’s cable TV market.

“Comcast has treated Savannah like a third world country for years, delivering the best service to the wealthiest neighborhoods while leaving cable lines dangling on the ground in the areas they don’t care about,” said Stop the Cap! reader Jenny Child, who has kept a folder of papers documenting more than a dozen service calls regarding poor Internet service at her small business.

“If it rains in Savannah, and it does so a lot, our Internet goes out,” Child complains. “We have called and called but the technician shows up when it is bright and sunny and shrugs his shoulders and says there is no problem.”

Child and her two employees now handle their online business activities based on local weather forecasts.

“If the man says we’re getting rain today, we handle our Internet things real quick, because as sure as I’ll be in church on Sunday, we won’t have service after the first drops fall from the sky,” she says.

Child keeps calling Comcast when her Internet service drops out, but long hold times to reach the company’s outsourced-to-India customer service department have cut into her business.

“I can’t be sitting here on hold with Comcast for 45 minutes waiting for some representative’s nails to dry so she can pick up the phone and deal with customers,” Child complains. “It’s the biggest cable company ever, and don’t they own NBC? How many people do they have working there that they can’t answer the phone. Maybe everyone else is calling to complain too.”

Comcast’s Business Broadband Blockade Prompts Whining When Potential Competition Shows Up

Hargray is wiring downtown Savannah with fiber broadband to serve long-neglected area businesses

While fielding complaints from more than 50 local residents at a second meeting held to address complaints, Comcast executives questioned whether the city of Savannah was giving favorable treatment to Hargray, a new entrant pushing to bring 21st century broadband into the city of Savannah for businesses Comcast has refused to serve for years.

Comcast complained they didn’t mind competition, but wanted “a level playing field,” a statement that prompted an immediate and angry response from some members of the city council, who blasted the cable company for its attitude.

Aldermen Tony Thomas, John Hall, and Tom Bordeaux all noted Comcast has steadfastly refused to wire many downtown business buildings for cable broadband service, despite years of requests.  Comcast claimed the relatively low number of customers did not justify the cost to expand the service.

Alderman Tony Thomas has championed the ongoing dispute with Comcast Cable on behalf of local residents.

All three could not understand why Comcast had a sudden urgency to complain about unfair treatment when a competitor sought to provide the service they never did.

“If [Comcast] did not want to offer that service previously and someone else is coming in to provide the service, where is the sticking point?” Thomas said.

Bordeaux was more blunt in his remarks intended for Comcast.

“Tell them to sue us,” he said.

In contrast to service from AT&T and Comcast, which often markets 3-6Mbps broadband in Savannah, Hargray’s fiber broadband project will deliver speeds up to 1Gbps, first to business customers. But the company promises it is considering selling to residential customers as well.

Great Deals, But Only for “Selected Neighborhoods”

As Comcast’s bad press has become fodder for the nightly newscasts on several of the city’s television outlets, Comcast literally took to the streets to try and mitigate their public relations nightmare. In the process, they created a new one.

Councilman Tony Thomas is happy Comcast is approaching upset customers and offering them substantial discounts on their cable bill.  But he’s not happy Comcast is only extending those deals to certain customers, not all.

Thomas wants the deals offered to everyone, something that he says is not happening today.

(Courtesy: Ted Goff/newslettercartoons.com)

Andy Mackie, Comcast’s Vice President of Communications counters, “All they have to do is call 1-800-COMCAST and they will hear the same deals that the same people are getting from those reps going from door to door.”

“Comcast’s attitude in Savannah is see no evil, hear no evil,” says Jeff White, a Comcast customer who has watched the scuffle. “They don’t even admit there is a problem until it runs on the evening news and city council waves 150 complaints they are getting at the camera — the ones Comcast ignored.”

Mackie himself told WJCL-TV, which has covered the dispute with Comcast repeatedly, he was “unaware of the extent of the concerns that our Savannah customers had with us.”

Despite promises to make things right, Alderman Thomas says many complaints are still unresolved.

“We were told that all of those folks had been contacted and that their problems were being worked on. I have since found a few of these people [who] have had no contact whatsoever with Comcast,” Thomas told the TV station.

“Under no circumstances should City Council let the situation with Comcast get pushed under the rug,” one person wrote in the Vox Populi column in the Savannah Morning News. “We the people need help!”

No Help On the Way

Unfortunately for that reader, and other Savannah residents, an attempt by Savannah city officials to attract competing cable service has met with no success and no interest.  Cable operators almost never compete head to head, each respecting the service areas of fellow providers.  Hargray’s interest in Savannah is primarily serving business customers, and the option for municipal service may not be possible much longer if a bill supported by Comcast, SB 313, ever becomes law.

A compilation of news reports from WJCL, WSAV, and WTOC exploring Comcast’s performance problems in the city of Savannah, Georgia.  (15 minutes)

Georgia's broadband map shows just a smattering of 50Mbps broadband. That is half the speed required to attract new businesses, says the IEDC.

Suffering the Great Recession blues?  As communities continue to face the loss of manufacturing, heavy industry, and textile jobs to overseas outsourcing, local economic development specialists have discovered one of the most effective ways to lure new high-tech industry into areas hard-hit with job losses is the availability of cheap, plentiful, and fast broadband.

• 42% believe that that 1Gbps is the minimum speed needed to lure new businesses.
• 35% believe the minimum must be at least 100Mbps.
• Rural economic developers appear to be well ahead their urban counterparts in the area of planning. 58% of rural respondents either have broadband strategies and tactics worked into their economic development plans or are writing plans with these elements. Only 39% of urban respondents have done the same.
• 92% see no benefit from the FCC’s minimum broadband standard of 4Mbps, defined largely to suit telephone company DSL service common in rural areas.

Why are rural economies benefiting from better broadband planning? Because in the absence of commercial providers willing to provide the service, an increasing number of small towns and cities are building their own municipal networks to get the job done themselves.  Those networks are routinely superior to the facilities provided by most cable and phone companies serving less populated areas.

Community broadband is working in Wilson and Salisbury, N.C., where a transition from a textile/tobacco-based economy into higher-tech knowledge economy jobs required state-of-the-art broadband as a foundation.  Chattanooga, Tenn.-based EPB Fiber has already attracted dot.com giants like Amazon.com, creating hundreds of millions in local investment and thousands of new jobs.  Why Chattanooga?  Gigabit broadband for just a few hundred dollars a month is just one phone call away.

Relying on commercial providers to build 21st century broadband as a platform for economic transformation has delivered uneven results, especially outside of the largest cities. Large cities traditionally get most of the provider’s time, attention, and upgrades.  Smaller, more out of the way places often see little or nothing.

That is why this year’s latest push in Georgia and South Carolina to tie the hands of communities trying to remake themselves with modern broadband is so risky. While AT&T and the cable companies may position their argument as “protecting consumers,” in fact they are only protecting their own interests, even if it means the next Amazon.com distribution facility or Google data center finds a better home somewhere else.

Updated 3:55pm ET: We added a link to the full report, with appreciation to the author.

Sen. Chip Rogers' vision of rural Georgia's broadband future

Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) thinks he knows broadband.  He, along with several other Georgia legislators well-compensated by some of the state’s largest telecom interests, have defined appropriate Internet speeds at a remarkably low “200 kilobits per second,” less than four times faster than your old AOL dial-up Internet account.  The one you canceled in 1998.

With a background like that, it was no surprise last Thursday when technology leaders and city representatives from across Georgia testified before the Senate Regulated Industries & Utilities Committee, strongly objecting to Rogers’ SB 313, a bill bought and paid for by the very companies the legislation would effectively protect from competition.

Rogers argues he wants to “level the playing field” between private providers that currently dominate broadband service in Georgia, and the long-suffering communities in rural areas that have waited for faster Internet since the Clinton Administration.

City officials from Dalton, Newnan, Elberton, Thomasville, Cartersville, LaGrange, Hogansville and Monroe collectively noted the proposed legislation hardly represents a level playing field when it fully exempts the bill’s backers from any of its provisions.  Thomasville mayor Max Beverly noted the same cable and phone companies that fiercely fought for statewide cable franchises for themselves now want to impose rules that forbid publicly-run companies from operating outside of their respective city limits.

“We would have to turn off service to the county’s two largest employers,” Thomasville Mayor Max Beverly told the Senate panel. “There is no telling what that would do to jobs in our area.”

Those testifying uniformly noted they entered the broadband business because private providers refused to deliver adequate service in their areas.

What community broadband provides communities the big phone and cable companies don't.

“We started our cable system not on a whim but on a demand from our citizens to provide a higher level of service for cable TV and Internet,” said Newnan Mayor Keith Brady. “We got into the cable business originally to provide fiber optics and broadband because Charter Communications would simply not invest in our community.”

Now cable and phone companies across Georgia are supporting legislation that would make that community service next to impossible to provide.

“The most ironic part of legislation like SB 313 is that cable and phone companies only take an interest in rural broadband when they ghostwrite bills like this to stop other people from providing the service themselves,” said Stop the Cap! reader Max Curr. “When I lived in Hiltonia, some of these same companies laughed at me when I asked about broadband. It simply was not profitable, they were not going to provide it, and with this bill, they will make sure it stays that way.”

But the cost to consumers extends way beyond the most rural corners of the state. SB 313 also hurts existing cable and phone customers who pay higher rates because of the lack of competition.  That assures the kind of anemic broadband Rogers and his friends in the cable and phone industries are only too happy to define as 200kbps.  At least that is 10kbps more than a similar bill being pushed by telephone and cable operators in South Carolina.

Brady says their community-owned system not only provides broadband where Charter would not, the cable company also was forced to reduce their rates for consumers in nearby communities, saving taxpayers across the entire city and county millions.

In Elberton, the lack of broadband was so pervasive the 4,700 local residents demanded the city provide the service themselves. Commercial providers had stonewalled the county seat of Elbert County for years until the city broke ground on a broadband project in 2001.

Dalton Utilities' CEO Don Cope (left), Newnan mayor Keith Brady (right) (Photo: Georgia Municipal Assn.)

Elberton City Manager Lanier Dunn complained SB 313 undercuts the rational definition of minimum Internet speeds to levels most Americans would not even consider “broadband.”  Dunn noted that the 2010 National Broadband Plan calls for download speeds 250 times greater, and by 2020 500 times greater, than what Rogers’ bill currently defines as broadband service.

“We should be reaching for higher and faster speeds, not relegating ourselves to barely just above dial-up,” Dunn said.

Don Cope, president and CEO of Dalton Utilities, demonstrated that municipal broadband systems are not the financial risk large telecommunications companies always claim they represent.  In fact, Dalton’s system has never received a penny of tax revenue and its accounting is open to public scrutiny to prove it.

Cope noted SB 313 imposes restrictions on community providers, but completely exempts those owned by the companies pushing the bill.

“I would ask that you look at the private providers in the state,” Cope said. “Look at their reports, and you would see how many dollars that are provided to them from the federal government. We are talking about in the billions of dollars. All the [private telecommunications entities] that I know about have some form of government support.”

Dalton isn’t the only city in Georgia with a successful community-owned operation.

The city of Newnan found their system such a valuable asset, they sold it at a profit to a private company in 2008 and used the proceeds to pay off its remaining construction costs.

Perhaps the most the world ever hears about the tiny British island of St. Helena, a home in the South Atlantic for 4,000 residents, is the annual St. Helena Radio Day when the nation takes to the shortwave radio dial to say hello to friends on every continent.

Beyond that, St. Helena is mostly known as an out-of-the-way tourist destination and potential point of contact for ships traversing the South Atlantic between South America and southern Africa.  St. Helena’s residents live with three television stations, two radio stations, two newspapers, and a single satellite connection to the Internet providing one 10/3Mbps circuit shared by all 4,000 residents.

Signing up for “broadband” is an expensive ordeal.  Individual residents can purchase strictly usage-limited DSL Internet service at prices ranging from $31 a month for 128/64kbps service (limited to 300MB per month) to $190 for 384/128kbps service, with a 3.3GB monthly allowance.  Overlimit fees start at around $0.15 per megabyte.

St. Helena

Local residents find life without the modern day definition of broadband service a major hindrance, especially for education.  Students have left St. Helena for the United Kingdom to pursue studies.  Economically, self-sustained employment is next to impossible on the island.

“I’m an IT engineer and I would love to return to my island to start an IT business, but because of the slow, expensive and unreliable Internet connection this is simply impossible,” said Jonathan Clingham, an IT infrastructure engineer now working in Wiltshire, England.

Now a grass-roots campaign has been launched to help convince several telecommunications companies financing a new underseas fiber cable project laid between Brazil, Angola, and South Africa to reroute the cable slightly through the island of St. Helena, opening the door to modern broadband for the island.

The group is calling on supporters to help draw attention to the project, arrange for the British government to help underwrite the expense of an extra 50 kilometers of cable needed to reach St. Helena, and providing assistance to lease a circuit on the new cable:

• If you are an British citizen or UK resident please sign our e-petition to connect St Helena.
• Show your support by liking our Facebook page.
• Spread the word and let everybody know about our campaign.
• Ask the following entities/persons for support:
  • the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office
  • the UK Department for International Development
  • as a UK citizen your MPs and Lords

Phillip "Rural Georgia Isn't On AT&T's Mind" Dampier

Columbia County, Georgia has been talking about fiber optic broadband for two years — two years that the state’s largest phone and cable companies have not stepped up to provide suitable broadband to local schools, residents, and libraries.  In 2010, enough was enough and the county applied for, and won, a $13.5 million Broadband Technology Opportunity Program grant to increase broadband and wireless access to the Internet throughout the area.  Local taxpayers chipped in about $4.5 million in 1-percent sales tax dollars, and in-kind voluntary donations worth $2.3 million fulfilled the grant requirement that local matching funds be provided.

To residents long-suffering with satellite-delivered Internet, usage-capped mobile broadband, spotty DSL service, and frequent outages and slow speeds, a modern fiber network would help 120,000 county residents obtain the kind of broadband service people elsewhere take for granted.  Columbia County’s rural character is evident when you consider it contains only two small incorporated cities and 91 percent of the population lives in unincorporated areas, making the eastern Georgia county an afterthought for big phone and cable companies who see better profits in bigger cities.

Now these companies, with the help of a campaign contribution-gorging state legislator, are intent on stopping projects even in areas they could care less about.

The News-Times captured this image from the groundbreaking ceremony for Columbia County's new fiber network in 2010. Big phone and cable companies would like them to run this picture again at the project's burial.

Columbia County’s local newspaper, the News-Times, is alarmed at the prospect of public tax dollars already spent on the project burned for the benefit of Big Telecom companies:

Republican State Sen. Chip Rogers, fueled by generous contributions from telecommunications companies, has filed a bill in the Georgia Legislature that, he claims, would protect private service providers from unfair competition by government-subsidized broadband systems.

Nonsensically, some in Columbia County welcomed the news as a slap at the county’s government. While we’re on record opposing the concept of the $13.5 million federal grant that allows the county’s entry into broadband, the fact remains that the project already is underway.

That federal program is designed to expand broadband Internet service to rural areas that, because of the up-front infrastructure costs, aren’t deemed profitable by private companies. Our county has plenty of those areas, served at best only by spotty, expensive cellular-based services.

Columbia County’s program wouldn’t compete with private companies. Instead, it uses the federal grant and local sale-tax funding to build that high-speed infrastructure, which private companies can then lease to provide Internet service to underserved areas.

Rather than undercutting local communities and sacrificing rural customers on behalf of the private companies, Rogers ought to look for ways to improve such public-private partnerships. Columbia County taxpayers had better hope so, too, unless they want all the money they’ve spent wiring the county with fiber optic cables to have been wasted.

SB. 313 is just another contract taken out on community-owned broadband networks that could deliver competition (and worse — far better service) to areas of Georgia where even conservative-minded voters wary of spending public money on anything are simply fed up with the status quo.

Columbia County, Georgia

So much for the Columbia County Broadband Network, a 220-mile, county-wide fiber middle mile network that will connect nearly 150 community anchor institutions and enhance health care, public safety, and government services throughout the county. Anchor institutions hoping to be connected at broadband speeds of 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps include K-12 schools, fire and emergency facilities, public libraries, Augusta Technical College, and the Columbia County Health Department. The project also planned to facilitate the creation of a high-capacity data center at the Medical College of Georgia, support a sophisticated county-wide traffic and water control system, and construct five wireless towers to enhance public safety communications as well as improve wireless communications capabilities throughout the region.

If Rogers’ bill passes, the county may have to go back to begging for access from the companies that have repeatedly said it wasn’t worth the investment or their time.

County officials have been more generous, offering all along to share access to the fiber network with the very providers who are seeking to destroy it.  So far, that hasn’t changed any minds.

“If we don’t own it, that means we don’t want you to have it” is standard operating procedure for the state’s phone and cable operators, even in the service areas they routinely ignore, even if it means flushing millions of dollars already spent on new networks down the drain.

That’s money-fueled politics.  State legislators with Big Telecom dollars in their eyes can’t see the 120,000 Columbia County residents waiting years for better broadband.  Perhaps the best way to reach legislators in Atlanta is to condemn them to the same kind of broadband service local residents in Evans, Martinez, and Appling are forced to endure, if they have it at all.

While a downturn economy continues to afflict middle and lower income America, it doesn’t seem to be doing much harm to Time Warner Cable’s profits.

America’s second largest cable operator saw profits jump more than $150 million higher to $564 million last quarter, compared to $392 million at the same time the year before.  Time Warner’s revenue grew by 4% to $5 billion in the fourth quarter alone.  In fact, the company is performing so well, executives announced they would return $3.3 billion in earnings to shareholders through share buybacks and dividend payouts, in addition to the forthcoming $4 billion share repurchase program.  Wall Street liked what they saw, boosting shares 7% after the company posted its quarterly and annual results on its website.

Time Warner’s biggest success story remains its broadband service, which consistently delivers the company new subscribers and has helped offset the loss of video subscribers, numbered at an additional 129,000 who “cut the cord” in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Time Warner Cable earned $1.148 billion in revenue from broadband in the last quarter, an increase of 8.6% over last year.  For 2011, the cable operator earned $4.476 billion selling residential Internet access, also representing an 8.6% growth rate over earnings across 2010.

The company attributed this to “growth in high-speed data subscribers and increases in average revenues per subscriber (due to both price increases and a greater percentage of subscribers purchasing higher-priced tiers of service).”

The increased costs incurred by Time Warner Cable to upgrade and expand their network and cable systems were well offset by the aforementioned price increases and subscriber upgrades.  The company increased capital expenditures to $942 million in the last quarter.  Results over the full year show just a 0.2% overall increase in capital investment, now at $2.937 billion.  System upgrades, Time Warner’s plans to move their systems to all-digital cable television, the ongoing rollout of DOCSIS 3.0, new home security and automation services, and investment in online video and data centers are included in these costs. But a more significant reason for the increase comes from the company’s ongoing expansion into business services, which requires wiring more office buildings for cable.

Britt

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt led off the conference call with investors with an explanation for the increased expenses.

“We plan to continue our aggressive growth in business services by expanding product offerings, growing our sales force, improving productivity and increasing our serviceable footprint. This means continued investment, both in people and in capital,” Britt said. “Projects include expansion of our content delivery network, which powers our IP video capability, our 2 international headends, completion of DOCSIS 3.0 deployment, and conversion to all-digital in more cities. We expect to be able to accomplish this while maintaining the capital spending of the last 2 years — that is, between $2.9 billion and $3 billion, which represents a continued decline in capital intensity.”

Nothing in Time Warner Cable’s financial disclosures provides any evidence to justify significant changes in their pricing model for broadband, which currently delivers flat rate, unlimited service to customers at different speed rates and price points.  In fact, the company’s investments in DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades, which can support faster broadband speeds and a more even customer experience, have already paid off with subscriber upgrades.

Robert D. Marcus, president and chief operating officer, noted subscribers are increasingly considering faster (and more profitable) broadband tiers.

“Once again, high-speed data net adds over-indexed to our higher-speed tiers,” Marcus noted. “Roughly 3/4 of residential broadband net adds were Turbo or higher. And DOCSIS 3.0 net adds accelerated for the eighth consecutive quarter to an all-time high of 54,000.”

Time Warner’s biggest challenges continue to be the current state of the economy, which has made subscribers much more sensitive to pricing and rate increases, and cord cutting traditional cable television service.

“One group is extremely price-conscious, perhaps due in part to the ongoing economic malaise,” Britt said. “The other group is willing and able to pay for more features and service. We’re going to focus more attention on products and services that best meet each group’s needs rather than pursuing traditional one-size-fits-all solutions.”

That is clearly evident in the company’s bundled service options, including increasingly aggressive discounted pricing for new customers and for those threatening to leave and Time Warner’s super-premium Signature Home service, which delivers super-profits.  Average revenue from Signature Home customers averages $230 a month.  Traditional “triple play” customers who buy phone, Internet, and cable service only bring the cable company an average of $150 a month.

The company’s plans for 2012 do not include a specific statement about implementing an Internet Overcharging scheme like usage billing or usage caps.  But it is unlikely such an announcement would be made explicitly at an earnings announcement.  In the last quarter, Stop the Cap! reported comments from chief financial officer Irene Esteves that the company was still very interested in the concept of selling broadband with usage pricing as a “wonderful hedge” against cord-cutting.

Esteves told a UBS conference she believes usage-based pricing for Time Warner Cable broadband will become a reality sooner or later.  Charging “heavy users” more would already be familiar to consumers used to paying higher prices for heavy use of other services, and she claimed light users would have the option of paying less.

But despite favorable reception to the idea of usage pricing by Wall Street, Esteves acknowledged the company’s past experiments in usage pricing didn’t go as planned, and she suggested the company will introduce usage pricing “the right way rather than quickly.”

Other developments and highlights

• 

  Time Warner faces Verizon's $500 rebate offers in NY City

  Time Warner Beats Up DSL: Time Warner Cable’s most lucrative source for new broadband customers comes at the expense of phone companies still relying on DSL to deliver broadband service.  As DSL speeds have failed to stay competitive with cable broadband, the cable operator has successfully lured price-sensitive DSL customers with attractive ongoing price promotions delivering a year of standard 10/1Mbps cable Internet access for $29.99 a month, often less expensive than the total price of DSL service that frequently delivers slower speeds.

• Stalled Verizon FiOS deployment has limited the amount of competition Time Warner faces from fiber optics to just 12% of the company’s service area.  Where competition does exist, especially in New York State, Time Warner has had to stay aggressive to retain customers with deeply-discounted retention deals to keep up with Verizon’s high value rebate gift cards and new customer offers.  AT&T now provides U-verse competition in about 25% of Time Warner’s service area, but like satellite, AT&T U-verse pricing is less heavily discounted.
• Retention pricing and new customer deals deliver lower prices than ever.  In November, Time Warner started selling a triple play offer for $89.99 a month that includes DVR service and now also includes deep discounts or free 90 day trials of premium movie channels. That is $10 less than the same time last year.
• Premium movie channels continue to take a major hit as subscribers try to reduce their bills, especially after Time Warner began increasing rates on those networks.  HBO now sells for as much as $15 a month in many areas.  Time Warner Cable hopes to ‘revitalize’ premium movie channels with online video services like HBO and Max Go and promotional discounts.
• Long-standing customers of Time Warner’s “triple play” package received a “thank-you gift” — free voice-mail in 2011, something that will continue in 2012.
• Customers signing up for Time Warner’s premium-priced Wideband (50/5Mbps) service ($99/month) are being offered free phone service to sweeten the deal.

What to Expect in 2012

• Time Warner is moving forward to create its own Regional Sports Network for southern California;
• Los Angeles will continue to see large-scale expansion of Time Warner’s growing Wi-Fi network, available for free to premium broadband customers, with thousands of new access points on the way;
• The cable company will introduce Wi-Fi service in other, yet-to-be-announced cities in 2012, with up to 10,000 access points planned.
• Time Warner will be making its “digital phone” product more attractive with lower prices and more features, especially in product bundles, as consumers increasingly discard landlines;
• Expect to see the end of analog cable television in a growing number of Time Warner Cable areas, requiring customers to use new equipment (initially provided free) to continue watching on older televisions and those without existing set top boxes.
• Time Warner will continue to expand its “TV Everywhere” project to include live streaming TV on smartphones, video game consoles, computers, and more.  On-demand programming will be available as well sometime this year across all platforms.
• A nationwide channel re-alignment will move subscribers to consistent channel numbers across the country, in part based on grouping them together into “genres.”  Many areas already have digital cable channels arranged this way, but now they will be consistent from coast-to-coast.
• Time Warner will complete DOCSIS 3 deployment in all areas this year.
• The company is moving to introduce 2-hour service call windows almost everywhere, and 1-hour windows and weekend appointments in some markets.  Several cities now allow customers to select specific times for service appointments.
• Self-install kits will become increasingly available for different products, allowing customers to install equipment themselves;
• Time Warner’s IntelligentHome home security, monitoring, and automation product will expand beyond its launch markets (Syracuse and Rochester, N.Y., Charlotte, N.C. and Los Angeles/Southern Calif.).  The product currently has customers in the thousands, considered relatively small.  But Time Warner has learned subscribers are using the service in surprising ways, which will let them adapt their marketing.  Among the most popular features: remotely watching your pets at home.

Most Memorable Quote: “I think, more than anything else, our pricing strategy is dictated by what the marketplace will bear as opposed to what our underlying cost structure is.” – Robert Marcus, president and chief operating officer, Time Warner Cable

A group whose national umbrella organization has close connections to the nation’s largest phone companies estimates 5.3% of residents in the state of Tennessee now have access to world-class fiber broadband at speeds up to 1Gbps, but no thanks to AT&T or Comcast.

As part of updated broadband availability estimates, the group noted that only a fraction of the state gets access to the community-0wned Chattanooga-based utility that provides fiber to the home service, EPB.

Key findings from this update include:

• 95.2% of Tennessee households have access to fixed broadband service of at least 768 Kbps downstream and 200 Kbps upstream (excluding mobile and satellite services).
• 93% of Tennessee households have access to fixed broadband service of at least 3 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps upstream (excluding mobile and satellite services).
• 4.8% of Tennessee households remain unserved by any fixed broadband provider, representing approximately 120,000 unserved households that do not have access to a fixed wireless or wired broadband service offering (excluding mobile and satellite services).
• Across rural areas of Tennessee, the percentage of unserved households by any fixed broadband service is 8.4%, representing approximately 110,000 unserved rural Tennessee households.
• 5.3% of Tennessee households now have access to broadband service of at least 1 Gbps, marking the first time in Tennessee.

Most households receiving the slowest speeds get them from phone-company marketed DSL service and some fixed wireless ISPs operating in the state.

In Chattanooga, consumers have a choice between AT&T U-verse in selected neighborhoods, Comcast Cable, or EPB Fiber.  Recently, Christopher Mitchell at Community Broadband Networks alerted us that The Chattanoogan newspaper shared the difference between Comcast and EPB customer service:

You’ve got to be kidding me, Comcast! Several days ago our On Demand stopped working with a message to contact customer service and report that error seven occurred.

My husband called and after being given the self-help/troubleshoot option over the phone selected and requested a signal to be re-sent to the box. The box had already been unplugged, the appropriate amount of time waited, and the box plugged back in. No luck. The box was sent the refresh signal…it didn’t work; surprise.

So, he called back and spoke with someone who wanted to re-send the signal again and if that didn’t work then a technician would be needed.

[...]

I called Comcast this morning to schedule the technician to be told that it was going to cost me $30 for them to come out regardless of the problem. Let’s see, Comcast’s DVR box that they own and I rent shot trouble and I have to pay them another $30; I asked at least twice – “if Comcast’s equipment is the problem, I still have to pay $30?” “Yes, mam”.

They should bring out a replacement DVR for me, adjust my account for the days we’ve been without the On Demand plus an amount plus or minus $30 for the time we’ve had to take to mess around with this; not counting the time that will have to be arranged to be taken to have their technician come out.

Since I’m going to have to arrange to take more time, maybe we’ll just have someone else come out and put in something other than Comcast and they can have their broken DVR and all their other stupid little additional cable boxes returned to them.

Melanie Henderson
Hixson

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

The community-owned broadband alternative, EPB Fiber

We experienced the same “customer service” issues with Comcast. We finally cancelled our service when the tornado came through our neighborhood and we were forced to move for six months. When we finally moved back home we became EPB customers.

We have had one instance where we needed to contact customer service, and the problem was fixed quickly and easily by the most polite customer service rep I’ve ever dealt with.

Comcast came by recently to offer us a “substantial savings” if we’d make the switch back to them. My question was, why now? I was a customer for years and treated poorly as rates increased exponentially. Now the offer the discount? No thanks.

For the $5 extra per month that we pay for EPB, we receive better features, prompt and polite customer service, and an all around trouble free experience. Thanks EPB!

Leah Crisp
Harrison

Lowering the bar on "unlimited use" customers.

Customers grandfathered on AT&T’s “unlimited use” data plan are starting to wonder whether AT&T’s definition of “unlimited” is worth the effort.

Stop the Cap! reader Earl shares news the wireless carrier has lowered the bar (and wireless speeds) on customers who consume just 2GB on an “unlimited” wireless plan the company charges $30 a month to keep.  That’s $15/GB before AT&T considers you a usage abuser.  Now customers are discovering for the same $30, they can buy a usage-limited plan that offers 3GB a month, one gigabyte more than the “unlimited plan” allows before AT&T considers you among the top 5% of its “heavy users” subject to a punishing speed throttle.

[From CNET's 'Ask Maggie' column:]

Dear Maggie,
I am currently using an iPhone 3GS and am grandfathered into the unlimited data plan. I normally use between 3GB and 4GB of data a month without issue. I have now been notified after 2GB of data that my data consumption is in the top 5 percent of customers and my data will be throttled. I have noticed that this seems to be a common cutoff for other customers as well.

My question to you is–Does this make the unlimited data plan basically useless as the new 3GB plan will at least give me 1 extra gigabyte of data for the same price? Also, why don’t they just cancel the unlimited plan instead of forcing people to switch through throttling?

Dear Brian,
I think you’ve nailed this issue right on the head. AT&T’s throttling program seems to target customers, who are just over the 2GB threshold. And its new higher priced data plans that offer 3GB of data for $30 looks like an attempt to get customers to switch from their unlimited data plans to the 3GB plan for the same price.

Whether you can live with the slower data rates is up to you.

It’s increasingly apparent AT&T is engineering data plans to discourage customers from retaining their grandfathered unlimited-use plan.  By luring customers to ‘never-throttled’-tiered data plans, AT&T can expose customers to lucrative overlimit fees charged when plan allowances are exceeded.

Just a few weeks after announcing $2 rate increases on most tiers of the company’s broadband service, Rogers Communications has announced speed upgrades and tiny increases in usage allowances for certain customers:

• Express: download speeds will increase from up to 12Mbps to up to 18Mbps and data allowance will increase from 60GB to 70GB.
• Extreme: download speeds will increase from up to 24Mbps to up to 28Mbps and data allowance will increase from 100GB to 120GB.

These enhancements apply to customers utilizing Rogers DOCSIS 3.0 capabilities. Rogers will start rolling out the faster speeds to existing Express tier customers currently receiving download speeds of up to 12 Mbps starting January 26^th and will continue over the following weeks. New customers will experience faster speeds beginning February 21^st. All new and existing customers will benefit from higher data allowances starting March 8^th.

Rogers has played repeatedly with their usage allowances, particularly for its Extreme tier, which has seen increases and decreases over the past few years:

Rogers Extreme Tier Usage Cap History

• 2009: 95GB per month
• 2010: Reduced to 80GB per month (-15GB)
• 2011: Increased to 100GB per month (+20GB)
• 2012: Increased to 120GB per month (+20GB)

Rogers’ Express service gets just a 10GB monthly bump, making the speed upgrade less valuable because customers are restrained from using the service.

Rogers says the incremental upgrades are a result of Canadians using the Internet more than ever.

“Rogers customers are increasingly watching movies on Rogers on Demand Online, working from home and using multiple devices like tablets and laptops connected by Wi-Fi to the internet,” said John Boynton, executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Rogers Communications. “The ways Canadians are using the internet are changing dramatically and we are constantly reviewing our plans and policies to ensure they deliver the best possible customer experience that lines up with evolving needs and usage patterns.”

Apparently those living in western Canada use the Internet even more, because Shaw Communications’ comparable broadband tiers are much more generous:

Shaw Communications Usage Allowances

• High Speed 10Mbps: 125GB per month
• High Speed 20Mbps: 200GB per month
• Broadband 50Mbps: 400GB per month

Heartland Institute: "By not disclosing our donors, we keep the focus on the issue."

In an eyebrow-raising exchange between the Heartland Institute’s Bruce Edward Walker and Dr. Joseph P. Fuhr, Jr., who produced a dollar-a-holler “research report” on behalf of corporate-backed astroturf group the Coalition for the New Economy (which lists the Heartland Institute’s Florida chapter as a member), the two dismiss Chattanooga’s award-winning EPB Fiber Network as providing lesser service than private competitors AT&T (also a member of the Coalition) and Comcast, in part because EPB “only sells customers a gig.”

An exchange between Heartland Institute’s Bruce Edward Walker and Dr. Joseph P. Fuhr, Jr. fundamentally misrepresents Chattanooga’s EPB Fiber network. At no point does Walker disclose Heartland Institute’s chapter in Florida is a member of the group that sponsored the production of Fuhr’s report. (1 minute)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Walker: The government broadband services are always one step behind private industry and I’m thinking in Chattanooga, the law [sic] that they have the fastest download speeds of all government broadband in the United States, but they only offer 1Gbps service.

Fuhr: Well, one of the issues there is, well, the supply is there but they kind of have the feeling that if you build it, they will come.  Well, they haven’t come.  I mean they are charging $350 a month for that service and very few people are willing to subscribe.  People are, for the most part, happy with slower speeds.  Who really needs a gigabyte (sic) and the market shows that people don’t really need that.

Dr. Fuhr apparently does not know the difference between a “gigabyte” and a “gigabit,” so I am not sure how seriously we are supposed to take this “broadband expert.”  He also does nothing to challenge Walker’s wholly-inaccurate declaration that EPB only sells customers $350 1Gbps broadband.

In fact, most of Heartland Institute’s views about EPB broadband are a big bucket of wrong:

1. EPB Fiber offers the fastest fiber broadband in the United States.  It is “private industry” providers Comcast and AT&T who are more than one step behind, and they refuse to sell faster service and upgrade their networks to the speeds seen in Asia and Europe that Chattanooga’s EPB customers can have today.
2. There is no “law” involved in the delivery of broadband by EPB.  In fact, EPB fought off attempts by incumbent operators to sue the municipally-owned provider out of the broadband business, and some of those same companies are backing the “Coalition for the New Economy” in their efforts to curtail community broadband with new laws that would make networks like EPB next to impossible to provide.
3. EPB does not only offer 1Gbps service.  Consumers and businesses are free to choose between several different speed tiers.  As any commercial entity will tell, you 1Gbps at just $350 a month is a steal compared to the prices AT&T and Comcast would charge.
4. When EPB built their fiber network, private businesses did come.  In addition to media reports documenting expansion in Chattanooga from one Knoxville business, Amazon.com has announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new investments building and expanding distribution centers in and around Chattanooga, in part because EPB Fiber was available for their use.
5. People are not happy with the slow speeds some providers force them to accept.  It is no surprise, however, that industry-funded astroturf groups would repeat the usual provider line that people “don’t need” fast broadband that they have no plans to deliver anyway.