Time Warner Cable is probably changing your channel lineup, or already has — removing several analog channels you used to receive as part of your Standard Service subscription and moving them to digital.

For customers with digital set top boxes, the change happens without most noticing the difference.  The formerly analog signal still shows up in the same place, only the transmission format has changed.

But customers without set top boxes will notice as channels disappear forever from their lineups, replaced with… nothing.  But their cable bills will remain exactly the same, despite the loss of channels.

For Stop the Cap! readers like Bev, today spelled the end of Animal Planet and The Travel Channel, among others.  For those in Rochester, N.Y., last night was the last chance to watch C-SPAN 2, The Travel Channel, TruTV, Discovery Health, and Shop NBC in analog.  In Buffalo, it was bye-bye to The Travel Channel, C-SPAN 2, TV Guide Channel, and CMT.

It some states, particularly Texas, Time Warner Cable is sticking it to Public Access, Educational, and Government channels, moving them all to digital.  In some cases, cable companies and AT&T U-verse have managed to forever bury these PEG channels in Digital Channel Siberia with channel numbers in the high hundreds or even thousands.  For many subscribers, a search and rescue team couldn’t find their new channel positions.

It’s all a part of a larger plan to slowly erode away analog channels in favor of digital service, which takes up far less bandwidth on Time Warner Cable systems.

As cable systems are nearing capacity and do not wish to spend millions to commit to further upgrades, switching out analog service in favor of digital can provide enormous new capacity to accommodate HD channels and forthcoming DOCSIS 3 cable modem service upgrades.

Unfortunately, these channel changes will irritate subscribers who do not want to pay for set top boxes and do not want them on their televisions.  If you are among this group of box-haters, Time Warner Cable will continue to slowly drop more and more of the channels you used to watch without bothering to reduce your bill for the channels you no longer get.  Eventually, virtually all analog channels will probably disappear, replaced by digital versions you will need a set top box to view.

In many areas of upstate New York, Time Warner is trying to placate angry subscribers by offering one set top box at no charge for one year.  But here comes the tricks and traps — Stop the Cap! confirmed with Time Warner Cable this evening that only those customers without any set top boxes in their home can take advantage of this free offer.  If you already have a box, you’ll continue to pay for it even though your neighbor is getting one free for a year.  After the year is up, pony up — each box costs $7.80 a month ($7.50 for the box, $0.30 for the remote).

At least Texans are getting a better deal from Time Warner Cable — Broadcast Basic subscribers will get their boxes free for five years, Standard Service customers will get them for one year.  But beware — if Time Warner needs to roll a truck to install your box in the San Antonio area, be prepared to cough up $39 for the service call.

For broadband customers, there is some good news.  Virtually all major Time Warner Cable service areas facing channel changes like this will receive DOCSIS 3 upgrades and the chance to obtain faster Internet service by the end of 2010, even those communities bypassed for earlier upgrades.  You will also get additional HD channels.  In western New York, for example, Time Warner Cable plans to add a large number of HD cable channels by mid-fall:

On or About September 2, 2010:
Style HD
BBC America HD

On or About September 9, 2010:
National Geographic Wild HD
MTV HD
Comedy Central HD
Nickelodeon HD
Spike HD

On or About September 16, 2010:
History Channel International HD
CMT HD
Hallmark HD
VH-1 HD
Cooking Channel HD
DIY HD
TWCSN HD
YNN HD

On or About October 1, 2010:
Womans Max HD
HBO Latino HD

Although never the cheapest provider in Chattanooga, municipally-owned EPB Fiber continues its track record as the city’s fastest Internet service provider, and has increased its value to residents with a free doubling of Internet speeds.

The speed upgrade arrives the same week AT&T mailers began showing up in Chattanooga residents’ mailboxes announcing U-verse was now available in the neighborhood.

AT&T joins Comcast in some areas, Charter in others — and EPB as the third competitor for cable, phone and broadband service in this part of southeastern Tennessee.

EPB Fiber to the Home Broadband Speeds

• 15/15Mbps service is now 30/30Mbps for $57.98 per month
• 20/20Mbps service is now 50/50Mbps for $69.99 per month
• 50/50Mbps service is now 100/100Mbps for $174.99 per month

A 150Mbps residential speed tier is also due anytime now.

Although EPB is already well known to Chattanooga residents as their local power company, the introduction of fiber optic telecommunications service has helped broaden the company’s reach.  EPB claims to be signing up around 500 residents a week for service.  The company does not use temporary pricing promotions to attract new customers — customers all get service for the same price.  But the attractiveness of the service, especially its speed, has made EPB popular with Internet enthusiasts.

John Appling in East Lake was shocked at just how fast EPB began installation of his fiber to the home service — within hours after the company placed a door-hanger tag announcing fiber service was now available on his street.

I called 30 minutes after the door tag was hung and to my delight was able to talk with a lady that was very nice, courteous and spoke perfect English. She took all my information and told me the day and time the installers would arrive to finish installing for the TV, internet and phone service inside my home, and that a crew would come by to install the boxes on the side of my home.

I left shortly after that call and returned a couple of hours later from grocery shopping. EPB contractors had already been to my home and installed the boxes on the side of the house. Yes, super fast service.

The day the installers came to complete the inside installation, they were on time, courteous and knew just what needed to be done to complete the install. One of the men even told me of a problem with my A/C heating unit duct work underneath my home which needed to be looked about soon. The men cleaned all the areas they worked in, made sure all my services worked correctly and asked if I had any questions they could answer before they left. Both men did a fantastic job and worked quickly to complete the work.

The pictures on our TVs never looked so great, the audio sounds wonderful also. Our telephone service is perfect and works just like anyone’s phone should. I enjoy the internet service most of all. I got the Fi-Internet 20. It is so fast and works great.

I have had to call twice this week to get the support group to help me with my internet connections and both times I have gotten a person who really helped me with my problems. They spoke perfect English, knew where I lived and what services I had from EPB. It is so nice to talk with our hometown folks and know they wanted to help myself in getting all I pay for in their services.

I just read where I was one of the first of 5,000 people to have their services installed in my home. Believe me, I am so thankful that EPB has the TV, internet and phone services. I have seen so many ads from their competitors with special prices for this or that. I am just glad to have the services of EPB services myself.

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Chattanooga FTTH by EPB.flv[/flv]

What will your future look like?  While most of the country contends with a broadband duopoly providing “fast enough service for you” broadband, EPB Fiber in Chattanooga, Tenn., is bringing southeastern Tennessee broadband speeds they could only dream about before.  Even better, EPB Fiber is bringing new jobs to the region and helping to light a fire under Chattanooga’s economy as one of the fastest connected cities in the southern United States.  (6 minutes)

AT&T's HotZone in Charlotte only covers a tiny portion of the city, along S. Brevard Street between the NASCAR Hall of Fame and East Trade Street and for AT&T customers waiting to use the nearby Lynx light rail.

What do you do when your wireless 3G network capacity is hopelessly overloaded and you don’t want to spend the money to upgrade the network to meet the daily demands your customers place on it?  You offload as much of that traffic as possible on less costly, conventional Wi-Fi network technology.

AT&T has discovered that Wi-Fi can turn an ugly congestion problem into a marketing opportunity.  The company has announced free, unlimited access to its increasing number of “Hotzones” to AT&T wireless customers, promising stronger signals and faster speeds along the way.  The three cities chosen for the launch of the neighborhood-blanketing Wi-Fi service are New York, Charlotte, N.C.,  and Chicago.

That New York and Chicago are on the list come as little surprise, but why Charlotte?

It turns out Charlotte is among the top-10 cities companies use to test market new products and services to get a better feel of how customers will react.  Charlotte has served as a test market for years.  FedEx used the city to test drop boxes inside U.S. post offices back in 2001.  Time Warner Cable brought its “Start Over” and “Caller ID on TV” services to Charlotte to get customer reaction.  AT&T first test marketed its 3G Microcell service in the area, so the company has a track record of choosing the community to test its newest offerings.

Stop the Cap! has been measuring reaction on our own to learn what Charlotte residents think about AT&T’s Hotzone.

First, many AT&T customers are still unaware that this Wi-Fi service has even made it to Charlotte.  For those who have learned about it, anything that improves AT&T’s service in uptown Charlotte is good news for them.

“Although AT&T in Charlotte has never suffered from the kind of congestion faced in larger cities, when you concentrate a lot of data users in one area, such as the Time Warner Cable Arena on East Trade, AT&T’s network can slow to a crawl,” writes Stop the Cap! reader Eric, who lives in Charlotte.  “I have ventured around that area several times and, to be honest, you can quietly hop on one of many business Wi-Fi hotspots for free now, but you can’t go too far before losing the signal.”

Eric says AT&T would be better off extending their Wi-Fi network across the city of Charlotte if they really want to offload 3G traffic.

“Wi-Fi is faster than their 3G service and it’s unlimited,” he notes. “I’d actually have a much more favorable impression of AT&T if they created city-wide Wi-Fi networks for their customers because it would add tremendous value and be a great reason to stick with AT&T for cell service.”

But Liam, who works in downtown Charlotte but lives near Freedom Park writes it’s a Band-Aid for a much bigger problem — AT&T underestimating the demand on their network.

“I am not sure how excited I should be about a Hotzone that runs up a street for about four city blocks,” he says.  “This is not midtown Manhattan where a service like that could make a huge difference for residents of skyscraping-condos and apartment buildings.  What about the rest of Charlotte?”

Liam was an AT&T customer but left for Verizon Wireless nearly a year ago.  He thinks AT&T isn’t a bad provider in Charlotte — in fact he thinks AT&T does a much better job in rural western North Carolina than Verizon does, but inside metro Charlotte, Verizon’s signals are more consistent.

“If this service does reach into Time Warner Cable Arena, it could make a big difference though, especially when that stadium is nearly full,” Liam notes. “Somehow I think we’ll see Time Warner Cable’s own Wi-Fi service operating there, for free, in the not-too-distant future.”

The Charlotte Observer‘s @Charlotte blog asked readers what they thought about AT&T’s Charlotte Hotzone in two articles.  Amidst a rhetorical war over the merits of AT&T and Apple’s latest iPhone, most comments welcomed the improved service, even if some are not sure exactly where that improved service can be found.

Reporter Eric Frazier wrote, “I was trying to find out for certain whether this zone will cover the office towers along Tryon Street, but a spokesperson for AT&T told me they can’t say whether specific buildings, such as the Bank of America headquarters, will or won’t be covered by the Hotzone.

Reverend Mike wants to know when he can get a Hotzone installed in his backyard, noting he was “glad to hear they are setting this up downtown.”

AT&T completed upgrades to its HSPA 7.2 network earlier this year and offers about double the potential speed its older 3G network provided Charlotte customers.

Is Rahm Emanuel the consigliere to a deal to sell out broadband consumers to big telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast?

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is said to so afraid of big phone and cable companies donating millions to Republican candidates, he told agencies like the Federal Communications Commission to go along with Verizon, AT&T, and Big Cable’s demands for an end to Net Neutrality and other pro-consumer broadband reforms.

That is the rumor industry expert Dave Burstein is hearing about the prospects of broadband reclassification actually happening at the FCC this year.

It seems Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg has become a frequent guest at the White House, appearing 16 times since President Obama took office.  Seidenberg is behind the notion that saddling giant telecommunications companies with Net Neutrality will force those firms to flood Republicans with unprecedented campaign contributions.  That’s fascinating news, especially since most politicians claim campaign contributions never make any difference in how they vote on issues.  Perhaps Verizon is just being extra charitable this year.  The Republicans, who fall lock-step in support behind the nation’s largest phone and cable companies, will be delighted to accept.

With politicians like Rahm Emanuel involved, the fix may already be in.  Rule number one in politics is to always follow the money.  Rule number two is that many politicians will always take the money and vote against their constituents’ best interests unless voters are paying attention.  When a politician is forced to weigh the consequences of accepting a fat check from a corporation and voting with them or infuriating their constituents to the point of potentially losing the next election, they’ll vote with their constituents.

Meanwhile, telecom companies are engaged in a divide-and-conquer strategy, with Verizon recently making gestures to Google, one of Net Neutrality’s strongest  proponents.  Burstein thinks that unless public interest groups and the public-at-large don’t force an end to these insider deals, Net Neutrality and other broadband reforms will become little more than a voluntary agreement not to be too evil (until they redefine ‘evil’ as ‘good’ and do it anyway):

Julius (Genachowski) has already agreed to almost everything [telecom lobbyists] really want, including loopholes wide enough to carry 350 TV channels. [Stifel Nicolaus] says there is still some opposition so that nothing is final and that the public interest groups are ready to assail Julius. Meanwhile, Verizon and Google are discussing a separate peace that will make the FCC irrelevant.

This one is about power and money, not principle. The likely outcome is an agreement that will allow everyone to say noble things, will allow Julius to look himself in the mirror, and will essentially have no substance.  I hope I’m wrong.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bloomberg Bloomberg’s Shields Discusses Net-Neutrality Battle 8-3-10.flv[/flv]

Bloomberg News reviews the regulatory landscape with the FCC’s secret weekend meetings to find a deal on broadband rules.  (2 minutes)

For consumer groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge, already furious over secret backroom negotiations between FCC officials and the nation’s large phone and cable companies, any deal that culminates in providers being allowed to tamper with Internet traffic, choosing favorites along the way, is tantamount to a deal with Tony Soprano.

Tim Karr from Free Press wrote a guest editorial in the Seattle Times Sunday warning there is a corporate deal in the making to take over the Internet:

On the one side, elected officials and regulators have heard from millions of citizens demanding that Washington protect this rule that preserves the Internet’s open architecture.

On the other is a lobbying juggernaut that seeks to dismantle online openness so that phone and cable companies can rebuild the Internet as a gated community that serves their bottom line.

The problem is that policymakers aren’t holding the line for the public. They seem content simply to cut a deal between companies with the most political and economic clout.

If that doesn’t worry you, it should.

Because the deal they’re cutting is over who ultimately wins control of online information. And it goes without saying that you’re not in the running.

Google, Verizon, AT&T and others are reportedly nearing consensus on an agreement that could radically redesign the Web, allowing the carriers to build priority access lanes that admit only large companies that can pay the toll.

Where will that leave the rest of us? Stranded on the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road, with slower service, fewer choices and limited access.

Here’s the kicker. The Federal Communications Commission, the one agency tasked with protecting your interests online, may be poised to sign off on this plan. The agency is reportedly convening closed-door meetings with these companies to strike a deal that would let Internet providers implement a “paid prioritization” scheme.

According to The Washington Post, the FCC’s chief of staff wanted to “seize an opportunity to agree on ways that carriers could “manage traffic” on their networks.

If recent articles by Amazon and AT&T execs are any indication, paid prioritization would allow carriers to ransom access to their customers to the highest bidder. AT&T’s top lobbyist, James Cicconi, wrote that such extortion was “not only necessary but in the best interest of consumers.”

Don’t believe it. The beauty of the open Internet is that anyone with an idea has a chance to take on giant corporations without first having to bribe network owners for access. Net neutrality is the rule that guarantees this openness.

It’s because of Net neutrality that great ideas like YouTube (which began in an office above a pizzeria in San Mateo) and Twitter (which grew out of a daylong brainstorming session among podcasters) blossomed to revolutionize how we connect and communicate with one another.

The paid prioritization deal under consideration wouldn’t allow for the next YouTube. And the next Twitter would likely never make it off the drawing board.

This scheme would let companies like Comcast and AT&T favor their own video services, voice applications and social media. It would let Verizon build a wide moat around its Internet fiefdom, insulating itself from competition by upstart innovators that want to show consumers how things can be done better and more cheaply.

Columbia Law Professor (and Free Press board chairman) Tim Wu has said that letting carriers choose favorites is “just too close to the Tony Soprano vision of networking: Use your position to make threats and extract payments. This is similar to the outlawed, but still common, ‘payola’ schemes in the radio world.

“If allowing network discrimination means being stuck with AT&T’s long-term vision of the Internet,” Wu concludes, “it won’t be worth it.”

Should any of this come to pass, it will mark the end of any credibility for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who will have sold out to the interests of big telecom and, more importantly, proved himself little more than another inside-the-beltway-liar.  The implications for the Obama Administration’s credibility on broadband issues are devastating.

It was Genachowski himself who promised this would be the most open FCC ever and that he would see to it that the open principles of the Internet were safeguarded.  It’s more than a little difficult to see that happening while Genachowski’s staff secretly meets with telecom lobbyists to conclude a deal that will turn over control of Internet traffic to a broadband duopoly.

Another rate increase letter from Time Warner Cable (click to enlarge)

For the second time in a year, Time Warner Cable is jacking up the rates on its Road Runner broadband service for residents in western New York.

Stop the Cap! reader Patrick in Rochester sent word and a screen image of a letter he received notifying him Time Warner Cable was raising the price on standalone Road Runner service to $54.95 a month, effective September 1st.  Patrick, and other customers who are only interested in getting broadband service from the cable company, were paying just under $45 a month for Road Runner standalone service in early 2009.  Today, standalone service runs $49.99 a month, but the cable company is back looking for another $5 a month starting this fall.

July 30, 2010

Dear Road Runner Customer,

We are writing to inform you that effective September 1, 2010, we will be increasing the price of our Road Runner High-Speed Internet product from $49.99 to $54.95 per month for all Road Runner Standard only customers.

If you are currently receiving Road Runner High-Speed Internet products at a discounted rate, your current discounted rate will continue until the term of your promotion is complete.  Your rate will increase to the new retail rate noted above or the effective retail rates at that time.

This rate will also apply as of September 1, 2010 for those customers with two separate Time Warner Cable accounts at the same address.  Please contact us if you’d like to combine these accounts.

Keep in mind there are many packages available allowing you to bundle our video and phone products together with your Road Runner High-Speed Internet for substantial savings….

Time Warner Cable, like many cable providers, wants to discourage customers from taking only one of its products, so it gradually increases prices to drive customers to its “better value” bundled services.  As for broadband, Time Warner Cable executives have made it clear they can raise prices whenever they want.

Landel Hobbs, Chief Operating Officer for Time Warner Cable, told investors this past February consumers love their Road Runner service.

“Consumers like it so much that we have the ability to increase pricing around high-speed data,” Hobbs said.

At $55 a month, standalone Road Runner becomes increasingly difficult to justify for many consumers, but for residents in cities like Rochester, the only alternative is far slower DSL service from Frontier Communications, complete with its 5GB monthly usage allowance.

However, you can leap off the Time Warner Rate Increase Railroad by switching to Earthlink, which is running a promotion for six months of 10Mbps service for $29.95 per month.  Earthlink service is indistinguishable from Road Runner, except Earthlink speeds do not benefit from “Powerboost” — Time Warner Cable’s very temporary speed boost during the start of large file transfers.  Most customers will prefer the boost they receive from keeping the $25 difference in price in their wallets — $150 over the life of the promotion.  At the end of six months, you can hop back to Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service on a new customer promotion at a significant discount.  No modem exchange is required — the switch to and from Earthlink can be done over the phone.  Billing is done by Time Warner Cable for both services.  Just be aware your Road Runner e-mail account will be closed when you change providers.

You can escape Time Warner Cable's Road Runner rate hike by switching to Earthlink service at a substantial discount.