Stop the Cap! reader Wayne A. dropped us a line to let us know Comcast has been getting very aggressive in the Denver area, poaching CenturyLink customers with enormous discounts:

My wife and I just accepted a package from Comcast to leave CenturyLink for a package that includes:

• Digital Premier HD with DVR
• HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and other premium movie channels
• Broadband service at 25/5Mbps
• Unlimited Long Distance Digital Phone Service

Comcast’s price?  An amazing $109.99/month for the first year, $129.99/month for the second.  Wayne says that’s a savings of $90 a month over ordinary Comcast prices, and compared with what he was paying CenturyLink, he will save $912.12 during the first year and around $600 for the second.

What makes Comcast’s pricing so aggressive is the fact they include much faster broadband speed than many other retention or “capture” customer deals.  They also throw in free premium movie channels.  We’ve seen Time Warner Cable offer triple-play retention deals for less than $90 a month for the first year, but they don’t include movie channels and deliver broadband service at the standard 10/1Mbps speed.

If you are paying Comcast more, it may be time to pick up the phone and threaten to walk unless you can have the same deal.  We’ve found dealing with customer retentions to be a real “your results may vary”-experience.  Don’t be willing to take the first offer.  Don’t be afraid to dismiss weak deals with a non-committal “I’ll think about it” if the price is not right for you.  Then call back.

In the last few weeks, we’ve found Time Warner Cable’s best deals still go to customers who actually schedule a service disconnection. Within hours, Time Warner starts calling, looking to “make an offer you cannot refuse.” The retention specialists at Time Warner who reach out to you generally have the most aggressively priced deals. You qualify if you call, schedule a disconnect a week or two out, and wait by the phone. You can keep your service running while company representatives try to convince you to stick with them.  Just make sure you answer those unfamiliar Caller ID-calls — it’s probably the cable company.  Most will ask why you disconnected.  If you answer “price,” the deals start coming.

Unfortunately, there was no way we could take advantage of any of their latest offers, which literally started two hours after disconnecting my late grandmother’s cable service.

It’s a buyer’s market for telecommunications products, so never settle for the regular price when a substantial discount is a phone call away.

Internet Service Providers who use “increasing bandwidth costs” as an excuse to raise prices or implement an Internet Overcharging scheme like usage limits or usage-based billing are being dishonest.

That’s the conclusion of a new British report that found providers grossly overestimating the costs of meeting increasing usage demands of their customers.  In some cases, providers are inflating the price of usage by 1,000 percent or more over their own costs.

“Traffic-related costs are a small percentage of the total connectivity revenue, and despite traffic growth, this percentage is expected to stay constant or decline,” claims the report, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Britain’s Channel 4, and Skype.  “Studies in Canada and in the UK put the incremental cost of fixed network traffic at around €0.01-0.03 per GB.”

That represents a cost of pennies per gigabyte, yet many providers charge anywhere from $0.20-10.00 or more to residential customers, an incredible markup.

The study further concludes ISP claims of “ballooning costs” are simply “a myth,” and points to company financial reports which clearly show “for fixed networks, traffic-related costs are low, falling on a unit basis and likely to fall overall given declines in traffic growth and on-going cost-reducing technical progress.”

In fact, most broadband providers are reporting decreasing costs and investment in their broadband product line, while enjoying unprecedented increased profits.

As broadband traffic increases, the technology to sustain that traffic has improved, and brought unit costs for broadband traffic to an all-time-low.

The report admits that costs for wireless technology are higher, primarily because of limited airwaves, a shared usage infrastructure, and initial expenses in delivering improving connectivity with cell or wireless radio towers.  But with the advent of 4G technology, providers can sustain increased speeds, traffic, and revenue from selling wireless service that can handle higher bandwidth applications.

Plum Consulting authored the new report.

Plum Consulting, which wrote the report, concluded that even in more expensive wireless service areas like the United Kingdom, smartphone data tariffs amounting to around €10 per GB are not justified on 4G networks.

“The cost to the mobile network operator is under €1 per GB,” Plum Consulting found.

Predictably, service providers are dismissive of the report’s findings.

Trefor Davies, CTO of communications provider Timico and a member of the board at the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) says bandwidth costs are a real problem, especially for smaller ISPs that rent access on a usage-based, wholesale access plan.

“Bandwidth is by far the greatest proportion of cost for an ISP,” Davies told PC Magazine. “It’s very much you pay for what you use,” he said. “If you use twice as much bandwidth, you’re going to be paying twice as much.”

[Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Bill H. for sharing the news.]

The CW Television Network

First it was the United Paramount Network (UPN) and The WB Television Network (WB), two mini-networks run by their respective studios that simply refused to become profit centers and established challengers to more traditional broadcast networks.  In 1996, both networks combined to create The CW Television Network, and the result has been less than the two original networks had hoped.  Youth-oriented programming targeted to an audience that increasingly doesn’t watch traditional television and a challenging advertising market that has considerably declined since 2009 haven’t helped.

Now the folks in charge of the CW are resting a lot easier, all thanks to Netflix.  The movie streaming and rental service is reported to be signing an agreement worth upwards of $1 billion to access CW programming for its streaming service.

Les Moonves, chief executive of CBS Corp., which now co-owns the network with Warner Bros., couldn’t be happier.

“It essentially makes the CW a profitable enterprise,” Moonves said.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Netflix is buying rights to repeats of current and future series on the network, and the longer the shows stay on the air and performs well, the more the subscription video company will pay for streaming rights.

For example, Netflix is paying in the neighborhood of $600,000 an episode for “Gossip Girl,” an established show, but will initially pay much less for newer or lower-rated CW programs, people familiar with the pact said. The window between when a new episode of a CW show appears on the network and then ends up on Netflix could be as long as a year.

Netflix has exclusive online subscription rerun rights to all episodes of all CW shows. However, CBS and Warner Bros. can still sell reruns to other outlets, including local television stations and cable networks.

Netflix is hurrying to sign new programming deals as it prepares to lose access to an important component of its streaming library — current movie titles that come courtesy of an expiring agreement with Starz.  Netflix said without renewing that agreement, it would spend heavily to try and find new programming to make up the difference.  The deal with the CW may be an example.

Besides sports, the biggest challenge for cord-cutters is to find access to 24-hour news channels they give up when they cancel pay television service.  While cable news often doesn’t actually spend much time on “news” when breaking stories are few and far-between, when something serious does happen, cord-cutters looking for live coverage can and do miss access to news networks.

But now a New York startup, RadixTV, has a solution for news junkies: Rtv.

Yesterday, the company launched a package of four cable news networks — Bloomberg, CNBC, CNBC World, and MSNBC streamed live 24 hours a day for $14.99 a month.

That’s a steep price for four channels, of which MSNBC is arguably the most important.  The company plans to expand to 10 channels in the future, including CNN, Fox News, and international news networks like BBC World, France 24 and Al Jazeera English that American cable companies routinely ignore.

Kaul

Rtv is pitched primarily to Wall Street — financial firms, brokerages, and investment businesses that want access to continuous business news but don’t need a traditional cable package.  In fact, the package is technically only supposed to be sold to business customers, but anyone can sign up if they say they are stock traders, accountants, investors, etc.

Stop the Cap! sampled Rtv this morning and found the service to work well with our broadband connection, although at times crawling news and stock prices found at the bottom of the screen on some channels seemed less smooth than they could be.  It occasionally was distracting.  MSNBC was the most compelling channel in the lineup, although we’d love to see international news channels even more.  But $15 a month is still a high price to pay.

The company’s CEO, Bhupender Kaul, worked for Time Warner Cable for nearly two decades, and believes the future of cable TV is likely to be Internet-based, with programming sold in niche packages like his.  True a-la-carte may be too unwieldy for providers to pull off, but selling groups of channels together might not.  Still, Kaul seems intent on not aggravating the industry as much as earlier cord-cutting online viewing services, which have all since been sued out of existence.  Local broadcast and general interest programming does not come with Rtv.  While a six figure-salaried Wall Street banker won’t mind $15 a month, you might.

Further reading: In New Web TV Service, A Glimpse of the Future

Even after the financial meltdown and the Great Recession, Americans still trust their cable and telephone companies even less than bailed-out financial institutions, mortgage brokers, credit card issuers, insurance companies, and airlines.

Those are the findings of the Temkin Group, which polled 6,000 U.S. consumers who recently contacted the surveyed companies to obtain customer service, support, or to ask a question or resolve a billing issue.

Temkin asked, “to what degree do you trust that these companies will take care of your needs?”  Responses were scored on a scale of 1-7 — from “do not trust at all” to “completely trust.”

The results show there is plenty of room for improvement for phone, wireless, and Internet providers.

The top-10 scoring companies don’t sell Internet service:

1. USAA (insurance)
2. Amazon.com (retail)
3. Costco (retail)
4. Edward Jones (investment firm)
4. Hyatt (hotel chain)
4. Sam’s Club (retail)
4. TriCare (health plan)
8. Kohl’s (retail)
9. Walgreens (retail)
10. Vanguard (investments)

Lower-rated companies do.  Here’s a sampling of where many telecom companies ended up (from better to worse) with respect to Internet and wireless service:

54. MSN
60. Cox Communications
89. Verizon Wireless (wireless)
90. T-Mobile
93. Sprint
100. AT&T (wireless)
104. AOL
106. AT&T (Internet service)
109. Cablevision
113. Time Warner Cable/Road Runner (Internet service)
120. Qwest
122. Virgin Mobile
140. Comcast
142. Charter Communications

Charter scored dead last out of 143-rated companies.  Customers trashed both Charter’s Internet service (142) and their cable-TV service (143).

Temkin shows telecom companies rate dead last.