A Comcast customer in Albany, Calif. got the cable company to pay her $290 towards the purchase of a new television after her cable box went out with a bang.

Kay Corlett’s television, plugged into the back of the box, was an unintended casualty.

Corlett had no trouble getting Comcast to replace her defunct cable box at no charge, but her television was another matter.

“I was very distressed because I had the feeling that they caused the problem so they should be taking care of it very quickly,” Corlett told KGO-TV News.

Corlett played phone tag with a supervisor assigned to investigate her claim and other Comcast employees proved unable to help.

Attitudes changed when KGO’s “7 On Your Side” consumer team intervened. With Comcast’s ongoing intransigence threatening to end up on the evening news, Comcast quickly asked their insurance company to cover the loss.

Corlett received a check for $290 which she put towards the purchase of a new and improved television.

Comcast called the incident extremely rare and recommended customers use surge protectors on their electronic equipment. It was unclear whether the cable box spontaneously failed or if a surge in a nearby power line caused the problem.

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGO San Francisco Comcast buys woman TV after cable box exploded 11-26-12.flv[/flv]

KGO-TV in San Francisco helped Kay Corlett get compensation for the damaged television she says failed after her Comcast cable box exploded.  (3 minutes)

Can Verizon be enticed to puts its FiOS trucks back on the road to expansion?

Despite the fact further expansion of Verizon FiOS has been stalled for more than two years as a result of a company directive, local officials in one Massachusetts community won a commitment from Verizon to extend its fiber to the home service to every home and business in return for a lengthy contract renewal.

Just nine months after local officials in Medford, north of Boston, first signed an agreement with Verizon, The Medford Transcript reports the two were back at the negotiating table with an amended agreement to extend Verizon FiOS beyond the 71 percent already served in return for a franchise that will not expire until 2025.

Verizon originally left large sections of West Medford and several neighborhoods scattered around the area without a fiber upgrade.

Verizon regional president Donna Cupelo acknowledged Medford is the only community in the state that has won a second round of FiOS expansion.

Like many cable franchise agreements, Verizon has agreed to contribute towards the operation of the community’s Public, Educational, and Government access channels available to subscribers of both Comcast and Verizon FiOS.

The amended agreement will expire at the same time Comcast’s current franchise agreement ends, giving both providers parity.

Verizon’s agreement to expand its FiOS network under certain conditions may provide the first visible path for other communities with incomplete fiber service to entice Verizon to keep building its fiber network.

Two North Carolina men subcontracted by Comcast to perform repairs in sections of New Jersey hard-hit by Hurricane Sandy spent their Thanksgiving trying to rob a drug store instead, authorities say.

Hillside police told The Star-Ledger 28-year-old David Dockery of Morganton and 34-year-old Jerry Lee Williams of Hickory were arrested Thanksgiving night and charged with burglary and criminal mischief.

Police say the pair attempted to burgle the CVS Pharmacy on Long Avenue by breaking the drive-thru window. Authorities were alerted by an alarm.

A pair of officers found both men in a white cargo van on railroad tracks behind the store. Police speculate the two were searching for prescription drugs.

In a slightly risque move that could alienate some, AMC Networks is alerting Verizon customers to a potential contract dispute that includes the depiction of a nude woman mannequin on its campaign website.

(Image pointlessly edited by Stop the Cap!)

The illustrated image, part of a sequence informing customers about the shows they could lose if the network is pulled, is a reference to the popular series Mad Men.

The program dispute involves AMC, IFC, Sundance Channel and WEtv — all owned by parent company AMC Networks, Inc.

AMC also began running a series of television ads alerting Verizon subscribers that the networks could be removed from the FiOS TV lineup.

Verizon objected to both the tone and substance of AMC’s campaign:

“There is no risk of FiOS TV customers losing AMC imminently, as AMC Networks has incorrectly claimed,” Verizon officials said in a statement. “This is nothing more than a desperate attempt by AMCN to scare our FiOS TV customers into thinking that they will lose their programming.”

One of our readers wondered why we bothered: “You censored a plastic mannequin and called her a woman?” tweeted Shawn.

Shawn turns out to be right. Although not completely visible on the website, some additional research shows the original image was part of a bizarre promotional poster for season five of the show.

Consultant payday

While rural West Virginia waits for broadband service, more than $1 million in federal tax dollars devoted to rural Internet expansion is instead paying for consultants, most who live out-of-state.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports state officials paid out huge sums to a network of consultants, many employed by Verizon Communications, ostensibly to assist with its $126.3 million federal grant to improve broadband to “anchor institutions.” But critics wonder whether the money, which will ultimately not deliver a single new broadband connection to any individual home or business, is redundant and an example of wasteful government spending.

Among the recipients:

• Perry Rios, a Verizon employee who resides in Denver, was paid $512,000 in 2011 and is on track to earn another $329,000 this year helping the state figure out how to spend the money before the clock runs out. Rios has traveled to West Virginia 47 times since the summer of 2010. Total tab to taxpayers: $731,770 so far for just over two years of subcontracting work;
• Verizon network engineer Lloyd Draper, who resides in Virginia, earned $252,075 in consulting work. Clarence Turning, who lives in Connecticut, has received $143,490. Two other Verizon workers contracted as project managers both earned nearly $100,000 each.
• Verizon demands $250/hour for consulting work in the state it abandoned in 2010 when it sold off its landline network to Frontier Communications.

Questions are being raised about the necessity of the Verizon contractors because Frontier Communications, tasked with building the institutional fiber network, already has project managers and other workers with nearly identical job responsibilities. State officials seem to suggest Frontier’s employees are not up to the task.

“This work goes far beyond our current staffing resources,” Gale Given, chief technology officer for West Virginia state government told the Gazette. “These professionals are necessary to provide engineering, project management and other functions, and to coordinate the various parties that are involved in the grant.”

In May, Stop the Cap! reported that the stimulus-funded broadband expansion project was already mired in controversy over earlier spending decisions that included high-powered, expensive routers for rural schools and libraries that sat unused for two years and fiber broadband built with taxpayer funds that rural institutions could not afford to maintain once taxpayer funding ran out.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Inspector General and West Virginia Legislative Auditor are reviewing the state’s use of the stimulus funds.

According to the newspaper, West Virginia is using its $126.3 million federal stimulus grant to purchase Internet routers and bring fiber-optic broadband to more than 1,000 “community anchor institutions” — schools, libraries, 911 centers, state agencies, police barracks, health centers, and other public facilities. The money, which was awarded in 2010, also will pay to upgrade an existing wireless Internet tower network. The network will not provide service to individual homes or businesses.

State officials also told the newspaper the $1.3 million spent on the Verizon consultants wouldn’t hamper the broadband expansion project. The state expects to finish the $126.3 project with $9 million in leftover funds. The state has until Jan. 31 to spend the stimulus money, or risk having to return unspent funds to the federal government.