Wheeler

President Barack Obama will shortly nominate a former top cable and wireless industry lobbyist as his choice to represent the interests of the American people at the Federal Communications Commission.

Thomas Wheeler, who has been a telecom industry insider for at least 30 years and today serves as a venture capitalist, will have enormous influence over how the FCC manages the public airwaves, broadband, and wireless spectrum.

The Wall Street Journal reports this afternoon that President Obama may make a formal announcement as early as this Wednesday, with current FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn serving as interim chair until Wheeler is seated.

Wheeler is expected to take a more industry-friendly attitude at the FCC. As Stop the Cap! noted after reviewing several years of Wheeler’s personal blog, the future FCC chairman would have approved the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, considers Google, Apple and other technology companies challenging telecom public policy part of a “Silicon Valley mafia,” and praised AT&T’s chief lobbyist as a visionary that could define the wireless industry’s future.

Wheeler’s regulatory philosophy offers that mergers and acquisitions present an opportunity for regulators to impose certain temporary conditions on deals, offering the best opportunity to influence a short-term regulatory outcome. But such preconditions are often mild, quickly expire, and are predictable for the companies involved. When Comcast sought merger approval for its deal with NBCUniversal, one concession was to sell discounted Internet access for poor families — a service Comcast had earlier plans to offer but withheld as a bargaining chip during merger approval talks.

Time Warner Cable is seeking a patent for technology to let cable subscribers watch DVR recordings on mobile devices including tablets, smartphones, and computers outside of the home.

The patent application, obtained by FierceCable, shows most of the cable company’s efforts are directed at preserving licensing agreements for content viewing and managing restrictions on copying television shows and movies to external devices.

Time Warner Cable has proposed a three level security system for customer recordings. Level 1 would prohibit the customer from accessing DVR recordings, Level 2 would permit limited viewing and perhaps no copying, and Level 3 would allow open access to recordings and allow them to be shared with other devices.

The company theoretically could also use its security system to secure customer use, charging extra depending on how a customer wants to view DVR recordings remotely.

“Because of the increasing popularity of home networking, there is a growing need for a strategy that enables a user to perform authorized transfer of protected content, e.g., transferring content from an STT [set-top terminal] to a second device in a home network, and at the same time prevents unauthorized distribution of the protected content,” Time Warner Cable wrote in the patent application.

Time Warner could be the first cable company to allow remote viewing of DVR recordings if its patent application is approved. When working with InventHelp Invention Company, the chances of your patent application getting approved is higher. The company already offers a “whole home” DVR system that permits customers to start recorded shows on one television and finish them on another, but this enhancement would extend viewing outside of the home.

The company offered no comment about the patent or an estimate of when the service might become available.

Frontier’s new mascot

I’m sure more than a few readers work for a company with a marketing department that churns out advertising and imagery that leaves you shaking your head wondering what they were thinking.

There are some employees at Frontier Communications who are head-scratching this week as the company unleashes “Frontier’s First Ever Spokesman.”

His name is Francis Abraham Buffalo (his friends get to call him “Frank.”) He’s a… buffalo.

An internal memo obtained by Stop the Cap! informs employees Frank is prepared to bulldoze his way through “the clutter and get consumers buzzing.”

“Think of the Aflac duck and the Geico gecko,” a Frontier executive writes. “People have a truly positive association with them that translates into a positive feeling for those companies.”

But can a new mascot really change perceptions about a company more than the quality of the products or services a company provides (or doesn’t)?

For the record, your editor has never been particularly moved by either the duck or the gecko, and I, along with many other Americans, stopped watching television commercials years ago with the advent of the DVR. I have also never bought a product or service based on anything other than its merits and price. Frontier’s buffalo will not change that.

The mascot search involved a nationwide focus group of at least 800 customers and non-customers who were shown a series of “try-outs” involving lip-synched ducks, pigs, and various other creatures you may have last encountered as roadkill.

“Frank was the top choice, lifting our preference rating over the competition by 8 points and decreasing the competition by 3 points.  That’s a net 11 point increase for Frontier and solid support that we’re on the right path,” the company trumpets.

Of course, their cable competitors can always suggest while Frontier is busy playing with animals, they are delivering far faster broadband service and a better package of phone, broadband, and television service that does not involve a third-party satellite dish stuck on your roof.

Even some Frontier employees were less than enthusiastic about the endeavor, already predicting the response ads from the competition.

“I thought the pig would’ve been a better choice,” writes one. “I can just see the competition running ads about not getting ‘Buffaloed’ by Frontier!”

Most of the excitement among employees seems to emanate from the office that envisioned the campaign and spent a lot of money to make it happen.

“A landmark decision in the continuing evolution of Frontier,” jokes a Frontier worker less than thrilled with the result.

Even Frontier executives admit that Frank might be a big, fat target:

“We have also heard some concerns from our employees that we are proactively addressing in the campaign so our competitors won’t take advantage of our new brand spokesperson.”

“Frank will be a boffo buffalo. A solid, truth-talking machine that doesn’t like fuss or tricks – and neither do we.   We play it straight — price guarantees and no contracts make it easy for consumers to understand our products and services.  So if anyone asks, Frank is not here to “buffalo” or trick anyone (call Cable if you want that!).  He doesn’t deal with BS or malarkey, and that means no hidden fees, no surprises.”

Phillip “It’s actually an American bison” Dampier

Frontier is asking for advice on how to make Frank a better buffalo and offer any additional feedback. At Stop the Cap! we are always willing to help, so we publicly offer advice for our hometown phone company.

1. The American buffalo is actually the American bison, but that probably sounds too French (it is actually Greek, but nobody wants to get too close to Greece these days). The bison’s story is remarkably similar to phone companies like Frontier. It once roamed across the American landscape in great herds but was targeted to near extinction. Just like your landline. It still maintains “near threatened” status, and is only gradually making a comeback with the help of conservation efforts. While our ancestors shared their lives with the bison, most people today will only meet one in a zoo or park. We are unsure why Frontier would want to associate itself with an animal best known in the past and unlikely to be seen today.
2. Lip-synching animals (and babies) has become cliché. We were not too impressed with the voice talent Frontier decided to use for their animals either. Instead, check out Telus, western Canada’s biggest phone company. They turn animal wrangling into an art form, using various critters in their ads for phone, broadband, and wireless service. Telus compliments their animal friends with Canadian musicians to visually and musically deliver whatever message the company wants to share.
3. While Frontier may have eliminated some of its old tricks like contract termination, equipment, service protection, and surcharge fees from customer bills, many of us have long memories of the surprise steep cancellation fees charged when dropping landline service that we kept for 20+ years. Others found Frontier’s inadequate DSL only slightly less annoying than the $100+ service termination fee thrown on the last bill. Some of those fees are still being charged to customers, including a particularly silly broadband account service order charge that still stings departing customers. It is hard to accept Frontier’s new marketing messages when the company is still baiting the traps.
4. Frontier’s reputation problem does not come from poor advertising. It comes from a poor selection of products and services. Frontier until recently has simply refused to keep up with the reality of today’s broadband market. Sorry, basic DSL will no longer cut it, particularly when a competitor arrives. Cable can still out-class Frontier’s broadband products even after upgrades to ADSL2+ and VDSL. Frontier bills are still loaded with surprise surcharges and extras that raise the out-the-door price, sometimes even higher than what cable charges. The more important question to ask focus groups is why people do business with Frontier. Is it because they have to or they want to?

Frontier still does not evoke “cutting edge” anything. Frontier FiOS, inherited from Verizon, is the child nobody wants to talk about.

For years, Frontier only offered ADSL at speeds that stopped keeping up with cable a decade ago, even in large metro areas like Rochester, N.Y. When the company advertised “up to” in association with broadband speeds, it meant it: advertise up to 12Mbps but deliver service as slow as 3.1Mbps. With VDSL, 25Mbps might be doable, but cable already offers 30/5 or 50/5Mbps that is a sure thing.

Frontier’s landline service is generally reliable and works even with a power outage if you have a wired phone. But the company charges too much for a phone line many people are now jettisoning in favor of their cell phone and the company is still pushing long distance calling plan bundles that are now irrelevant. Does anyone under 35 know what a toll-call is?

Frontier’s “television” service for most customers is a third-party reseller agreement with a satellite provider with its own contract and conditions. Exciting? Not exactly.

There isn’t much to see here. AT&T and Verizon have spent money to earn money. The only major success story from AT&T’s landline business is its U-verse platform. Verizon FiOS delivers the most formidable competition cable operators like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision have seen. Even CenturyLink has invested in Prism, a fiber to the neighborhood system that can deliver a true triple-play package of services that give customers a reason to stay.

Frontier has Frank the Buffalo and some long-overdue technology upgrades that probably won’t win back a lot of customers.

So what are the strengths Frontier can sell?

1. In most markets, Frontier has no hard limit on broadband usage. That is an attractive selling point where cable operators slap usage caps on customers. Usage caps can and do trigger customer defections;
2. Frontier phone service is generally more reliable than cable or Voice over IP. Talk to customers in storm-struck areas who lost power and cable, but their phone line kept on working;
3. Frontier ADSL2+ and VDSL can outperform rural cable operators who have either oversold their shared network or don’t offer higher DOCSIS 3 speeds yet;
4. Frontier Wi-Fi, if vastly expanded, can be a useful free add-on and selling tool in areas served by cable operators that do not offer the service. But Frontier Wi-Fi hotpots have to be more commonly encountered to make a difference.

Above all, Frontier must keep upgrading its network to stay competitive. Once you lose customers, they can be extremely hard to get back. For many of us, establishing an account with the phone company meant significant installation fees and several days before a crew would turn up to connect service. Frontier knows perfectly well going back to the phone company after leaving is a high hurdle many never attempt.

The best mascot a company like Frontier can adopt are real customers and employees talking about their satisfaction with the changes Frontier is making. Without that, the customers that left will probably always think of Frontier as yesterday’s news. Using an American buffalo that neared extinction itself is probably not going to change that perception.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Frontier Animal Mascot Tryouts 4-13.flv[/flv]

Here are Frontier’s animal mascot tryouts. (1 minute)

Circling…

While tens of thousands of customers in the southeastern United States might describe the quality of Windstream service as something to avoid stepping in, turkey buzzards are generating plenty of the real thing in Nebraska, creating two major headaches for the independent telecom company.

As of this afternoon, at least 30,000 Windstream customers in the southeast U.S. cannot make or receive long distance or toll-free calls without encountering a fast busy signal or an intercept recording. In case callers forget what a regular busy signal sounds like, one can be heard by dialing Windstream’s national customer support number, which is overwhelmed with complaint calls from annoyed customers.

“Windstream’s network operations and engineering teams are working a widespread outage affecting long-distance and toll-free call processing,” Windstream customer support acknowledged this afternoon. “This has also affected inbound calling to our support centers. An estimated time for restoral is not known.”

That is not good enough for Windstream customer Megan Short. Anyone calling her business number is likely to hear a Windstream recording telling callers: “The number you have reached is not in service, disconnected, or has been changed.”

“I am trying to run a business here, and this issue needs to be resolved ASAP,” she wrote on the company’s Facebook page. “This is your job, you know. You have ONE JOB.”

Other customers are complaining the outage is affecting local calls as well.

Veterinary Ophthalmology Services near Nashville is having a very quiet Monday with “few calls in or out, so it can’t be just long distance numbers. The majority of our clients are local.”

The employees of Don Meyler Inspections had plenty of free time to inspect the morning newspaper, afternoon lunch, and their frustration level, because the phones simply are not ringing in south Florida either.

“We’re severely impacted for inbound calls and outbound is sporadic,” the company writes on DownDetector.com. “It is the worst outage we’ve had in six years.”

Those tenacious enough to wait for customer support are not exactly getting total customer satisfaction:

“The big kicker was being on hold with the online chat for over an hour only to inform me there was ‘a high call volume’ and then the chat session ended,” said Chad Spaulding in Louisville, Ky. “You can’t even reach the corporate office for support. This is the fourth outage in our area in two months.”

With outages like this, some might thing the buzzards would be circling, and in Beatrice, Neb. they literally are, according to the Omaha Herald-World, fouling Windstream-provisioned Verizon Wireless cell towers where the federally protected birds favor building their nests.

Windstream’s John Dageford presented the company’s solution to the annual poo-problem from the birds: shoot them.

Dageford thinks if someone kills a handful of the large birds, the rest will flee in terror.

The Beatrice council reserved its decision on how to proceed for now, although a number of Windstream customers affected by today’s outage may not.

AT&T is seeking freedom from regulation, oversight and the right to abandon its landline network with the assistance of Connecticut legislators who modeled a state deregulation measure on recommendations from the corporate-funded, AT&T-backed, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee voted 20-4 to approve the bill, which would eliminate service and oversight requirements and allow the phone company to raise rates. AT&T has lost most of its landline customers since assuming control of service in Connecticut. Today, only 28 percent of homes in the state choose AT&T for their home phone service. The Office of Consumer Counsel suggests AT&T’s poor performance in the state may have had a lot to do with that, citing the company’s slow job of restoring phone service after a series of storms affected the state.

AT&T wants the power to drop telephone service altogether in areas considered unprofitable to repair or continue to serve. A trio of company-backed bills in the state legislature would hand them that right.

House Bills 6401, 6402 and Senate Bill 888 are all measures that would deregulate the phone company and open public lands for placing cell towers, limit regulator oversight and cut reporting requirements that let regulators track telephone rates.

None of the measures have been introduced on a whim, contend critics. The Connecticut Citizen Action Group released a report showing links between corporate-written model bills produced by ALEC and the current legislation before the Connecticut General Assembly.

HB 6401: House Bill 6401 strips the Public Utilities Review Authority (PURA) of their ability to regulate Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services. An emerging market, this bill creates deregulation for the sake of deregulation.

HB 6402: House Bill 6402 eliminates the right of regulators to oversee AT&T to make sure it has some form of accountability to the public. The section on annual audits has been gutted, making it impossible to protect the public from rate-fixing. More importantly, it includes a provision to allow AT&T to end service to any customer it wants upon 30 days’ written notice.

SB 888: Senate Bill 888 has an ALEC-drafted provision that allows cell phone towers to be built on public lands on a presumption that the will of telecommunications companies is in the interest of the public good.

“If AT&T is allowed to drop service in unprofitable areas at their sole discretion, if they’re allowed to let service outages drag on for weeks with no consequences, if they’re allowed to jack up rates — of course they will,” Daniel Ravizza of Connecticut Citizen Action Group said in a statement. “‘Trust me’ is not a good enough guarantee for Connecticut consumers.”

ALEC and AT&T’s Legislative Chorus

• Rep. Debra Lee Hovey of Monroe and Newtown and Sen. Kevin Witkos of Simsbury, Avon, and Torrington serve as ALEC’s chair people for the state;
• Rep. John Piscopo is currently serving as ALEC’s National Chair;
• Rep. Lonnie Reed (D-Branford), chairwoman of the state legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee defended the measures saying they would give certainty to the telecom industry which would attract more investment in broadband and phone services. But she admitted once consumers learned of the proposed bills, things got heated quickly. “Some of this stuff is radioactive,” she told The Hartford Courant. “It’s hard even if you change the language to convince people otherwise;”
• “The arguments by opponents of HB 6402 have been shown to be without merit so now they’re resorting to desperate measures and innuendo,” said AT&T spokesman Chuck Coursey. “The fact is modernizing our telecom rules this year will help encourage private investment, job growth and consumer choice at a time when Connecticut needs it most;”
• John Emra is AT&T’s chief lobbyist in Connecticut. Emra was behind last year’s attempts to advance similar deregulation. Emra serves as the Executive Director of External Affairs for AT&T and as the chair of ALEC Connecticut.

“This is part of a national strategy by ALEC to advance a pro-corporate agenda at the expense of consumers,” James Browning, regional director of state operations for Common Cause, said in a statement. “We’ve seen the destructive impact these measures have had in other states. AT&T should not be allowed to get away with it here in Connecticut.”

The New Haven Register notes Browning said the three bills — SB888, HB6401 and HB6402 — closely resemble model legislation ALEC’s legislative template used in 20 other states where telecommunications regulatory overhaul has occurred. In 17 of those 20 states, telecommunications rates have increase, and in some cases, the cost of service has doubled.

Connecticut consumers can share their feelings about the bills through e-mail with their elected officials.