Greater Austin, a city served by up to four different broadband providers — three either offering or promising fiber to the home service — is getting a speed upgrade from the one company that is sticking with its fiber-coax network — Time Warner Cable.

Starting June 3, Time Warner Cable customers who receive letters regarding the upgrade will see major broadband speed boosts at no additional charge:

Austin: Keeping the good broadband all to themselves. (Image courtesy: Kong)

The upgraded speeds will be offered to approximately 40 percent of customers in Austin and surrounding communities in June, with the remaining customers in the area getting upgraded through early fall. Here is the upgrade schedule:

June Speed Upgrade: Downtown Austin, West Campus, Hyde Park, Clarksville, Old Enfield, North Loop, Terrytown, Highland Park West, Central East Austin, Windsor Hills, Copperfield, Springdale Heights, Harris Branch, Edinburgh Gardens, Rollingwood, West Lake Hills, Lost Creek, Barton Creek, Jollyville, Anderson Mill, Brushy Creek, Bull Creek Park, Steiner Ranch, River Place, Canyon Creek, and the Reserve at Twin Peaks, as well as these communities: Manor, Cedar Park, Jonestown, Bee Cave, Kyle, Mountain City, and Uhland.

Fall Speed Upgrade: Round Rock, Leander, San Marcos, Elgin, Marble Falls, Lockhart, Bastrop, Fredericksburg, Taylor, Smithville, Wimberley, Liberty Hill, Lago Vista, Buda, Kyle, Elroy, and Lakeway.

“These significant speed increases will allow all our Internet customers in the greater Austin area to enjoy TWC Internet better,” said Kathy Brabson, area vice president of operations for Time Warner Cable in Central Texas.

Time Warner says it is spending about $60 million to upgrade its Austin-area network. That investment may help the cable company withstand competition from providers like Grande Communications, AT&T, and Google. For most in Austin, Time Warner Cable will be the first provider to dramatically boost Internet speeds. Google Fiber has postponed its launch until this fall, AT&T’s U-verse fiber to the home service is more press release than reality, and Grande Communications, although offering 1,000Mbps service for $65, only has that service available in parts of the greater Austin area.

Some customers will need to upgrade and/or exchange their current cable modem to receive the full speed upgrade. Customers leasing a modem can get information about whether an upgrade is needed from Time Warner’s Speed Increase website. We still strongly recommend customers consider purchasing their own modem — it will pay for itself in no time. Communication to the first group of customers about the new speeds and details about equipment is being delivered to homes this week.

Separately, Time Warner also announced it is expanding its local Wi-Fi hotspot network, but did not share any specific details.

Stop the Cap! will not be surprised to see Kansas City the next upgrade choice for Time Warner Cable — Google Fiber is up, running, and competing there. The rest of us will have to wait up to two years for faster speeds to arrive.

Comcast has at least 40 lobbying firms working on its merger deal with Time Warner Cable.

It’s shock and awe time in D.C. as Comcast pulls out all the stops to ram its $45 billion deal with Time Warner Cable down Washington’s throat.

The Hill reports Comcast is assembling one of the biggest lobbying teams ever seen inside the beltway, hiring at least seven additional lobbying firms on top of the 33 it already retains. Their mission: to pressure legislators and overwhelm regulators to accept the merger deal and ignore the critics.

The lobbying firms are loaded to the rafters with D.C.’s frequent revolving-door travelers — former legislators, staffers, regulators and their aides that worked in the Clinton and Bush Administrations who now work on behalf of the companies many used to oversee.

On Comcast’s generous payroll: former aides for the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House and Senate Judiciary committees, in addition to the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission — precisely the agencies that will review the merger for anti-trust concerns.

“If you’ve worked on the committees, or if you’ve worked in an agency overseeing a transaction like this, you’ve got knowledge about how the process works and credibility with the staff — it’s that simple,” one lobbyist told the newspaper.

A quick review of some of the players from The Hill:

Britt

Another two weeks, another stock sale for retired Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt. The man that oversaw a business now rated worse than the MERS coronavirus no longer has to worry about the day-to-day ordeals of running a cable company under fire. His biggest challenge is where to stash all the cash he collects selling off the generous profligate number of shares he received during 12 years at the helm of the cable operator, as well as those granted in his golden parachute retirement package.

Last Friday, Britt dumped another 30,000 shares on the open market at an average price of $136.04 a share. His total take home: $4,081,200.00.

Incredibly, no matter how many shares Britt sells, he seems to end up with the same number he started with. The Legacy reports Britt still owns 177,542 shares in the company after the sale, worth an estimated $24,152,814. That does not include what he has cashed out over the last several months.

When you consider your last rate hike, remember one of the “increased costs of doing business” facing Time Warner Cable is paying exorbitant salaries, bonuses and benefits to top executives that increase annually. That is money out of your wallet.

Comcast says you must have the option to pay more for the same broadband service you already get, only now with an allowance

Comcast has announced it is considering testing an innovative new plan in several test markets offering “unlimited Internet access” to customers for a yet-to-be-determined price. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Comcast’s executive vice president David Cohen raised eyebrows last week when he predicted all Comcast customers nationwide would see usage-based billing for their Internet access within five years.

Such statements tend to muck up things like a $45 billion dollar merger with Time Warner Cable that both companies must prove is in the public interest. The buyer wants to limit your Internet usage and the seller got its fingers burned back in 2009 when it tried its own usage cap experiment and now advertises it has no data caps.

Telling Time Warner Cable customers it is in their best interest to lose unmetered Internet plans may be too tough to sell, so Cohen has spent much of this week backtracking and claiming he was “misunderstood:”

To be clear, we have no plans to announce a new data usage policy.  In 2012, we suspended our 250 GB data cap in order to conduct a few pilot programs that were more customer friendly than a static cap.  Since then, we’ve had no data caps for any of our customers anywhere in the country.  We have been trialing a few flexible data consumption plans, including a plan that enables customers who wanted to use more data be given the option to pay more to do so, and a plan for those who use less data the option to save some money.  We decided to implement these trials to learn what our customers’ reaction is to what we think are reasonable data consumption plans.  We certainly have no interest in adopting any plans that our customers find unreasonable or disruptive to their Internet experience.

It’s important to note that we remain in trial mode only.   We’re now also looking at adding some unlimited data plans to our trials. We have always said that as the Internet, and our customers’ use of it, continues to evolve, so will Comcast and our policies.

Cohen makes a careful distinction between a strict usage limit and the kind of usage-based billing that will fill the company’s coffers with overlimit fees. But any usage allowance is a limit of how much you can use the Internet before something bad happens — either your access is shut off or your bill explodes.

Stop the Cap! has talked with more than a dozen customers in Comcast’s test markets about their experiences with Comcast’s “data usage policy.” Although the company claims it is seeking customer reactions, it never asks whether those customers want usage limits or not, only what kind.

Giving customers “the option to pay more” is exactly the type of thinking that won Comcast the dubious distinction of being the worst company in America. No usage plan tested by Comcast actually offers savings to customers. It simply places an artificial, arbitrary usage allowance on the overpriced broadband service the company offers now.

At this point, Comcast is not offering any unlimited use trials, but we have learned the value they are likely to place on “unlimited” based on what certain customers have paid all along for that privilege. Ars Technica reports some avoided the 250GB cap by signing up for business class service. The cost? $133.79 a month for 50/10Mbps. If Google Fiber was in town, you’d pay $70 for unlimited 1,000/1,000Mbps service, and the search engine giant would still be making money.

Cohen claims nothing is set in stone, but considering Comcast’s “don’t care” attitude towards its customers, it is a safe bet they will do what is best for shareholders and ignore complaints from customers that often have nowhere else to go for 21st century broadband speeds.

de Blasio

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an ambitious plan this week to make the city a favored home for new high-technology jobs with a commitment to guarantee every neighborhood in the city is wired for high-speed Internet access.

de Blasio’s remarks came at the opening of the city’s “Internet Week,” an event promoting innovative uses of broadband.

“We take an energetic view of helping this sector grow,” said de Blasio. “We can’t continue to have a digital divide that holds back too many of our citizens.”

The mayor noted Harlem will be the home to the nation’s largest continuous free-access Wi-Fi network when it is completed.

“This will bring free Wi-Fi to 80,000 people between 110th Street and 138th Street,” de Blasio said during a news conference on West 18th Street in Manhattan. “And it’ll be a great model for us going forward.”

Under the former Bloomberg Administration, New York City already announced several other regional free Wi-Fi hotspots, in various stages of development:

Brooklyn: