Georgia’s first gigabit fiberhood will serve residents of a luxury $600 million development now under construction in an Atlanta suburb.

North American Properties is partnering with Hotwire Communications to install an ultra high-speed fiber to the home broadband network offering gigabit speed to every resident, hotel guest, retail shop, restaurant and office worker at the Avalon development in Alpharetta, located north of Atlanta.

“This is a game-changer for Alpharetta,” said Alpharetta mayor David Belle Isle. “Nowhere else in Georgia can you get gigabit service to your home and nowhere else but Alpharetta can a business take advantage of this cost-effective way to future-proof their operations.”

Avalon is a 2.4 million square foot mixed-use development that will open in October 2014. Phase one will consist of 250 luxury rental homes (average rent $1,400), 101 single-family homes ($400,000-1.7 million), 400,000 square feet of retail and restaurants and 108,000 square feet of loft office space.

The property developer hopes fiber broadband will help it attract around 800 permanent residents as well as be a selling point for commercial tenants.

Hotwire Communications specializes in overbuilding multiple dwelling residences with fiber service. The nearest competitors are Comcast and AT&T, neither which offer speeds at Hotwire’s level.

Or maybe not.

A New York hedge fund manager wants Outerwall, Inc., operator of Redbox movie kiosks, to sell, spinoff, or shutdown a streaming movie service that has failed to compete effectively with Netflix.

Redbox Instant by Verizon has proven not to be much of a threat, said JANA Partners’ co-founder Barry Rosenstein. The hedge fund controls a 13.5 percent stake in Outerwall, Inc., (formerly Coinstar) best known for its change counting machines and Redbox DVD rental kiosks.

Some analysts predict JANA Partners will attract several other shareholders disenchanted with the disappointing earnings results.

Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, told his clients the group will likely force Outerwall’s management to focus on cash generation. The alternative is a forced sale of some or all of the company’s businesses.

Redbox Instant is 65% owned by Verizon, and could eventually be owned outright by the phone company or shut down. Outerwall entered the video streaming venture with Verizon to cut the company’s dependence on Redbox kiosks, which provided 87 percent of 2012 revenue (with Coinstar coin-counting kiosks and other vending machines covering much of the rest).

Netflix has de-emphasized its DVD by mail rental service in favor of a less-costly online video alternative. Redbox still depends primarily on customers visiting a nearby kiosk to exchange DVD rentals.

In September, Outerwall reported disappointing results and predicted earnings per share would be as much as 40 percent below expectation. Shares plummeted 20 percent after the earnings predictions were made.

Most of the problems are from “heightened promotional discount activity,” which translates: an excess of coupons and promo codes that attracted new customers that never spent much. Expect the company to curtail promotions and focus instead on profitability.

Also on the hedge fund’s chopping list: Seattle’s Best Coffee-branded “Rubi” coffee kiosks in grocery, drug and mass merchant stores. It seems there isn’t much interest in on-demand, fresh ground coffee selling for $1-1.50 a cup.

Time Warner Cable will spend $600 million in cash for Duke Energy Corporation’s 8,700 mile fiber network currently serving wireless carriers, government, business, and data center customers.

DukeNet, based in Charlotte, N.C., is a partnership between the electric utility and an investment fund owned by Alina Capital Partners. Duke Energy shed the network as part of its new business strategy refocusing on the energy sector. Time Warner Cable intends to use the fiber network to bolster its regional fiber backbone and offer enhanced fiber connectivity to its business customers.

“Business services is a key growth area for Time Warner Cable and this acquisition will greatly enhance our already growing fiber network to better serve customers, particularly those in key markets in the Carolinas,” said Phil Meeks, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Business Services for Time Warner Cable. “This acquisition will help us expand our fiber footprint at a price that is consistent with our disciplined approach to mergers and acquisitions.”

Last month, DukeNet announced it provided fiber backhaul service to more than 3,500 cell towers across North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.

Time Warner Cable has focused much of its investment activity in expanding and enhancing services sold to commercial clients.

The acquisition follows Time Warner Cable’s $230 million purchase of NaviSite, Inc., a 2011 deal that also brought it more business customers.

Orange Poland has launched a new fiber to the home package that bundles 300Mbps broadband, 119 television channels, a Livebox 3.0 fiber-ready gateway, a whole-house DVR, and unlimited calling for $64.50 a month with a two-year contract.

The new service is now available to more than 14,000 homes in Warsaw and has gotten good reviews from about 1,000 beta test subscribers. Orange Poland says their fiber network is capable of faster Internet speeds, which it is considering introducing after the initial launch is complete.

In comparison, Time Warner Cable now offers its customers 50Mbps Internet service, a cable modem, over 200 television channels, whole house DVR service, and unlimited calling for a promotional price of $165.50 a month for 12 months – $100 more a month.

Monika Torbińska , director of marketing for residential services at Orange, said that the company was pleased with the results of the pilot and now believes it has a strongly competitive product in the Polish market.

Orange plans to gradually expand its fiber optic network in the Polish capital and eventually beyond.

Cable ONE customers nationwide lost eight Turner Networks channels yesterday, despite the fact the cable company has a signed contract with Turner to pay for some of the networks that have gone dark.

“In an extraordinary act of retaliation and bullying, Turner Networks removed TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network from all Cable ONE systems without warning, when our prior Turner contract expired on October 1,” said Cable ONE CEO Tom Might. “This happened despite the fact that Cable ONE had signed new contracts and already agreed to pay an enormous nearly 50% rate increase for these three networks.”

Cable ONE was under pressure to carry all eight Turner-owned networks (in turn owned by Time Warner Entertainment) during contract renewal negotiations that included substantial fee increases. The cable company independently decided to boot five “less popular” networks from lineups nationwide: Boomerang, TruTV, TCM, CNN and CNN Headline News. It agreed to keep buying TBS, TNT, and Cartoon.

“We signed contracts for TBS, TNT and the Cartoon Network through the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), which allows for the purchase of individual channels rather than the entire bundle of eight,” said Might. “In a disgraceful punitive reaction, Turner Networks refused to recognize the NCTC contracts and immediately de-authorized all Cable ONE systems in order to ‘teach’ Cable ONE a lesson about the power of cable programmers to tie and bundle channels together and force carriage of unwanted bundles.  They refuse to give cable operators or their customers any choice about what they can or cannot buy.”

Turner Networks claims Cable ONE has no authority to buy a slimmed-down package of channels through the NCTC and must negotiate with Turner directly.

Cable ONE will automatically credit its customers for the missing channels. The cable company is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company and serves 730,000 customers in 19 states.

Cable ONE explains to its customers why eight Turner Network-owned channels are now missing from the channel lineup. (2 minutes)
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