Judge Engelmayer

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will have to wait to bring his lawsuit claiming Charter/Spectrum is ripping off New York consumers with false speed claims until the courts can find a judge that isn’t a Charter/Spectrum subscriber.

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer recused himself from hearing the case in state court Wednesday because he has a conflict of interest – he’s a Charter/Spectrum customer and could receive monetary damages if the cable company is found culpable.

“I am obligated to recuse,” Judge Engelmayer said, while also apologizing for not doing so earlier. As a former Time Warner Cable customer, he was unfamiliar with the Spectrum brand and only recently realized Charter Communications had acquired Time Warner Cable. “I can barely use a toaster. I have no idea what internet service I subscribe to.”

Charter Communications is trying to get the case heard in a presumably more friendly venue – federal court, and the case is on hold until Schneiderman completes his argument to have the case heard by a New York court. Charter argues that Schneiderman should not be allowed to bring enforcement actions under state law in state courts just because he is dissatisfied with the performance of the FCC.

The New York Attorney General brought the action after allegedly finding extensive evidence Time Warner Cable was not delivering the internet speeds the company promised in its advertising and in some cases left customers with equipment incapable of supporting the higher speeds customers purchased.

If Schneiderman can successfully keep the case in New York, the courts will have to find a judge with Verizon FiOS or no internet at all — a tall order in a state where Charter/Spectrum’s service area covers Buffalo to Manhattan and all points in-between.

Consumer Reports is having a hard time handing out high scores to America’s cable and phone companies after its recent editorial overhaul that replaces simple numeric-only scores with a simpler color code that ranks good companies in green, fair companies in yellow, and downright lousy ones in red.

In its most recent rankings (subscription required), only three internet providers managed to win green ratings: a publicly owned municipal utility in Chattanooga, Tenn., a private ISP serving northern California communities in and around San Francisco, and Google Fiber, which shows every sign of stopping further expansion of its fiber to the home network.

EPB Fiber is the runaway winner of Consumer Reports’ ongoing ratings of America’s top telecom providers, scoring 92 and getting excellent ratings for value, reliability and speed. Sonic, which still primarily offers DSL service, achieved second place despite being limited in selling higher speeds available over AT&T’s wireline telephone network. Google Fiber made third place and is a regular favorite for offering affordable gigabit speeds for around $70 a month, not much more expensive than what some ISPs charge for 60Mbps for less.

The fact a public utility like EPB offers America’s best broadband service must give fits to the telecom giants like Comcast, Charter, and AT&T that only dream of achieving similar scores and have a history of opposing public broadband and in some cases have financed lobbying efforts seeking to ban it.

Providers achieving “yellow” ratings were almost exclusively small, regional independent cable operators and overbuilders like WOW and RCN. Verizon and Frontier’s versions of FiOS also made the cut, although it seems both suffered ratings drops attributable to decreased scores for value and customer service. Both companies have eliminated some of their most aggressive promotions that used to lure customers with a very low price for service.

The list of lousy-scoring companies is larger than ever, and encompass all the familiar large operators most Americans have to do business with. Since Stop the Cap! started in 2008, Mediacom is still rated the lousiest of the lousy cable companies, achieving a score of just 51. Only HughesNet, a satellite internet provider, scored worse, and not by much — achieving a 47 score.

DSL providers other than Sonic performed dismally as well: FairPoint (52), Windstream (53), Frontier (53), Verizon DSL (54), TDS (55), AT&T DSL (55), CenturyLink (57), and Cincinnati Bell DSL (57).

Cable companies also live in the ratings basement – Comcast/XFINITY (54), Charter/Time Warner Cable (55), GCI (60), Comporium (60), and Atlantic Broadband (60). Charter Communications just barely made it out of the red section with a score of (61), also shared by Cox and Cable ONE. Altice’s Cablevision, AT&T U-verse, Blue Ridge Communications, and Consolidated Cable managed scores of just 63. Charter/Bright House and Service Electric got a 64, and Altice’s Suddenlink managed a surprising 66.

The consumer magazine’s conclusion – most Americans still loathe their cable and phone companies, their prices, their bundles, and are greatly dissatisfied with the state of competition. That is unlikely to change considering the industry’s current trend of consolidation, which further reduces customer choice.

Comcast has begun rolling out another speed increase for its broadband customers subscribed to its Performance tier.

The free upgrade, which began March 1, raises downstream speeds from 50 to 70Mbps. The speed boost is likely to gradually spread across Comcast’s nationwide footprint, but this month the new speeds are available to residential customers in:

• Oregon
• Washington State
• Colorado
• Utah
• Houston
• Tucson, Ariz.

Comcast is notifying customers with older modems they will need to get a new one to take advantage of the faster speeds.

DOCSIS 3.1 is the latest standard for cable broadband. (Image courtesy: Diparth Patel)

DOCSIS 3.1 — the newest iteration of the standard that allows cable operators to deliver broadband over their hybrid fiber-coax networks — is performing better than expected, according to engineers at some of the largest cable companies in the country.

Multichannel News reports the new robust standard works “really well” even when cable infrastructure isn’t up to pristine standards.

“It [DOCSIS 3.1] works better than 3.0 in noisy plant,” said JR Walden, senior vice president of technology and chief technology officer of Mediacom. Walden adds it even performs well where cable operators oversell their network, packing too many customers on a congested node that would normally cause speeds to fall dramatically under the current DOCSIS 3.0 standard.

DOCSIS 3.1 is more efficient handling bandwidth available for broadband service and its ability to bond multiple channels together allows cable operators to boost internet speed tiers dramatically. Mediacom is currently deploying gigabit speeds across its entire network footprint, and the technology is backwards-compatible with DOCSIS 3.0 so cable networks can be upgraded without any disruption to customers.

Mediacom expects its costs to provision customers with broadband service across all speed tiers to drop because of DOCSIS 3.1, delivering the company “better economics.” Customer upgrades can also deliver additional revenue, and Walden claimed between 3-10% of Mediacom customers have already upgraded to gigabit speeds.

The Comcast XB6, one of the first DOCSIS 3.1 network gateways.

The biggest challenge found by early adopters of DOCSIS 3.1 isn’t the technology — it is the network gateways that connect cable modem service to in-home wired and wireless networks. DOCSIS 3.1-compatible gateways are still in short supply, and is essential if the customer is going to get the broadband speed they are paying for. The biggest bottleneck of all comes from in-home Wi-Fi.

Multichannel News:

“Having a very powerful WiFi device is critical” for DOCSIS 3.1, agreed Damian Poltz, VP of technology strategy and networks at Shaw Communications.

Comcast is trying to address this with the XB6, a full-featured DOCSIS 3.1 gateway that will also integrate speedy WiFi, ZigBee and other connectivity technologies.

For its initial D3.1 deployments, Comcast has been pairing stand-alone modems with a separate gateway to serve “thousands of customers.”

While acknowledging that such a set-up is not ideal, Jorge Salinger, VP of access architecture at Comcast, confirmed that Comcast is building versions of the XB6 that use Broadcom and Intel chipsets. He said Comcast is completing employee trials shifting toward customer trials and on to commercial deployments, which are expected to begin in the next month or so.

Customers without DOCSIS 3.1-compatible equipment will find speed tests reporting slower speeds than advertised. Several vendors are working on expanding the supply of network gateways and are making sure those devices can deliver robust Wi-Fi.

The cable companies most aggressive about DOCSIS 3.1 deployment have been Comcast and a variety of smaller national and regional operators like MidCo and Mediacom. Altice is upgrading Suddenlink customers to gigabit speeds using the current DOCSIS 3.0 standard and is scrapping its existing coax network for Cablevision customers, to be replaced with fiber-to-the-home service. Lagging behind will be Charter Communications, expected to be among the last cable operators to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 as it remains preoccupied with integrating Time Warner Cable and Bright House into its existing operations. Charter’s first priority is to complete all-digital upgrades for TWC and BH customers, expected to take up to two years to complete.

The second half of 2016 shows losses in broadband and television customers.

Frontier Communications CEO is blaming employees for the company’s deteriorating financial condition and operating performance and has allegedly dropped bonuses and merit pay increases for lower-level employees.

Sources inside Frontier Communications tell Stop the Cap! Frontier CEO Dan McCarthy notified employees in email on March 2 — one week before employees were expecting to receive their annual bonus — the company would no longer be providing bonus compensation for “lower banded management employees.” They hired redundancy representation for employers for this case.

“He implied that he too was affected but I highly doubt that is the case,” one source tells us. “We weren’t notified via a ‘Town Hall’, no conference call, no face to face with our managers, only a cowardly e-mail sent from behind a desk thousands of miles away. Keep in mind that people use that to pay house taxes, medical bills, pay off other bills, pay college tuition, etc, and a week before we were slated to get it we’re told that it isn’t coming.”

McCarthy has been on the hot seat with Wall Street for weeks after reporting yet another quarter where many of Frontier’s most profitable customers are fleeing faster than the company can replace them with new ones. McCarthy also told investors that many of Frontier’s losses in the last quarter were due to the company finally disconnecting service and writing off customers who haven’t paid their Frontier phone bills for as long as a year in acquired former Verizon territories in Florida, Texas, and California.

McCarthy

“There was certainly no suggestion that the big acquisition would pay off in the company’s Q4 earning report when subscriber counts, average revenue per residential user, and quarter-over-quarter revenue all fell,” wrote Daniel B. Kline of TMFDankline. “That has been the pattern in all three quarters since the Verizon deal closed, and while McCarthy has done an excellent job controlling expenses, his excuses for the drop in subscribers have started to sound a bit hollow.”

That effort to “control expenses” may be coming at the expense of customers that Frontier is depending on to stay in business.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last month announced the state was reviewing Frontier’s performance in western New York. A Rochester television station has aired more than a half-dozen stories about deteriorating service quality at Frontier since last summer. After airing the first few stories, the station was inundated with hundreds of complaints about Frontier’s spotty broadband and phone service.

News10NBC (WHEC-TV) reported it can take weeks for a Frontier technician to show up on a service call. Customer service is no help and customers are not getting the services they paid to receive.

Frontier was also implicated last month in knocking a Rochester area radio station off the air. After the company first blamed the radio station’s equipment for the problem, Frontier eventually admitted its own “old infrastructure” was responsible for outages that interrupted broadcasts for hours at a time.

Frontier’s stock continues its descent.

Schneiderman has been focused on keeping New York’s ISPs honest about their speed claims and performance, but service reliability is also increasingly an issue, especially after high winds in a recent storm in western New York left nearly half of the Rochester metro area without essential utilities for several days. Infrastructure upkeep, particularly aging utility poles, is now under investigation by the state’s Public Service Commission. Early evidence revealed local utilities may have underinvested in pole maintenance for years due to cost cutting. Some utility poles in western New York are well over 50 years old, originally placed in the 1950s and 1960s. Hundreds failed in the high winds.

Frontier’s track record of blaming others for their own problems has not been well-received by employees.

“Maggie Wilderotter [former CEO of Frontier Communications] was bad but McCarthy’s leadership is erratic and catastrophic,” shares another Frontier middle management employee wishing to stay anonymous. “McCarthy was defending the regional management autonomy approach as a unique strength for Frontier last summer, now he’s declared that is inefficient and is centralizing management decisions at corporate headquarters. He was selling Wall Street on Frontier’s IPTV project in 2016 by promoting expanded service territories. Now that project is on hold and there are signs Frontier is pulling back on meaningful and long overdue broadband speed upgrades. He recently announced he was reorganizing residential and commercial sales units, something our competitors did long ago and will only disrupt things at Frontier even more. Poor customer service was the result of “on-shoring” our call centers? Not exactly. Poor training and inadequate support have left our call center employees unable to properly handle customer concerns. Employees can reach out to an employment law attorney when facing unjust treatment in the workplace. He also consistently downplayed how nightmarish the Verizon conversion was for our new customers in Florida, Texas, and California. It was bad planning, bad vision, and poor execution and the buck stops with our CEO.”

Another source tells us:

“We worked 60-80 weeks, late nights, weekends, countless hours away from our families to push forward with projects that were horrible for our customers and senior leadership was told to get the job done regardless any way they could. We worked through the AT&T and Verizon conversions. We performed as employees of Frontier. Who did not perform? Those making these horrible financial and planning decisions that caused major outages to former Verizon customers when they finally cut over. Some problems were so severe that many customers decided to leave.”

Frontier insiders tell us the company is on a mission to slash expenses across the board to turn in better financial results that can protect the company’s dividend payout to shareholders and, in turn, executive pay and bonuses. The company is reportedly considering allowing more employees to work from home to cut facilities costs, utilities, and maintenance expenses.

“There have been numerous resignations over this and morale is at an all-time low within the company,” a source tells us.

One of the employees sharing the latest developments reports he has turned in his resignation this month and hired an employment lawyer at HKM.com to get the compensation he deserves.

“I figure I should follow so many of our customers to a company that isn’t great, but at least makes an effort delivering what it promises.”

Frontier’s Problems Afflict Hundreds of Customers in Western N.Y.

WHEC-TV Rochester has been following problems with Frontier Communications since last summer. Until the acquisition of former Verizon customers in Texas, Florida, and California, the Rochester, N.Y. metropolitan area was considered Frontier’s largest legacy city service area. But just like in smaller rural communities, service problems have plagued Frontier, with complaints rolling in about slow or non-existent broadband, landline outages, poor billing and customer service practices, and service calls that take weeks before anyone shows up.

WHEC-TV Rochester began covering problems with Frontier on Aug. 22, 2016 with an investigation into internet woes at a Geneseo insurance agency. (2:21)

One day later (Aug. 23, 2016) complaints from other Frontier customers poured into WHEC-TV’s newsroom because of outages and bad service. (2:54)

In September, 2016 WHEC-TV was back with another story from frustrated and angry customers who can’t get suitable service from Frontier Communications, but found a $200 early termination fee on their bills when they tried to cancel. Now the Attorney General is getting involved. (3:18)

In late December, WHEC reported it had asked the N.Y. Public Service Commission to start an investigation into Frontier Communications over its broadband service. (2:20)

In February, when N.Y. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman came to town to discuss the honesty of ISP speed claims, WHEC reporter Jennifer Lewke instead questioned him about the hundreds of complaints the station had received about Frontier Communications. (3:03)

About one week after the Attorney General visited Rochester, WHEC reported Frontier Communications’ “old and outdated” equipment was directly responsible for taking a local radio station off the air for hours at a time. (1:10)

Several days after a windstorm in the Rochester area took away power to nearly half the metropolitan area, WHEC reports residents are frustrated waiting for cable and phone service to be restored. An investigation into utility infrastructure is now underway. (3:17)