AT&T is accelerating the demise of its own landline business with a new wireless home phone product that is cheap for voice calls but could spell the end of your DSL service in certain cases.

AT&T Wireless Home Phone service provides contract-free unlimited nationwide voice calling for $20 a month ($10 if you are already an AT&T wireless phone customer sharing your Mobile Share minutes).

The service includes a base station ($99.99 prepaid or free with two-year contract) that receives AT&T’s wireless signal and integrates with your existing home telephones. The landline replacement includes caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling and voice mail. There is a $36 activation fee, a “Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge” of $1.25 per month and all the local taxes and surcharges that go with your current landline. Unless choosing the prepaid option, an early termination fee up to $150 applies. The restocking fee for customer returns is up to $35.

In certain cases, forfeiting your landline could mean the end of your DSL service if you do not remind the phone company you want to keep your broadband service intact. If you don’t AT&T and other phone companies might disconnect all of your services.

There are other caveats:

• Call quality is only as good as AT&T’s network and reception in your home;
• Caller ID only includes the calling party’s number. No name information is provided;
• Emergency 911 calls lack exact geographic information, which could make locating a caller more difficult;
• The service is unregulated and has no local or state government oversight to guarantee call quality and reliability;
• If power fails, an internal backup battery can keep the system running for up to 36 hours or 3.5 hours of talk time;
• The service cannot be used with home security systems, fax machines, medical alert systems, credit card terminals, dial-up Internet, or other data services.

Verizon Wireless offers their own version of this service: Wireless Home Phone Connect, for about the same price. It gets mixed reviews from owners because of complaints about call quality.

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AT&T’s product promotion of its wireless home phone service. The pricing information in this video was intended primarily for existing AT&T wireless customers and is slightly outdated. (1 minute) 

Frontier’s headquarters in Rochester, N.Y.

Frontier Communications is boasting it spent $123.6 million in New York to upgrade broadband speeds, now available up to 25Mbps through bonded ADSL2+ or VDSL technologies.

Frontier’s New York customers are now offered traditional 1-6Mbps DSL, Broadband Ultra (up to 12Mbps) and Broadband Ultimate (up to 25Mbps).

Kevin Smith, senior vice president and general manager of Frontier’s New York division said 155 of Frontier’s 194 switching offices now have faster speeds available, as do 214 remote DSLAM switches. In all, Frontier now reaches 403,000 New York households with faster Internet service.

The company also spent a considerable sum in the Rochester and Chenango areas to upgrade its backbone network with interoffice 10G Ethernet Ring Protection Switching topology. Rochester remains an important center for Frontier, as its largest metropolitan market. IT software upgrades in Rochester will also help improve the national help desk and network operations.

Frontier also plans a major broadband expansion in Hamilton County with broadband grant funds that will improve the company’s backbone between Eagle Bay and Gloversville. That will introduce 25Mbps service to more than half of the households in the immediate area.

Frontier claims it intends to further expand broadband to 85 percent of its service areas nationwide, including those it acquired from Verizon Communications.

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Traditional Hollywood studios now compete with streaming content providers like Netflix and Amazon to capture viewers’ attention. Hari Sreenivasan looks at the growing impact of broadband and its effect on our viewing habits and entertainment industry with Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Lisa Donovan of Maker Studios. (8 minutes)

Some portions of the video were not cleared for online viewing. The missing section of the segment:

Traditional Hollywood studios have long produced the movies and television programs we love to watch, but in the era of high-speed broadband, companies like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Hulu are some of the new power players.

All of them stream movies, TV and video. Increasingly, they’re creating their own unique content as well. For the moment, Netflix has raised the stakes most prominently. Last month, it debuted all at once 13 episodes of its original $100 million dollar series “House of Cards” all at once. It stars Kevin Spacey as a cynical U.S. House majority whip. Its success turned up the heat on its competitor, Amazon Prime, which is spending millions on new content.

Amazon in turn announced an exclusive deal with PBS to stream its hit show “Downton Abbey.” Cable providers like Xfinity and Time Warner are making more of their content available for their online customers, an audience that is growing.

According to comScore, a company that tracks digital media, every day, 75 million people in America watch videos online.

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Chattanooga, Tenn., is home to American’s fastest Internet connection — up to 200 times faster than the national average. Hari Sreenivasan talks with Sheldon Grizzle of The Company Lab and Richard Bennett from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation about whether Chattanooga offers a model for the rest of the U.S. (9 minutes)

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Internet use is now so ubiquitous in the U.S. that not having access or online literacy can create major hurdles. As part of the NewsHour’s series on broadband technology and its effect on society, Hari Sreenivasan explores the so-called digital divide with Vicky Rideout of VJR Consulting and former FCC official Karen Kornbluh. (9 minutes)

Comcast’s eMTA backup battery. (Image: David Trebacz)

Comcast digital phone customers will no longer receive battery backup and monitoring service free of charge, according to a notification mailed to customers with their bills:

“Effective February 26, 2013, a battery backup and battery monitoring will no longer be provided free of charge. For existing XFINITY Voice customers with backup batteries, Comcast will continue to monitor your current battery at no charge; however, replacement batteries and their monitoring will no longer be provided free of charge. Backup batteries (which include monitoring) will be available for purchase.  Please call 1-888-972-1261 for pricing and details. XFINITY Voice uses the electrical power in your home. If you do not have a battery backup, you will not be able to use this service, including the ability to make emergency 911 calls, during an electrical power outage.”

Comcast customers leasing eMTA modems (which supply the cable company’s phone service) report that before the change batteries were included in the box. But not anymore, even though the packaging and accompanying literature still show the battery is included.

The lithium-ion battery keeps Comcast’s phone service working during power outages, but like other rechargeable batteries, it does eventually wear out. Now customers pay to replace them, even though the modem itself is leased to the customer.

Scott, a Comcast customer in Michigan, told Comcast he was unhappy with what seems like a petty cutback:

“I’m really miffed that they would now suddenly require customers to purchase a battery for a leased device,” Scott said.

Sarah Palin and her Big Gulp were seen on every Comcast channel in mid-Tennessee until technicians could force her off subscribers’ screens.

“If this had been an actual emergency, you would not be seeing Sarah Palin holding a Big Gulp while addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference convention….”

The former vice-presidential candidate got free extra publicity from Comcast cable systems serving middle Tennessee on Saturday night when a test of the emergency alert system went haywire and switched every Comcast channel to Gov. Palin’s speech given to a conservative political group.

Subscribers may have been amused until they discovered she was on every channel, and there was no way to get rid of her and back to regular programming until a Comcast technician could be called on to reset the system.

“The Comcast cable system serving middle Tennessee has experienced a problem with its emergency alert system,” Comcast spokeswoman Sara Joe Houghland said in an e-mailed statement. “Impacted customers had their equipment locked onto C-SPAN until Comcast personnel were able to resolve the problem shortly thereafter. The company is working diligently to find the root cause of the matter.”

Not diligently enough for irritated subscribers, some who missed post-season basketball games or network shows.

The Tennessean reports this is not the first time Comcast has had this problem:

• It happened again on Monday morning when a line of powerful storms moved through the area;
• A similar incident happened when a string of tornadoes hit the Nashville area in late January.

The problem seems to be the “end of warning/test”-signal not being processed properly by Comcast, which then keeps the warning active until the equipment is reset. In January, the newspaper reports the “end of message” disengage signal was missing altogether.

The Tennessee Association of Broadcasters have lost their patience and have asked the FCC to exclude local stations from being overridden by the EAS warning system.

Their argument is that any real emergency will likely be covered by local newsrooms well in advance of any weather or news messages dispatched through the EAS system.