Comcast announced last week it will invest $100 million in fiber optic and coaxial cable to expand its network for businesses and residents across the Chicago region, but not before it slaps a usage cap on Chicagoland internet users forced to join its compulsory data cap “trial.”

Beginning Aug. 1,  customers who exceed 1 terabyte of data usage per month will face a nasty overlimit fee of $10 for each 50GB of additional usage they rack up over the course of a billing cycle. Customers who want to keep the unlimited broadband plan they have today can, if they are willing to pay an extra $50 a month.

Comcast’s PR department has christened the incoming data cap the “Terabyte Internet Experience,” suggesting customers will now have the privilege of using up to 1,000GB each month without facing extra charges. But the plan customers have until the end of this month already allows that, and more, without facing overlimit fees that will top out at $200 a month.

Customers like Greg believe Comcast has a different agenda imposing data caps.

“We’ll teach those cord cutters a lesson,” he wrote. “We’re going to get your money one way or another. Comcast is just greedy, they want to extort as much money as they can from people. I’m paying $90 for internet, with the option to charge more based on their conditions. Remember when consumers had options?”

Other residents looking for an opt-out of the “trial” are out of luck.

“Got the email this week we get to be part of this data cap ‘trial,'” shared another customer. “How lucky are we? And what do we get for being part of this trial? Absolutely nothing! And can we opt out of this trial? Heck no!”

Comcast claims almost nobody will be impacted by the terabyte cap, predicting as few as 1% of their customers reach that level of usage. But 25% of Comcast customers nationwide have now received email and other notifications about a data cap plan “trial” Comcast has spent time, money, and resources trying to explain and implement in a growing number of cities in their service area. Many ask if so few are affected, why make the effort?

The FCC received 11,812 complaints about Comcast in 2015, mostly about its data cap trials. That is at least 5,000 more complaints than AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable received combined. That would seem to indicate a significant percentage of Comcast customers are concerned about data caps, even if they are not among the “1%” Comcast now claims will be affected by caps.

Comcast’s plan to invest $100 million in Chicago, primarily on fiber expansion, may not placate customers who do not appreciate their internet usage being capped at the same time Comcast’s network capacity continues to increase. Most of the upgrades may be targeted to benefit Comcast’s business customers. The expansion will string 50 miles of fiber cable across seven square miles of downtown Chicago, including the Loop, River North, and River West. Additional expansion will target the city’s Back of the Yards and Bridgeport neighborhoods at in the Peterson-Pulaski business district near O’Hare.

Comcast claims the upgrade will expand internet, video, voice, and home security/automation services for residential customers. They will just need to make sure not to use them too much.

Charter Communications is promising its Southern California customers it won’t bungle the transition from Time Warner Cable to Charter Communications like Frontier Communications did with former Verizon customers.

“We purchased all of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. With this transaction we acquired everything,” company spokesman Justin Venech said. “We’re able to take more time in the integration process and not rush to make changes.”

Charter will take up to 18 months to make its presence fully known in areas formerly served by Time Warner Cable, and then primarily under its brand name known as Spectrum.

Time Warner Cable customers will be able to keep their current service and packages even after the transition, at least for a while.

But not all customers are happy about Charter’s slow transition plans. Customers waiting for Time Warner Cable Maxx upgrades, some already in progress, may be out of luck. Charter’s new management team put an indefinite hold on Time Warner’s more aggressive upgrade plans in favor of Charter’s much more modest commitment to offer customers two broadband speed tiers – 60 and 100Mbps over the next 18 months. Customers in the northeast and midwest have been told there are no longer any definitive dates for the introduction of Maxx, which offers free speed upgrades up to 300Mbps.

Almost all of Time Warner Cable’s executive management has been escorted out of the company’s Manhattan headquarters, severance pay and benefits in hand. In fact, Charter plans to abandon Time Warner Cable’s Manhattan headquarters altogether and shift top management to its plush Connecticut office. Most workers will be reassigned to other locations yet to be announced, some possibly upstate.

Charter has already begun repricing service and packages that will resemble Spectrum offerings, at least for new customers across Time Warner Cable and Bright House territories. The packages will not carry the Spectrum brand just yet, however.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/When Mobile Providers Are Actually Honest 7-6-16.mp4[/flv]

On the occasion of Verizon Wireless’ new and “exciting” cell phone plans that will cost many customers more money, here is what an honest ad from a cell phone company would look like. (From the folks at Cracked.) (3:45)

A condition imposed by the Federal Communications Commission requiring newly merged Charter-Time Warner Cable-Bright House to expand service into at least two million new homes already served by another cable or phone company already offering High Speed Internet is causing heartburn for smaller cable and phone companies that fear government-mandated competition in their service areas.

FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler has long believed that cable operators could compete against one another for customers, driving down prices for consumers while forcing service improvements. One of the conditions approving the Charter deal could have put Wheeler’s theory to the test, but not if Charter can help it.

Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge implied that he will continue to shield fellow cable operators from unwanted competition.

“When I talked to the FCC, I said I can’t overbuild another cable company, because then I could never buy it, because you always block those,” Rutledge said at last month’s MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit. “It’s really about overbuilding telephone companies.”

It seems unlikely Charter will ever directly overbuild one of its friends in the cable industry, especially important ones like Comcast, Cox, and Cablevision. Smaller independent cable companies don’t feel as secure, which is why the trade group that represents many of them, the American Cable Association, has tried to get the FCC to back off.

“The overbuild condition imposed by the FCC on Charter is stunningly bad and inexplicable government policy,” ACA president Matthew Polka said in a statement. “On the one hand, the FCC found that Charter will be too big and therefore it imposed a series of conditions to ensure it does not exercise any additional market power. At the same time, the FCC, out of the blue, is forcing Charter to get even bigger.”

The FCC probably crafted the deal conditions to force Charter to compete with other cable operators, because one million of those new customer locations must be where at least 25Mbps broadband service is already available. That protects many phone companies still offering DSL as an afterthought, because most don’t offer speeds anywhere close to 25Mbps. But the FCC left several counter-intuitive loopholes in the language that Republican FCC commissioner Ajit Pai says lends credibility to the ACA’s argument.

“Unless Charter chooses to exclusively overbuild areas served by Comcast, which I find highly unlikely, Charter’s increased broadband market share will come at the expense of smaller competitors,” Pai wrote in comments about the proposal.

Notably, Charter is allowed to buy up other small telecom companies and count up to 250,000 of their customers towards the one million new homes served requirement. If those are small rural cable companies, that means the FCC is allowing Charter to grow even larger instead of providing more competition. Charter could also choose to overbuild municipal broadband providers and co-ops, especially in areas next to existing Charter/TWC/Bright House systems. That would harm the FCC’s current interest in removing roadblocks to publicly owned broadband networks. Enthusiasm for such networks could be dampened if Charter is willing to wire the area at their own expense.

Rutledge’s announcement is sure to make life uncomfortable for a number of rural phone companies that have invested in fiber network upgrades and now face the potential of Charter taking away customers that are helping to pay off those upgrades.

An unintended consequence of the FCC’s various loopholes could place a heavy burden on independent telephone companies that invested in network upgrades for faster broadband even as wealthier and larger phone companies are protected from that competition by delivering frustratingly slow DSL.

One potential target for a Charter overbuild could be UniTel, headquartered in Unity, Maine. UniTel offers residential customers in Albion, Dixmont, Newburgh, Thorndike, Troy, and Unity broadband speeds up to 1 gigabit. Unity is located between Bangor and Portland — both served by Time Warner Cable (now Charter).

Phone companies like UniTel call the FCC’s mandate “artificial competition” that could put it and other rural independent phone companies into financial distress. UniTel has a speed edge over anything Charter plans to offer customers in the immediate future as it deploys fiber to the home service, but television is another matter. One of the benefits of being a large cable company is volume-discounted pricing for cable television networks. Smaller independent operators cannot compete when wholesale television programming discounts are calculated in, allowing larger companies to undercut smaller ones with lower pricing.

UniTel officials criticized the FCC for creating deal conditions that Charter will exploit to the detriment of improving rural broadband service.

“Rather than allow New Charter to unilaterally narrow the scope of the buildout condition to meet its own business objectives, UniTel respectfully urges that the Commission should act to narrow the scope of any buildout condition, not to meet the private business objectives of New Charter, but rather to meet the public policy objectives of universal service in rural areas,” the company argued in its filing with the FCC.

A handful of rural telecom associations generally agree with UniTel and want the FCC to retarget Charter’s buildout requirements to fixing the rural broadband problem by expanding into unserved service areas instead.