Sens. Sanders and Warren

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt.) has expressed serious doubts about the claimed consumer benefits of a multi-billion dollar cable company merger between Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks.

In a joint letter with Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sanders told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Attorney General Loretta Lynch the deal would create a “nationwide broadband duopoly, with New Charter and Comcast largely in control of the essential wires that connect most Americans to how we commonly communicate and conduct commerce in the 21st century.”

The senators explained that “broadband service is not a luxury; it is an economic and social necessity for consumers and businesses.”

The five Democrats believe the merger could have negative effects on consumer choice, competition, and innovation in broadband and online video. With Comcast and New Charter controlling at least two-thirds of the high-speed broadband lines in the country, Sanders and his colleagues are concerned this will allow Comcast and New Charter to raise rates while reducing broadband innovation, allowing the United States to fall even further behind other industrialized nations with superior broadband.

The senators asked the Department of Justice and the FCC to carefully evaluate how the proposed deal could impact the marketplace.

“New Charter must not only prove that this deal would not harm consumers, but they must also demonstrate that it would actually benefit them and promote the public interest,” the senators argued.

This week, New Jersey regulators approved the merger transaction in that state, leaving California as the last major challenge for Charter executives. Federal regulators are not expected to rule on the deal until the spring or summer.

Finding affordable wireless Internet access that isn’t speed throttled or usage capped is becoming rare, but Stop the Cap! has been exploring a provider that offers both.

Unlimitedville is the latest authorized reseller of Sprint that has managed to get permission to market an unlimited LTE 4G wireless data plan that comes without speed throttles. The service is priced at $42.99 a month (not including certain minor fees and surcharges) and includes a 30-day free trial to test the service. A $50 setup fee includes a mobile hotspot device (typically a Netgear Zing or Pocket Wifi) that is yours to keep once you commit to the required 2-year contract (after the free trial).

Customers we have communicated with give the service a universal thumbs-up for not limiting or throttling usage. Customers in suburban and semi-rural areas near highways and interstates report the best speeds from relatively uncongested Sprint cell towers. Those in very rural areas may have a lot of trouble finding Sprint service available, so potential customers should review Sprint’s coverage map carefully for data service coverage before considering Unlimitedville.

There are some peculiarities about doing business with this reseller, however.

First, Unlimitedville acts as a front line sales agent, but accounts are apparently provisioned by an another company named Impact Wireless, a “master agent” for Sprint. After service is established, all future communications, support and billing take place directly with Sprint.

Getting service established is the first minor hurdle. Because the contract plan is intended for business use, customers will need to list a company name on the enrollment form. It is acceptable to consider yourself a consultant or use your current profession if you intend to use the service at anytime/for any reason for work or while travelling for work. No formal business registration is required. Some customers sign up using their last name, as in “Smith Consulting.” You do have to give them your Social Security number or business Taxpayer ID Number to run the usual required credit check. Most applicants are easily approved within 72 hours and Sprint will then call to help arrange for service. If you are not approved, you can agree to pay an upfront deposit and after 12 on-time monthly payments, the deposit will be returned to your account.

Second, some customers have recently reported they’ve been surprised to discover their account activation came with membership in a free loyalty program for a certain home improvement retail chain. With the recent demise of Karma’s Neverstop plan, disconnecting customers are banging at the doors of Unlimitedville to get in. Evidently this overflow is also affecting Impact Wireless, which evidently has some limitations on how many new customers it can enroll itself over a certain period of time. As a result, they may be looking for other entry points available to them to get customers activated as quickly as possible. Customers should be ready to be flexible. Getting unlimited wireless data from anyone these days increasingly requires creativity.

As Unlimitedville gains more visibility, there are also questions about how long it will last given carriers’ dislike of resellers that attract a lot of heavy users. The service has been around at least as long as Karma and is still welcoming new clients, so it is hard to say. It will probably last longer if customers respect the wireless network that powers it was not built to sustain customers running up a terabyte of usage a month. Being a responsible user of a limited resource is likely to help keep these kinds of unlimited services viable, an important consideration for customers who do not have the luxury of going to another provider if Unlimitedville folds.

Frontier Communications plans to leverage their existing fiber-copper infrastructure to offer broadband-powered television service for up to half of their national customer base over the next four years.

Like many Frontier initiatives, the company’s IPTV effort relies on minimal spending, with just $150 million in capital budgeted for the project, spread out over several years.

“Our plans are to introduce video service to more than 40 markets representing approximately three million households over a three- to four-year period,” said Frontier CEO Daniel McCarthy. “Once complete, video service will be available to about 50% of the 8.5 million households in Frontier’s existing footprint, not counting the pending Verizon acquisition.”

Frontier intends to sell the service to the 57% of customers it claims can receive at least 20Mbps broadband speed. The video streams will co-exist with customers’ data service.

“Our IPTV applications employ the latest very advanced compression technology,” said McCarthy. “[Each] HD television channel will require approximately 2.5Mbps of capacity, meaning a household with four HDTVs active at once will require 10Mbps of capacity into the home, leaving the remainder available for data usage.”

Frontier’s IPTV approach is similar to AT&T U-verse. The company will depend on fiber to the neighborhood service already in place in certain markets, coupled with existing copper wiring already on telephone poles or buried underground in each neighborhood. To further minimize expenses (and customer inconvenience), Frontier will rely on customer-installable wireless set-top boxes that can be relocated to any television in the home.

McCarthy

Frontier has experimented with its video service since last fall in its test market of Durham, N.C. That city also benefits from an extensive fiber upgrade undertaken by Frontier. Frontier’s website sells the service as Frontier FiOS TV, even though Durham’s fiber network was built by Frontier, not Verizon.

For customers, it will likely be a welcome change from Frontier’s ongoing dependence on its partnership with satellite provider Dish Networks to offer video service. One clue Frontier has not well withstood heavy competition from competing cable operators comes from the company’s latest quarterly earnings report. Frontier executives admitted voice service disconnects are accelerating beyond expectation and average revenue per customer dropped 1.1% to $63.14 for the fourth quarter of 2015.

Frontier also continues to feel the wrath of former AT&T customers in Connecticut that withstood a messy “flash cut” from AT&T to Frontier that left some customers without service for days. Despite the expiration of special pricing promotions for Connecticut customers resulting in the prospect of higher revenue, Frontier still recorded a $7 million decline from Connecticut alone, which it mostly blamed on customers ditching landlines. In the rest of the country, Frontier’s “legacy service areas” (those still dependent on aging copper infrastructure) delivered another $4 million decline in revenue for the quarter.

Where are those customers going? Cable operators continue to grab Frontier’s unhappy DSL customers and wireless companies continue to benefit from landline disconnects.

To prevent a repeat of Connecticut in the Frontier-acquired Verizon territories in Florida, California, and Texas, Frontier will keep Verizon’s service plans and only gradually shift services away from Verizon, with the ability to back out of the transition immediately if something goes wrong.

Frontier’s IPTV service will depend on the classic cable television model — 100+ local, network, and cable channels delivered in a bundle with broadband and voice service. At the outset, Frontier won’t be emphasizing skinny bundles of TV channels, but will allow existing Verizon FiOS customers to keep the slimmed down packages they already have.

Time Warner Cable will upgrade its Cincinnati area customers to Time Warner Cable Maxx service offering broadband speeds up to 200Mbps by this summer.

The Cincinnati Business Courier was the first to report on the upgrade, which has yet to be officially announced by Time Warner Cable, but has been confirmed by a company spokesperson.

The upgrade started Feb. 15 and is expected to be complete in some areas by June, in part thanks to the fact Time Warner’s network in northern Kentucky was inherited from Insight Communications, which Time Warner acquired in 2011. Insight had previously upgraded most of its facilities to all-digital service. Elsewhere, Time Warner has to first upgrade customers to all-digital cable television, which begins with a notification to customers that they will be losing analog television service and will need a set-top box or other equipment for each cable-equipped set in the home.

The conversion to all-digital service frees up bandwidth to boost broadband speeds, giving customers considerably faster service at no extra cost. Standard customers now subscribed to 15Mbps service will be upgraded to 50Mbps. Customers currently frustrated by Time Warner’s top speed of 50Mbps in Ohio will get an upgrade to 300Mbps. Former Insight customers will be the first to get the faster speeds, starting in March. Other Cincinnati area customers may have to wait until summer or fall before the new speeds arrive.

Some Time Warner customers may need to replace their current cable modem, including those now leased by the company for $10 a month.

To ease the transition, Time Warner Cable will provide existing TV customers with one or more digital adapters at no charge through at least June 29, 2017, provided they order an adapter by Oct. 22, 2016. Customers can consult Time Warner’s website for local updates and ordering information.

Karma’s very expensive $150 startup equipment package.

After customers spent $150 on a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot device promising unlimited LTE wireless Internet access for $50 a month, Karma – the company offering the service – has put a stop to its “Neverstop” plan four months after introducing it.

“Karma is a bitch,” complained one customer who spent $250 with Karma trying to find a replacement for Clear’s now discontinued WiMAX service for his rural home. “After spending hundreds for nothing, it should be obvious to everyone why Karma turned off the comment section on its website.”

Neverstop customers have been through a rough ride during the brief life of the service, which started last November. Customers were promised unlimited 5Mbps service for $50 a month, after buying the $150 in required hardware. But not long after the plan was introduced, customers discovered their speeds were throttled to as low as 1.5Mbps to discourage customers from excessively using the service.

Insiders tell us the likely cause of the plan’s demise is Sprint, the wireless company Karma contracts with to offer the service. Sprint reseller contracts are closely guarded, but there is a clear track record of wireless companies taking action against resellers that place unexpected burdens on their networks. Millenicom, a similar provider that won customers largely through word-of-mouth, saw its unlimited offerings curtailed long before Karma announced its Neverstop plan, because wireless companies didn’t appreciate the fact some Millenicom customers relied entirely on the service for Internet access in the home.

Karma sold a plan that encouraged heavier data usage and then punished customers for using it.

Karma officials claim most of their customers never exceeded 15GB a month, but apparently enough did to get Sprint’s attention. Karma’s own internal research found that despite its insistence Neverstop was not a home broadband replacement, at least 60% of their customers used it exactly for that purpose. A handful of customers ran up hundreds of gigabytes of usage from online video, cloud storage/backup, and file trading. But a larger percentage used the service because they had no access to DSL or cable broadband, and used about as much data as the average household – an amount deemed by Sprint and/or Karma as “unsustainable.” Karma quickly moved to impose universal speed reductions on the service, dropping from 5Mbps to 1.5Mbps in an effort to curtail usage.

“Bait and switch,” complained Shannon Krakosky on Karma’s Facebook page. Many of the company’s earliest customers found the throttles arrived just as their 45-day return window for the expensive equipment expired, saddling them with a $150 paperweight. The company’s Black Friday offer inspired still more customers to sign up at a discount, only to find the equipment backordered, arriving at around the same time the traffic reduction speed throttles were announced.

Just one week before the speed reductions took effect, new customers were enticed with a year-end signup offer, further increasing traffic loads. Then customers received this:

[We] were surprised to learn how many of you are also using it heavily at home. We’ve seen lots of you binge watch Netflix in HD all day, back up your hard drives over the internet, and even connect your Xboxes through ingenious means. It’s a glimpse of how the internet should be, and we love it… but it’s putting a strain on the service and it’s not what the product is meant for today.​

After spending $150 on hardware for $50 unlimited LTE service, less than four months later these are your new choices.

But usage should have never surprised Karma, considering the firm marketed Neverstop in November and December as the perfect answer for “heavier usage, streaming, downloading….”

Only after imposing a speed throttle — later increased to 2.5Mbps — came changes in how Neverstop marketed its service. In early January, Neverstop was now sold as the perfect solution for “daily usage, worry-free browsing, on-the-go work, travel, occasional streaming, and more.” Also gone was the marketing that promoted unlimited usage. The new message to customers: lay off.

Many customers were unhappy about the sudden changes and have filed false advertising complaints with the Better Business Bureau and several state attorneys general.

Karma continued to modify its Neverstop plan later in January, claiming to relent on speed throttling and moving to impose a 15GB usage cap on Neverstop instead. The company claimed the usage cap would allow it to restore 5Mbps service, but most customers complained their speeds remained slow. In effect, customers were being asked to continue paying $50 a month for a shadow of the service originally advertised.

As of late last week, Karma revisited customers again to announce the once unlimited wireless data experience of Neverstop was being stopped… permanently.

van Wel

Karma CEO Steven van Wel told Verge the company came to the realization that Neverstop was unsustainable after observing a month of customer usage following January’s adjustments. Even with the restrictive throttling, half of Neverstop customers reached the 15GB cap before the end of their billing cycle, and there was no way for them to easily continue high-speed service, whether by changing plans or paying overage fees. Just one month earlier van Wel told Verge only a few customers were likely to exceed their 15GB cap.

“You bait and switched us again,” came a chorus of complaints before Karma switched off public comments on all but its Facebook page.

“Poor business at best,” added Daniel Frisch. “Sell a customer one thing and then switch it to something completely different. You sold me an unlimited data device at a reasonable price and now you have gone from throttling that data to a high-priced limited data plan like everybody else.”

Karma’s latest plan is called Pulse and Neverstop customers will gradually find their existing Neverstop service transitioned to the new plan over the coming month, which will sell 5GB of service for $40 a month. Many complain there are better deals available elsewhere.

Stop the Cap! will continue to seek out options for rural or on-the-go customers who depend on wireless Internet access where DSL and cable broadband are not available. For now, we cannot recommend Karma because of the company’s unstable service plans and the high upfront cost of equipment.