Time Warner Cable owes Araceli King $229,500 after bombarding her with 153 robo-collection calls intended for somebody else.

A Manhattan judge on Tuesday in a summary judgment awarded triple damages amounting to $1,500 per call for Time Warner’s “willful violations” of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which forbids companies from placing unwanted calls.

King, of Irving, Tex., began receiving automated “interactive voice response (IVR)” collection calls from Time Warner on her mobile phone intended for Luiz Perez, the former owner of her phone number. In less than one year, the cable company called King more than 150 times looking for Perez, even after King told the company the phone number they were using was not correct. King sued Time Warner after the company wouldn’t stop the calls.

Even after the lawsuit reached the cable operator, it called 74 more times.

“Defendant harassed plaintiff with robo-calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its IVR system,” wrote U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein. “Treble damages are unquestionably appropriate to reflect the seriousness of TWC’s willful violations.”

Hellerstein

Time Warner Cable has fought to have the case dismissed, claiming King cannot bring a claim under the TCPA because Time Warner was not placing automated telemarketing calls and had authorization from King to keep calling. The company also argued it did not realize it was calling the wrong number and only 70 of the calls were actually answered.

“Each of these arguments fails,” ruled an unimpressed Judge Hellerstein, who educated Time Warner that under the TCPA, “TWC violated the statute each time it placed a call using its [automated dialer] without consent, regardless of whether the call was answered by a person, a machine, or not at all.”

He told the cable company a “responsible business” would have tried harder to find Perez’s correct number. Instead, Time Warner never bothered to update its records, even after King spent seven minutes on the phone with a Time Warner representative who promised to correct the problem.

The judge called the 74 additional phone calls placed by Time Warner even after King sued the company a “particularly egregious violation of the TCPA” and demonstrated TWC “did not take this lawsuit seriously.”

King’s attorney said Time Warner made life miserable for the Texas woman, a point the judge seemed to agree with.

“We’re thrilled that Ms. King got the justice she deserves,” said King’s lawyer Sergei Lemberg. “And we’re proud every time we can hold big businesses accountable when they trample consumer rights.”

Stop the Cap! will formally participate in New York State’s regulator review of the proposed merger of Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable.

“We will be submitting documents and testimony to the New York State Department of Public Service on behalf of consumers across the state that need a better deal from their cable company,” said Phillip Dampier, the group’s president. “A review of the current proposal from Charter is inadequate for New York ratepayers and most of Charter’s commitments for better service and lower prices expire after just three short years.”

Stop the Cap! will urge regulators to insist on significant changes to Charter’s proposal that will permanently guarantee a broadband future with no compulsory usage caps/usage-based billing, Net Neutrality adherence, affordable broadband to combat the digital divide, and upgrades that deliver faster broadband than what Charter currently proposes outside of New York City.

Dampier

“Upstate New York is at serious risk of falling dramatically behind other areas where Google Fiber and other providers are moving towards a gigabit broadband future,” Dampier said. “In most of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, and Albany buying the FCC’s definition of broadband means calling a cable company that now delivers no better than 50Mbps to residential customers. Verizon FiOS expansion is dead and obsolete/slow DSL from Frontier and Verizon should have been scrapped years ago.”

Stop the Cap! worries that with limited prospects for a major new competitor like Google in Upstate New York, broadband speeds and service will not keep up with other states. Verizon has devoted most of its financial resources to expanding its wireless mobile network, which is too expensive to use as a home broadband replacement. Frontier claims to be investing millions in its networks, but has delivered only incremental improvements to their DSL service, which in most areas is still too slow to qualify as broadband.

“Frontier is more interested in acquisitions these days, not upgrades,” Dampier argued.

“Although we have some entrepreneurs managing to deliver competitive fiber service in limited areas, it will likely take years before they will reach most customers,” Dampier added. “Upstate New York cannot wait that long.”

Comcast today officially announced speed increases for its broadband customers in the northeastern U.S. that includes a nearly 50 percent speed boost for its Blast! tier.

• Performance Pro: Customers subscribed to Comcast’s eligible triple play packages will get an upgrade to Performance Pro, raising speeds from 25 to 75Mbps;
• Blast!: Customers signed up currently for 105Mbps will soon see speeds of 150Mbps.

“We’ve invested tens of billions of dollars to create a network that makes broadband widely available to the most homes, and allows us to continually deliver the fastest, most reliable Internet and Wi-Fi speeds in and out of the home,” said Kevin Casey, president of Comcast Cable’s Northeast Division, which includes 14 states from Maine to Virginia and the District of Columbia.

The new speeds and tiers will be available to the vast majority of new and existing customers starting later this month. To get the new speeds, customers may need to re-start their modems. Comcast will also notify customers who may need to upgrade their modems to receive the increased speeds. Customers who lease modems from Comcast will be able to receive upgraded modems. A list of approved modems can be found online at http://mydeviceinfo.comcast.net/.

If Windstream was hoping to make a splash with its new Kinetic IPTV service, Time Warner Cable certainly isn’t reaching for a towel.

Kinetic debuted in April in Lincoln, Neb., the first community to get Windstream’s fiber to the neighborhood TV service. Three months after being introduced, it’s available in about half of the city. But it is not proving much of a threat to incumbent Time Warner Cable because Windstream set rates roughly the same or higher than what the cable company charges.

In fact, a Stop the Cap! reader contemplating a trial run of Kinetic was quickly dissuaded when he learned Windstream charged $10 more than what he already paid Time Warner Cable.

“Windstream either does not understand Time Warner’s pricing or is artificially trying to limit demand for the moment,” our reader tells us. “I have to believe it is one or the other because the alternative is they don’t know what they are doing and are creating an experiment built to fail. When I told Time Warner I was toying with the idea of trying Kinetic, they cut my bill another $30 a month and Kinetic is now dead to me.”

Time Warner Cable’s customer retention department is well positioned to keep customers because it can sell faster Internet speeds at a lower price than Windstream has offered so far. The phone company obviously has no interest in starting a price war in Lincoln:

• Windstream Kinetic offers packages ranging from $39.99-$129.98/mo;
• Time Warner Cable offers packages ranging from $19.99-$129.99/mo.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports other customers have had similar experiences.

Ryan Pryor said he inquired about Kinetic, but the price quoted was slightly more than what he now pays for a similar bundle with Time Warner and would have offered a slower Internet speed. So he chose to stick with what he has.

Where Windstream has had some success is attracting current satellite customers. Jason Smith was tired of losing satellite service during storms and since he was already a Windstream DSL customer, upgrading to Kinetic made sense.

“The picture quality has been very impressive,” Smith told the newspaper. “The one thing I noticed was how much better the picture looked than on DirecTV with the same HDMI connection to my TV.”

Smith is also happy with a more capable whole house DVR and the fact Windstream offers wireless set-top boxes.

But Smith also admitted he wasn’t sure if we would stick with the service long-term. A significant disadvantage of Kinetic is its reliance on copper wiring part of the way between Smith’s home and Windstream’s central office. All fiber to the neighborhood projects have bandwidth limitations that would not exist with a straight fiber to the home upgrade. Kinetic’s limits become clear when trying to watch three HD signals at once while being on the Internet. He can’t. Kinetic limits customers to two HD video streams at a time, compared with DirecTV’s five. Broadband speeds slow if other members of the household are also accessing telephone and television services.

With competition like that, Time Warner Cable has done little to strengthen its position, with no immediate plans to upgrade service in the city. All that has changed recently is a channel realignment that groups like-channels together starting at channel 100. Time Warner began that nationwide channel realignment in Syracuse, N.Y., in the spring of 2013. More than two years later, that change is only now reaching Lincoln.

Bryan Brooks, the Windstream vice president of business development, did not offer the newspaper many specifics about how Kinetic was performing, except to say demand has met expectations.

The headquarters building of U.S. satellite TV operator DirecTV is seen in Los Angeles, California May 18, 2014. REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – AT&T Inc’s proposed $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV is expected to get U.S. regulatory approval as soon as next week, according to people familiar with the matter, a decision that will combine the country’s No. 2 wireless carrier with the largest satellite-TV provider.

The Department of Justice, which assesses whether deals violate antitrust law, has completed its review of the merger and is waiting on the Federal Communications Commission to wrap up its own, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The FCC, which reviews if deals are in public interest, is poised to approve the deal with conditions as early as next week, according to three other people familiar with the matter.

All the sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak with the media. An AT&T spokeswoman and FCC spokesman declined comment. Justice Department representatives were not immediately available for comment.

AT&T’s merger with DirecTV, announced in May 2014, would create the country’s largest pay-TV company, giving DirecTV a broadband product and AT&T new avenues of growth beyond the maturing and increasingly competitive wireless service.

The deal has been expected to pass regulatory muster in contrast with the rival mega-merger between cable and Internet providers Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which was rejected in April largely over the combined companies’ reach into the broadband market.

The FCC and AT&T have been in negotiations over conditions for the merger for several weeks, the people said, adding that none of the conditions are controversial enough to break the deal.

Those conditions are expected to include assurances that both middle-class and low-income Americans have access to affordable high-speed Internet, including an offering of broadband subscriptions as a standalone service without a TV bundle, according to two of the people.

AT&T has earlier committed to expand access to broadband service in rural areas and to offer standalone Internet service at speeds of at least 6 Megabits per second to ensure consumers can access rival video services online, such as Netflix.

FCC officials are also considering ways to ensure that the conditions are properly enforced in the future, possibly through a third-party monitor, according to the two sources.

The FCC is also weighing how to ensure the merged companies abide by the so-called net neutrality rules, which regulate how Internet service providers manage traffic on their networks.

AT&T has promised to abide by net neutrality principles such as no-blocking of traffic, but is challenging in court the FCC’s newest net neutrality regulations that have expanded the agency’s authority over various deals between Internet providers and content companies.

FCC reviewers are weighing what net neutrality-related conditions to apply to the merger and how to address the possibility that the court throws out the latest rules, the two sources said.

Reported by: Alina Selyukh and Diane Bartz