Time Warner Cable is launching a new network of outdoor hotspots in the Dallas Metroplex, giving their customers free unlimited access at popular outdoor destinations and retail stores.

The Dallas Business Journal reports Time Warner will be switching on nearly 500 outdoor hotspots starting today, available to customers and non-customers until June 8. After that date, only Time Warner Cable (and certain other cable companies) broadband customers will be able to get free access.

“We believe Wi-Fi both in your home an outside is really important to our customer,” said Mike Roudi, senior vice president and general manager of broadband services. “We’re spending millions and millions of dollars. It’s a brand new network we’re building.”

Time Warner Cable has launched outdoor Wi-Fi in about 12 of its markets around the country, most scheduled for or already getting TWC Maxx upgrades.

But Time Warner Cable customers elsewhere will also find a quickly growing network of indoor hotspots hosted by businesses that subscribe to Time Warner’s commercial broadband service. As part of their broadband package, businesses are encouraged to host TWC Wi-Fi Passpoint access, which allows TWC customers to automatically connect to any participating Wi-Fi hotspot without having to ask the business for a password.

Customers can use the TWC Wi-Fi app to find hotspots and authenticate wireless access.

Customers of other cable operators, including Comcast, can usually also get access through Time Warner’s network partners program.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, here are the locations of the new outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots with more to follow:

• Oak Lawn/Turtle Creek (including Reverchon Park)
• Uptown
• Deep Ellum/Baylor University Medical Center
• University Park
• Highland Park
• Galleria area
• Downtown/central Plano
• Downtown/central Arlington

Time Warner Cable customers can also access free Wi-Fi at more than 100 Boingo locations, including Dallas Love Field and 24 other U.S. airports.

Time Warner Cable announced last week that its Enhanced DVR product allowing users to record up to six programs at once is now available in Ohio, including the markets of Columbus and Chillicothe.

The upgraded DVR also has up to six times more storage than Time Warner’s old DVR, capable of storing 150 hours of HD programming. The device has built-in “whole house” capability as well, which gives up to four other HD set-top boxes in the home access to the DVR at the same time.

The Enhanced DVR has usually only been available in areas upgraded to TWC Maxx, but evidently the company now has enough units available to begin offering it elsewhere. If your area can get one, let us know in the comments section.

Just remember if you choose to upgrade, there is no way to transfer any shows recorded on your current DVR to the upgraded model.

WiredWest is a public co-op seeking to deliver fiber to the home broadband across western Massachusetts.

Despite the dreary drizzle, fog, and unseasonably cold weather that has plagued the northeast since last weekend, 191 residents of New Salem, Mass. crowded into a basement for the town’s annual meeting Monday night, largely with one issue in mind: better broadband.

A reporter from The Recorder noted Moderator Calvin Layton was surprised by the overwhelming vote for fiber broadband — 189 for and only one apparently against.

The town clerk for New Salem typically counts around 60 heads at such meetings, but this night was different because the community was voting to spend $1.5 million to bring broadband to a town completely ignored by Comcast and Verizon. That fact has hurt area property values and has challenged residents and business owners alike. The town is fed up with inaction by the state’s dominant phone and cable company, which has done nothing to expand access in western Massachusetts.

“Our goal is to make this broadband available to every house, not just the places that are easy to wire,” said MaryEllen Kennedy, the chair of the town’s Broadband Committee.

New Salem isn’t alone.

Monterey passed its own bond authorization with a vote of 130 to 19, becoming the 10th consecutive town to vote in favor of bringing 21st century broadband to the region. The community of Beckett followed a day later.

Phillip “There are no broadband magic ponies” Dampier

Residents in 16 of the 17 towns asked so far to authorize the borrowing necessary to cover their community’s share of the fiber to the home project have usually done so in overwhelming majorities. But it has not been all good news. The town of Montgomery in Hampden County voted down paying its share by just two votes. Supporters claim low voter turnout may have done the project in, at least for the time being. A call for a new vote is underway.

Perhaps the most contentious debate over WiredWest continues in the small community of Hawley, where one activist has organized opposition for the project based on its cost to the community of 347. Hawley is in the difficult position of being a small community spread out across a lot of hills and hollows.  The cost for Hawley to participate in the fiber to the home project would be around $1 million, a figure many residents decided was out of their price range. Participation in WiredWest was shot down in a recent vote and the repercussions continue to this day in the opinion pages of The Recorder as residents fire back and forth at each other, sometimes with strident personal comments.

While easy to vote down participation in WiredWest, finding an alternative for Hawley has proved difficult.

Kirby “Lark” Thwing, a member of both the town finance and communications committees, is trying to find the cheaper broadband solution advocated by Hussain Hamdan, who has led the charge against WiredWest’s fiber to the home service in Hawley.

Thwing has run headfirst into what Stop the Cap! feared he would find — the rosy budget-minded alternatives suggested as tantalizingly within reach simply are not and come at a higher price tag than one might think.

Installing a Wi-Fi tower to bring wireless Internet access to a resort park.

Thwing is looking at a hybrid fiber/wireless solution involving a fiber trunk line run down two well-populated roads that could support fiber service for about half the homes in Hawley and lead to at least two large wireless towers that would reach most of the rest of town. He’s also hoping Hawley would still qualify to receive its $520,000 share of broadband grant money from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute to help cover the alternative project’s costs.

If Hawley can use that money, Thwing predicts it will cover much of the construction cost of the fiber trunk line. After that, each homeowner would be expected to pay to bring fiber from the trunk line to their home, definitely not a do-it-yourself project that will cost at least several hundred dollars, not counting the cost of any inside wiring and a network interface device attached to each participating home. Residents should also expect to spend another $100 on indoor electronics including a receiver and optional router to connect broadband to their home computer and other devices.

But the expenses don’t stop there.

Thwing also has to consider the cost of the wireless towers and provisioning a wireless service to Hawley residents not immediately adjacent to the fiber trunk line. He will be asking residents if they are willing to pay an extra $25-50 a month ($300-600 a year) to pay down the debt service on the town’s two proposed wireless towers. It isn’t known if that fee would include the price of the Internet service or just the infrastructure itself.

As Thwing himself recognizes, if the total cost for the alternative approaches the $1 million the town already rejected spending on fiber to the home service for everyone, it leaves Hawley no better off.

As Stop the Cap! reported last month, we believe Hawley will soon discover the costs of the alternatives Mr. Hamdan has suggested are greater than he suspects and do not include the cost of service, billing and support. Fiber to the home remains the best solution for Hawley and the rest of a region broadband forgot. Other towns that want to believe a cheaper alternative is out there waiting to be discovered should realize if such a solution did exist, private companies would have already jumped in to offer the service. They haven’t.

At the same time, we cannot ignore there are small communities in western Massachusetts that will find it a real burden to pay the infrastructure costs of a fiber network when there are fewer residents across wide distances to share the costs.

That is why it is critical for the Federal Communications Commission to expand rural broadband funding opportunities to subsidize the cost of constructing rural broadband services in communities like Hawley.

At the very least, state officials should consider creative solutions that either spread the cost of network construction out over a longer term or further subsidizing difficult to reach areas.

There is strong evidence voters across western Massachusetts are not looking for a government handout and have more than stepped up to pay their fair share to guarantee their digital future, but some challenges can be insurmountable without the kind of help the FCC already gives to private phone companies that spend the money on delivering dismally slow DSL service. Western Massachusetts has demonstrated it can get a bigger bang for the buck with fiber to the home service — a far better use of Connect America Funds than spending millions to bring 3Mbps DSL to the rural masses.

“Last night, Internet service for a number of our customers in the western part of the country was degraded or unavailable for several hours,” Comcast wrote on its blog this morning. “We had a team on this immediately, and were able to restore full service to most customers by 9pm PT.”

The cause of the failure – a defective piece of hardware – began that morning, which meant it took almost nine hours for Comcast to find the equipment responsible for eventually wiping out Internet service for millions of broadband customers up and down the west coast.

Most backbone networks, including Comcast’s, are designed to heal themselves and route traffic along alternate paths much like a detour would route automobile traffic around a street closed for construction.

One type of traffic that gets automatically rerouted is Domain Name System (DNS) traffic.  Unfortunately, some of that traffic shifted in an unexpected way and overloaded local DNS server capacity causing many customers to experience service interruptions.

The worst of the outage affected most California, Oregon, and Washington customers between 6:30-9:30pm PT, but many reported poor service for at least six hours before that.

“Our condolences on the death of your Internet,” wrote Upgrade Seattle, an advocacy group trying to convince the city to run its own public gigabit Internet service to compete with Comcast. “This is why we need a strong, accountable municipal Internet service throughout Seattle.”

Comcast has offered to placate angry customers with a $5 service credit for the outage, but offered conflicting information about how customers will get it.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury claimed the company will “proactively send the credit to affected customers.”

“Down Detector” shows the extent of Comcast’s latest service outage, which largely covers its entire service area in the states of Washington, Oregon, and the Bay Area region of California.

But other Comcast representatives, and the company’s own blog post, suggest otherwise.

Comcast’s policy states customer outage credits are not automatic, and callers to Comcast report customers must still ask for an outage credit to receive one.

“Comcast does not issue blanket service credits for outages,” reflects the policy of Comcast’s west coast divisions. The reason for that policy, according to Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp, is that Comcast prefers to work one-on-one with customers.

“You may have had somebody that may not have been home and did not even notice there was an outage,” Kipp offered. “Another customer may have lost valuable work time.”

But some people might be getting credits, if they got through to Comcast to complain about the outage as it happened.

“We are directly reaching out to those who reported problems last night to offer our apologies and a credit for lost service,” Comcast wrote on its blog this morning.

For everyone else:

“We are also building a Web site that impacted customers can visit to receive their credit. We will update this post with a link to that site as soon as it is available and will share the link on Twitter through our customer support handle @comcastcares.”

“Yeah, after we forget about it in a few days,” says Stop the Cap! reader Sarah Bowler who this morning asked us about the conflicting information coming out of Comcast. “You can’t live your life with Comcast without being ready to let go of their usual screw-ups after they are fixed or else you will become obsessed. They can’t get their billing right on a good day so I don’t believe for a second they will follow through with automatic credits. Go on record asking for that credit or you probably will never see it.”

Bowler tried calling 1-800-XFINITY (1-800-934-6489) but the lines were jammed, presumably with other callers looking for outage credits or information. She eventually got her credit using Comcast’s online support website. Customers can use live chat or try calling again later.

Seattle residents are particularly infuriated because this represents the second major outage since April, when a fiber optic cable cut wiped out service for 30,000 customers for nine hours, forcing some businesses to close for the day and 911 service to be disrupted for thousands because Comcast’s redundancy plan failed.

Customers there were also told they could receive credit, but it later turned out they received it only if they asked, and even then some claim they never got it.

“Comcast spends more time alienating their customers than they work on their service,” Bowler said.

Following the footsteps of HBO Now, CBS Corporation is preparing to offer a broadband-only streaming video version of Showtime.

Variety reports a formal announcement is due this week for the service and just like HBO Now, it will initially launch as an Apple TV exclusive, with other platforms added later.

No information about the depth of the online Showtime on-demand catalog is available yet, but the pricing for the service is: $10.99 a month. It will launch July 12. HBO Now costs $15 a month.

CBS has gotten experience in the streaming video market with its $6/mo CBS All Access service, which offers on-demand viewing of decades of CBS programming and all episodes of current CBS series. In markets where CBS owns its local affiliate, live streaming is also available.

Showtime will also be expanding into Canada for the first time in January, to be made available on Bell Media platforms including Fibe TV and its direct to home satellite service.

This article updated to reflect pricing and launch date of the service.