While AT&T trumpets vague plans to upgrade up to 100 cities with gigabit fiber to the home service, some AT&T GigaPower U-verse customers in Austin wish they could just consistently get the 300Mbps service they were promised.

More than a few customers are unhappy with the service they are getting and have been vocal on an AT&T forum with complaints about service interruptions and speed issues.

Among the complaints:

Unresponsive Internet

A common complaint for U-verse GigaPower customers is a suddenly unresponsive Internet.

“Since upgrading to GigaPower often times my browser (same issue with Firefox, Safari, Chrome) will not always load or display web sites. Same thing happens with Tuba and/or Youtube,” writes bcslas. “Often it will fail to load and sometimes I see timeout errors, yet at other times the site loads fine. […] Usually a refresh or 30 second wait to refresh will fix the issue – but it is constant.”

“I upgraded to GigaPower last December and since then, the service started getting disconnected multiple times per week,” wrote ybasha. “Sometimes it lasts a few minutes and sometimes longer. When that happens, I lose Internet and TV service. I called technical support multiple times. They sent technicians twice. One of them swapped the modem, but I still have the problem.”

“When I do a Google search from Chrome, it hangs there until it eventually times out and then I have to reload the page, after which the search results appear,” writes bustedmagnet. “Another example is in Gmail, sometimes the initial page is very slow to load, but it hangs forever when trying to open individual emails. Again, multiple page refreshes seem to fix this.”

It turns out that IPV6, enabled by default, is unreliable when using AT&T GigaPower. Customers have usually found relief downgrading to IPV4-only support or switching to Google’s IPV6 DNS servers:

• 2001:4860:4860::8888
• 2001:4860:4860::8844

Slow Speeds

AT&T GigaPower is supposed to offer 300/300Mbps service today with an upgrade to gigabit Internet forthcoming later this year. But not every customer comes close to getting those speeds. GigaOM writer Stacey Higginbotham found some customers cannot reliably get more than 75Mbps:

Yesterday I was at my brother in-law’s house where he is a GigaPower subscriber, his computer was registering speeds of 70 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up using Ookla on a wired connection. That’s fast, but not 300 Mbps fast and certainly not a gig. My brother and sister-in-law are not speed freaks like myself, but they were disappointed with the GigaPower product.

To me, what was most troubling is that they couldn’t tell me if they had signed up for AT&T’s service plan that offers them a lower price on internet service if the customer lets AT&T use your surfing habits to offer ads. They signed up for a bundle, they said, that was cheaper than their previous service.

“Upload speeds are consistently slower than download speeds,” complained egardiner. “Using att.com/speedtest, I can consistently achieve 320Mbps down, but typically never more than ~180Mbps up. The CrashPlan backup service is glacially slow, never achieving more than 3kbps when sending data to CrashPlan’s cloud servers.  CrashPlan’s techs have suggested that there are no issues on my client PC side nor on their server’s side, and they’ve asked if U-verse GigaPower is throttling backup traffic.”

Broadband Reports’ readers report Usenet newsgroup downloads appear to be heavily throttled over the GigaPower fiber network as well, with speeds dropping well below 100Mbps.

It turns out GigaPower speeds won’t help you with a good Netflix viewing experience either.

“I signed up for the U-Verse GigaPower service and the overall speeds seem to be faster,” writes mstang1988. “The bad, some of regularly used services are not performing. For example, Netflix. On Grande [a competing provider] I was always running at HD. With U-verse I’m seeming giant blocks of blur. I’m fixing to cancel.”

Kim R. in Cedar Falls, Tex. isn’t happy either:

AT&T GigaPower was good for the first 20-30 days, then they made a change and my upload speed is 35-78 on average with a lot of latency and my VoIP phones cannot send or receive calls. Multiple techs were dispatched on Friday and they were at my home for 7+ hours. They eliminated my home as being the source of the issue and other friends in the neighborhood are having the same issues.

We have been in this mode for 4 days now and I have spend most of today working with tech support with no luck. Customer service was no help either when I asked them to suspend billing until they got it working again, of course there answer was “we can’t do that”.

I will loose another day of service when the tech(s) come out again tomorrow. Beware of AT&T’s GigaPower, it’s a myth so far and their techs ride on unicorns and most have no idea about any networking.

Comcast will increase capital spending in the first half of 2014 to hasten the rollout of its advanced X1 set-top boxes and new wireless gateways that provide public Wi-Fi from customer homes.

Comcast told investors Tuesday its increased spending will likely be offset by increased earnings from more subscribers and room for further price hikes over the course of the year.

First quarter consolidated revenue increased 13.7% to $17.4 billion over the past three months. Almost $11 billion of that comes from Comcast’s cable business. The company boosted cable earnings by 5.3% in the first quarter. Most of that came from a 4.5% increase in the average customer’s cable bill. Comcast subscribers, on average, pay $134 per month. They will pay even more by the end of the year.

Although Comcast’s head of its cable division Neil Smit noted the company implemented lower rate increases during the first quarter, there is room to boost prices further.

“I wouldn’t read any trends into it,” Smit said. “We took rate increases across the smaller percentage of our footprint this quarter than last year as well, but we target different offers to different customers and I don’t think we’re seeing it topping out. In the competitive arena, the offers are in the same ballpark, the promo prices go up and down, but the destination pricing is fairly similar across these various competitors.”

Roberts

Comcast continued to buck cord-cutting trends and added 24,000 new video customers in the quarter, a major improvement over the 25,000 it lost at the same time last year. Comcast believes its new X1 platform and aggressive customer retention efforts are responsible for winning and keeping cable television customers. Ongoing speed enhancements in Comcast’s broadband division won the company 383,000 new Internet customers in the last three months. Broadband is Comcast’s biggest money-maker, and revenues increased a further 9% during the quarter owing to customer growth, rate hikes, and customers choosing higher-speed tiers. By the end of the quarter, 38% of Comcast’s residential customers subscribed to at least 50Mbps service, showing growing demand for higher speed Internet.

Sources tell Stop the Cap! Comcast intends to further expand its trial of usage caps (Comcast prefers to call them “usage thresholds”) to more markets this year. Comcast has settled on 300GB usage allowances for most broadband products in current test markets, charging $10 for each additional allotment of 50GB as an overlimit fee. Comcast has avoided trials of usage caps in areas where Verizon FiOS delivers significant competition. Verizon has no usage caps on either their DSL or fiber broadband products.

Comcast also picked up 142,000 new phone customers in the quarter, mostly from those subscribing to aggressively priced triple play service bundle promotions. Around 155,000 new triple play customers signed up over the last three months.

At the end of the first quarter, 68% of Comcast customers took at least two products and 36% took three products, compared to 33% at the end of last year’s first quarter.

Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, said there were several factors that fueled Comcast’s growth during the quarter, starting with its advanced X1 set-top box platform, which offers a better television experience and makes finding things to watch easier. If customers have an X1, Roberts told investors, they are less likely to drop cable television service.

X1

“These positive early results reinforce our decision to accelerate our X1 deployment this year, and we are now adding 15,000 to 20,000 X1 boxes per day, which is double our rate of deployment from just six months ago,” Roberts told analysts. “Additionally, we are now rolling out a new XFINITY TV app, which enables our customers to live stream virtually their entire television lineup on any IP device in the home and watch DVR recordings in the home or on the go.”

Although usage caps remain controversial, Comcast has been aggressive about increasing broadband speeds at least once a year.

“In broadband, we recently increased speeds again for the 13th time in 12 years,” Roberts offered. “Doubling speeds in our Blast products to 105Mbps, while our Extreme tier moved up to 150Mbps for customers in the northeast. And we’re not stopping there. Our focus on wireless gateway deployment is adding utility to our customers while at the same time helping us create the largest Wi-Fi footprint in the U.S. with over one million public Wi-Fi hotspots currently available to our customers.”

Although Comcast’s first quarter capital expenditures increased $51 million (or 4.6%) to $1.1 billion (10.6% of cable revenue versus 10.7% in the first quarter of 2013), the cable company returned even more money to shareholders. In the first quarter, the company boosted return of capital by 35% to $1.3 billion. Comcast repurchased its own shares of stock totaling $750 million and paid $508 million in dividends for the quarter.

In 2014, Comcast will invest 14% of cable revenue (compared to 12.9% in 2013) to accelerate the deployment of X1 and wireless gateways, increase network capacity and continue to invest in expansion of business services and XFINITY Home. But it will spend far more than that placating shareholders. If Comcast wins support to buy Time Warner Cable, Comcast intends to increase its stock repurchase plan by $2.5 billion. The company earlier committed it would spend $3 billion on repurchasing its own shares, for an expected total of $5.5 billion during 2014.

When a company repurchases its own shares, it reduces the number of shares held by the public. That in turn means that if profits remain the same, the earnings per share increase. It also boosts the value of the massive portfolios of Comcast stock held by executives as part of their compensation packages.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Comcast Introducing the X1 Platform from XFINITY 4-14.mp4[/flv]

Comcast produced this video showing off its X1 platform and new set-top boxes. (1:47)

Time Warner Cable TV subscribers with a set-top box can now access more than two dozen new channels on the company’s TWC TV App, now offering more than 300 channels for in-home streaming.

The newly available channels may vary depending on your local lineup, but generally include a large number of subscription international channels, home shopping, and religion. (Note: ITV Gold is not part of the United Kingdom’s ITV network. It is a network targeting the South Asian diaspora with Bollywood musicals, soap operas, and movies. C1R should probably be listed as Channel One Russia (Первый Канал), so it isn’t confused with C1R.com, an adult video site. Oops.)

1. America’s Auction Net SD
2. BlueHighways TV HD
3. C1R
4. CCTV 4 America (Mandarin)
5. CCTV News English
6. Daystar TV Net (National)
7. Filmy
8. Gem Shopping Network
9. GMA DWLS Radio
10. GMA DZBB Radio
11. GMA Life TV
12. GMA Pinoy TV
13. Infinito
14. ITV Gold
15. Liquidation Channel
16. NASA TV
17. Phoenix North America Satellite TV
18. RAI Italia
19. RLTV
20. Sundance HD
21. TV Asia
22. TV5 Monde
23. TVB1
24. UTV Movies SD
25. YouToo
26. Zee TV

Now you can watch Law & Order reruns in HD on Sundance TV.

The TWC TV App is available for iOS, Android, PC & Mac, Roku, Samsung Smart TV’s, Kindle and the Xbox 360 — you can find out more about it at the TWC apps page.

The only mass interest channel in the list is Sundance HD, although NASA TV is also a welcome addition.

Viewing is free for current cable subscribers, but many of these channels may not be available for viewing outside of the home.

At least 46 percent of AT&T’s wireless customers are now paying at least $100 a month for a Mobile Share account with at least a 10GB usage allowance, a dramatic increase of more than 11 million customers during the last three months alone. AT&T customers used to pay a flat rate of $30 a month for unlimited wireless data. Now they pay much, much more for much less usage.

AT&T’s Mobile Share plans start at $20 a month (plus the cost of the device) and include just 300MB of data. Prices escalate from there (all prices don’t include the cost of the device)

• $20 for 300MB
• $25 for 1GB
• $40 for 2GB
• $70 for 4GB
• $80 for 6GB
• $100 for 10GB
• $130 for 15GB
• $150 for 20GB
• $225 for 30GB
• $300 for 40GB
• $375 for 50GB

AT&T is banking on growing mobile data use to earn the company perpetually accelerating revenue and dramatically higher average revenue per customer. The average AT&T customer does not come close to exceeding their current allowance, but the company’s sales force has proven exceptionally adept at convincing customers to upgrade to higher allowance plans whether the customer needs one or not.

Time Warner Cable reports it has unleashed major broadband speed upgrades for a handful of communities in New York and Los Angeles and is now delivering speeds up to 300Mbps.

After overhauling its network and neighborhood nodes, residential customers in Costa Mesa and West Hollywood, Calif., Staten Island and the Woodside neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., should now be getting faster broadband speeds ranging from 50Mbps for Standard (formerly 15Mbps) to 300Mbps for Extreme (formerly 50Mbps) service.

“These significant speed increases and network enhancements will allow our Internet customers to get the most out of their TWC experience,” said Time Warner Cable CEO Robert D. Marcus. “With this service transformation, our customers can enjoy all the ways they use TWC Internet even better, including streaming video, downloading music and more.”

Time Warner Cable’s senior vice president for corporate development Mike Roudi said Time Warner Cable expects to roll out similar upgrades nationwide over the next two years. But Comcast may have other ideas if it successfully completes its merger with Time Warner Cable by this time next year.

The cable company’s progress in rolling out upgrades is not as fast as their new top broadband speeds. Time Warner only expects to reach 200,000 customers with the new speeds by the end of June. The next areas scheduled for upgrades include:

• California: Covina, Cypress, Hoover, Crenshaw District and Jefferson Park areas of Los Angeles;
• New York: Upper Manhattan and more neighborhoods in Queens and Staten Island.

Time Warner said it expects to complete upgrades in New York and Los Angeles by the end of this year. No timeline was provided to start upgrades in other cities. Affected Time Warner customers will be contacted about replacing their existing DOCSIS 2 modem and getting set-top boxes for the all-digital television conversion that accompanies the upgrade.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TWC Talks About New Customer Experience in NY LA 4-22-14.mp4[/flv]

Time Warner Cable’s Mike Roudi explains how the cable company is upgrading customers for faster broadband speeds and all-digital television service in this company-produced video. (1:49)