Bell today announced it will spend $100 million dollars to expand its all-fiber network to 60,000 homes and businesses in Oshawa, Ont.

The Bell Fibe upgrade will bring gigabit upload and download speed to the community, located east of Toronto. It is part of Bell’s larger plan to upgrade 1.3 million homes and businesses across the GTA/905 region around Toronto to fuel southern Ontario’s digital economy.

Earlier this month, Bell launched its all-fiber network in the city of Toronto, which reaches more than one million residents around Canada’s largest city.

“We welcome Bell’s investment in Oshawa to provide our residents, businesses and visitors with access to truly world-class Internet connectivity,” said Oshawa Mayor John Henry. “High-speed networks are a primary driver of growth and innovation, supporting Oshawa’s status as a Smart City and our 5 key areas of economic growth – advanced manufacturing, energy generation, health and biosciences, multimodal transportation and logistics, and information technologies.”

Bell’s network is currently capable of delivering up to 40 Gbps broadband speed, and is infinitely upgradable to even faster speeds in the future. Residents will be able to subscribe to the new service beginning this fall. New customers will pay $79.95 a month for gigabit speeds for the first year, $149.95 a month after that. A $59.95 installation fee also applies.

Bell’s fiber network now extends across more than 240,000 kilometers and is Canada’s largest fiber network. Bell provides fiber broadband in four Atlantic provinces, Québec, Ontario and Manitoba, serving 9.2 million customers over its older fiber-to-the-neighborhood network (similar to AT&T U-verse) and over 3.7 million fiber to the home subscribers — a number expected to exceed 4.5 million by the end of this year.

Oshawa will join several other “all-fiber” cities across Canada, which include St. John’s, Gander, Summerside, Charlottetown, Halifax, Sydney, Moncton and Fredericton — all in Atlantic Canada, Québec City, Trois-Rivières, Saint-Jérôme and Gatineau in Québec, Cornwall, Kingston, Toronto, North Bay and Sudbury in Ontario, and Steinbach and The Pas in Manitoba. Bell unveiled its major Montréal all-fiber project in 2017 and other major new centers getting Bell Fibe to the home will be announced later this year.

Charter Communications’ takeover of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks has not proved popular, according to a new survey from Temkin Group.

The cable operator received rock bottom scores among customers frustrated about how Charter handles its acquired customers, especially those facing a transition to Spectrum plans and pricing. Customers have filled the company’s own forums with complaints about rate increases for newly required equipment or cable television plan changes that force customers to upgrade to win back channels deleted from their long-standing Time Warner Cable or Bright House lineups.

Customer dissatisfaction about the changes was picked up in Temkin Group’s 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings, U.S., published in March.

Just 35% of Charter/Spectrum customers were emotionally satisfied after interacting with Spectrum, the third worst performing company among the 318 surveyed across 20 different industries. Spectrum saw a ratings drop of 8.2% from 2017-2018, the worst performance decline among all TV and internet service providers,  according to Temkin’s survey.

Spectrum also scored just 57% on the “effort” metric, which measures how difficult it was to interact with the company to resolve a problem. Only 51% reported satisfaction with the ability of Spectrum to resolve their concern or problem, putting Spectrum on Temkin’s “Bottom 50 Organizations” — 312th best performer out of 318 companies. (Comcast, Cox, and Altice-Optimum actually performed slightly worse.)

Temken explains the root cause for perennially poor ratings of cable and phone companies: they often have a monopoly.

“There are some industries that have habitually poor customer experience,” Temken explains. “In many of the cases, these problem stems from some form of monopolistic power. TV service providers and internet service providers have carved out regions and have limited competition.”

This marks the eighth year Temkin has published its Temkin Experience Ratings, generated from compiling the results of a survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers about their recent interactions with 318 significant U.S. companies. Temkin measures three dimensions of a customer’s experience:

• Success: To what degree were customers able to accomplish what they wanted to do after a recent interaction with a company.
• Effort: How easy was it to interact with the company.
• Emotion: How did the customer feel about those interactions.

The TV/internet service category has stood out in recent years for consistently delivering rock bottom ratings — the worst of Temkin’s surveyed industries. Only health insurance companies come close to the dismal ratings phone and cable companies deliver year after year.

Much of the decline in Spectrum’s rating is attributed to an increase in the negative emotions customers experienced after interacting with the company. In the last year, the company has adopted a much firmer position on pricing and packages that customers criticize as “take it or leave it pricing.” Spectrum also recently scaled up digital television conversion in many legacy Time Warner Cable markets, with many customers paying for new set-top boxes to continue receiving cable television service on all televisions in the home. The company has also frustrated early and enthusiastic adopters of broadband speed upgrades with compulsory upgrade fees as high as $199.

Based on Temkin’s four customer experience core competencies, it seems like Charter is mired at the first stage of what Temkin calls ‘Customer Experience Maturity’:

Stage One — Ignore: Organization does not focus on customer experience management and does not view customer experience as a core part of its value proposition.

The best performers in Temken’s annual study were supermarkets, which took five of the top 11 spots. The top-rated company in the 2018 study was Wegmans, a privately held supermarket chain operating in the northeastern U.S. Other top scorers included H-E-B, Publix, Aldi, Wawa, Citizens Bank, USAA, Subway, and Ace Hardware.

Golisano

Rochester billionaire and philanthropist Thomas Golisano is seeking expedited regulatory approval from New York’s Public Service Commission to acquire Rochester-based Greenlight Networks, LLC, a fiber to the home network provider for an undisclosed sum.

Greenlight Networks has been slowly overbuilding Charter/Spectrum and Frontier Communications’ service areas in eastern Monroe County since 2012, offering subscribers gigabit internet access. But time may be running short for Greenlight’s competitive broadband speed advantage. Charter Communications is reportedly planning to introduce gigabit service as early as April 25th throughout upstate New York, except for Buffalo.

The urgency of the transaction’s approval is clear in the companies’ filing with state officials requesting an expedited review and approval of the transaction.

“Greenlight’s […] need for working capital and the optimization of capital structure required for long-term success in the competitive telecommunications industry are matters for urgent consideration,” the application states. “Greenlight seeks Commission approval in order to avoid unnecessary delays in the completion of its network expansion projects and in order to secure valuable, committed, outside investors who share Greenlight’s vision and believe in its ability to execute on its plan.”

Greenlight’s success is likely dependent on its ability to rapidly expand its fiber optic network before its biggest competitor, Charter’s Spectrum, capitalizes on its forthcoming ability to match Greenlight’s download speeds. Greenlight receives praise from subscribers lucky enough to live in a neighborhood reached by its network. But residents also report frustration over the slow pace of the company’s fiber network expansion, particularly in suburbs west of the Genesee River that bisects the city of Rochester.

Golisano’s Grand Oaks LLC of Pittsford, N.Y. promises customers the acquisition will not result in any changes in Greenlight’s rates or its terms and conditions.

The petition claims the acquisition is in the public interest because it will offer Greenlight much-needed additional capital to accelerate deployment of its fiber network inside Rochester and beyond. Greenlight’s website suggests the company is considering expansion into the New York State cities of Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Ithaca, Syracuse, and the Finger Lakes Region. In Connecticut, the company is considering serving Bridgeport, Danbury, Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford (the corporate home of Frontier Communications). Grand Oak also promises to grow jobs at Greenlight and increase operational efficiency at the company.

Golisano is well-known in Rochester as an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and civic leader. Golisano founded Paychex, a leading national payroll service provider in 1971. After his retirement in 2004, Golisano has been actively involved in local civic causes and advocates for policies promoting improvement in the economy of western New York State.

The application is likely to be approved, but not soon enough to combat Charter Communications’ accelerated broadband upgrades across New York State. By early summer, Spectrum customers across New York State will receive 200 Mbps Standard service, 400 Mbps Ultra service, or 940 Mbps (nearly gigabit) Gigabit service from the cable operator at prices ranging from $65-125 a month. In contrast, Greenlight currently offers customers 100 Mbps for $50, 500 Mbps for $75, or 1,000 Mbps for $100 a month.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson today announced AT&T would offer a slim-sized version of DirecTV Now offering a significant number of cable networks and live local television stations, but without expensive sports programming.

The new service, AT&T Watch, will sell for $15/month and is expected to arrive sometime this May.

The new option is expected to compete head to head with Dish Network-owned Sling TV.

Rep. Trujillo — a friend of CenturyLink

Rep. Carl Trujillo (D-Santa Fe), a New Mexico legislator embroiled in a hotly contested primary for New Mexico’s state legislature, is accused of violating the state’s campaign finance laws by concealing contributions from companies including CenturyLink, the single biggest contributor to his campaign during his last race in 2016.

Denie Cordova of Alcade filed a formal complaint with the New Mexico Secretary of State on Monday.

“Mr. Trujillo failed to disclose thousands of dollars on his campaign finance reports from donors related to CenturyLink and the oil and gas industry, which is against the law,” Cordova said. “Because his failure to disclose these contributions relate to these two industries solely, I believe his failure to disclose was willful.”

Cordova tracked where Trujillo’s campaign funds originated and discovered CenturyLink, along with several companies in the oil and gas industry, may be secretly funneling campaign money to Trujillo with the help of Rep. Patricio Ruilobo, a fellow Democrat who has contributed thousands of dollars to Cordova’s campaign.

“Unopposed again this year, Mr. Ruilobo has suddenly raised over $17,000, or a third of the amount he has raised since being initially elected,” Cordova wrote. “Mr. Ruilobo has received numerous contributions from businesses who have never donated to his campaign, but are contributors to Mr. Trujillo, such as Occidental Petroleum ($2,500), Chevron ($1,000); and Encana ($1,000). Did Mr. Trujillo funnel contributions from oil and gas through Mr. Ruilobo’s campaign account? These ‘pass-through’ contributions are illegal in the state of New Mexico.”

The complaint also alleges CenturyLink’s lobbyist, Johnny Montoya, gave Trujillo free baseball tickets that were never reported on disclosure forms. But in a more serious allegation, Cordova claims both CenturyLink and Trujillo violated New Mexico law by accepting money from the telecommunications company above the corporate limit.

Trujillo’s defense of CenturyLink’s contributions also raised eyebrows.

“One campaign contribution came from a telecommunications PAC [affiliated with CenturyLink], the other came from a telecommunications [company – CenturyTel], therefore, there is no violation,” Trujillo said. “She is claiming that they are from the same company, ($500 from CenturyLink, $2,500 from CenturyLink lobbyist Katherine Martinez) and that is completely untrue.”

CenturyTel is the old corporate name for what is now known as CenturyLink. Although the two entities still exist for business and regulatory reasons, they are both essentially the same company. Corporations often skirt campaign contribution laws by making multiple donations as an individual company, through an affiliated Political Action Committee (PAC), and through personal contributions from corporate executives and occasionally employees. While each distinct contribution is reported individually on disclosure forms, politicians do the math and understand where the combined contributions are coming from.

As for the baseball tickets, Trujillo waived them off.

“That is not a campaign contribution, there is no place to amend my report, it’s all within the limits of the Campaign Finance Act, so there’s no violation there,” he told the Los Alamos Monitor.

Trujillo has been criticized by some in his district, which covers a largely rural area from Santa Fe to the northern half of the county, for being too corporate friendly, a charge Trujillo strongly disputes.

Montoya

“I am probably the number one representative or senator in the state that receives the vast majority, 90 percent of my contributions, from grassroots organizations, individuals and small businesses,” he told the newspaper. “I raised a lot of money from many small businesses and individuals within the district. Those characteristics of my campaign funding are completely untrue.”

But at least some of Cordova’s charges seem to be accurate, particularly regarding large donations from energy companies like Encana Gas and Oil, which Trujillo had to send back.

“I sent many contributions back throughout my tenure as a legislator. I have probably sent 30 to 40 contributions back,” Trujillo said. When asked why he has had to return so many corporate contributions, Trujillo answered, “Because of what we’re dealing with now. Campaigns that have nothing to grab onto make desperate attempts to make somebody look bad. People refuse to run for office because of tactics like this.”

Trujillo also turned the spotlight back on Cordova and her complaint, which he called “suspicious,” noting it was a very detailed add filed by someone who lives outside his district. A Facebook page for Ms. Cordova reveals no political leanings or obvious interest in politics.

His opponent in the primary, Andrea Romero, has herself been the subject of some controversy. In February, a complaint filed by Northern New Mexico Protects claimed Romero spent over $1,850 on a single dinner, not including $307 for alcohol and baseball tickets, during a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. Romero is also under investigation in her role as former executive director of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities — a group of towns that have banded together to deal with issues surrounding the Los Alamos National Laboratory. New Mexico’s state auditor is currently auditing the books of the coalition over financial irregularities relating to travel expenses.

Romero accused her complainant of having political connections to Trujillo and claimed the entire affair was politically motivated. Trujillo claims essentially the same, but has not directly accused Romero by name.

The larger issue for ethics in government observers is the money laundering of political campaign contributions to skirt campaign finance laws. The fact that many of Trujillo’s donors suddenly began making contributions to an Albuquerque legislator that has faced no significant opposition and has raised very little money in the past was intriguing. When that money turned into a legislator to legislator campaign contribution from Ruilobo to Trujillo, it looked suspicious.

Campaign finance reform advocates call it a shell game and a way to undermine campaign finance limits. But they admit in New Mexico it is both legal and common.