AT&T is hunting for buyers of its massive network of 10,000 cell towers worth about $5 billion to defray the costs of Wall Street-pleasing stock buybacks and fund potential acquisition deals in Europe.

The company first signaled a willingness to sell its towers and other ancillary assets at an investor meeting in March according to Bloomberg News. AT&T has hired TAP Advisors LLC and JPMorgan Chase to help coordinate the sale.

After the sale, AT&T would lease access to the network of cell towers from its new owner, potentially winning AT&T certain tax benefits. In return, the company will give up about $326 million in annual revenue now earned from other companies that pay to lease space on AT&T’s towers.

The sale could help competing carriers seeking to improve coverage. An independent owner will any wireless company to lease access to a site’s tower, something AT&T did not always permit for competitive reasons. That could cut a lot of red tape for companies seeking to build new tower sites and meeting objections from area residents.

Tower company consolidation has already reduced the number of potential buyers to three major likely contenders: Crown Castle International, SBA Communications, and the largest tower owner in the United States – American Tower Corp.

Cell tower sales are no longer unusual. T-Mobile USA agreed to sell the rights to operate 7,200 cellular towers to Crown Castle for $2.4 billion last September and other companies are buying wireless network assets in Brazil and Mexico.

TiVo Roamio DVR

The newest entry in the should-be-more-competitive world of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) might have gotten five stars from reviewers willing to play down the device’s asking price, but the biggest hurdle of all isn’t its cost, it is the complexity of getting it to work properly with your cable provider.

TiVo’s new Roamio was designed to declutter your viewing experience. It’s a DVR that can record shows you missed, an online video device that can stream content from Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, Spotify, Pandora and YouTube right on your television, and perhaps most powerful of all — it will soon stream it all to you on any mobile device located anywhere there is an Internet connection.

That puts TiVo’s Roamio well ahead of the behind-the-times set-top boxes and DVRs rented out by the cable company. Customers have clamored for a device that can properly record scheduled programs and allow those recordings to be viewed anywhere the customer wants to watch. Comcast’s box doesn’t work that way. Neither do boxes from Time Warner Cable, Cox, Bright House, and the rest.

Cue the lawyers.

The reason these common sense portability features are not available on the box you rent in perpetuity from the cable company is that programmers won’t allow it and many pay television providers don’t consider it a priority. Time Warner Cable only recently filed a patent to deliver customer-recorded content to portable devices. The patent application is an exercise to placate litigious programmers that cannot sleep nights knowing someone is offering a service they failed to monetize for themselves through licensing agreements. Feel the legal fees piling up:

“Because of the increasing popularity of home networking, there is a growing need for a strategy that enables a user to perform authorized transfer of protected content, e.g., transferring content from an STT [set-top terminal] to a second device in a home network, and at the same time prevents unauthorized distribution of the protected content,” Time Warner writes in its patent application.

While TiVo is selling a device that allows consumers to record programming for private viewing purposes, a cable operator with deep pockets that only rents DVRs cannot do likewise.

The Roamio comes in three versions, none of which are compatible with satellite television services:

• Roamio Pro ($600): Six tuners allow customers to record up to six shows at one time and has storage capacity for 450 hours of HD programming. Includes built-in Wi-Fi. Stream TV to mobile iOS devices coming soon (as is Android support);
• Roamio Plus ($400): Same as above except storage capacity is 150 hours of HD programming;
  Roamio ($200): Four tuner basic version omits built-in streaming to mobile devices but can record four shows at once and store 75 hours of HD programming. A good choice for cord-cutters as it includes an over-the-air broadcast television antenna input.
• All Roamio devices require TiVo service, which costs $15 a month or $500 for a lifetime subscription. All boxes support external hard drives with an eSATA interface to backup or store more recordings. All Roamio devices support 1080p and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.

This Comcast DVR is only available for rent.

In contrast, cable operator-provided DVR service can often add $20 a month to your cable bill… forever. But is there real value for money paying TiVo $15 a month (or a $500 payment for the life of the device) for “service” on top of hardware that can cost up to $600?

TiVo thinks so: “Once you bring together all your favorite shows, movies and music into one place, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

Unfortunately, getting there is one heck of a battle according to Bloomberg’s Rich Jaroslovsky, who got his hands on a test unit that simply refused to get along well with Comcast.

“The cable industry is standing in the way,” Jaroslovsky writes.

That may not be surprising, considering the lucrative business of renting DVR equipment to customers eager for time-shifting and commercial-skipping. The cable company’s concept of DVR service includes a set-top box, decoder, and recording unit into one, relatively simple integrated device.

TiVo’s persistent monthly “service fee” as well as a steep purchase price made marketing the cable company’s “no-purchase-required” DVR easy, and the cable industry quickly won the lion’s share of the DVR business. Another strong argument in favor of the cable company’s DVR is the lack of a complicated set up procedure to get competing devices to reliably work with the cable company’s set-top box.

Motorola’s M CableCARD

Thanks to Comcast and other cable companies, setting up Roamio managed to confound even a tech reporter like Jaroslovsky, and Comcast was not much help.

The Roamio requires a CableCARD, a plug-in card-sized version of the cable company’s set-top box, to unlock digital cable channels.

The CableCARD was Congress’ attempt in the 1996 Telecom Act to give consumers an option to avoid costly and unsightly set-top boxes. Originally envisioned as a plug-in device that would offer “cable-ready” service without a set-top box in future generations of televisions, the CableCARD never really took off. The cable industry opposed the devices and dragged its feet, preferring to support its own set-top boxes. The CableCARD that eventually did emerge was initially often difficult to obtain and had huge limitations, such as one-way-only access which meant no electronic program guide, no video-on-demand, and no access to anything that required two-way communications between the card and the cable company. Newer CableCARDs do offer two-way communications and support today’s advanced cable services.

The only place most cable operators mention the availability of the CableCARD in detail is in a federally mandated disclosure of pricing, services, and a consumer’s rights and responsibilities — usually provided in a rice-paper-thin, tiny-print leaflet included with your bill once a year, if you still get one in the mail.

Roamio is likely to frighten technophobes right from the start with this important notification:

CableCARDs are made by one of four manufacturers: Motorola, Scientific Atlanta/Cisco, NDS, or Conax. You need one multi-stream CableCARD (M-card). Single-stream CableCARDs (S-cards) are not compatible.

“That costs an extra $1.50 a month from Comcast, and in my case, required three trips to its nearest office because the first card didn’t work,” Jaroslovsky writes.

On the second trip, Comcast handed him two cards in the hope at least one would work, requiring one last trip to return the card that didn’t.

Time Warner Cable and certain other cable operators use Switched Digital Video, incompatible with the Roamio without a Digital Tuning Adapter, available from the cable company.

The second hurdle was to get Comcast to recognize and authorize that CableCARD. Comcast’s technical customer support staff was lacking. Jaroslovsky found his call bounced from department to department attempting to authorize the card and diagnose why it simply refused to work at first.

After finally overcoming those problems, Jaroslovsky discovered he was out of luck getting Roamio to stream premium movie channels like HBO and Cinemax. The encryption system Comcast supports prohibits streaming the movie networks outside of the home. The Slingbox works around the issue by bypassing the encryption system’s permission settings with extra cables between it and your cable box.

Time Warner Cable subscribers will need still another piece of equipment — a Tuning Adapter compatible with Switched Digital Video (SDV). To conserve bandwidth, cable companies like Time Warner limit certain digital channels being sent to each neighborhood unless someone is actively watching.

Before you can view or record a program on an SDV channel, your box must be able to send channel requests back to the cable headend. Roamio is a one-way device and cannot send the required channel requests. Cable providers who have deployed SDV technology will provide a Tuning Adapter to customers who have HD TiVo boxes. A Tuning Adapter is a set top box that provides two-way capabilities, so your box can request SDV channels. There are two Tuning Adapter brands: Motorola and Cisco. Motorola CableCARDs work with Motorola Tuning Adapters. Scientific Atlanta and NDS CableCARD work with Cisco Tuning Adapters. Without the Tuning Adapter, a Roamio user will find error messages on several digital channels indicating they are “temporarily unavailable.”

Other cable operators offer varying support for Roamio. Cablevision has been learning how to support the device along with customers. Prior customer experiences make it clear front-line service representatives are not going to be very helpful managing the technical process to properly configure, update, and authorize CableCARD technology for the new TiVo device, so prepare to have your call transferred to one or more representatives.

After all this, Jaroslovsky was finally watching his Comcast cable channels, able to access on-demand services, and found TiVo’s interface and program guide more satisfying than the one offered on Comcast’s DVR.

Roamio Plus and Pro have built-in support for video streaming away from home that will be fully enabled this fall.

Jaroslovsky found in-home streaming smooth and satisfying. Programs launched quickly and looked terrific on an iPad with Apple’s high-resolution Retina display, with none of the blockiness or stuttering sometimes associated with streaming video.

His review unit allowed him to test streamed programming outside of the home and video quality on the go was much more variable. The current software prohibits video streaming on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, a problem with a resolution now in the works. Public Wi-Fi hotspots often delivered poor performance, even when they could supply up to 2Mbps. Blurred pictures and pixel blocks often broke up the video on slow Internet connections. A faster connection supporting more than 10Mbps is capable of delivering a better viewing experience, especially if that connection comes without usage caps.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TiVo Roamio DVR Demo Video 8-19-13.flv[/flv]

An introduction and demo of the TiVo Roamio DVR, produced by TiVo. (3 minutes)

This article was updated with a clarification about Tuning Adapters, required by some cable operators using Switched Digital Video. Thanks to reader Dave Hancock for helping clear things up.

EPB this morning celebrated its fourth anniversary by thanking Chattanooga residents for supporting the utility’s fiber network with a series of price cuts and speed increases.

Beginning today, EPB’s fiber broadband customers are getting the following upgrades and savings:

• 50/50Mbps customers get a free upgrade to 100/100Mbps service with no change in their current price ($57.99/month);
• 100/100 and 250/250Mbps customers get a free upgrade to 1,000/1,000Mbps service;
• 1,000/1,000Mbps customers now paying $349 a month will see their bills slashed to $69.99 a month, a savings of $230 a month;
• EPB’s business broadband customers will be contacted individually to coordinate the speed upgrades.

Customers will see the new speeds provisioned within the next two weeks. At least 3,000 residential customers will be upgraded to gigabit service.

EPB also reported this morning it has 55,000 broadband customers.

EPB is one of the nation’s most successful municipal fiber providers and is proving itself a major challenger to Chattanooga’s cable competitor Comcast and incumbent phone company AT&T.

AT&T’s U-verse is the least capable network in Chattanooga, because its fiber-to-the-neighborhood technology currently limits AT&T’s maximum broadband speed in the city to 24/3Mbps. AT&T says it is working on doubling or tripling speeds, but it still leaves U-verse far behind Comcast and EPB.

Comcast has lost at least 47,000 customers in Chattanooga, estimates EPB CEO Harold DePriest. Comcast originally had 122,000 customers on the EPB grid when EPB launched fiber broadband. This year, Comcast has about 75,000 customers and is expected to see numbers decline further in 2014 to about 60,000 customers.

The best Comcast offers is 505/20Mbps service in select cities, with a price tag of $400 a month.

Neither Comcast or AT&T is competing on price for higher speed broadband in Chattanooga. Comcast charges $114.95 a month for 105/20Mbps service and offers 505/100Mbps service in a handful of other cities, for $399.95 a month. Comcast is also currently testing the reintroduction of usage caps and overlimit fees in several markets.

AT&T charges $65 a month for 24/3Mbps service — its fastest — with a 250GB monthly usage cap, currently not enforced. For $5 more, EPB customers get 1,000/1,000Mbps with no usage limits or overlimit fees.

EPB has been criticized by conservative groups, bloggers, and its competitors that argue municipal utilities have no business being in the broadband business. Most of these groups predicted EPB Fiber would deliver a costly failure for Chattanooga utility ratepayers. The utility has also come under repeated fire from the conservative editorial page in the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, often from ex-editorial writer Drew Johnson, who was fired in August.

DePriest can afford to take the criticism all in stride. He has been with the publicly owned utility for 42 years and has seen Chattanooga transformed from its old manufacturing roots into an increasingly high-tech city, thanks in part to EPB’s robust broadband infrastructure that has exceeded even EPB’s expectations.

EPB’s original business plan called for 28,000 customers to break even, with an estimated ceiling of 43,000 customers that would be willing to sign up. EPB has already passed both estimates with additional growth anticipated. DePriest even predicts EPB could surpass Comcast — the city’s biggest broadband and cable TV player — in market share by the end of next year.

Far from being a financial failure, EPB Fiber is now covering the $19 million debt payment incurred by the utility’s electric business, protecting Chattanooga residents from an electricity rate increase.

EPB is also making money offering advice to other cities who want to launch their own publicly owned fiber networks and avoid making costly mistakes. Consulting services will net EPB more than $1 million over the next three years.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/EPB EPB 4th Anniversary Speed Increases Price Cuts for Gigabit 9-17-13.flv[/flv]

EPB CEO Harold DePriest announces speed increases and price cuts for customers to celebrate the utility’s fourth anniversary in the broadband business. (3 minutes)

Correction: The original story misreported Comcast’s upstream speed for its 505Mbps tier as 20Mbps. It is, as corrected above, 100Mbps.

Bell’s version of price competition before the government made wireless prices and competition a priority.

After years of acute bill shock afflicting those who didn’t bother to check the breathtaking cost of using a Bell cell phone abroad, Canada’s largest phone company announced today it was cutting in half the prices it charges for mobile data, voice, and text roaming plans for customers headed to the United States.

“During the summer, Canadians told the federal government that they support wireless competition and strongly believe the wireless rules should be the same for all carriers, Canadian or international. But Canadians also told us that they want to use their smartphones a lot when they travel, and they want the price to come down,” said Bell Mobility president Wade Oosterman in a statement. “We heard you, and today Bell is cutting in half the cost of mobile roaming where Canadians travel the most: the U.S.A.”

The new, discounted rates begin Tuesday and cover the following plans:

• 30-day travel bundle: $25 (was $50) — includes 50MB of data, 50 anytime minutes in the U.S. or to Canada, unlimited incoming text messages, 200 sent text messages.
• 30-day travel add-ons: $20 each (formerly $40) — 100MB of data, or 100 minutes of voice calling, or unlimited incoming and sent texts.

Bell officials said the company is not stopping with the United States and plans further cuts in joint roaming rates in conjunction with their global telecom partners.

Some Canadians wonder what took the company so long.

“When you can just casually drop the price of something by half, I can only imagine how much profit you are actually making on it to begin with,” commented Mark Winn.

Analysts speculate Bell’s move is designed to preempt, or at least soothe “competition fever,” now rampant in the Conservative Harper government. Officials in Ottawa were reportedly disappointed that a rumored entry by Verizon Wireless into Canada never came to fruition. Opposition critics have labeled the current ‘all competition, no regulation’ government policy impotent. Some have also pointed the finger at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada’s telecommunications regulator, criticized as being too cozy with incumbent market leaders.

“Viagra couldn’t grow competition in this country,” said Sally Pearson, a consumer advocate fighting to broadly open Canada’s wireless market to foreign-owned competitors. “Years of government policies that favor Bell, Rogers and Telus and flaccidity at the CRTC has given us the level of competition telecom lobbyists intended all along.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CP With Verizon out whats next for Canadas wireless space 9-3-13.flv[/flv]

With Verizon out of the picture, there are no obvious candidates to take on the big three Canadian wireless providers. Canadian Press reporter Steve Rennie considers how this will impact the Harper government, its telecom policies and the telecom industry. Will Canadian consumers demand something better when Parliament returns in the fall? (2 minutes)

Britt

Time Warner Cable’s outgoing CEO has cashed in some of his TWC stock options, making a $4.3 million profit last week.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows on Sept. 11 Britt’s portfolio manager purchased 50,000 shares of TWC stock at the company-authorized executive discount “strike” price of $23.48 per share, spending $1.2 million. That same day, those acquired shares were sold for just over $110 a share, reaping a profit of $4.3 million.

Britt acquired the heavily discounted shares as part of his executive compensation package. Under SEC rules, executives are not permitted to know the exact timing of stock trades, to prevent accusations of insider trading. But executives usually can’t lose because the “strike price” — the mutually agreed-on price of each share — often bears no resemblance to the actual trading value of the stock.

Britt intends to retire in December.