Frontier’s headquarters in Rochester, N.Y.

Tens of thousands of Frontier Communications customers have dealt with the loss of their broadband and phone service in five states because of cable damage, copper theft, and overselling broadband service with insufficient capacity.

Upstate New York

Officials in Oswego County report Frontier phone and broadband service was disrupted Monday for customers in several central New York communities. At least 3,400 customers were unable to dial outside of their home exchanges in Fairhaven, Hannibal, Cato and Lysander. Frontier said a cable owned and maintained by Verizon was responsible, and they were unaware when Verizon would complete repairs.

Tennessee and Illinois

Frontier Communications acknowledged a “major outage” was affecting customers in both Tennessee and Illinois today. As of late this afternoon, Frontier said it was still attempting to restore service to both states’ customers.

Washington

Frontier Communications has reported copper lines stolen in Snohomish, Skykomish and Granite Falls, causing temporary outages for thousands of customers throughout north King and Snohomish counties. It’s the tenth copper wire theft affecting Frontier so far this year.

West Virginia

Ongoing problems in the Panhandle region of West Virginia have left Frontier broadband customers without service, sometimes for days. Customers have been told copper thefts were responsible for outages in mid-July, but some Frontier technicians have also told customers that slow speeds that persist month after month are a result of too many customers trying to use Frontier broadband at the same time. Other customers in the Shepherdstown area report persistent, ongoing problems with broadband outages as well.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCPQ Seattle Frontier Copper Theft 7-25-13.flv[/flv]

KCPQ in Seattle reports Frontier has been a repeated victim of copper thefts in Washington state. At least 10 instances of copper theft have left thousands of customers without service until the company can string new cable.  (3 minutes)

Marcus

A three-year contract to serve as Time Warner Cable’s next CEO has earned Robert Marcus a $16 million windfall during his first year in the new job.

According to disclosures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Marcus will get an annual salary of $1.5 million — a $500,000 pay bump from his old job as chief operating officer, a $5 million annual bonus, a $2 million award just to take and keep the CEO job, and up to $7.5 million a year in unspecified long-term incentives.

Marcus isn’t taking any chances.

His employment contract also includes provisions for continued compensation for up to two years should Time Warner Cable be sold to another entity — obvious financial planning for any potential takeover attempt by John Malone, Charter Communications, or any other entity.

Comcast is in hog heaven thanks to Pennsylvania’s generous handouts from its corporate welfare system.

This week, Philadelphia residents are pondering why the city is hounding entrepreneurs and middle class, at-home workers with new taxes and fees while the nation’s largest and richest cable company, Comcast, is receiving enormous tax breaks and government handouts.

Welcome to the United Corporations of America, where taxpayers front at least $80 billion in corporate welfare handouts, according to the New York Times. Comcast is the fourth biggest recipient of corporate welfare in Pennsylvania, dwarfed only by a giant oil company and two Hollywood studios that have learned how to cash in by filming movies inside the Keystone State. The average Pennsylvanian contributes $381 in taxes per year that gets diverted to multi-billion dollar corporations. At least 18 cents of every dollar in the state budget is now spent on corporate welfare programs.

The budget busting handouts have continued without interruption, even during The Great Recession. Elected officials believe the only way to keep big business from picking up and moving to another city or state is to keep making them offers they cannot afford to refuse. But local taxpayers can’t afford to make up the difference. While the economy was melting down from 2008-2010, Philadelphia-based Comcast scored $18 million in tax abatements, credits, and other government handouts. At the same time, local officials faced with upside down city budgets enacted controversial new taxes and business fees on some of the city’s smallest businesses, ranging from bloggers, freelance writers, to independent contractors and consultants.

Pennsylvania is easily among the top-tier of states handing out corporate welfare. In 2011, the Commonwealth collected $4.89 billion in business taxes. But it promptly returned $4.84 billion in tax credits to the state’s biggest businesses. Government benefits for Philadelphia for-profits totaled over $200 million that year alone. Many of the state’s biggest companies receive nearly as much in tax credits, grants, and other benefits that they pay in state and local taxes. Some incentive programs are so broadly written, businesses doing “business as usual” qualify for enormous tax breaks.

Take, for example, Comcast subsidiary QVC. Pennsylvania’s “film incentive program” handed the home shopping network $7.05 million in tax credits just for hawking jewelry from studios inside Pennsylvania. It did not matter QVC had been pitching products from those studios before, during and after the subsidy program handed out the award. Comcast had no plans to move the studios either, but it pocketed the corporate welfare just the same.

While Comcast was building up enough financial resources to acquire NBC-Universal, Philadelphia’s city budget was in tatters. Officials looking for creative ways to boost the local tax base didn’t tap Comcast for the money. Instead, they declared bloggers were now required to get a “business license” to operate within city limits. In fact, the city argued, every person, partnership, association and corporation engaged in a business, profession or other for-profit activity within the city of Philadelphia must now file a Business Privilege Tax Return. The cost just to apply for the business license? $300. Sorry Nathanial, the lemonade stand has to close because you didn’t cough up the $300 before erecting the card table in the front yard.

The “blogger tax” appeared to be sufficiently overreaching (thanks to excoriating coverage in the local media) to provoke the city to begin to phase it out, but no worries — Philadelphia has since found another source of revenue — Comcast? No, of course not. The real money is in taxing strippers. From The Philly Post:

So Mayor Nutter’s effort to tax lap dances—which reached its, er, climax last week in a Philadelphia courtroom — might be somewhat sympathetic if it had been cast as a way to crack down on the general level of skeeviness in the city. After all, it’s a fairly common rule of economics that if you want less of something, just tax it. That’s the logic behind Nutter’s anti-obesity effort to put a tax on sugary drinks, after all.

But nobody’s making that argument. (To be fair, City Hall hasn’t made much of a public argument of any sort, with officials saying they can’t comment on pending litigation.) So we’re forced to assume that the city, always desperate for revenue, is simply finding new ways of taxing its citizens — going after strippers the way you and I might check the folds of the couch for loose change.

And since strip club attendees already pay the city’s amusement tax just to enter the strip club, it seems reasonable to conclude that asking them to pay again when they witness actual stripping is thus a direct tax on stripping itself. It’s a tax on work.

There probably are not enough deep-pocketed lap dancers inside the City of Brotherly Love to cover Comcast’s tax tab. Just for building its new headquarters in Center City Philadelphia, the company was awarded an extra $42.75 million in government subsidies. But it did not stop there. In 2011, the cable company received an extra $18 million in miscellaneous gratitude corporate welfare categorized generally as “assorted grants and credits.” No other Philadelphia business came close to competing with Comcast’s taxpayer-provided gift basket. In return, Comcast showed its gratitude to Pennsylvania by declaring itself a Delaware-based corporation that was exempt from paying the state’s corporate income tax.

AT&T has continued its efforts towards wireless industry consolidation with today’s announcement it has acquired Iowa-based Long Lines Wireless (formerly Cellular One of Iowa) for an undisclosed amount.

“We concluded that Long Lines could best serve our customers by focusing our attention and investing our resources in providing new features for our non-wireless services including voice, broadband services, and cable TV, and in expanding our fiber optic network to reach more communities and customers,” said Long Lines CEO Brent Olson.

The rural telecom company has served Siouxland since 1941 and today provides wireless, landline service, cable television and broadband to residents in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota.

Customers have not suffered doing business with a small independent provider like Long Lines. The company operates a fiber optic network providing business customers up to 40Gbps broadband and residential customers up to 100Mbps Internet service. Those services are not available from the much larger telephone companies that also serve these states, including AT&T, Frontier, and CenturyLink.

Despite the availability of infrastructure that can rival any large city, Long Lines concluded it could simply not succeed in its wireless business.

“Regional wireless providers have limited access to the latest smartphones and other devices, and it has become increasingly difficult to for Long Lines Wireless to meet the digital mobile needs of our customers,” Olson said.

The sale to AT&T means Long Lines wireless customers will eventually be a part of AT&T’s wireless network, with access to its 4G network and a wider selection of phones.

Long Lines intends to invest its resources in providing new features for non-wireless services including voice, broadband services, and cable TV, and in expanding its fiber optic network to reach more communities and customers.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCAU Sioux City Long Lines Sold to ATT 7-25-13.mp4[/flv]

KCAU in Sioux City reports on the sale of Long Lines Wireless to AT&T Mobility. (1 minute)

Within the hour viewers in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas will know whether Time Warner Cable and CBS have managed to reach an agreement on retransmission consent, agree to further extend talks, or choose to pull the plug on CBS affiliates in the three cities, and a handful of independent stations with it.

Negotiations are said to be tense and down to the wire, with a weekend extension expiring at 5pm ET this afternoon. Time Warner Cable customers nationwide could experience the loss of Showtime if Time Warner Cable decides to drop the pay movie channel as a negotiating tactic.

CBS’ Les Moonves confirmed this afternoon the two sides remained at odds over the exact amount the cable operator will pay per viewer for CBS-owned local stations in the three cities. If an agreement is not reached, Time Warner Cable is likely to drop the channels this afternoon.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bloomberg Will CBS Lose its Place on the TV Dial 7-29-13.flv[/flv]

Bloomberg News reports late this afternoon the two sides have still not reached an agreement and unless another extension is approved, CBS will be off the cable dial in New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. (5 minutes)

The cable operator upped the stakes late Friday reportedly threatening that if CBS does get removed, it will give up its coveted channel positions on Time Warner Cable indefinitely. In New York, WCBS occupies channel 2. In Los Angeles, KCBS is also on channel 2 and its sister station KCAL is on channel 9. In Dallas, KTVT is on Time Warner Cable channel 11. Low channel numbers have significant financial value to programmers, because it makes finding channels easier. Jeff Zucker from CNN has already expressed an interest is taking over channel 2 for CNN.

The dispute comes at the same time Time Warner Cable is notifying customers of rate increases on broadband and cable modem rentals. CBS is expected to recommend Time Warner customers switch to a competitor or watch shows online, presumably over TWC’s broadband service.

In Wisconsin, another retransmission consent fight with Journal Broadcast Group caused the cable company to drop those stations from its lineup. Among the stations affected in Wisconsin:  WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) in Milwaukee and WGBA-TV in Green Bay, which carry Packer pre-season games, and WACY-TV in Appleton, which carries Spanish language pre-season broadcasts.

Ellis

State Senate president Mike Ellis (R-Neenah) wrote a letter to the cable company insisting that it give rebates to customers affected by the blackout.

“It is clear your customers are no longer receiving the service they are paying for,” Ellis wrote in a letter to the company last Friday.

But Time Warner Cable made it clear subscribers are not entitled to refunds when stations disappear from its lineup:

Stations “are sold as a package of channels. We change our programming packages from time to time, including by adding new networks to the lineup. It is not our practice to issue credits for individual networks that are offered in a package.”

In New York, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has asked CBS and Time Warner Cable to keep the stations up and running on cable until the negotiations are resolved. If they don’t Quinn has threatened to hold an oversight hearing on the matter, although her power to affect the two companies is very limited.

[flv width=”534″ height=”320″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/NY1 Quinn Says Dont Interrupt Video 7-29-13.mp4[/flv]

NY1 reports on New York City mayoral candidate Christine Quinn’s request that CBS and Time Warner keep WCBS on the cable dial until the dispute can be resolved.  (1 minute)