Rogers Communications customers have a New Year’s surprise arriving in their mailboxes as eastern Canada’s largest cable company announces it is boosting rates effective Jan 24.

Many Rogers broadband customers will be paying an additional $3 a month for usage-capped service. Some of the steepest rate increases are reserved for budget-minded customers who only want the basics.

Those subscribed to Phone Essentials, Cable Digital Plus and Internet Lite face a 6.7 percent rate hike, which translates into $8 a month or $96 a year. One thing not increasing is Rogers’ usage allowances.

Rogers Rates Up, Up, and Away

• Phone Essentials up 7.0%
• Phone Favorites up 5.2%
• Phone Deluxe up 4.6%

• Cable Basic up 2.9%
• Cable Digital Plus up 5.7%
• Cable VIP up 2.9%

• Internet Lite up 7.8%
• Internet Express up 6.1%
• Internet Extreme up 4.8%
• Internet Extreme Plus up 4.2%

Rogers Communications isn’t exactly hurting. Their profits have been accelerating every quarter over the last year:

• Q4 2011: $327 million profit
• Q1 2012: $356 million profit
• Q2 2012: $400 million profit
• Q3 2012: $466 million profit

Image courtesy: Rick

Rogers’ customer Sunfox, who lives in Markham, Ont., and provided the breakdown, is purely tongue-in-cheek about Rogers’ quest for more of their customers’ money.

“I mean clearly something had to be done,” he writes on Broadband Reports’ Rogers Forum. “Any reasonable person can see that $1.5 billion profit in 12 months isn’t anywhere near enough, so it was time to significantly increase rates for their customers.”

Customers who want out can follow these instructions provided by Rogers:

Affected customers who wish to respond to the rate increase notice may call us at 1 888 ROGERS 1 (764-3771).

Residents of New Brunswick who do not wish to accept any applicable rate increase may choose to cancel the service(s) affected by the rate increase(s). Any applicable early cancellation fee, device savings recovery fee or service deactivation fee will apply.

Residents of Newfoundland and Labrador and Québec who do not wish to accept any applicable rate increase may choose to cancel the service(s) affected by the rate increase(s) without any early cancellation fee by sending us a notice to that effect no later than 30 days after the rate increase(s) take effect, as indicated in the rate increase notice.

Residents of Ontario who do not wish to accept any applicable rate increase may choose to cancel the service(s) affected by the rate increase(s) without any early cancellation fee, device savings recovery fee or service deactivation fee, as applicable, by sending us a notice to that effect no later than 30 days after receiving the rate increase notice.

Marshall

Karen Marshall, Vermont’s appointed “broadband czar” and head of ConnectVT has accepted a lucrative job offer from one of the broadband providers she formerly oversaw.

Marshall’s trip through the revolving door from public servant to the private sector she helped regulate will land her as the new president of VTel Data Network.

Raising eyebrows across the state is the fact her new employer received $116 million in broadband stimulus grants in 2011 to expand service in rural Vermont. Less than two weeks ago, Marshall was praising VTel for another $5 million state grant from the state’s telecommunications authority to expand rural cell service in the state. VTel is the largest recipient of taxpayer-financed grant funding in Vermont.

VTel executives said Marshall would be a perfect fit for the company that owns a fiber network in the state with connections to New York, Montreal, and Boston.

VTDigger called Marshall, a former Comcast employee, a one-woman enforcer for the current administration’s broadband goals:

Her job has been to ensure that state and federal agencies, private companies and Vermont municipalities work together to meet the governor’s 2013 deadline.

The VTel project is key to that effort. No other company has received as much federal funding. ECFiber, a fiber-optic company, Burlington Telecomm and FairPoint are also expanding broadband in the state.

ConnectVT is widely viewed as Shumlin’s alternative to the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, which is dominated by former Gov. Jim Douglas appointees. After four years of state funding, the authority failed to make much progress on broadband expansion, in part because of corporate disinterest in investing in expensive rural broadband development. It’s only been in the last few years that private companies were awarded enough federal funding to make extending broadband access to very rural parts of the state financially viable.

Roberts

While Comcast customers face New Year rate hikes that could cost some as much as $60 more a year for cable, broadband, and phone service, life is good for Brian Roberts, chairman, CEO and president of Comcast Corporation.

Comcast disclosed Roberts ditched 317,000 shares of stock in the company for nearly $11.6 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Roberts sold 105,800 shares of his wife’s stock on Dec. 19, 106,000 shares owned by his trusts on Dec. 20, and another 105,400 shares owned by his wife on Dec. 21.

He has plenty of shares left. Roberts owns 100% of Comcast’s Class B common stock, which entitles him to one-third of Comcast shareholders’ voting power.

Mediacom, regularly rated America’s worst cable operator by Consumer Reports, is earning its bad reputation when it left one Iowa retirement community with extended outages that began Dec. 20 and did not get resolved for more than two weeks.

Dozens of elderly residents at the Good Life Retirement Apartments in Norwalk, Iowa were unable to talk to anyone except a national technical support center that never connected the dots about the broader outage and only arranged individual service calls that never addressed the larger problem.

When the Des Moines Register’s consumer watchdog began receiving calls, Mediacom finally noticed.

The optics of delivering bad service to a retirement community populated primarily by 70+ year old retirees on fixed incomes that depend on cable television for entertainment delivered the cable company yet another public relations blow.

A Mediacom official finally acknowledged there was a bigger problem. Phyllis Peters, communications director for Mediacom, told the newspaper the outages were due to a “rare and broader issue” that affected customers across Des Moines.

Affected customers have been given credits for the extended outages, finally resolved Jan. 4, but most would have rather received working service.

“With this being a senior community, we don’t get to go out to the movies at night,” Edna Haines told the Register. “Our TV is our entertainment.”

Mediacom claims they are addressing their poor reputation for customer service with two new initiatives:

• Customers left endlessly on hold can select a new call-back feature to request a local employee call back the customer at a pre-selected time;
• Mediacom’s national customer service center (1-800-332-0245) now uses speech recognition to help direct calls to the appropriate department.

A one-way street or Avoidant personality disorder?

Back in July we noticed Time Warner Cable’s Conversations website, engaged in two-way conversations with customers, began a “dialogue” on the issue of its new 5GB usage-capped “Internet Essentials” plan first unveiled in several Texas cities.

The company provided its view that broadband innovation required pricing flexibility with new usage-based broadband plans to offer customers “more choice” and a $5 discount on service if they agreed to limit monthly usage to 5GB or less.

Despite sharing our two cents (and several of our readers tried to add their own as well), we noted none of these views ever appeared online.

This week we checked back and discovered the dialogue had decidedly turned one-way: namely from Time Warner Cable to you. The company deleted the few views that were published on cable television programming costs and removed its comment section altogether.

Our reader Kevin even tried to be generous in his comments to the company last summer, but to no avail.

“I basically told them if usage meter billing is inevitable, then give us no less than 300 GB a month, at a rate of $40 a month,” he wrote. “Seeing how 1 GB of bandwidth and data costs you less than $1 to generate to me, this is more than fair. Doubt they will even read it since it isn’t a ‘wow this is awesome, OMG i luv you so much for this new plan TWC’-message.”

They might have read it, but elected to avoid the uncomfortable notion of sharing the actual costs to provide broadband service to customers. It is not the first time, either.