Charter Communications ‘productive negotiations’ with New York’s Public Service Commission have deteriorated.

On Monday, Charter Communications filed a Motion for Stay to block the regulator’s July order revoking Charter’s merger with Time Warner Cable and requiring the cable company to file an orderly exit plan with the state no later than Dec. 24.

“Discussions have, so far, not resulted in a settlement,” the company admitted in the legal filing.

Get Out of New York

Calling the order “draconian” and against the public interest, Charter all but accused the Commission of being petty for throwing the country’s second largest cable company out of the state over what it called “the Commission’s revisionist interpretation” of the agreement to expand cable broadband service to unserved parts of the state. It called the Commission unreasonable for not giving the company due process, setting an unreasonable deadline to formulate an exit from the state, and violating the company’s 1st Amendment rights.

“The Revocation Order imposes a draconian penalty on Charter’s New York operations, commanding Charter to undo a significant portion of a multi-billion dollar merger the Commission approved over two-and-a-half years ago and purporting to evict Charter from the State where Charter serves 3.1 million customers and has more than 11,000 employees,” the company’s lawyers argued. “To top it off, the Order, as extended, gives Charter only until December 24 to formulate an exit plan, and six months thereafter to accomplish the exit, timing that would (as the Commission knows) effectively insulate the Commission’s actions from any judicial review. The Commission’s actions reflect not reasoned decision-making directed to the public interest, but rather retaliation against Charter because Charter challenged the Commission by advocating for its good-faith reading of the expansion condition.”

“The Revocation Order is unprecedented in its scale and represents a unique and extremely unusual penalty that, to Charter’s knowledge, no other major cable or telecommunications provider has ever faced in New York,” the company added. “Merely developing an exit plan to meet the December 24, 2018 deadline would force Charter to divert significant resources from its business operations in order to explore what an exit plan might look like, if it is feasible at all. Already, business executives in various departments of Charter have had to take time away from overseeing the business in order to explain the impacts of the Revocation Order and expected impacts of any exit plan. Continuing to divert resources to such an effort, including the time of Charter’s management teams, will necessarily impact Charter’s ability to focus on its core operations.”

The 25-page attack on the Public Service Commission suggest negotiations have strained between the company and regulators, despite several deadline extensions and often-repeated claims from both sides that “productive negotiations” were underway. In a footnote, Charter attempts not to burn all of its bridges with the Commission, noting, “Charter is filing this petition to preserve its substantial and compelling legal rights. Nothing in this application is intended to foreclose the possibility of further discussions with the Commission to resolve this dispute without the need for judicial review.”

The company wants the Commission to stop the clock it imposed on Charter to get its affairs in order in preparation of leaving New York. It is requesting a stay that will drop the deadlines until the courts wrangle over what Charter is calling an “unprecedented and unlawful action.”

Scrambled Eggs

Charter argues the Commission has no right to insist on much of anything, because much of its business operation is unregulated and attempts to interfere with it would cause the company “clear and substantial irreparable harm,” and violate the company’s constitutional rights.

The harm from Charter’s actual departure from New York roughly seven months from now would itself be massive and irreparable, as there would be no way for Charter to restore its position by “re-entering” the State in a commercially reasonable way if Charter later prevailed on judicial review. The eggs here are scrambled—the merged companies’ national operations are fully integrated, and there is no obvious way to separate them. Any obligation to do so would require a massive commitment of time and resources—starting immediately—to navigate the complex business, legal, and regulatory requirements needed to implement the Commission’s order to unscramble the eggs. Moreover, the preparation of an exit plan would itself negatively impact Charter’s reputation with employees, customers, and suppliers in highly competitive markets and require Charter to expend substantial effort, resources, and money that could not be recovered if Charter ultimately prevails in challenging the Revocation Order.

The filing does not acknowledge that Charter was informed of the Commission’s decision in late July and that multiple deadlines have already been extended on the company’s behalf by regulators. Charter also does not mention there is a long history of cable companies separating, spinning off, selling, or trading parts of the business to other cable operators when business or regulatory conditions warrant. Several cable industry mergers have required spinoffs of certain cable properties which have been accomplished with little protest from the cable companies involved.

Charter also argues that the very idea New York’s PSC would demand the company leave the state is irreparably harming the company’s good reputation with its customers — a contention long in dispute with many of those customers and customer satisfaction surveys which have rated the company among the worst in the country. But that did not stop Charter’s attorneys from trying:

[…] The Revocation Order has negatively affected Charter’s reputation and goodwill, and will continue to do so unless stayed. The Revocation Order unfairly paints Charter as an irredeemable bad actor, and the Revocation Order’s unwarranted requirement that Charter exit the State within a matter of months has damaged Charter in the general public’s eye. Indeed, Charter’s goodwill was already harmed by the initial media attention the Revocation Order received, and this harm is likely to be exacerbated by the filing of an exit plan that will spur a second round of news stories and public speculation regarding the dispute.

Bad Faith

Charter claims the Commission changed the terms of the Merger Order after it was approved. In Charter’s view, the company’s expansion effort to reach unserved parts of New York State should include New York City, one of the most wired metropolitan areas in the United States. That the Commission took offense to Charter’s interpretation of the Merger Order should not mean the company should face the ultimate consequence — being asked to leave the state.

“The unprecedented revocation of the Commission’s approval of a merger that closed over two years ago is grossly disproportionate to any conduct at issue here,” Charter argues. “Although the parties dispute the meaning of the expansion condition in the merger order, the revocation of the merger approval serves no legitimate Commission interest when other remedies are available and when the Commission has no reason to doubt Charter’s readiness to comply with any authoritative judicial construction. Nor can the Commission’s unprecedented action be justified by any finding of “bad faith.” What the Commission inappropriately labels bad faith is simply Charter’s reasonable effort to challenge the Commission’s new interpretation, exhaust administrative remedies, and prepare its case for judicial review. There is no reasonable justification for the punishment the Commission imposed.”

Charter also takes issue with the way the Commission met and voted to throw the company out of New York, calling it “the paragon of procedural irregularity.”

“The Commission issued the ‘revocation’ penalty […] at a rump session of the Commission, without providing Charter with an opportunity to comment or present any argument on the availability of the remedy itself, or upon most of the grounds on which the penalty was predicated,” the company argued. “The Commission also denied the public—including Charter’s customer base, who would be required to switch to a new provider, and the local governments that are parties to Charter’s franchise agreements that the Order purports to vacate—an opportunity to comment on the unprecedented proposal to force Charter to exit New York.”

Charter Sets Its Own Deadline – Nov. 26

Charter expects the PSC to rule on its motion within a week of filing it, demanding a stay before the start of business on Monday, Nov. 26. If the company does not get what it wants, it will seek a stay from the Supreme Court in Albany County instead.

But the company also suggests the PSC is bluffing.

“The Commission is currently pursuing an action to enforce its interpretation of the Expansion Condition in the Supreme Court, suggesting that the Commission itself intends for the condition to remain in effect rather than for Charter to actually discontinue operations and leave the State,” the attorneys wrote. “And even if the Commission truly intended to revoke Charter’s merger approval and require it to leave New York, there is no reason the Commission needs Charter to do so—and to submit a plan to that effect—immediately, before Charter has had an opportunity to seek rehearing and obtain judicial review.”

A dispute is emerging in New York between Sprint and T-Mobile and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and pro-consumer group the Public Utility Law Project (PULP) over the wireless companies’ attempt to argue for their merger deal in a partly secretive filing not open to review by the public.

In a joint letter signed by Richard Brodsky, on behalf of the CWA and Richard Berkley, on behalf of PULP, the two groups argue Sprint’s initial summer filing promoting its merger did not come close to meeting the state’s burden of proof that allowing the two companies to join forces would be good for New York consumers. But even worse, the two wireless companies are now trying to introduce new arguments in favor of their merger, while redacting them from public view and comment.

“The use of the public comment process to recast the Petition, to attempt to repair the fatal defects in the Petition, and to insulate this new information from public comment is fundamentally unfair,” the two men wrote. “This maneuver deprives Parties of the opportunity to respond to the full set of arguments and assertions made by the Joint Applicants; it undermines the usefulness and value of the public comment policies so fundamental to the Commissions’ history and values and the proper conduct of a rulemaking proceeding; it is not contemplated by Commission rules; and it sets a precedent for future misuse of comments to short-circuit full public analysis.”

The companies filed what they called “comments” on Nov. 16. Detailed information about how the merger will impact on New York consumers was left redacted:

Sprint and T-Mobile’s arguments regarding the consumer benefits of its merger for New Yorkers remain a public mystery. The companies redacted this submission to keep the prying eyes of average consumers from reading it.

The CWA and PULP are asking the Commission for an order that:

1) Requires the Joint Applicants to provide unredacted submissions or to withdraw any document relying on redactions; and/or
2) Convenes an evidentiary hearing permitting examination and testimony relating to the Petition and the submission; and/or
3) Grants our previous request for a formal Public Hearing on the Petition and the submission; and/or
4) Removes from the record the Joint Applicants’ November 16 submission from the record; and/or
5) Extends the deadline for Notice and Comment in the October 19 Order to December 15, 2018; and/or such other relief as the Commission may order.

The merger of the two wireless companies requires state and federal approval. Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and the District of Columbia have already essentially “rubber-stamped” approval of the merger deal with little comment. Pennsylvania regulators submitted a series of questions that the two companies answered earlier this week.

Sprint and T-Mobile are having a tougher time dealing with regulators in New York and New Jersey, however — the two most likely to either deny approval or impose significant deal conditions in approving the transaction. A review is pending in California, which routinely asks a lot of questions but rarely opposes telecommunications company mergers. Hawaii and Mississippi will also examine the merger in the near future, but neither are expected to oppose it.

New York regulators are likely to consider the impact of the merger on the availability of affordable cellphone plans, the Lifeline program that offers discounted phone service for the poor, and how the transaction will affect rural wireless service in upstate New York.

An unhappy customer in Georgia.

Victor Brown, like many residential customers in rural northeastern Ohio, has one option for internet access — Windstream, an independent phone company that typically serves areas larger companies like AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink forgot. For 17 years, his internet speed has been absolutely consistent, and slow.

“It’s 1.2 Mbps day or night, no more and no less, and for that they are charging me $58 a month,” Brown told Stop the Cap! “In that time, there has never been an upgrade, a real commitment to improve service, or anything except repetitive sales calls and mailers offering to upgrade me to a faster speed level Windstream cannot actually deliver.”

Windsteam has told its investors that it expects to offer 60% of its customers at least 25 Mbps service by the end of 2018. In fact, Brown has already been offered that for nearly a year, but the service is not actually available.

“They will switch you to 25 Mbps today, with the higher bill to boot, but you won’t actually get any better speed than you have right now,” Brown said. “I know because we tried.”

Brown and several of his neighbors all attempted to upgrade to the higher-speed service advertised. Windstream accepted their orders, charged them more, and delivered exactly the same 1.2 Mbps service they have always had.

“It took a service technician coming out to make it clear to us there was no way we would ever get faster speed because there was too much copper wiring between their office and our homes,” Brown said. “The technician felt for us, and about half of his service calls were disappointing customers like us.”

Brown explained the Windstream technician candidly told him that the company’s head office is behind the speed upgrades, but does not actually have a clear understanding of the state of the local network. Marketing then sells customers on better service Windstream’s network is not capable of providing.

“They need to spend money to replace some copper with fiber but there is no money for that,” Brown said. “The most the technician could suggest was installing a bonded DSL connection that would use two different phone lines and deliver 2.4 Mbps. That would come at a price, however.”

Ruth in Cochranton, Penn., is in exactly the same position.

“We are paying for internet speed that we aren’t receiving,” Ruth complained. “It is so slow that we have a hard time getting a short 50 second video to load. Forget watching a YouTube video, it’s not going to happen.”

Over in Lilitz, Penn., Eileen and her neighbors were also dealing with temporary phone lines Windstream installed by dropping both on their lawns and then leaving them unburied for nine months. She cannot get anyone from the company to bury the lines despite seven separate phone calls. Down the street, internet and phone outages can last a week after a strong rainstorm hits the area, and since the weather has turned much colder, hum and crackle on the neighborhood’s phone lines have disrupted phone calls and DSL service. Nobody from Windstream has come to fix the problem.

Windstream tells a very different story to its investors in the form of ‘upgrades by press release’ and cheerful investor conference calls that claim dramatic improvements in service and growth. While cable operators are touting increasing availability of gigabit service, phone companies like Windstream are promising to give a little more than half their customers the minimum definition of broadband service — 25/3 Mbps, by the end of this year. Many of Windstream’s other half get nothing close to those speeds, with 1-3 Mbps common in rural areas.

Wall Street balks at the dollar amounts it would take for Windstream to fully update its network to offer broadband speeds that were common for cable subscribers a decade ago. That kind of network investment would likely drive down the share price, impact shareholder dividends or stock buyback plans, and increase debt. Instead, many phone companies are hoping the federal government will come to the rescue and subsidize rural network improvements through the FCC’s Connect America Fund or government grants. But many of those grants won’t deliver service improvements to existing customers. Instead it will allow rural phone companies to bring broadband to customers who never had it before.

Even the threat of new competition has not inspired many investor-owned phone companies to embark on a spending spree. That competition may eventually come from new wireless broadband services like 5G, but most observers predict that will be years away in the rural communities Windstream traditionally serves. Where Windstream does face competition, it often still loses market share, usually to the local cable company.

“My sister has Comcast and although they are evil as can be, at least their internet speed matches what they sell, and it is shockingly fast in comparison to what DSL has given me for nearly 20 years,” Brown said. “Unfortunately, no cable company is going to wire us up. There are only a few houses on my street.”

Brown believes it is time for the federal government to start insisting that investor-owned phone companies do better.

“We have universal service laws for landlines but not for internet? That does not make sense to me,” Brown tells us. “Isn’t it time for the government to insist that all providers deliver at least 25 Mbps service to their customers? They are not going to do it without someone ordering them to.”

In the not-too-distant future, AT&T will be delivering television programming to its DirecTV and U-verse TV customers over the internet instead of satellite or the variant of DSL its U-verse product uses.

Appearing at Morgan Stanley’s European Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, AT&T chief financial officer John Stephens told investors AT&T will be able to slash costs of television delivery by eventually retiring satellite service and rolling its U-verse TV into a single, self-installed, DirecTV set-top box product that will rely on broadband.

“It’s a device that allows us to, instead of rolling a truck to the home, we roll a UPS or FedEx truck to the home and deliver a self-install box,” Stephens said. “This allows the customer to use their own broadband. We certainly hope it’s our own fiber but it could be on anybody’s broadband. And they get the full-service premium package that we would normally deliver off satellite or over our IP-based U-verse service.”

AT&T employees are currently beta testing the new box and the company hopes to begin rolling it out to subscribers in 2019. Assuming they respond positively to the online streaming experience, AT&T will begin transitioning DirecTV customers away from its existing satellite platform and towards internet delivery. Stephens said the benefits are obvious: no more installers, roof-top satellite dishes, and service calls to deal with signal problems.

“The key is, as we roll that out to full production or full availability to our customers, you will see subscriber acquisition costs come down significantly because it’s the cost of that box as opposed to the cost of an employee rolling a truck, climbing the roof and installing the satellite [dish],” Stephens added.

The transition to less costly delivery platforms may be just in time for AT&T, which saw historically large subscriber losses on its DirecTV satellite platform. Other providers reported significant losses as well, demonstrating cord-cutting is a growing trend in the pay television industry. DirecTV’s expensive fleet of satellites carry not only nationally distributed networks but hundreds of local television stations beamed regionally to customers. The economics of satellite television may become questionable if customers continue moving away from linear, live television. Internet delivery services are much less costly and offer more robust on-demand viewing options.

Rural Americans may face the consequences of any transition. They are least likely to have suitable broadband service capable of supporting DirecTV’s streaming video service and could lose access to television altogether if AT&T (and Dish) retire their satellite fleets. That may be a small concern to AT&T, which has 25 million subscribers, the vast majority of which have access to broadband internet.

From the producers of Dividing Lines:

Across the country, state legislatures have created barriers to community involvement in expanding internet access.

In Tennessee, lobbyists from AT&T, Charter, and Comcast spread huge campaign contributions around the state legislature. AT&T’s influence is felt in the governor’s own broadband expansion legislation, which was tailor-written to allow the phone company to collect huge taxpayer subsidies to expand inferior DSL into rural parts of Tennessee.

Meanwhile, some local communities seeking to build state-of-the-art fiber to the home networks capable of delivering 10 gigabit service found that doing so would be illegal under state law.

Think about that for a moment.

A multi-billion dollar telecom company is allowed to expand its slow speed DSL network with taxpayer-funded grants while your local community is forbidden to bring fiber optic service to your home even if your community votes to support such a project. Exactly who is the governor and state legislature working for when it comes to resolving Tennessee’s rural broadband nightmare?

In part two of this series, watch State Senator Janice Bowling describe how much influence AT&T has over the Tennessee state legislature. (5:31)