CenturyLink is planning to trial usage caps on its broadband service later this year, not to reduce congestion or to bank the extra money for service upgrades, but to boost revenue and profits.

Stewart Ewing, chief financial officer at CenturyLink, told Wall Street analysts the company was on board with usage caps and usage billing primarily because its biggest competitor (Comcast) is already implementing a similar program in many of its markets. It’s that kind of “competition” many customers say they could do without.

“Regarding the metered data plans; we are considering that for second half of the year,” Ewing told investors on a morning conference call. “We think it is important and our competition is using the metered plans today and we think that exploring those starts and trials later this year is our expectation.”

No details about the test markets or range of usage allowances were made available by Ewing, but CenturyLink is under pressure by Wall Street to improve its revenue after raising prices and tightening credit standards on its customers. The combined impact of rate hikes and a tighter credit qualification policy led CenturyLink to lose 22,000 broadband customers during the last quarter, many who simply stopped paying the bill.

CenturyLink has been under pressure by Wall Street to put usage caps and usage pricing on its broadband service for over a year.

David Barden from Bank of America called data caps “an opportunity” for CenturyLink to rake in more dollars from customers by using misleading pricing to trick customers.

Post

“We have been seeing a lot of the cable companies experimenting with data caps and metering higher-end usage,” Barden told CenturyLink executives on the conference call. “It seems like the FCC is not pushing back on this and it feels like it could be a big opportunity for telcos to, if nothing else, price underneath the cable umbrella and start to raise rates from high-end users.”

In plain English, Barden wants companies like CenturyLink to make customers believe they are getting a better deal from a lower price, at least until customers actually use the service. Then, the rate increases from usage caps and overlimit fees begin.

Glen Post, CEO of CenturyLink, is still committed to believing CenturyLink is in a good position to add broadband customers, despite the forthcoming trials of usage caps and overlimit fees. He defines 40Mbps broadband from CenturyLink as the speed that will “address most of our customers’ actual needs.”

CenturyLink now has 940,000 households connected to its Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON), many for its Prism TV service. Another 490,000 businesses also have access to CenturyLink’s GPON network, primarily for broadband. Post claims more than 30% of the company’s service area is now served with broadband speeds of 40Mbps or greater.

In 2016, CenturyLink expects to spend $1.2 billion on upgrades for its broadband network and capacity. In comparison, in 2015 CenturyLink spent $1 billion repurchasing shares of its own stock and another $1 billion on dividend payouts – both to benefit shareholders.

At present, CenturyLink has around a 15% market share in its GPON-enabled markets (the company didn’t say what its market share was where legacy copper wire infrastructure still dominates). Post believes that gives the phone company enormous room to grow, assuming its customers can pass credit checks and do not mind their broadband service data-capped. Like many phone companies looking for the biggest return on investment, Post noted CenturyLink will pay extra attention to wiring Multiple Dwelling Units (MDUs) — apartment buildings, condos, etc. — where the company can bring fiber service at a lower cost than wiring each home and business.

In the darkness of night, Congress on Tuesday handed some of America’s largest telecom companies a huge tax windfall allowing many to continue taking a special 50% depreciation bonus that slashes their tax bills on new equipment purchases, winning substantial reductions in their federal tax bills.

CenturyLink had been heavily lobbying House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other House leaders to extend a “temporary tax provision” that was designed to stimulate corporate spending on capital investments during the height of the Great Recession. Stimulus programs like these have allowed corporations like AT&T and Verizon to pay virtually no federal taxes at all for multiple years in a row. AT&T was the second biggest tax provision/corporate welfare recipient in the country, Verizon was fifth according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Between 2008-2012 taxpayers effectively covered the $19.2 billion in federal tax not paid by AT&T and $11.1 billion not paid by Verizon.

The two words that make it possible are: Accelerated Depreciation

Telecom companies, particularly those with wireless assets, are benefiting from the “temporary” stimulus program introduced by President George W. Bush in the last year of his second term because most are capital-intensive, spending regularly to expand, maintain, and upgrade their networks. CenturyLink has taken advantage of accelerated depreciation to invest billions in fiber network expansions to reach cell towers and businesses and on residential broadband speed upgrades the company claims would not have come so quickly without the tax savings.

Mobile companies like AT&T and Verizon Wireless are some of the largest beneficiaries of the stimulus program, using accelerated depreciation to write off expenses for cell tower expansion, network densificiation, and deployment of services like 4G LTE. In most cases, “accelerated depreciation” is technically a tax deferral, but because these companies maintain constant investment in network development and upkeep, the tax man never actually arrives at the door to collect.

Heavy lobbying from beneficiaries not only succeeded in getting the program’s expiration date extended, the Obama Administration agreed to expand it at the end of 2013. Companies slashed tens of billions off their tax bills as a result. A report from the Congressional Research Service, reviewing efforts to quantify the impact of depreciation breaks, found that “the studies concluded that accelerated depreciation in general is a relatively ineffective tool for stimulating the economy.”

Citizens for Tax Justice added:

Combined with rules allowing corporations to deduct interest expenses, accelerated depreciation can result in very low, or even negative, tax rates on profits from particular investments. A corporation can borrow money to purchase equipment or a building, deduct the interest expenses on the debt and quickly deduct the cost of the equipment or building thanks to accelerated depreciation. The total deductions can then make the investments more profitable after-tax than before-tax.

The latest budget bill, passed Dec 15-16, extends the tax breaks until 2018 when the bonus drops to 40%, 30% in 2019, and zero in 2020.

WASHINGTON/DURANT, Okla. (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama announced a pilot project on Wednesday aimed at expanding broadband access for people who live in public housing, part of an effort to close what Obama called the “digital divide” between rich and poor.

Eight Internet service providers, including Google Inc and Sprint Corp, have signed on to make the Internet cheaper and more accessible in 27 cities and the Choctaw Tribal Nation in Durant, Oklahoma.

Private and public institutions have pledged to invest $70 million in the plan. The federal government is only contributing $50,000, Julian Castro, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told reporters on a conference call.

The initiative will reach 275,000 households with almost 200,000 children.

“While high-speed Internet access is given for millions of Americans, it’s out of reach for far too many,” Obama said at Durant High School to a crowd that included many children in traditional tribal garb.

The Choctaw Tribal Nation is working with four local providers to bring the Internet to 425 homes.

In Atlanta, Durham, Kansas City and Nashville, Google will provide free Internet connections in some public housing areas.

In select markets, Sprint will offer free wireless broadband access to families with kids in public housing. In Seattle, CenturyLink Inc will provide broadband service for public housing residents for $9.95 a month for the first year.

Cox Communications Inc [COXC.UL] is offering home Internet for $9.95 a month to families with kids in school in four cities in Georgia, Louisiana and Connecticut.

The program also includes free training and technical support. Best Buy Co Inc will offer free training to the Choctaw Tribal Nation and in some cities, the White House said.

(By Alex Wilts and Julia Edwards; Reporting by Alex Wilts and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Alan Crosby and Lisa Shumaker)

Frontier Communications scored dead last in a nationwide survey of websites run by 262 companies — ranked for their usability, helpfulness, and competence.

The “2015 Web Experience Ratings,” conducted by the Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, looked at how customers feel about companies based on experiences visiting their websites. The firm wanted to know whether customers would forgive a company if its website proved less than satisfactory. The answer appears to be no, and phone and cable companies were the most likely to experience the wrath of dissatisfied customers.

“It’s ironic that many of the cable companies that provide Internet service earned such poor ratings,” Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group, said.

Most household name cable companies did especially poor in the survey. Time Warner Cable, Comcast and CenturyLink all tied at 252nd place (out of 262 firms). But special hatred was reserved for the website run by Frontier Communications, repeatedly called “incompetent” by consumers, especially after the phone company disabled most of the website’s self-service functions in late April. A well-placed source inside Frontier told Stop the Cap! the company could not manage to get its website ordering functions working properly and simply decided to give up, forcing customers to call instead.

Only 29% of consumers were willing to forgive a telecommunications company for a lousy web experience, according to the findings. Other website disasters were run by: Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Spirit Airlines, Blue Shield of CA, and Haier.

Which websites do consumers love the most? Temkin says USAA (a bank) and Amazon.com have traded the #1 and #2 spots for the last five years.

It’s an acute case of broadband envy.

Residents of Fort Collins, Colo., that have an excuse to take an hour’s drive south on U.S. Route 87 to visit Longmont and experience the Internet over the community’s public broadband service can’t believe their eyes. It’s so fast… and cheap. Back home it is a choice between Comcast and CenturyLink, and neither will win any popularity contests. While large parts of Colorado have gotten some upgrades out of Comcast, Fort Collins is one of the communities that typically gets the cable company’s attention last.

The city of Longmont took control of its digital destiny after years of anemic and expensive service from Comcast and CenturyLink. Longmont Power & Communications’ NextLight Internet service delivers gigabit fiber to the home service to the community of 90,000. The service was funded with a $40.3 million bond the city issued in 2014, to be paid back by NextLight customers, not taxpayers, over time. It remains a work in progress, but is expected to start construction to reach the last parts of Longmont by next spring.

NextLight delivers a mortal blow to competitors by charging a fair price for fast service. Instead of spending to upgrade their networks to compete, the incumbents demagogued the public project and Comcast spent $300,000 of its subscribers’ money in a campaign to kill the service before it even got started. Perhaps they had a right to be worried considering NextLight customers pay $49.95 a month for unlimited 1,000/1,000Mbps service. NextLight offers 20 times the download speed and 100 times the upload speed of Comcast’s Blast! package for nearly $30 less a month.

After NextLight was rated America’s fastest performing Internet service by Ookla in May, residents in Fort Collins began to wonder why they were still putting up with poor service from Comcast and lousy DSL from CenturyLink.

Fort Collins is about a one hour, fifteen minute drive north of Denver.

At the same time, city officials were doing their best to leverage some modest improvements from Comcast in return for a renewed franchise agreement. All they got was a vague commitment permitting the city to monitor Comcast’s notorious customer service and two HD channels set aside for Public, Educational, and Government use, along with a $20,000 grant to help the public access channel with online streaming.

The Coloradoan urged Fort Collins officials to think big and establish public fiber optic broadband in the city.

To manage this, they will have to overcome a 2005 state law backed by Comcast and Qwest (now CenturyLink) that bans municipal telecommunications services. A local vote or federal waiver can sidestep a law that was always designed to restrict competition and make life easier for the two telecom giants.

The newspaper opines that Fort Collins is in no way ready for the digital economy of the 21st century relying on Comcast and CenturyLink.

The cable company’s attention is focused on bigger cities in the state and CenturyLink remains hobbled by its copper legacy infrastructure. While some upgrades have been forthcoming, both Comcast and CenturyLink are also testing usage caps or usage-based billing — just another way to raise the price of the service. And speaking of service, neither Comcast or CenturyLink are answerable to the communities they serve – a community owned broadband alternative would be.

As the Coloradoan writes:

We’ve got to lay the groundwork now. Society took huge steps forward when automobiles replaced the horse and carriage. And no, installing municipal broadband isn’t adopting a new mode of transportation, but it is symbolic of laying an entirely new road.

Look at it another way. The city provides needed services such as water and electricity. Internet access is a needed service.

One thing Fort Collins doesn’t absolutely need Comcast or CenturyLink. But nobody is asking them to leave. They have a choice to use their massive buying power and resources to upgrade their networks to compete. But Fort Collins residents should not have to wait for that day to come when there is a better alternative in their grasp today: public broadband.