With unlimited home wireless broadband from T-Mobile and Verizon starting to take a dent out of Cox Communications’ customer base, the cable operator is shoring up a defensive position by waiving its arbitrary data cap for existing customers signed up for gigabit speed service in select areas.

“We’re showing our appreciation by giving you free unlimited data for two years,” reads the postcard sent to one of Stop the Cap’s readers in Phoenix. “Now you can stream away without worrying about overages.”

Phoenix residents currently have a choice of up to four different providers — Cox Cable, CenturyLink, Verizon 5G Home Internet, or T-Mobile’s 5G fixed wireless home broadband. Verizon and T-Mobile both offer service with no data caps, but coverage remains selective, especially for Verizon.

Customers must receive the postcard offer and redeem it with Cox to waive their data cap, and the offer is not transferable. It applies only to subscribers with gigabit speed and after 24 months, Cox’s 1.25 TB data cap returns.

The fact Cox is willing to waive its own arbitrary data cap for marketing and competition reasons further demonstrates that artificial limits imposed on internet service have nothing to do with congestion, “fairness,” or network management.

Two months after a late July thunderstorm interrupted phone and internet service for some CenturyLink customers in parts of Albemarle County, Va, some are still waiting for the phone company to restore service.

Multiple CenturyLink customers around the area told The Daily Progress about the extended outage, and the company’s lack of responsiveness in restoring service. Many report their service appointments are unilaterally canceled or a repair technician just never shows up. Others are receiving messages the repairs are complete, but they still have no service.

Mobile phone service is spotty in this part of central Virginia, so many customers keep their landlines to reach emergency services. With service out for nearly two months, making emergency calls or accessing the internet has been difficult.

In August, CenturyLink employee Derek Kelly told attendees at a Albemarle Broadband Authority meeting that at storm brought down almost a mile of CenturyLink’s legacy copper wire network, which has been in place for decades. Kelly noted CenturyLink intended to replace the damaged copper wiring with more copper wiring, instead of upgrading to fiber optics, and because of supply chain issues, customers have been left waiting.

“We ran into logistical issues of being able to find that length of copper,” Kelly said. “I think between COVID and everything else, supplies are limited, so it took us longer than we typically hope for to get the copper in place and get it in town and get it hung back up and spliced in.”

So far, customers are still being billed for service they do not have, and the company has refused to issue automatic credits for customers left without service. Some customers want CenturyLink to compensate them extra for interrupted service as well as for the company wasting their time on unfulfilled service calls and being left on hold, sometimes for an hour, trying to resolve the problem.

Firefly is a service of municipal/co-op power companies in central Virginia.

Albemarle County Supervisor Donna Price has been hearing complaints from local residents for weeks and she is also well aware CenturyLink is in the process of selling a large part of its legacy local phone operations in 20 states to Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. The phone company will keep its most profitable customers in 16 states — many already served by fiber optics, under its Lumen brand. As that sale waits to close, Price believes CenturyLink has already walked away from their soon-to-be ex-customers.

“I believe that corporate CenturyLink has basically given up and has abandoned their responsibility, which leaves it all upon the individual consumers to either seek some sort of collective relief or basically just suffer until a new provider comes in,” Price told the newspaper. “I think CenturyLink has failed in customer service, in the delivery of service and, I’ll be a little more generous, in the recovery from the storm, because those are really difficult situations.”

Some customers in nearby Fluvanna County who have also experienced multi-month service interruptions from CenturyLink were lucky enough to have a choice of broadband providers, and many have switched to Firefly Fiber Broadband, which also supplies landline phone service. Firefly is owned and operated by a partnership subsidiary that includes the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative. That fiber to the home network has survived serious storms in the past without lengthy service interruptions. The member-owned cooperative has also invested heavily in fiber broadband and communications services its members demand, and if something goes wrong, local repairmen answerable to local supervisors are on hand to manage any issues.

Firefly Fiber is currently looking to expand its operations within its central Virginia service area, which includes the counties of Albemarle, Appomattox, Buckingham, Cumberland, Fluvanna, Goochland, Greene, Louisa, and Powhatan.

Endangered Species: The AT&T Printed White Pages Directory

Landline customers in Michigan might never receive another printed telephone directory after AT&T successfully lobbied the state legislature for an end to the requirement that anyone that wants a phone book can have one, for free.

AT&T let its fingers do the walking and looked up support for Michigan Senate Bill 372, introduced by the company’s good friend, Sen. Ken Horn (R-Frankenmuth). In addition to counting AT&T as his third largest contributor, Horn has been honored with the Excellence in Education Award (2017), sponsored by AT&T and the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning.

Horn’s bill was short and to the point, amending Michigan state law by stripping out the requirement that every landline provider in the state must provide a free printed telephone directory (if requested) to each customer. In its place:

The People of the State of Michigan enact:

Sec. 309. (1) A provider of basic local exchange service shall provide to each customer local directory assistance.
(2) A provider of basic local exchange service shall provide each customer at no additional charge the option of having access to 900 prefix services blocked through the customer’s exchange service.

This act is ordered to take immediate effect.

The bill was passed in both houses of the legislature with wide margins and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed it into law last month.

The new law requires phone companies to continue offering local “411” directory assistance service, but says nothing about how much a phone company can charge a customer looking for a telephone number (in Michigan, some now pay as much as $2.49 per directory assistance call.)

It also finally allows customers to block all calls to “900 numbers” that can carry hefty per minute charges. Of course, the worst scandals involving 900 call charges were back in the 1990s — some 20-30 years ago. Many phone companies lobbied against call blocking technology when 900 number revenue, split between the phone company and the 900 number, was far more lucrative than it is today. Does anyone even call “Time of Day and Temperature” or “Local Weather and Horoscope” numbers today?

AT&T has once again shown it is effective lobbying state legislatures, where it brings its corporate agenda to state lawmakers like Mr. Horn. About a decade ago the company fought to eliminate the automatic delivery of printed phone directories. It also fought for statewide video franchising to rip control of cable TV services away from local communities just as it was introducing U-verse, its own TV service. It fought to marginalize public, educational, and government access channels. It even continues to seek an end to the requirement it provide local wireline phone service in areas it considers unprofitable.

AT&T was not alone in support of the measure to eliminate the century-old printed phone book. Frontier Communications heartily supported AT&T in its efforts.

Today’s printed directory has been hobbled by the ongoing move towards wireless. As consumers cut their landlines, listings disappear from phone directories because wireless numbers are rarely published. Competing digital phone companies like Charter Spectrum offer to sell their customer number listings for telephone directories, but companies like Frontier refuse to pay, resulting in Frontier’s phone books slimming down to the point of irrelevance. In the Rochester, N.Y. 585 area code, where Frontier is by far the largest incumbent local landline provider, its printed White Pages for 2021 includes just 111 pages of business and residential listings in an area with more than a million people.

With reciprocal listings no longer freely shared, the obsolescence of the telephone directory — electronic or printed — is virtually assured. That will leave many customers with just one option: calling directory assistance and paying a fee for each number successfully obtained.

A dispute between Charter Communications and Roku over compensating the set-top box maker for distributing the Spectrum TV app in the Roku app store is over after a nine-month impasse that kept new Roku users from accessing the cable company’s streaming TV package.

“Charter Communications and Roku have reached a mutually beneficial agreement to renew distribution of the Spectrum TV App on the Roku platform,” a joint statement announced. “As a result of the renewal, the Spectrum TV App is now available for download from the Roku channel store. We are pleased to renew our partnership and offer this great streaming experience to our shared customers.”

The dispute began when Charter turned down Roku’s demands for an undisclosed form of compensation in return for distributing the Spectrum TV app. Roku removed the app from its app store, but allowed existing versions already downloaded to continue working. The dispute annoyed Spectrum TV customers that found they could not install the streaming TV app on new Roku devices. Roku has at least 54 million active users in the United States. Charter’s solution to cord-cutting is heavily reliant on streaming a budget-priced TV package over independent set-top devices like Roku.

The two companies did not discuss specifics of their final settlement agreement. The Spectrum TV app should be back on Roku’s channel app store today.

Cuomo

As expected, New York’s efforts to lower broadband pricing through a state mandate has been effectively killed in a Brooklyn federal court, putting an end to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s efforts to require providers to offer a $15 broadband tier to income-challenged state residents.

U.S. District Judge Denis R. Hurley, who signed a preliminary injunction preventing the mandate from taking effect on June 15, signaled the concept was likely unlawful in a memorandum attached to the injunction. Several telecom companies challenged the mandate in a lawsuit heard in Hurley’s courtroom, claiming states have no regulatory authority to set broadband terms or pricing. Hurley was clearly persuaded in their direction, and was pessimistic the state could ever show a legal way to regulate internet pricing, something currently reserved to the FCC. As a result, a settlement has been proposed dropping the affordable pricing mandate.

Hurley was also moved by arguments from several smaller New York providers that claimed the new mandate would force them to sell service below cost. Empire Access, a fiber to the home overbuilder based in Prattsburgh, filed a declaration with the court threatening to cancel a major expansion project to wire customers in Livingston and Broome counties, including the city of Binghamton, if the mandate was implemented, because it would likely lose federal funding.

Because of the state’s definition as to who would have qualified for the affordable broadband tier, many smaller companies in rural, economically challenged area of upstate New York claimed they would face substantial economic losses to their businesses. Empire claimed it would lose “approximately $2 million per year,” Heart of the Catskills claimed top-line revenue would decrease $1,364,000 annually, Delhi Telephone claimed it would lose at least $90,000 per month, and the Champlain Telephone Company notified the court that “nearly half (48%) of its existing broadband customers will qualify for discounted rates,” causing the company to lose money on each customer.

“While a telecommunications giant like Verizon may be able to absorb such a loss, others may not,” Judge Hurley wrote in his order.

Gov. Cuomo bristled after learning of the lawsuit, threatening to revoke the franchise of any company that refused to implement the  state’s affordable broadband program. But the governor has made empty threats before, including a promise in 2018 to revoke the merger of Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable because the company failed to live up to the deal commitments it made to state regulators. A settlement was eventually reached between the cable giant and the state, and it appears a settlement between the plaintiff telecom companies and the state will also end this dispute and lawsuit. It appears the state has capitulated and plans to walk away from the affordable broadband proposal, although it reserved the right to appeal the case.

Stop the Cap! predicts the state will work with larger providers to increase public knowledge of the companies’ existing affordable internet programs, which usually have similar qualifications to the affordable internet law Cuomo proposed. Cuomo Administration officials will also likely lobby the Biden Administration to toughen federal oversight of broadband service and suggest a possible federal mandate for an affordable service tier and a return to net neutrality under a regulatory framework that opens the door for future price and service regulation.

The court decision signals states the solution to broadband affordability will not be found in state laws or mandates that attempt to regulate broadband pricing, at least until the current federal law changes.