Charter Cable customers in Mesa County, Col., experiencing the latest service outage from the cable company were told to “quit whining” and “check your attitude” when they called Charter’s customer service line to ask when the problems would be fixed.

“If Mesa County didn’t whine so much, maybe something would be done,” one Charter representative told a customer in Grand Junction.

“Talking to [Charter] is like trying to put socks on an octopus,” said Dillard Jenkins.

Stop the Cap! reader June Jones found that to be true when she complained to Charter about not being able to reach 911 on her Charter phone during the recent outage.

“I was unhappy after the representative literally told me ‘that’s not our problem, get a cell phone like everyone else’,” Jones said. “I was so shocked being talked to that way I didn’t know what to say. I am 76 years old and in all my life I have never heard a company use that tone with me. The next thing I heard was, ‘is there anything else? I didn’t think so’ and she just hung up.”

Alex Danders waited on hold 35 minutes to speak to a representative about the Charter Internet outage at his business. He later wish he hadn’t.

“All I wanted to know is if they knew when it was going to be fixed and the guy told me ‘to check my attitude’ and later told me to ‘go screw yourself’ and disconnected me,” said Rodriguez.

Charlotte Conboy is a Charter customer who has had trouble with Charter for the last six months. Her two home-based businesses have suffered from no Internet access during frequent outages.

“If […] their company [had] issues [affecting their offices], they would have it fixed right away” said Conboy. “They say that’s beside the point and I get hung up on.”

A county official calling to find out when repairs would be completed was told, “we have excellent service and do not appreciate your complaint for one incident of interruption of service.”

The latest outage took out Internet service for schools across Mesa County for several hours two days in a row. Teachers scrambled to change their lesson plans to work around the outages.

“I’ll tell you the last couple of weeks the last three weeks or so I’ve been out talking to people, they’re furious, people are upset I mean this is our primary communications,” commissioner Scott McInnis told KKCO. “In exchange for using the right of way we expect them to deliver a service that the reasonable person would say ‘hey the quality of this service is good’ and we expect that [they will] deliver that.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KKCO Grand Junction County Commissioners get involved with Charter issues 1-15-15.flv[/flv]

KKCO in Grand Junction reports that hundreds of area residents are outraged about ongoing problems with Charter Cable and the rude responses they get when they call Charter’s customer service line. (3:23)

The ongoing problems with Charter Cable and the company’s surly responses to customers prompted a stern letter from the Mesa County Board of Commissioners to Charter Communication’s senior manager of Government Relations. They plan to meet with senior Charter officials today to discuss the matter.

Dear Mr. Rasmussen;

Today we have received multiple complaints from businesses and residents of Mesa County regarding interruption of Charter’s Cable Service. Currently, District 51 Schools are without service and we have been informed that service has been down for several hours.

Please note that this is unacceptable for Charter subscribers who feel that they can go to no one for resolution. When calling the customer service line they are told multiple ‘reasons’ for the outage, including responses such as ‘we have excellent service and do not appreciate your complaint for one incident of interruption of service,’ and ‘If Mesa County didn’t whine so much, maybe something would be done.’

Timely resolution of this issue would be prudent. We are requesting immediate and prompt dispatch of a response team to fix the system post haste; as well as a heightened awareness of the frustration Mesa County subscribers are having with your Customer Service Department. Good faith compliance is implied with the franchise agreement. We have also been informed by the City of Grand Junction that they have also heard from frustrated citizens regarding this issue.

Sincerely,
Mesa County Board of Commissioners
Rose Pugliese, Chair
John Justman
Scott McInnis

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KKCO Grand Junction School district loses phones and internet again 1-16-15.flv[/flv]

The entire Mesa County school district lost Internet access for a second day after another Charter Cable outage. KKCO reports parents and staff are concerned. (3:08)

 Thanks to reader June Jones for tipping us about this story.

A conservative group has launched an assault on the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, accusing the cable company of cozying up to the Obama Administration and the political left in its news coverage to win corporate favors.

“Comcast needs Obama administration approval to merge with Time Warner Cable, giving it access to two-thirds of American’s homes,” Conservative War Chest spokesman Mike Flynn said in a statement. “The last time Comcast needed a government favor we got Al Sharpton five nights a week. What will we get in exchange for a deal worth billions to Brian Roberts and other owners of Comcast?”

The group has bought airtime to run two-minute ads detailing its case that Comcast-owned NBC News has become a partisan supporter of the current administration and if its parent company’s merger deal is successful, it means Comcast’s power and value to the left-wing will grow even greater.

“Of course, Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner is an attempt to further not only its commercial hegemony, but its political agenda,” the group writes in a lengthy 68-page letter addressed to NBC affiliated local stations in at least five presidential swing states–Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. “And to that end it spent $12 million on Washington lobbyists in 2014 alone, not including what Comcast spent in the final three months of the year. Conservatives should embrace this opportunity to show a commercial and political mega-giant that the truth and the support of the American people far outweigh entrenched power and massive amounts of money.”

“We intend to demonstrate to Comcast/NBC/Universal that [conservatives] have not thrived for six decades – we have not come all this way – just to cede our national and, indeed, global victories for the cause of freedom to a group of grasping corporate operatives seeking commercial and political power. So, the focus of the conservative movement needs to be not on the politicized and partisan faces of NBC or the hired slanderers at MSNBC – criticizing them just makes them more important than they are – but on the corporate ‘suits in the suites’ who are the truly culpable parties.”

“Hence, we hope Mr. Roberts [CEO of Comcast] had a pleasant visit with the President of the United States when he stopped by his home. But he and his colleagues should also know that in the form of public messages, like this letter, they will be getting less pleasant coverage from the conservative movement.”

The group isn’t directly attacking the merger deal as a central focus of their campaign. Instead, they are seeking a restoration of “the traditional journalistic standards that have been squandered in recent years by NBC News and its corporate owners.”

“I hope the affiliates have a stiff drink ready when they read the report,” Flynn added. “Reviewing the trite liberal gruel that comes out of Brian Williams and Chuck Todd, for example, is not for
the faint of heart.”

No NBC station has yet acknowledged they have read the lengthy letter and it isn’t known if they will consent to airing the group’s advertisement that directly attacks the integrity of the network to which the station is affiliated.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CWC_Save NBC News.mp4[/flv]

The Conservative War Chest produced this two-minute ad it intends to run on NBC stations in at least five states condemning what they perceive as a politically motivated left-wing bias at Comcast-owned NBC News. The group fears approval of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger will only increase the damage of anti-conservative bias in the NBC newsroom. (2:00)

Alaska’s largest cable company today unveiled changes to its Internet plans, ditching surprise overlimit fees in favor of a speed throttle.

GCI has been the subject of bad press in the past, with some customers experiencing up to $1,200 in overlimit fees after exceeding GCI’s usage allowances. In an effort to avoid public relations nightmares like that, GCI will stop assessing automatic overlimit fees and instead impose a speed throttle on customers over their limit that will temporarily reduce broadband speeds to less than 1Mbps until the next billing cycle begins. Customers can voluntarily pay for more usage in $10 increments, which buys a reprieve from the speed throttle.

GCI “No Worries” Broadband Plans offer varying usage caps and extra usage allotments:

Customers on lower speed plans continue to face a lower usage allowance and will receive considerably less extra data for their $10 add-on data plan. GCI’s highest speed re:D offering does get a bigger usage allowance: 600GB, up from 500GB. An $11.99/mo surcharge continues for broadband-only customers.

GCI’s largest competitor remains telephone company ACS, which heavily markets its unlimited usage DSL plans. Almost as an afterthought, ACS now markets packages that include landline service with unlimited local calling and 180 minutes of long distance for free.

A price comparison between the two providers is somewhat hampered by the fact GCI does not publicize a broadband+home phone bundle package on their website. GCI Home Phone is priced at $19.99 a month.

A 10Mbps unlimited use package from ACS costs $110/month. A 10Mbps plan from the cable company with a 30 40GB allowance + GCI Home Phone costs $79.98. On price, GCI wins at this speed… if you stay within your allowance. A 50Mbps unlimited use package from ACS runs $180 a month. GCI charges $104.98 with 150GB of included usage. Again, the price winner is GCI if you stay within your allowance. Taxes, surcharges and government fees are extra.

Heavier users may find ACS’ initially higher prices worthwhile if they are forced to buy GCI’s add-on data buckets. Both companies charge considerably more than providers in the lower 48 states.

Last year, nearly 10% of GCI’s revenue was earned from automatically applied overlimit fees. Giving up some of that revenue is a concession, but one that is likely to end bill shock and negative media attention. Still, usage allowances remain arbitrary. GCI’s entry level 10Mbps plan only offers a paltry 30 40GB a month — an allowance largely unheard of among other U.S. cable providers. GCI will also have a difficult time explaining why $10 will only offer one customer 5GB of extra usage while others will get up to 30GB. The costs for the additional data to GCI are the same.

Our thanks to an anonymous reader for sharing the news.

Updated 4:08pm EST 1/15: After going to press, GCI changed their website, adjusting the usage allowance for their 10/1Mbps plan to 40GB (up from 30GB) and deleted references to the $11.99 surcharge for broadband-only customers, which apparently no longer applies.

Rep. Rocky Miller (R-Lake Ozark)

A Missouri state representative with a track record of supporting AT&T and other telecommunications companies has introduced a bill that would effectively prohibit community broadband competition in a bid to protect incumbent phone and cable companies.

Rep. Rocky Miller’s (R-Lake Ozark) House Bill 437 would strictly prohibit the construction of public broadband networks in any part of Missouri served by a private provider, regardless of the quality of service available or its cost, without a referendum that includes a mandated question observers consider slanted in favor of existing providers.

HB437 would banish community broadband networks as early as September unless services were already up and running. The bill would effectively stop any public broadband network intending to compete against an existing phone or cable company within the boundaries of a city, town, or village offering any level of broadband service. It would also require communities to schedule a referendum on any project budgeted above $100,000, and includes ballot language that implies public broadband projects would duplicate existing services, even if a private provider offers substantially slower broadband at a considerably higher price. (Emphasis below is ours):

“Shall [Anytown] offer [broadband], despite such service being currently offered within Anytown by x private businesses at an estimated cost of (insert cost estimate) to Anytown over the following five-year period?”

Miller’s proposal would also require voters to approve a specific and detailed “revenue stream” for public broadband projects and if the referendum fails to garner majority support, would prohibit the idea from coming up for a second vote until after two years have passed, allowing cable and phone companies to plan future countermeasures.

The proposed bill also carefully protects existing providers from pressure to upgrade their networks.

Miller’s bill defines “substantially similar” in a way that would treat DSL service as functionally equivalent to gigabit broadband as both could be “used for the same purpose as the good or service it is being compared to, irrespective of how the good or service is delivered.”

In other words, if you can reach Rep. Miller’s campaign website on a CenturyLink 1.5Mbps DSL connection and over a co-op gigabit fiber to the home connection, that means they are functionally equivalent in the eyes of Miller’s bill. Residents voting in a referendum would be asked if it is worthwhile constructing fiber to the home service when CenturyLink is offering substantially similar DSL.

Among the telecom companies that had no trouble connecting to Rep. Miller to hand him campaign contributions: AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, and Charter Communications

The Coalition for Local Internet Choice was unhappy to see yet another state bill introduced designed to limit competition and take away the right of local communities to plan their own broadband future.

“The state of Missouri is the latest legislature to attempt to erect barriers to the deployment of broadband networks that are critical to the future of its local economies and the nation, via House Bill 437,” said a statement released by the group. “High-bandwidth communications networks are the electricity of the 21st century and no community should be stymied or hampered in its efforts to deploy new future-proof communications infrastructure for its citizens – either by itself or with willing private partners.”

The group urged the Missouri legislature to reject the bill.

In 2013, Miller hit the ground running in his freshman year to achieve his campaign pledge of “getting the government out of the way of economic development.” In the Missouri state legislature, Miller strongly supported AT&T’s other state legislative priority: deregulation of cell tower placement. Miller traveled around Missouri promoting HB650, an AT&T inspired bill that would strip away local oversight powers of cell sites.

The issue became a hot topic, particularly in rural and scenic areas of Missouri, where local officials complained the bill would allow haphazard placement of cell towers within their communities.

“[The] bill inhibits a city’s ability to regulate cell towers as we have in the past,” Osage Beach city attorney Ed Rucker said. “The process we have in place has worked, and has worked well.”

Had HB650 become law, Osage Beach residents would today be surrounded by six new cell towers around the city, with little say in where they ended up. The bill Miller supported would have also eliminated a requirement that providers repair, replace, or remove damaged or abandoned cell towers, potentially leaving local taxpayers to pick up the tab.

Miller claimed the legislation would allow expansion of wireless broadband across rural Missouri and remove objectionable fees. HB650 would limit municipal fees to $500 for co-locating an antenna on a pre-existing tower and $1,500 for an application to build a new tower. Local communities complained those limits were below their costs to research the impact and placement of cell towers.

“That cost is an inhibitor to broadband,” Miller countered. “It’s beginning to look like the fees are an impediment to the expansion of broadband.”

Miller did not mention AT&T’s interest in cell tower expansion is also connected to its plan to retire rural landline service in favor of its wireless network, saving the company billions while earning billions more in new revenue from selling wireless landline replacement service over its more costly wireless network. The cell tower bill was eventually caught up in a legal dispute after a court ruled the broader bill that included the cell tower deregulation language was unconstitutional on a procedural matter.

Verizon Communications has stepped up efforts in New York City to get intransigent landlords to let the company into their buildings to bring FiOS fiber optics to tenants, even as some property managers accuse Verizon of ignoring earlier requests to get the service.

On at least 13 occasions in December, Verizon has filed petitions with the New York Public Service Commission requesting help to gain entry to a total of 476 buildings in the city after claiming to receive either no response from building management or active resistance to Verizon bringing FiOS to their tenants.

In an effort to stay compliant with its franchise agreement with the City of New York, Alyson Siegal, area manager for FiOS Franchise Assurance – New York City, has written a lot of letters lately:

Dear Property Owner/Manager:

I have been advised by Verizon New York Inc.’s (“Verizon”) NYC FiOS Real Estate Department of the difficulty Verizon has encountered in attempting to install and/or attach its FiOS facilities at [your property].

Our records indicate that you have not responded to our previous correspondence, that you have conditioned Verizon’s access on unreasonable terms and conditions or that you have denied Verizon access to the Property. The purpose of this letter is to restate our need to gain access to your Property.

By way of background, Verizon is attempting to gain access to your building because we have received a request for FiOS service(s) from a tenant(s) in your building and/or a resident(s) on your block, and our access to your Property is necessary to provide cable television services to those tenants and/or residents. We are very excited about the opportunity to provide world-class voice, data and video services to you and the area residents using a fiber based network to deliver these services at unprecedented speeds and capacities. Your cooperation in allowing Verizon access to your Property will enable your tenants and/or other residents on your block to receive the services they want in a timely manner.

Building owners don’t want a repeat of this kind of FiOS installation.

In a few earlier cases, some landlords refused entry without special financial compensation or gifts like free service for life. Others have unilaterally decided their tenants are happy enough being served by Time Warner Cable and don’t need a competitor. But a significant number claim the problem is with Verizon itself.

Hamdi Nezaj, who owns several buildings in Bronx, last summer refused entry to workers seeking to install FiOS, complaining Verizon performed shoddy work.

“On three properties that I own, the installation of FiOS was done recklessly,” complained Nezaj. “They never came back to fix the holes that were drilled, fix the boxes they installed and put molding on their respective wires. I am not interested once again in having Verizon drill holes and butcher my buildings.”

Several building owners responded to Verizon’s complaints indicating the phone company itself was responsible for dropping the ball on FiOS installation and were stunned the company was resorting to legal tactics to force entry.

Arthur Leeds from Leeds Associates LLC reports one of his properties has been waiting for Verizon to install FiOS since April 2014.

This customer found Verizon installing its FiOS cables up and down his doorways.

“We have responded every time we were asked for access most specifically to Thomas Miller, the FiOS franchise manager in NYC, and to Alyson Seigal (sic) another Verizon manager either by phone or via certified mail but all of our responses to them were ignored,” wrote Leeds. “Further we are well aware of the law and are certainly interested in supplying our tenants with alternatives to RCN and Time Warner Cable. However we do have a right to know how and with what materials Verizon intends to install their equipment in our building, [a request that] seems to stall any response on your part or that of your contractors.”

Amy Ward, an attorney representing the interests of 200 East 87”’ Street Associates, LP, has Leeds beat. She told the PSC Verizon first sought to install FiOS in the building in 2012, but Verizon kept stalling. When Verizon formally sought permission yet again in September 2014, a building representative asked for a delay because of “multiple intrusive projects occurring at and planned for the property.” No response to that request was forthcoming from Verizon until the December demand for entry was received.

Brian Loftman, property manager of the @The Aspen New York, wrote the PSC he was not happy to hear from Verizon’s legal team either.

Many building owners want Verizon to install crown molding like this that can effectively hide cables.

“I am appalled that Mr. Richard C. Fipphen, assistant general counsel for Verizon has contacted you stating that we have not complied with their request to give access to the property,” wrote Loftman.

Loftman included a copy of correspondence he sent to Ms. Siegal, claiming she is impossible to reach.

“I am writing to you because after several attempts to reach you via phone at 888 364 3467 it has been impossible,” wrote Loftman. “I find it hard to believe that you being in the telecommunications business that even your voicemail is full and I cannot leave a message on the number you provided us to contact your office.”

Loftman also questioned Siegal’s claims that Verizon has “world-class voice, data, and video services.”

“Has it improved since the last time our phones were out or the DSL went down for almost a week?” he asked.

Loftman’s previous experience with Verizon’s installation crews was not a positive one. He only learned after signing up for the service at another building he manages that Verizon intended to use visible basic plastic molding throughout the building’s hallways to hide FiOS wiring. Other property managers shared aesthetic objections to Verizon’s plans, requesting wiring be installed behind more visually attractive crown molding or run through ceiling ducts.

Part of New York State’s Public Service law covers the installation of cable television facilities, which also covers Verizon FiOS:

§228. Landlord-tenant relationship

1. No landlord shall:

(a) interfere with the installation of cable television facilities upon his property or premises, except that a landlord may require:

(1) that the installation of cable television facilities conform to such reasonable conditions are necessary to protect the safety, functioning and appearance of the premises, and the convenience and well being of other tenants;
(2) that the cable television company or the tenant or a combination thereof bear the entire cost of the installation, operation or removal of such facilities; and
(3) that the cable television company agree to indemnify the landlord for any damage caused by the installation, operation or removal of such facilities.

§898.1 Prohibition

Except as provided in section 898.2 of this Part, no landlord shall demand or accept any payment from any cable television company in exchange for permitting cable television service or facilities on or within said landlord’s property or premises.

§898.2 Just Compensation

Every landlord shall be entitled to the payment of just compensation for property taken by a cable television company for the installation of cable television service or facilities. The amount of just compensation shall be determined by the commission in accordance with section 228 (1)(b) of the Public Service Law upon application by the landlord pursuant to section 898.5 of this Part.