The New York Public Service Commission needs to hear from you about the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. Unlike some of the southern and midwestern states that have utility commissions that basically rubber stamp the agenda of Big Telecom companies, New York’s PSC has a reputation for being tougher and more customer-oriented. But the PSC cannot act in your interest if you don’t share your views.

It is incredibly easy to file your own comments with the PSC. Nearly 2,300 New Yorkers have done so thus far, but we need to make sure they understand our serious objections to Comcast’s usage caps, its expensive service, and customer abuse.

We have provided a sample letter below. We hope you will write your own, but offer ours as a guide that includes some of our biggest concerns. We may prepare another one soon outlining other concerns.

How to file your comment:

• E-Mail: [email protected]
• Mail: Hon. Kathleen H. Burgess, Secretary, Public Service Commission, Three Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York 12223-1350.
• Phone: 1-800-335-2120 (press “1” to leave a recorded comment)

All comments should refer to “Case 14-M-0183, Petition of Comcast Corporation and Time Warner Cable Inc.”

Hon. Kathleen H. Burgess
Secretary
Public Service Commission
Three Empire State Plaza
Albany, New York 12223-1350

Re: Case 14-M-0183, Petition of Comcast Corporation and Time Warner Cable Inc.

Dear Ms. Burgess,

I am writing to ask the Public Service Commission to reject the merger proposal of Comcast and Time Warner Cable on the ground the companies have failed to show such a merger would be in the best interests of New York and its residents.

Although Time Warner Cable has never been a prize, Comcast’s reputation for bad service, high prices, rationed Internet access, and customer abuse is well documented in just about every community the company serves. Comcast has repeatedly been voted the “Worst Company in America” by Consumer Union’s Consumerist.com. The American Consumer Satisfaction Index has documented so many complaints about Comcast, it declared it the worst company it has ever scored, performing even worse than the Internal Revenue Service. For more than three years running, Harris Interactive has called Comcast one of the least reputable companies in America.

That alone should be enough to reject this merger out of hand. Permitting it would reward this company’s appalling behavior towards its own customers and expose New Yorkers to an even bigger monopoly problem than we deal with now. Unless you live in a Verizon FiOS service area, cable is your only real choice for true broadband speeds. DSL is rapidly losing favor and market share and Verizon has shown no interest in expanding it.

Comcast already uses its market power to its advantage by raising prices… a lot. Time Warner Cable charges less for its services than Comcast does.

For example, Time Warner Cable offers a standard television service package that provides all the popular cable networks for one price. Comcast offers a similar package but stripped out cable networks including Cloo, CNBC World, Al Jazeera America, Discovery Fit & Health, Disney XD, DIY, a range of ESPN’s extra networks, EWTN, Fine Living, Fox Business News, Great American Country, IFC, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime Real Women, Military Channel, MLB, most of MTV’s extra networks, NBA, National Geographic Channel, NFL Network, NHL Network, most of Nickelodeon’s extra networks, OWN, Oxygen, Sundance, Turner Classic Movies, The Science Channel, and VH1′s extra networks.

Customers who want these networks, like Turner Classic Movies, National Geographic, and IFC will have to pay a stunning price of up to $86 a month — just for television. Many of these networks are especially popular with fixed income older residents, who will now face an even larger cable TV bill.

Comcast promotes the fact its Internet speeds are faster than Time Warner Cable, but that is not true as Time Warner Maxx upgrades arrive. Comcast Internet service costs more, is slower, and increasingly usage-capped. Time Warner Cable has made clear it will not limit customers’ Internet usage. Comcast has made clear it will, predicting usage limits/usage-based pricing will be imposed on customers across its entire footprint within five years. That is no improvement for New York. That is literally a downgrade. We can do better in New York with Time Warner Cable.

In fact, the company has promised extremely little to New York after winning your approval to merge. Comcast is so arrogant, it already announced it will not share any cost savings with customers, promising even higher cable bills for New York with the merger. Even its touted X1 set top system will cost New Yorkers — it comes with a steep installation price of almost $100. Again, how does this serve the public interest?

Comcast’s public service programs are also woefully inadequate. Its Internet Essentials is a bureaucratic nightmare that only provides temporary discounts to a small percentage of customers (with school age children) who need an affordable Internet option. I guess childless couples and the elderly poor don’t matter. Time Warner Cable offers a $14.99 discount program available to anyone who wants it, no paperwork or waiting periods required.

It is my understanding Comcast must prove this merger is in the public interest to win your approval. It has utterly failed to do so, and I expect my state’s Public Service Commission to reject this merger. This is one deal that can never be modified sufficiently to make it acceptable for people like myself. You are doing us no favors trying to negotiate for an Internet discount program or expanding Comcast’s service area by a small amount in rural upstate New York. The end result is that millions of New Yorkers will get worse service than we get today, at a higher price, with little/no competition on the horizon.

This is a rare opportunity for our state, which lost most of its oversight powers over the cable industry years ago. Cable operators have abused their deregulated status and have raised prices, provided dreadful customer service, and have kept competition away. Letting Comcast into New York from Buffalo to the Bronx will only encourage more abuse, wreaking havoc on New York’s growing digital economy. Let’s send a clear message to Comcast New York isn’t willing to put our broadband future in the hands of “the worst company in America.” Let’s make it clear enough is enough.

Sincerely,

The 1975 Saturday morning heroine

“O My Queen,” said the royal sorcerer to Hatshepsut, “with this amulet, you and your descendants are endowed by the goddess Isis with the powers of the animals and the elements. You will soar as the falcon soars, run with the speed of gazelles, and command the elements of sky and earth.” Three thousand years later, a young science teacher dug up this lost treasure and found she was heir to The Secrets of Isis. Andrea Thomas, teacher, and Isis, dedicated foe of evil, defender of the weak, champion of Truth and Justice.

Three thousand and one years later, AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless used their respective bank accounts to endow themselves with a mobile payment system called Isis they hoped would soar profits, run up your bill, and command the electronic payment universe. They called it Isis.

Three thousand and two years later a group of strict Wahhabist Muslims operating a terror group called the “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” would establish a new caliphate covering sections of Syria and Iraq.

Seconds after they declared the new (generally unrecognized) state, the group set off terrorizing the local infidels and apostates in their midst, a/k/a Shia Muslims and Christians. Although the name of their newly declared independent nation, “Islamic State” is about as catchy as generic paper plates, the group’s abbreviated name was enough to provoke some serious Excedrin headaches.

They call it: ISIS.

The Other ISIS

Checkmate AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

“However coincidental, we have no interest in sharing a name with a group whose name has become synonymous with violence and our hearts go out to those who are suffering,” said Isis CEO Michael Abbott. “As a company, we have made the decision to rebrand.”

Did Abbott just give in to the terrorists? Most Americans wouldn’t know or care, having never heard of the wireless industry’s payment system. In fact, with just 20,000 Isis Wallet activations per day, more Americans likely know that name from the 1975 Saturday morning TV series, The Secrets of Isis.

Which survives longer is open to question. Most consumers really don’t want or need an alternative to existing payment mechanisms.

According to a Forrester report released in December, “Understanding Digital Wallet Options For Your Business,” only 11% of US consumers have a digital wallet. “Driving consumer interest and adoption is a steep, uphill climb in developed markets because the current payment systems work quite well,” the report says.

Waiting for an upgrade… Sprint Spark is the latest and fastest, but it’s only in 24 cities.

Sprint may be feeling the music is about to stop and it doesn’t have a chair at the table.

While AT&T and Verizon Wireless divide up the premium market and T-Mobile goes for the aggressive price championship, Sprint is muddling along with its glacially paced upgrade to 4G LTE and a barely usable 3G experience that has a lot of customers pondering a switch. This spring Sprint lost 364,000 pre-paid and 231,000 valuable postpaid customers.

CNET reports Sprint is now seeking to follow other carriers with a shared family data plan and better pricing on both its Framily and individual plans.

Sprint may be America’s least exciting wireless carrier. While T-Mobile’s CEO gets into hot water with bombastic rhetoric about Verizon and AT&T, he largely ignores Sprint. To more than a few in the wireless industry, Sprint seems to be just plodding along.

“I will be collecting Social Security before Sprint upgrades to 4G around here,” writes suburban Sacramento resident Danny Chiang. “You just keep holding out for something better from Sprint just around the corner, but they never seem to actually get there.”

Chiang and others have endured a heavily congested 3G network while Sprint initially focused on rural and small market 4G network upgrades — hardly intuitive for loyal Sprint customers in urban areas. Today, all Sprint can claim is that it has America’s “newest network.”

Some investment analysts believe Sprint is being more conservative about spending as it navigates towards a potential merger with T-Mobile. Its Japanese owners — Softbank, have argued a combined Sprint and T-Mobile is the only way America’s third and fourth largest carriers can possibly hope to compete toe to toe with Verizon and AT&T.

Sprint’s latest network innovation — Spark — which combines spectrum in three different frequency bands to deliver a larger data pipe, is only available in two dozen cities. Spark would be a natural showcase for Sprint’s enormous spectrum holdings. Sprint Spark combines 4G FDD-LTE at 800MHz and 1.9GHz and TDD-LTE at Clearwire’s old WiMAX 2.5GHz spectrum.

But network upgrades do no good if your customers are headed out the door to the competition. While Sprint continues to upgrade its network, it is testing a variety of new plans in different cities for a possible wider release later this year.

Shared/Family Mobile Data Plan Trials — San Diego, Portland, Ore. and Las Vegas

Sprint believes its Framily Plan might be too expensive.

Data Allowance Options

• 1GB – $20
• 2GB – $30
• 4GB – $40
• 6GB – $50
• 10GB – $60
• 20GB – $100
• 30GB – $130
• 40GB – $150
• 60GB – $225
• No unlimited shared data option

• Unlimited Talk/Text Phone Access Charge (required charge per phone): $25 for 1-10GB data plans, $15 for 20+GB data plans
• Annual Device Upgrade included at no extra charge for all customers with 20+GB shared data plans (San Diego and Portland only)
• Annual Device Upgrade Option: $5/month (Las Vegas only)

CNET points out Sprint’s plans are a better deal for heavy data users. The $20 plan for 1GB, for instance, is only $5 cheaper than a comparable AT&T plan. But the 30GB plan is $75 cheaper than AT&T’s $225 version.

Discounted Framily Plan Trials – Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Providence, R.I.

• Starting price reduced $10 to $45/month. Add five people to your “framily” and the price drops to $25/month (two fewer people now required to get the largest discount).
• Selecting the $20 unlimited data option automatically enrolls you in an annual upgrade plan (Buffalo and Philadelphia only).
• Customers can choose to pay $5 extra a month for an annual upgrade option (Providence only).

New Bring Your Own Device Option for Individual Plan Trials — Chicago, Minneapolis, and West Michigan

• Customers paying full price for a smartphone, those paying in monthly installments,  or who bring their own device to Sprint are eligible for a $50 unlimited plan or a $40 for 3GB of data per month plan. Unlimited Framily data plans usually cost $75 a month.
• Unlimited data customers in Chicago and Minneapolis are automatically eligible for annual upgrades.
• West Michigan customers will have to pay a $5 fee each month for their annual upgrade.

A Mill Valley, Calif. woman was overcharged by more than $3,000 after AT&T removed her company retiree discount and refused to reimburse her for its own billing mistake.

Tes Norlin and her husband travel the world and make a lot of overseas calls using their AT&T cell phone along the way. It wasn’t much of a surprise when the couple began receiving AT&T bills for more than $600, but when their travel was finished, AT&T wasn’t — the Norlin family continued to see surprisingly high bills.

Tes is a victim of autobill complacency. The convenience of automatic bill payments has too often given people an excuse not to scrutinize their monthly bills, as long as the amount seems somewhat reasonable. It is only after an unexpectedly high bill arrives when customers finally begin to investigate.

The Norlin family bundles every telecommunications service they have with AT&T – cell phones, broadband, and television service. For that loyalty, and because of Norlin’s former employment with AT&T, she qualified for a substantial discount — $263 a month. AT&T mistakenly removed that discount when it deleted her Social Security number from the account… 14 months earlier.

“And [that discount] amounted to over $3,000 which is a substantial amount of money,” Tes told San Francisco television station KGO. “$263.88 times the 14 months, basically. Then you can do the math.”

AT&T did its own math. Despite more than two dozen calls to AT&T customer service and executive customer relations, the company’s final offer was a courtesy credit amounting to three months of the missing discount AT&T admitted accidentally removing.

The phone company says it’s the customer’s fault if they don’t analyze their AT&T bill and promptly call attention to billing errors.

“Rules are rules,” said AT&T.

Of course, AT&T wrote those rules and when KGO threatened to tell the story on the evening news, a full refund was quickly on the way.

“We provided an adjustment for the full amount, as requested, after discovering that the customer had been removed from the database of former employees eligible to receive this discount,” said AT&T in a change of heart.

Customers who don’t have the backing of Channel 7’s investigative reporter are much less likely to win that outcome so a word to the wise: even if your account is configured with autopay, always scrutinize your monthly bill for mistakes. Many cell phone companies are deleting employee discounts for customers that do not respond to employer verification requests. The re-verification procedure is detailed on the bill you may be ignoring.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGO San Francisco Woman struggles to get employee discount from ATT 7-9-14.flv[/flv]

KGO TV’s consumer reporter helps wrestle a substantial service credit from AT&T over a discount the company accidentally deleted from a customer’s account. (3:24)

Cox is behind the times.

While the rest of the world is moving towards gigabit broadband and unlimited access, Cox Cable continues to live in the past with a regime of data caps the company blames on increased data usage. Your only solution is to upgrade to a bigger data plan you may not want or really need.

Somehow, the folks at Cox can’t seem to manage the natural growth of the Internet while start-ups ranging from Google Fiber to a local fiber provider just getting started in our own community goes out of their way to point out how unnecessary usage limits and usage billing really are.

At Stop the Cap!, we’ll let you in on a little secret the “tech wonder twins” at Cox forgot to mention: data caps are not about managing Internet traffic, they are about managing to control costs, protect cable-TV revenue, and eventually empty customers’ wallets.

Since data caps don’t make much sense in the 21st century reality-based community, Cox attempted a longer-form rationale for data caps in a video that resembles a bad VHS copy of an interrogation by your local homicide squad. Don’t worry, only the truth gets murdered by the ironically named “Tech Talk with Todd and Sarah.” Six minutes later, you still know they’re full of it.

Tip: Next time, bring “the tech.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Cox Tech Talk with Todd and Sarah Internet Usage Trends.mp4[/flv]

What Cox still fails to understand (and what Google will have to teach them when they invade Cox’s biggest territories, including Phoenix) is that data caps and usage billing are as anachronistic as those 1978 limited edition Diana Prince/Wonder Woman glasses Sarah is still wearing. (6:17)