AT&T and Crown Castle, which owns many of the cell towers that AT&T and other wireless carriers use, have signed a new agreement allowing AT&T to lease space on existing Crown Castle towers to deploy 5G wireless infrastructure.

The key to the new agreement is streamlining the process of contracting for long-term space for small cells and other infrastructure that will be critical for 5G wireless deployments. AT&T also wants to more rapidly execute contracts to deploy wireless network upgrades to fulfill its obligations for FirstNet, the first responders emergency communications network.

“This agreement marks a significant milestone in our relationship with Crown Castle,” said Susan Johnson, executive vice president of global connections and supply chain. “It establishes a market-based framework and simplifies the lease management and administration process. This will allow us to streamline network projects to better serve our customers.”

The new agreement also covers traditional cell tower infrastructure for 4G LTE services. It will include provisions for long-term leasing, which will give AT&T additional stability in planning and service.

Crown Castle owns, operates and leases more than 40,000 cell towers and approximately 60,000 route miles of fiber supporting small cells and fiber solutions across every major U.S. market.

American Express cardholders will get 30 days of free service from ESPN+, ESPN’s new streaming video service, when it launches this Thursday, after the credit card company announced it would be the official launch sponsor.

Cardholders will have to enroll in the service during launch week to qualify for the 30-day trial, which can be canceled with no obligation. Those without Amex cards will likely get a 7-day free trial before the monthly $4.99 fee begins.

“It is fitting to have a renowned brand like American Express on board as the official launch sponsor for a renowned moment in our company’s history,” Ed Erhardt, president of ESPN global sales and marketing said in a statement. “Disney and ESPN continue to lead the industry in delivering innovative ad experiences and solutions for advertisers, and with ESPN+, we now have more opportunities to reach fans in new and engaging ways.”

Some sports fans are skeptical about the merits of ESPN+, which is designed to protect ESPN’s cable television partners. The Ringer reports a deeper look at the lineup reveals ESPN+ is likely to be underwhelming. Although the service may prove valuable to less-followed soccer, boxing, golf, tennis, rugby and cricket sports fans, devoted baseball and hockey fans are likely to be frustrated by slim offerings.

“It’s lacking the main thing sports fans want to watch: sports.”

“[It’s] programming not valuable enough to appear on one of ESPN’s eight cable networks (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Classic, ESPNews, ESPN Deportes, Longhorn Network, SEC Network),” opines The Ringer. “ESPN’s press release makes no mention of the NFL or NBA at all. There will be no Monday Night Football, and neither of ESPN’s two weekly NBA games will appear on the platform. Plus, no live event that is on one of ESPN’s eight cable networks will be on ESPN+.”

ESPN+ will be available on a redesigned ESPN app and through ESPN.com.

A growing number of Frontier Communications employees are sharing their dissatisfaction working at a phone company that continues its decline with nearly $2 billion in losses and more than a half-million customers departing in 2017. Employees who find themselves in such challenging situations may explore legal remedies for hostile work environments.

According to Perelson, using proactive communication in the workplace increases the productivity of your staff and helps you stay ahead of potential speed bumps that can impede project completion.

Workers describe a deteriorating workplace with increasingly hostile and disappointed customers that want to take their business elsewhere, and employees that are increasingly frustrated and predict the company is headed towards bankruptcy.

“This is a company in a long-term decline, which is good and bad for workers and customers,” said ‘Geoff,’ a Frontier employee in California who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. “It’s good because you know there is still some time left in case of a miraculous turnaround, but bad because like a glider slowly descending toward the ground, it is inevitably going to land or crash at some point in the not-too-distant future.”

Geoff was formerly employed by Verizon Communications before Frontier completed an acquisition of Verizon’s landline, fiber, and wireline networks in California in 2016. Now he’s employed full-time as a network engineer for Frontier.

“The trouble started almost immediately, because Verizon’s methodical, if not bureaucratic way of doing business was replaced with Frontier’s never ending chaos,” Geoff told Stop the Cap! “We were warned by techs in Connecticut, Indiana and West Virginia that Frontier’s management was very uneven, changes direction on various executive whims, and is very disconnected from mainline workers, and boy were they right.”

Geoff and his team, responsible for managing Verizon’s FiOS fiber network in Southern California, were split up after Frontier took over and put under severe budget restraints, which have grown tighter and tighter as Frontier’s economic condition deteriorates.

“Under good leadership, cost cutting can be an effective way to deal with wasteful, creeping spending that sometimes happens at large companies when budgets still reflect the priorities of several years ago, but Frontier just wants costs cut willy-nilly, including investments that actually save the company a lot of money, time, and frustration,” said Geoff. “Those cuts are also responsible for the deteriorating infrastructure and increasing failures customers are experiencing.”

“As a network engineer, I can see each day what Frontier’s network looks like and I talk to many other engineers at this company who are seeing much the same thing in their areas,” Geoff said. “If you live in an area where Verizon upgraded its network to fiber before selling it to Frontier, you will probably experience the least number of service problems, although the company’s billing systems are still troublesome. If you live in what Frontier calls its legacy (copper) markets, it’s a real mess and things are not getting better near fast enough, and customers are going elsewhere.”

Geoff’s views are shared by a growing number of hostile employee reviews being left on websites like Glassdoor. When cumulatively examined, those reviews show common points of complaint:

• Customers are treated to aggressive sales tactics, offered products and services they cannot use, while rushed off the phone when reporting service problems.
• Management is out of touch with employees and issue directives for new policies and services that cannot be easily managed from antiquated software and systems still in use at the company.
• Because company is performing poorly, managers can be very protective of their employee teams and attempt to keep them independent and insulated from management chaos. New employees perceive this as ‘cliquish’ and they often do not do well when assigned to one of those teams, as they are viewed with suspicion.
• Major cuts in training budgets have left employees with inadequate knowledge of Frontier’s own systems. In sales, this results in customers being sold plans they cannot actually get in their areas, incomplete orders, misrepresentation of pricing and product information, and customer trouble tickets being accidentally erased or left incomplete. Constant process changes are expected to be implemented by employees not trained to implement or manage them.
• No significant upgrades are coming, but employees are trained to tell customers to be patient for better service that is unlikely to be forthcoming.

Many employees share the view, “we’re all in the same boat, except that boat is sinking.”

The Better Business Bureau offers this advisory about Frontier Communications, which received a grade of “F” from the consumer organization.

“Sally,” who works at a Frontier internet support call center, tells Stop the Cap! she has noticed customers are getting increasingly hostile towards the company.

“The frustration level is enormous for customers and those of us tasked to help them,” Sally said. “Frontier markets itself as a solutions company and we sell a lot of ‘Peace of Mind’ support services for technology products, including our own, but sometimes the only answer to a problem has to come from the company investing in its facilities and not making excuses for why things are not working.”

Sally explains many Frontier customers do not have much experience troubleshooting technology problems.

“Most of my calls come from our rural customers who don’t have a choice in internet providers or are from lower and fixed income customers that cannot afford the cable company’s prices for internet access,” Sally said. “They know what they want to do with their internet connections but call us when they can’t seem to do it, whether that is sending email or watching video or using an internet video calling application to see their grandkids. You can only imagine what they feel when we tell them their DSL connection is unstable or their speed is too slow to support the application they want to use. We end up disappointing a lot of people because the internet and technology is moving much faster than Frontier is and our network just cannot keep up.”

Sally has been on the receiving end of profanity and a lot of slammed down phones, but there is little she can do.

“We can send a repair crew out but considering some of our lines are decades old, there isn’t much they can do about it,” Sally said. “This is a problem only management can solve and they’ve been distracted trying to deal with shareholders, acquisitions, and if you don’t mind me saying, being very preoccupied with their performance bonuses. We always know when another bad quarter is coming because of last-minute directives from top management designed to really push sales and hold on to customers to limit the damage. That is also around the time they start taking perks away from us in various cost-cutting plans. My co-workers are starting to leave because they don’t feel valued and do not want to work for a company in a long-term decline.”

“It seems like Frontier has just given up trying to compete with cable companies for internet services and now just sells internet to rural customers it can reach with the help of government subsidies,” adds Geoff. “It’s easy to do business with customers who don’t have any other choice for internet access.”

The Wall Street Journal today reported Sprint has rekindled merger talks with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA, the third time such merger discussions have taken place in the last four years.

The newest round of preliminary discussions begin five months after earlier negotiations collapsed over the issue of which merger partner would ultimately control the combined company.

Analysts are uncertain if the latest round of talks will amount to anything, especially after watching the Trump Administration’s Justice Department aggressively fight the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, Inc., on antitrust grounds.

If Sprint and T-Mobile combine, it would create three large national carriers competing with each other and an assortment of smaller regional wireless carriers, possibly leading to price increases for consumers who have benefited from the last few years of aggressive sales and promotions launched by market disruptor T-Mobile USA and, to a lesser extent, Sprint.

A Sprint/T-Mobile combination would have nearly 100 million customers, making it America’s second largest wireless company just ahead of AT&T, which had 93 million U.S. subscribers at the end of 2017. Verizon Wireless would continue to be the nation’s largest wireless company with 116 million customers.

CenturyLink’s Prism TV

CenturyLink has stopped expanding its cable TV alternative Prism TV, and will no longer promote the service to its customers.

“Due to emerging market trends in video content and delivery, we do not plan to expand our Prism TV service offering,” CenturyLink spokesperson Francie Dudrey told Fierce Cable, in a statement delivered at the NAB Show yesterday. “We will continue to provide service and support to our current Prism TV subscribers and make the service available to qualified customers who request it in the markets where we currently offer Prism TV.”

As Stop the Cap! reported last month, CenturyLink is planning to pull back on residential broadband upgrades and services it was expecting to sell on its improved internet platform after the company announced senior management changes. One key sign CenturyLink was moving away from Prism TV was the sudden retirement of Duane Ring on March 30. Ring, a 34-year veteran at CenturyLink had been recently promoted to help oversee CenturyLink’s residential broadband upgrades and was instrumental to the launch of Prism TV in 2005.

Wall Street and activist shareholders had pushed CenturyLink hard to replace long time CEO Glen Post III, who had recently turned bullish on costly residential broadband upgrades. Post’s replacement, former Level 3 CEO Jeff Storey, wants to refocus CenturyLink on its more profitable commercial customers.

Ironically, Level 3 was acquired by CenturyLink in 2016. Now some of Level 3’s top executives will firmly control CenturyLink itself. Shareholder activists were pleased with CenturyLink’s new direction under Storey’s leadership, arguing CenturyLink shouldn’t be devoting significant resources or funding to its legacy phone and copper broadband businesses. CenturyLink will now move away from home broadband services and towards commercial and enterprise broadband, metro ethernet, and cloud/backup services. About two-thirds of CenturyLink customers are commercial enterprises.

CenturyLink will now promote DirecTV to its residential customers instead of Prism TV.

Longer term, a growing number of analysts suspect CenturyLink’s new management will want to sell off some or all of CenturyLink’s residential customers to refocus the business entirely on its commercial customers. The company refused to discuss that issue at this time. CenturyLink may find a difficult market for would-be buyers. Frontier Communications, a regular buyer of wireline assets, is itself mired in debt and financial difficulties.

Investors continue to be skeptical of the merits of costly network upgrades for the nation’s copper wire phone networks. In areas where fiber-enabled phone companies compete directly with cable, price wars can develop, reducing profits and the incentive to invest.