Time Warner’s “Because We Can” One-Time Charge applies to new customers signing up for certain promotions.

Time Warner Cable has increased the monthly rental fee for its leased cable modem from $3.95 a month to $4.99 a month and has introduced a “one-time charge” of $19.99 applicable to certain Internet service new customer promotions.

CEO Glenn Britt earlier commented that Time Warner Cable had room to grow its modem lease fee:

“It was received with a minimum of push-back and we’re still actually charging less than Comcast ($7/month), so I think there is room to charge more going forward. People can buy their own if they want and a small percentage of customers have chosen to do that which is fine with us.”

For now, the increase only applies to new customers, but Stop the Cap! expects it will also eventually apply to current customers as part of the next round of rate increases. The Internet Modem with Free Home Wi-Fi, available to customers ordering 30/5 or 50/5Mbps service costs $14.99 a month.

Time Warner Cable has pulled back on customer promotions since the beginning of the year and has begun shifting its pricing for its most profitable service — broadband, to capture price-sensitive customers who have been unable to previously afford Internet-only service from the company.

Time Warner has introduced a new “Lite” tier offering 1Mbps service for $20 a month and has made the 3Mbps “Basic” service the staple of many of its bundled promotions.

Stop the Cap! strongly encourages Time Warner Cable customers to buy their own cable modems and avoid the rental fees. Customers can also bypass the rental fee by signing up for Earthlink service through Time Warner Cable.

Our top modem choice remains the Motorola SB6141, which can be found at the “Buy It Now” price on eBay as low as $77.99 with free shipping and no upfront sales tax for most buyers. This model does not include Wi-Fi, but most people don’t need it — a router generally provides Wi-Fi connectivity on its own.

We highly recommend purchasing DOCSIS 3-ready modems to avoid obsolescence issues.

The most recent list of “acceptable” modems that can be activated with your Time Warner Cable broadband service are:

We saved the only good part.

The best part of Cablevision’s latest ridiculous advertising campaign is the 12-month introductory price new subscribers will pay for phone, broadband, and television service: $84.95 a month. Not bad. The same cannot be said to the advertising agency that created this mess and the executives who approved it.

Richard Greenfield from BTIG Research, which covers Cablevision for Wall Street, isn’t impressed with Cablevision’s ads either:

We believe it is time for Cablevision to find a new ad agency, bring in some new marketing executives internally and seriously rethink what their consumer proposition is – going back to pitching the triple-play at an ever lower (now $84.95 price point) is not particularly compelling. Cablevision already has very high level of bundling of video, data and voice services across its customer base.  Given that, Cablevision should be devising a marketing approach to upsell existing customers, especially higher speed, higher ARPU broadband services (given their high margin).

Consumers concerned about the high cost of cable may not agree with Greenfield’s assessment. Paying $85 a month for a triple play package is a great deal, at least until it expires.

But we suspect a lot of consumers will never get that far through the ad, particularly when most viewers don’t pay that much attention to advertising in the first place.

Israel has decided its broadband future can no longer lie in the hands of one phone and one cable company, so the country is commissioning a nationwide fiber to the home broadband network that will be run as a public-private partnership, eventually reaching every home and business in the country.

This week, a quasi-governmental committee chose Sweden’s Viaeuropa to build the fiber network beginning as early as six months from now.

The network will support speeds up to 1Gbps and will be owned by the public utility Israel Electric Corporation and a consortium of private entities including Viaeuropa.

“All citizens of Israel will enjoy very fast Internet speeds, which could be a significant growth engine for Israel’s economy,” Roni Friedman, acting director of the Government Companies Authority in the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

The new broadband service will deploy at least 25,000km of fiber, 70 percent purposely wired above-ground to reduce construction costs. By 2020, at least two-thirds of Israel will have access to the service. Israel’s electric utility will also contribute its 3,000km of previously deployed fiber cable to the venture.

Current consumer broadband speeds in Israel top out at around 100Mbps, but at a price. Broadband is still costly in Israel and most customers choose packages comparable to what Americans receive — 10-15Mbps service.

The Israeli government is concerned that a duopoly is suppressing Israel’s broadband standing, a condition considered intolerable as the country moves towards the 21st century digital economy.

Bezeq, the former state-owned phone company, has a 61 percent market share. It offers a fiber to the neighborhood service similar to AT&T U-verse, with broadband speeds in some homes up to 100Mbps. Cable company HOT has most of the rest of the market — 39 percent, and also offers up to 100Mbps service. Upstream speeds are much slower — 1-1.5Mbps maximum.

The new fiber network is capable of gigabit broadband speeds in both directions. The government hopes the competition will force both the phone and cable company to deliver improved services at lower prices. Bezeq has already begun fiber to the home service trials.

Phillip Dampier

It is no secret that there is an urban-rural broadband divide.

The market-driven, private enterprise broadband landscape delivers the best speeds and service to urban-suburban areas, particularly those in and around large cities, short-changing rural communities.

This is true regardless of the technology: the fastest fiber optic services are delivered in large population centers, and wireless speeds are fastest there as well. But as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has discovered, the further away you get from these urban sectors, the poorer the service you are likely to get.

The NTIA’s findings present a significant challenge to phone company claims that rural customers would be better served with wireless broadband instead of spending money to support and upgrade landline infrastructure, which supports DSL and is upgradable to fiber optics.

The NTIA finds these rural wireless networks to be severely lacking:

Not only are far fewer rural residents than urban residents able to access 4G wireless services (i.e., at least 6Mbps downstream), but a further divide also exists within rural communities. For wireless download services greater than 6Mbps, Very Rural communities have approximately half the availability rate of Small Towns, and Small Towns have about half the availability rate of Exurbs (10, 18, and 36 percent, respectively).

This represents nothing new. AT&T and Verizon have shortchanged their rural customers with catastrophically slow DSL service (or none at all) for years:

For wireline download service, Very Rural communities also have the least availability of all five areas. Though a rural/urban split continues to be useful in providing generalized information about availability, a five-way classification uncovers a more refined picture of the divide in broadband availability across the nation. For example, at wireline download speeds of 50Mbps, broadband availability varies from 14 percent (Very Rural), 32 percent (Exurban), 35 percent (Small Town), 62 percent (Central City), to 67 percent (Suburban), even though the overall broadband availability was 63 percent in urban areas compared to 23 percent in rural areas. In addition, wireline and wireless broadband availability, particularly at faster speeds, tends to be higher within Central Cities and the Suburbs compared to everywhere else.

Why the disparity? It is a simple case of economics. Wealthy suburbs can afford the ultimate triple play packages, so providers prioritize the best service for these areas, even above less costly to serve urban centers. Rural residents either get no service at all or only basic slow speed DSL. The Return on Investment to improve broadband is inadequate for these companies in rural areas.

Source: NTIA

The same is true with wireless 4G service. Rural areas struggle for access or endure poor reception because fewer towers provide service away from major highways or town centers.

The NTIA observed wireless download speeds of 6Mbps or more were available to 90% of urban residents, but only 18% of small town residents. Wireless upload speeds of 3Mbps or greater were found in only 14% of small towns.

Dee Davis, president, Center for Rural Strategies, based in Whitesburg, Va. said the implications were clear.

“The market’s always going to go to the well-heeled communities,” Davis observed. “It’s going to go to the densest population.”

Folks in rural communities end up paying more for a lower level of service, Davis said.

“That also means that they don’t get the same chance to participate in the economy,” Davis added. “They don’t get to bring their goods and services to market in the same way. They don’t always get to participate.”

The economics of cutting off rural landlines delivers most of the benefits to providers, and assures decades of inferior service to consumers.

Economic market tests, including Return on Investment, that impact rural broadband availability will not disappear if AT&T and Verizon abandon their rural landline networks. While cost savings will be realized once rural wired infrastructure is decommissioned, there is no free market formula that would encourage either provider to pour investment funds into rural service areas. For the same reasons rural customers are broadband-challenged today, their comparatively smaller numbers and economic abilities will continue to fail investment metrics for innovative new services tomorrow.

The primary reason broadband speeds are lower in rural areas is inferior network infrastructure. Providers argue it does not make economic sense to invest in network upgrades to boost speeds for such a small number of customers. While wireless technology can be cheaper to deploy than the upkeep of a deteriorating landline network, it is not cheap or robust enough to deliver comparable broadband speeds now available in urban areas, especially as broadband usage continues to grow.

Verizon’s chief financial officer Fran Shammo admitted as much during remarks at the at JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in May:

If you recall, way back I guess about two years ago we did a trial with DirecTV in Erie, Pa., where we did broadband on the side of a house and offered a triple-play, if you will, which consisted of broadband, voice, and linear TV provided by DirecTV.

What we found was people were adoptive to the broadband; but because of the consumption of broadband through that LTE network, it was really detrimental to the spectrum and to the network performance. Because they used so much data, it soaked up so much of the spectrum.

So what we felt was LTE for broadband works in certain rural areas, but you can’t compete LTE broadband in those dense populated areas because you can’t — first of all, you can’t match the speed with a 50-megabit or a 100-megabit delivery between cable and FiOS and U-verse. And you literally don’t have enough spectrum to be able to use that much consumption.

So what we felt was by partnering with the cable companies, and delivering our LTE network with voice and data, and having that hardwired connection into the home was a better financial way to do it than trying to go LTE broadband. Because we just didn’t see where the spectrum could hold up to the volume that would be demanded.

Without rural cable companies to partner with, Verizon’s decision to move rural broadband to wireless guarantees rural Americans will not benefit from ongoing speed and capacity upgrades that are necessary to support the evolving Internet.

With promotions from Time Warner Cable no longer being what they used to be, customers are struggling to get as much savings as possible from discount pricing and a $200 gift card offer available to those switching from a competing provider.

But expecting a $200 debit card and actually getting it are two different things, as some customers are learning.

Stop the Cap! regularly gets reader complaints from customers who signed up for Time Warner Cable promotions but are rejected for the rebate, primarily because they did not follow all the rules or waited too long.

Typically, Time Warner’s complicated rebates are only available to customers switching from another provider. New customers who don’t have active, equivalent service with another company do not qualify. If you don’t have cable television and watch shows online from Netflix or only have a cell phone for telephone service, you won’t qualify.

Other important rules:

• Customers have to stay with Time Warner for 90 days after installation with no past due balances to qualify to apply for the rebate;
• You must register your rebate on a special website within 30 days of installation;
• You must also upload a copy of the bill from your previous service provider issued within the last 90 days showing the service(s) you are cancelling.  Customer’s name and/or address on previous provider’s bill must match name and/or address on Time Warner Cable installation order;
• You will need a “redemption code” found on a postcard and/or email sent to you after installation that includes your rebate registration instructions to apply for the rebate.

With requirements like that, customers can easily be tripped up along the way and get rejected for the rebate.

We recommend customers create a folder to keep Time Warner Cable documentation in one easy-to-remember place. If you can’t find a rebate redemption code, don’t search the house. Call Time Warner Cable at 1-888-892-2253 and request one over the phone.

We also suggest you use a calendar to make note of deadlines and track your rebate so you don’t forget. Some people only discover they were rejected when they called to ask about a missing rebate card.

The biggest obstacle is usually finding and uploading a final bill showing services disconnected with the other provider. By the time some providers send your last bill, the rebate may have slipped your mind or the submission deadline has passed.

If your rebate request was denied and you made a good faith effort to follow the rules, don’t give up and say goodbye to $200.

1. Start by calling Time Warner Cable and complaining.
2. If your documentation was sent and the company claims it was not received, ask them to accept a copy.
3. If you are still rejected or if the company points you to the rebate processor who points you back to the company, file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau against the Time Warner Cable division nearest you. In reviewing several cases about rebate eligibility, it is clear Time Warner usually settles these complaints by applying a credit for the rebate card amount to your Time Warner Cable bill.

If and when your rebate card does arrive, it comes with a booklet of terms and conditions as well. Our best advice is to spend the money quickly, because after six months, the issuing bank starts deducting service fees. If you lose the card, it will cost just under $6 to get a new one.

Some suggested uses include buying gift cards with fewer restrictions (Amazon.com is a common choice) if you are worried you won’t use the card fast enough.

One of the best local places to quickly use rebate cards are in supermarkets. Keep track of your balance and when just a few dollars are left, ask the cashier to process it for the exact amount of the remaining funds on the card. The cashier can then accept another credit card, cash or a check for any remaining balance due. Do not use your reward card at a gas station, rental car company, hotel, restaurant or for bill payments. These establishments often place a temporary hold on  card funds in excess of the transaction amount or first process a test authorization on the card for a few dollars to make sure the card is valid and has adequate funds available. It can take several days before holds on those funds are released.