Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen got himself off script and tangled in the percentages over the weekend when he told German magazine Focus the merger deal between AT&T and T-Mobile that the CWA has been cheerleading since it was first announced had little chance of coming to pass.

Cohen told Focus the chance of the deal getting beyond the current court challenge from the U.S. Department of Justice was around 20 percent. That seemed to signal the union was getting in line with those prepared to throw the current merger deal under the nearest bus.

Soon after that quote came home on the Bloomberg News wires (and reached AT&T), it didn’t take long for a revised quote (that a union spokesperson would later claim to be a “clarification”) to appear in a subsequent story:

There is about a 60 percent chance of a settlement between the companies and the Justice Department, Cohen said in a telephone interview today. Should the case go to court, it would be 50-50 on which way the decision would go, he said.

But the fuzzy math truly got exposed when the Wall Street Journal got this explanation for the discrepancy:

A spokeswoman for CWA said it was mostly a case of fuzzy math. Mr. Cohen’s point, she said, was that there was a 60% chance that the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the deal would be settled out of court.

But in the 40% chance that it didn’t, then there was a 50-50 chance that the company would prevail, which he may or may not have stated as 20 percent.

In reality, he meant to say that it was more likely than not that the case would be settled and the merger would succeed, the spokeswoman said.

“Perhaps it wasn’t the best of use of math,” she said. “Things got lost in the percentages.”

So, did AT&T push for the comments to be clarified? “I had some exchanges with my counterpart at AT&T, yes,” she said. “I sent her our clarification… which is good.”

Stop the Cap! received this unsolicited letter from an employee working at Frontier Communications about how the company has been running the business and treating their customers.  We’ve been able to independently verify enough of this letter, by talking with other Frontier employees, to highlight it for our readers. 

Frontier Communications is a long way from its progenitor (and namesake) — Rochester Telephone Corporation, which operated locally with excellence for 100 years.  Rochester Tel changed its name to Frontier Communications as it sought to abandon its image as a basic phone company.  It was later sold to Global Crossings, which later sold it to Citizens Communications, which decided to adopt the Frontier name itself.

Stop the Cap! reader Wayne A. dropped us a line to let us know Comcast has been getting very aggressive in the Denver area, poaching CenturyLink customers with enormous discounts:

My wife and I just accepted a package from Comcast to leave CenturyLink for a package that includes:

• Digital Premier HD with DVR
• HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and other premium movie channels
• Broadband service at 25/5Mbps
• Unlimited Long Distance Digital Phone Service

Comcast’s price?  An amazing $109.99/month for the first year, $129.99/month for the second.  Wayne says that’s a savings of $90 a month over ordinary Comcast prices, and compared with what he was paying CenturyLink, he will save $912.12 during the first year and around $600 for the second.

What makes Comcast’s pricing so aggressive is the fact they include much faster broadband speed than many other retention or “capture” customer deals.  They also throw in free premium movie channels.  We’ve seen Time Warner Cable offer triple-play retention deals for less than $90 a month for the first year, but they don’t include movie channels and deliver broadband service at the standard 10/1Mbps speed.

If you are paying Comcast more, it may be time to pick up the phone and threaten to walk unless you can have the same deal.  We’ve found dealing with customer retentions to be a real “your results may vary”-experience.  Don’t be willing to take the first offer.  Don’t be afraid to dismiss weak deals with a non-committal “I’ll think about it” if the price is not right for you.  Then call back.

In the last few weeks, we’ve found Time Warner Cable’s best deals still go to customers who actually schedule a service disconnection. Within hours, Time Warner starts calling, looking to “make an offer you cannot refuse.” The retention specialists at Time Warner who reach out to you generally have the most aggressively priced deals. You qualify if you call, schedule a disconnect a week or two out, and wait by the phone. You can keep your service running while company representatives try to convince you to stick with them.  Just make sure you answer those unfamiliar Caller ID-calls — it’s probably the cable company.  Most will ask why you disconnected.  If you answer “price,” the deals start coming.

Unfortunately, there was no way we could take advantage of any of their latest offers, which literally started two hours after disconnecting my late grandmother’s cable service.

It’s a buyer’s market for telecommunications products, so never settle for the regular price when a substantial discount is a phone call away.

Internet Service Providers who use “increasing bandwidth costs” as an excuse to raise prices or implement an Internet Overcharging scheme like usage limits or usage-based billing are being dishonest.

That’s the conclusion of a new British report that found providers grossly overestimating the costs of meeting increasing usage demands of their customers.  In some cases, providers are inflating the price of usage by 1,000 percent or more over their own costs.

“Traffic-related costs are a small percentage of the total connectivity revenue, and despite traffic growth, this percentage is expected to stay constant or decline,” claims the report, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Britain’s Channel 4, and Skype.  “Studies in Canada and in the UK put the incremental cost of fixed network traffic at around €0.01-0.03 per GB.”

That represents a cost of pennies per gigabyte, yet many providers charge anywhere from $0.20-10.00 or more to residential customers, an incredible markup.

The study further concludes ISP claims of “ballooning costs” are simply “a myth,” and points to company financial reports which clearly show “for fixed networks, traffic-related costs are low, falling on a unit basis and likely to fall overall given declines in traffic growth and on-going cost-reducing technical progress.”

In fact, most broadband providers are reporting decreasing costs and investment in their broadband product line, while enjoying unprecedented increased profits.

As broadband traffic increases, the technology to sustain that traffic has improved, and brought unit costs for broadband traffic to an all-time-low.

The report admits that costs for wireless technology are higher, primarily because of limited airwaves, a shared usage infrastructure, and initial expenses in delivering improving connectivity with cell or wireless radio towers.  But with the advent of 4G technology, providers can sustain increased speeds, traffic, and revenue from selling wireless service that can handle higher bandwidth applications.

Plum Consulting authored the new report.

Plum Consulting, which wrote the report, concluded that even in more expensive wireless service areas like the United Kingdom, smartphone data tariffs amounting to around €10 per GB are not justified on 4G networks.

“The cost to the mobile network operator is under €1 per GB,” Plum Consulting found.

Predictably, service providers are dismissive of the report’s findings.

Trefor Davies, CTO of communications provider Timico and a member of the board at the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) says bandwidth costs are a real problem, especially for smaller ISPs that rent access on a usage-based, wholesale access plan.

“Bandwidth is by far the greatest proportion of cost for an ISP,” Davies told PC Magazine. “It’s very much you pay for what you use,” he said. “If you use twice as much bandwidth, you’re going to be paying twice as much.”

[Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Bill H. for sharing the news.]

The CW Television Network

First it was the United Paramount Network (UPN) and The WB Television Network (WB), two mini-networks run by their respective studios that simply refused to become profit centers and established challengers to more traditional broadcast networks.  In 1996, both networks combined to create The CW Television Network, and the result has been less than the two original networks had hoped.  Youth-oriented programming targeted to an audience that increasingly doesn’t watch traditional television and a challenging advertising market that has considerably declined since 2009 haven’t helped.

Now the folks in charge of the CW are resting a lot easier, all thanks to Netflix.  The movie streaming and rental service is reported to be signing an agreement worth upwards of $1 billion to access CW programming for its streaming service.

Les Moonves, chief executive of CBS Corp., which now co-owns the network with Warner Bros., couldn’t be happier.

“It essentially makes the CW a profitable enterprise,” Moonves said.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Netflix is buying rights to repeats of current and future series on the network, and the longer the shows stay on the air and performs well, the more the subscription video company will pay for streaming rights.

For example, Netflix is paying in the neighborhood of $600,000 an episode for “Gossip Girl,” an established show, but will initially pay much less for newer or lower-rated CW programs, people familiar with the pact said. The window between when a new episode of a CW show appears on the network and then ends up on Netflix could be as long as a year.

Netflix has exclusive online subscription rerun rights to all episodes of all CW shows. However, CBS and Warner Bros. can still sell reruns to other outlets, including local television stations and cable networks.

Netflix is hurrying to sign new programming deals as it prepares to lose access to an important component of its streaming library — current movie titles that come courtesy of an expiring agreement with Starz.  Netflix said without renewing that agreement, it would spend heavily to try and find new programming to make up the difference.  The deal with the CW may be an example.