Despite a significant advertising campaign, Cox’s gigabit Internet service is more a public relations stunt than reality, with only a tiny number of new housing and apartment/condo complexes wired for the fiber to home service.

The high exposure ad campaign doesn’t make sense considering Cox’s new service is available to less than 1% of its customers.

A comprehensive search of addresses actually qualified for Cox’s G1GABLAST tier of service found less than 1% of Cox customers are able to get the gigabit service.

In Irvine, Calif., G1GABLAST is so rare, the Park Place apartments claim exclusivity of the service in the area. A 578-square foot studio apartment with one bedroom and bathroom starts at $1,705 a month, if interested.

Cox has staged press events at the rare locations where the service has turned up in very high-end housing developments in Phoenix, Ariz., with press releases touting the service’s imminent availability in Las Vegas and Omaha, Neb.

The company claims it will make G1GABLAST available to more than 5,000 homes in Phoenix by the end of this year, and has committed to expand that to 150,000 homes by the end of 2015, but there are growing questions whether Cox will meet those targets.

In Phoenix, an Ahwatukee Foothills homeowner was the company’s first residential gigabit subscriber in Arizona. Cox began rolling the service out in new housing developments where installing fiber is less costly than burying service lines in existing neighborhoods. Now it is focusing on other multi-dwelling units and complexes, and a limited number of existing homes in-between those developments.

In Irvine, Calif., Cox gigabit Internet is available exclusively at one complex – Park Place.

In Scottsdale, the only confirmed site where Cox offers gigabit service is the barely finished 440-unit San Travesia Luxury Apartment Complex (rent starts at $1,275 a month for an 815 square foot studio apartment).

G1GABLAST was also confirmed to be available in one extremely wealthy enclave in northwestern Las Vegas, where property values range from $6-50 million. Those who can’t afford that real estate can choose one of a handful of more affordable new housing developments in the area featuring properties valued at $500,000 and up.

The most affordable housing where customers will eventually find G1GABLAST later this spring will be high-end apartment complexes and condos in Omaha, Neb.

Further east, Cox will also be installing gigabit service in the Viridian Reserve at Hickory in Chesapeake, Va. Several hundred homes (starting at $373,000) will be the first in Virginia to qualify for the service sometime this year.

A high-priced publicity campaign for the extremely limited rollout of gigabit service would seem counter-intuitive, unless Cox was seeking an improved image of cable speed competitiveness as new entrants promise and deliver gigabit Internet service around the country. Claiming your company offers 1,000Mbps Internet costs a lot less than actually delivering it.

AT&T has returned fire in a price war with T-Mobile designed to keep its customers and attract new ones.

AT&T Mobility has cut $40-100 a month off the price of plans targeting some of its most lucrative customers — families with multiple phone sharing a lot of data.

Under its newest offer announced Saturday, a family with four smartphones sharing a 10GB data allowance will see their bill cut from $200 to $160 a month effectively immediately. Any family plan customer with 10GB or higher usage allowances will also see their bill cut by $40-100 a month.

The price cut comes in response to fierce competition from T-Mobile, which has repeatedly bashed AT&T in its advertising campaigns. Now a customer with three smartphones will find AT&T’s new plan price just $5 more than what T-Mobile charges, although T-Mobile’s offer includes unlimited data.

“This is about being competitive,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer for AT&T Mobility. “We feel we have the best network and the best value in the marketplace,” Christopher said.

AT&T is also offering a $100 bill credit for each new line added or for activating each new tablet, mobile hotspot, or AT&T’s wireless home phone service until March 31.

The contrast in pricing between AT&T, hounded by T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, which has largely ignored the price war, is striking. Verizon Wireless charges up to $125 more a month for its family plans with identical data allowances and features.

The new offer requires no contract, and phones must be purchased at full price either up front or in installments. Existing, on-contract customers with subsidized phones will pay more.

AT&T has also stepped up customer retention efforts, handing out hundreds of dollars in service credits to some threatening to leave for T-Mobile.

Customers are receiving an average of $55 a month in service credits over the next year by tweeting complaints to AT&T’s social media team: @ATTCustomerCare and @ATT

Those on family share plans with several lines of service complaining that AT&T is charging too much and are planning to switch to T-Mobile are being offered discounts such as $70 a month in service credits for the first six months and $40 a month for the next six months after speaking to an AT&T representative arranged through Twitter.

Customers get a less charitable response in AT&T stores where some employees have dared customers to switch to T-Mobile claiming they will be unhappy with the slow data service and coverage areas. In short, no service credits or retention offers are available from in-store representatives. Customers must appeal to AT&T’s social media team to get a discount.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ATT New Mobile Share Value Plan for Families 2-1-14.mp4[/flv]

AT&T explains the new pricing for their Family Share plans. (1:27)

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.

Japan has leapfrogged over Google’s revolutionary 1Gbps broadband service with twice the speed for roughly $20 less a month.

Sony-owned So-net Entertainment on Monday introduced its 2Gbps optical fiber GPON service called NURO, charging as little as $51 a month for 2/1Gbps service.

“Light NURO is reasonably priced, very high-speed fiber to the home broadband that delivers the world’s fastest speeds on technology usually reserved for commercial service,” the company said.

NURO is available in Tokyo and six Kantō region prefectures, including Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama, Gunma, Tochigi, and Ibaraki.

Customers agreeing to a two-year contract get the best prices and a waiver (in certain circumstances) of installation fees as high as $540. Customers wishing to avoid a term contract can sign up for around $77 a month.

Customers are supplied a wireless router with support for speeds up to 450Mbps backwards-compatible with all Wi-Fi wireless devices.

NURO also offers landline telephone service over the fiber network for $5.38 a month. The charge for local calls is $0.09 for each three minutes. Calls to the United States are even cheaper: $0.08 for each three minutes. (There are no government-mandated surcharges on international calls, which account for the lower prices.) Calls to Voice Over IP lines, including other So-net customers are free. Softbank mobile phones can also be free of charge with an add-on plan.

So-net has been providing broadband service in Japan since 1996 and is an aggressive user of optical fiber technology. The company says its new speeds may be even too fast for current wired home LAN technology, but claims faster broadband speeds also enable customers to share multiple devices within the home with absolutely no speed reductions from the shared connection.

So-net serves a densely populated region of Japan that consists of mostly multi-dwelling apartment units and condos and closely packed single family homes. It is not unusual for many urban Japanese homes to have almost no yard, with square lots accommodating a vehicle, storage shed, and little else. Wiring these densely populated communities helped Japan accelerate fiber deployment with more customers served per square kilometer than in countries like the United States or Canada.

[flv width=”640″ height=”323″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/So-net NURO Ad 4-13.flv[/flv]

So-net’s advertising campaign for its NURO fiber to the home service is opaque by western standards, avoiding details about the product, and is strangely presented in English. (2 minutes)

Virgin Media is in hot water with a UK advertising regulator after the company’s marketing department borrowed one of the tricks successfully employed in the United States: selling “unlimited broadband” service that actually is not unlimited at all.

Competitors BSkyB and BT jointly complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about misleading ad claims from Virgin Media that promise unlimited broadband, without bothering to clearly mention Virgin uses a “traffic management policy” that slashes speeds in half when a customer downloads more than 11GB during peak usage times.

Virgin defended its advertising, claiming its speed throttle is so infrequently activated that 97.7% of its customers would never encounter it.

But the ASA would have none of that, noting Virgin’s advertising campaign specifically targets customers who lust for faster speed and are engaged in bandwidth intensive activities.

The ad claim: “The faster your broadband speed, the more you’ll be able to do online. So, if there are a few of you at home gaming, downloading, streaming movies and shopping, then mega speeds of up to 100Mbps will let you all do your thing without slowing each other down.”

The tiny fine print.

“In that context we considered that the restriction of reducing users’ download speeds by 50% was not moderate and that any reference to it was likely to contradict, rather than clarify, the claims that the service was ‘unlimited’,” the ASA said. “We therefore concluded that the claim ‘unlimited’ was misleading.”

A Virgin spokesperson explained the “unlimited” in the advertising actually referred to one’s ability to use their account as often as they like without worrying about overlimit fees.

“Unlike BT or Sky, all Virgin Media customers can download as much as they like, safe in the knowledge we’ll never charge them more.”

The ASA itself is not militant adhering to the dictionary definition of “unlimited” either.

The ASA, which previously banned more than two dozen Virgin ads for stretching the truth, ruled this one misleading as well because Virgin Media crossed the line imposing restrictions “that were more than moderate:”

While the claim “no hidden charges” made clear that users would not be charged for downloading or browsing, we considered that the inclusion of the claims “unlimited” and “no caps” implied that there were no other restrictions to the service, regardless of how much data users downloaded and browsed. Virgin Media’s traffic management policy reduced users’ download speeds by 50% if they exceeded certain data thresholds and we considered that this was an immoderate restriction to the advertised “unlimited” service. We therefore concluded that the claim “Unlimited downloads Download and browse as much as you like with no caps and no hidden charges” misleadingly implied that there were no provider-imposed restrictions on a customer’s ability to download data.

“The problem is that the service claims to be unlimited but is too limited,” comments Stop the Cap! reader James, who almost thought this was an April Fools’ prank. “A little limited would be just fine. So if you claim your service is unlimited, consumers should expect it be subject to moderate limitations?”

Virgin has since slightly relaxed its speed throttle; violators now face a 40% speed cut when they are found to be downloading “too much” during peak usage periods.

For UK broadband users, the larger question is why the ASA simply didn’t reach for the dictionary when attempting to define “unlimited.”

“If a broadband provider wants to advertise unlimited service, they should simply offer it,” says Stop the Cap! reader Geoff Peale. “Calling it unlimited while interfering with your speed is nothing short of trickery, and the ASA should know better.”

[flv width=”384″ height=”236″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/BBC News Twenty five Virgin Media ads found to be misleading 10-11-12.flv[/flv]

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned 25 Virgin Media adverts for being either misleading or factually incorrect in the past 18 months. The BBC’s Watchdog took a humorous look at them to find out why so many are falling afoul of the regulator. (6 minutes)

Thanks to readers James and Geoff for sharing the story.