Love can be a fickle thing.

Take Comcast’s affair with J.D. Power & Associates, for example. In Comcast’s filings with regulators, it is very proud that J.D. Power cited Comcast for the most improvement of any cable operator scored by the survey firm. Comcast touted the fact it had managed to increase its TV satisfaction score by a whopping 92 points and Internet satisfaction was up a respectable 77 points. (Comcast didn’t mention the fact J.D. Power rates companies on a 1,000 point scale or that it took the cable company four years to eke out those improvements.)

Last month, J.D. Power issued its latest ranking of telecommunications companies and… well, the love is gone.

If customer alienation was an Olympic event, J.D. Power awarded tie gold medals to both Comcast and Time Warner Cable for their Kafkaesque race to the bottom.

The survey of customer satisfaction largely found only dissatisfaction everywhere in the country J.D. Power looked. While Comcast likes to cite its “customer-oopsies-gone-viral” blunders as “isolated incidents,” J.D. Power finds them epidemic nationwide.

The highest rating across television and broadband categories achieved by either cable company was ‘Meh.’ J.D. Power diplomatically scored both cable companies on a scale that started with “among the best” as simply “the rest.” Customers in the west were the most charitable, those in the south and eastern U.S. indicated they were worked to their last nerve.

“The ability to provide a high-quality experience with all wireline services is paramount as performance and reliability is the most critical driver of overall satisfaction,” said Kirk Parsons, senior director of telecommunications, in a statement.

Having competition available from a high-scoring provider also demonstrates what is possible when a company actually tries to care about customer service. In the same regions Comcast fared about as popular as hemorrhagic fever, WOW! Cable and Verizon FiOS easily took top honors. Even AT&T U-verse scored far higher than either cable company, primarily because AT&T offers very aggressive promotional packages that include a lot for a comparatively low price.

Other cable and smaller phone companies didn’t do particularly well either. Frontier and CenturyLink both earned dismal scores and Charter Cable only managed modest improvement. The two satellite television companies did fine in customer satisfaction for television service, but it was the two biggest phone companies that managed the best scores for Internet service. Among cable operators, only independents like WOW! (and to a lesser extent Cox) did well in the survey.

If J.D. Power is the arbiter of good service Comcast seems to claim it to be, the ratings company just sent a very clear message that when it comes to merging Comcast and Time Warner Cable, anything multiplied by zero is still zero.

J.D. Power ranking (Image courtesy: Reviewed.com)

More people will read this story than Atlantic Broadband has current customers for its 1Gbps broadband project in Miami.

“Atlantic Broadband is proud to be the first company to deliver 1 Gigabit Internet service to its customers here in the Miami Beach area,” said David Keefe, Atlantic Broadband’s senior vice president and general manager of the South Florida region. “While other companies are talking about what they will be doing, Atlantic Broadband moved forward and started offering this service in one of its communities. We look forward to extending access to our Gigabit Internet service to other properties and communities within our Miami footprint.”

Although Mr. Keefe isn’t being modest, his company’s gigabit broadband coverage area certainly is.

At present, the company serves just 40 properties with the super high-speed broadband service in high-income Indian Creek Village — the 8th richest community in the United States.

The tiny village of Indian Creek, in the Miami-Dade area, is made up of 40 properties and is the 8th richest community in the U.S.A.

Designed to appeal to residents who can spare no expense, the Atlantic Broadband package also includes more than 350 TV channels powered by TiVo, integrated access to Netflix, and unlimited phone service for up to four lines.

An Atlantic Broadband spokesperson wouldn’t reveal the price of the package, and admitted customers cannot choose standalone broadband-only service.

“The needs of Indian Creek Village were unique so custom service packages were created that include all of Atlantic Broadband’s TV services, Gigabit Internet and four phone lines,” a spokeswoman told Multichannel News. “Currently, there is not a published a standalone price for Gigabit Internet.”

Residents in the wealthy enclave include Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima, Spanish singer Julio Iglesias, his son Enrique Iglesias, Robert Diener, co-founder of Hotels.com, Edward Lampert, hedge fund billionaire and owner of what is left of Kmart and Sears, Don Shula, retired football coach, Charles Bartlett Johnson, mutual fund billionaire, billionaire investor Carl Icahn and former Philadelphia Eagles owner and billionaire art collector Norman Braman.

Other famous residents both past and present have included Beyoncé and Jay-Z, pro golfer Raymond Floyd, coach Rick Pitino, U.S. Senator George Smathers, Sheik Mohammed al Fassi, television host Don Francisco, co-founder of Calvin Klein Barry Schwartz, radio magnate Raul Alarcon, coal and oil executive, heiress and philanthropist Suzie Linden, Arthur I. Appleton, President of Appleton Electric Company and founder of the Appleton Museum of Art and Bridlewood Farm, and his wife Martha O’Driscoll a former Hollywood actress.

Atlantic Broadband has not ripped out classic cable infrastructure for its less-well-to-do customers outside of the village in the Miami-Dade area and relies on RF over Glass technology for its network extensions. That allows the company to keep its legacy equipment in place while giving some residents access to fiber and others traditional coaxial cable.

Atlantic serves an island of customers in the Miami Beach area, but most of Miami gets its cable service from Comcast. Competitor AT&T has promised fiber upgrades and gigabit speeds for its own customers in the Hialeah, Hollywood, Homestead, Opa-Locka, and Pompano Beach areas, but no time frame has been announced for the upgrade.

Atlantic Broadband will have one advantage over AT&T U-verse. It does not have usage caps.

Atlantic Broadband serves around 230,000 residential and business subs in western Pennsylvania, Miami Beach, Maryland/Delaware, and Aiken, S.C. It is owned by Cogeco Cable of Canada.

Staff at the New York regulator overseeing the state’s telecommunications companies have determined that some Time Warner Cable customers will see their largest rate increase in New York history — more than double their current rate — if Comcast is successful in its bid to acquire Time Warner Cable.

At issue is Time Warner Cable’s heavily promoted ‘buy only what you need’ Every Day Low Price Internet service, which offers 2Mbps service for $14.99 a month.

Comcast has no plans to continue the discount offering, which means Internet customers will pay more than twice as much for Comcast’s cheapest Internet package available to all customers — Economy Plus (3Mbps), priced at $39.99 a month and only available at that price if you also subscribe to Comcast telephone or television service.

Time Warner Cable’s cheapest television package is priced at $8-20 a month. Comcast’s least-expensive TV package costs $17-20 a month.

“Time Warner’s lowest-priced offerings… represent choices for New York consumers,” Public Service Commission staff wrote in an Aug. 8 filing in the case, noted Albany’s Times-Union. “Any loss of these services would likely result in consumers paying more.”

Comcast denies it will raise prices for New Yorkers or any other Time Warner Cable customer, but noted it needs to study the “significant competition that it faces” before making any decisions on prices. When Comcast discovers Verizon FiOS isn’t providing much of a competitive threat in areas unreached after Verizon stalled its expansion efforts and AT&T U-verse and other telco broadband offerings cannot keep up with cable broadband speeds, they might assume they don’t face that much competition after all.

There is a way out for AT&T U-verse customers stuck dealing with the company’s arbitrary 250GB monthly usage cap — sign up with U-verse reseller DSL Extreme for the same Internet access with no usage caps whatsoever.

Today, DSL Extreme announced the introduction of trueSTREAM in 21 states serviced by AT&T’s U-verse fiber to the neighborhood system. Much like Earthlink’s reseller agreement with Time Warner Cable, customers can transparently switch between the two providers and receive essentially the same service at a different price point.

The biggest selling point of trueSTREAM is that it has absolutely no usage limits.

DSL Extreme has signed a contract with AT&T to offer the service in states including California, Texas, Illinois, and Florida, among many others.

Customers don’t need to have a phone line to subscribe. They will need to lease a wireless gateway router ($6.50/mo) from DSL Extreme and the rate plans are similar to AT&T’s own U-verse broadband offerings:

• Value ($17.95/mo) 768/384kbps
• Plus ($22.95/mo) 1.5Mbps/384kbps
• Pro ($27.95/mo) 3Mbps/512kbps
• Elite ($32.95/mo) 6Mbps/768kbps
• Max ($37.95/mo) 12/1Mbps
• Max Plus ($42.95/mo) 18/1.5Mbps
• Max Turbo ($52.95/mo) 24/3Mbps
• Power ($62.95/mo) 45/6Mbps
• Power Plus ($92.95/mo) 75/8Mbps

Professional installation is now free of charge and an optional one-year contract delivers other extras, such as a static IP address. A Supplier Surcharge Recovery fee of $2.88 per month applies. Customers can pre-qualify on the company’s website.

The coverage area of trueSTREAM will extend the company’s reach overnight to 30 million potential customer locations, growing to nearly 60 million by 2015.

Just one technician can bring Time Warner Cable to its knees.

Time Warner Cable broadband and on-demand television services were unavailable for about three hours this morning after routine maintenance turned into a nationwide outage that affected early risers trying to go online.

Things began to go wrong at around 4:30am ET when Time Warner Cable Internet connections began dropping across the country. The problems also affected on-demand viewing for Time Warner Cable TV customers and brought down Time Warner Cable’s own website.

The company blamed a problem with their backbone connection during routine maintenance. The company said it schedules such work for the very early morning hours to minimize customer disruptions. But once alarm clocks on the east coast began ringing, customers discovered they had no Internet service.

The outage persisted until around 6am ET, although some customers were not back online until after 7am.

Although complaints about Time Warner Cable began flooding social media networks as the sun went up, customers also used the outage as an opportunity to oppose the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. The outage demonstrates that a single technician making a mistake at one of the nation’s largest cable companies can disable services for millions.

Virtually every provider experiences a significant outage affecting many or most of their customers at least once a year:

This outage map depicts this morning’s service disruption at Time Warner Cable.

• 10 months ago, Comcast’s heavily promoted X1 platform suffered a national outage lasting three hours;
• In 2012, Comcast suffered a nationwide e-mail outage also lasting approximately three hours;
• AT&T U-verse went down across the country in April for more than four hours;
• Even wireless isn’t perfect: In 2012, Verizon Wireless suffered a national 4G LTE outage lasting nearly four hours.

Time Warner Cable will credit you for their outage, but only if you ask:

• Phone: 855-225-7898
• Complete the menu options to launch an Online Chat
• E-Mail: [email protected]

Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised an investigation in a statement issued Wednesday:

Today’s widespread internet outage that has apparently impacted more than 11 million customers at Time Warner – which is based in New York – is a stark reminder that our economy is increasingly dependent on a reliable broadband network. That is one of the reasons why I pushed for a stronger standard of review for cable company mergers earlier this year.

I have directed the New York State Department of Public Service to investigate this outage as part of its review of Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner. The Department will also review whether the outage affected Time Warner’s provision of telephone service in any way. In addition, the Department will include its analysis of this event in its ongoing study of the telecom industry, which is exploring potential changes to the regulatory landscape pertaining to telephone, internet and cable. Dependable internet service is a vital link in our daily lives and telecommunications companies have a responsibility to deliver reliable service to their customers.