AT&T has new wireless data plans you can’t afford.

Saving money takes a back seat to AT&T’s newest supersized Mobile Share data packages reported by The Verge. AT&T’s goal of monetizing data usage for their most ravenous wireless data users means a 900 percent price hike from the days of the company’s $30 unlimited data plan. Here are the newest plans:

• 30GB data usage = $300 a month
• 40GB data usage = $400 a month
• 50GB data usage = $500 a month

Unlimited texting and talking are included in these prices, but the individual device fees for each smartphone, tablet, or wireless modem are not.

AT&T’s pricing is relevant to rural customers who face an imminent threat of losing landline phone and broadband service should the phone company win the right to abandon its copper wire network in favor of wireless-only service. A family watching Netflix consuming 45GB of usage on AT&T’s DSL service pay as little as $15 a month for broadband. With AT&T’s wireless Internet service, that same family will spend a prohibitive $500 a month.

Dr. John Malone’s Liberty Media will buy a 27.3 percent interest in Charter Communications with a $2.62 billion investment in America’s fourth largest cable operator.

Liberty will buy the stake from investment firms Apollo Management, Crestview Partners, and Oaktree Capital Management.

“We are pleased with Charter’s market position and growth opportunities and believe that the company’s investments in its high-capacity digital network which provides digital HD and on demand television, high-speed data and voice, will benefit its customers and shareholders alike,” Malone said in a statement.

Malone is no stranger to the cable industry, having been at the helm of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), the largest cable operator in the country in the 1980s and 1990s. TCI systems were sold to AT&T in 1999, which eventually spun them off to Comcast and Charter Communications, which still run them today.

Dr. John Malone

Since Malone’s exit at TCI, he has been in charge of Liberty Global, which owns cable systems overseas and controls several U.S. cable programming interests through his Liberty Media operation. The investment in Charter represents Malone’s return to an American cable industry he helped pioneer.

The agreement requires Liberty to acquire no more than 35 percent of Charter until January 2016, at which point Liberty’s maximum allowable controlling interest rises to 39.99 percent. Liberty also wins four seats on Charter’s board of directors. But many industry analysts predict Malone will not be satisfied with anything less than eventual full control.

Malone often takes an initial minority interest in the companies he later intends to acquire outright. Macquarie analyst Amy Yong told Reuters he employed a similar tactic to gain control of SiriusXM, the satellite radio company.

“He’s probably going to have a pretty big say in the company’s future over the next few years. This will accelerate capital returns and take advantage of Charter’s tax assets to consolidate the cable industry some more,” Yong said.

Malone is attracted to investment opportunities in companies with high marketplace leverage opportunities and exploiting potential revenue from captive customers in the rural, less-competitive markets Charter has traditionally favored.

Here today, gone tomorrow: Bresnan Communications that was Optimum is now Charter Cable.

Malone also has a strong philosophy towards marketplace consolidation, something ongoing in the cable industry, particularly among smaller cable operators serving less-populated areas.

Under the leadership of ex-Cablevision executive Thomas Rutledge, Charter Communications recently acquired the interests of Cablevision West — former Bresnan Cable systems in the mountain west. Malone sees considerable opportunities expanding operations in smaller communities that have either received substandard cable service, or none at all.

Malone has recently been stockpiling available cash for investments, spinning off his former cable programming properties Starz, a premium cable channel, Discovery Communications, which runs the Discovery Networks, and Liberty Interactive, which owns the lucrative home shopping channel QVC.

Charter Communications has had a difficult history. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bought a controlling interest in the cable operator in the late 1990s, primarily because he saw cable broadband as a natural fit for his vision of a future wired America. Allen’s weighty investment was used to jump into a cable industry consolidation frenzy still underway more than a decade ago. Cable operators claimed consolidation was necessary to increase efficiency by building up regional clusters of cable systems. Before consolidation, it was not unusual for two or three different cable operators to serve customers in separate parts of a metropolitan area. Often one operator would serve the city with one or two other cable companies offering service in suburban and exurban communities nearby.

In 1999 alone, under Allen’s leadership, Charter Cable acquired 10 cable companies.

By 2005, Charter Cable had amassed millions of new subscribers, but not as many as company executives claimed when they artificially inflated subscriber numbers to protect the value of the company’s stock. Four executives were indicted that year for criminal accounting fraud. By 2009, with $22 billion in debt, the company declared bankruptcy, eventually wiping out shareholders.

The court’s decision to forgive 40 percent of the company’s debt angered creditors but opened an opportunity for private equity firm Apollo Capital Management to gain control by ending up with the majority of shares in the restructured company.

For years, the company has continued to receive some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings in the industry, usually ranking at or near the bottom. But many Charter customers stay because there is little competition from other players, especially telephone companies. AT&T’s U-verse is the most likely triple-play competitor, but AT&T has avoided introducing U-verse in many of Charter’s service areas because they are deemed too small.

Malone sees Charter’s future revenue potential grow as a broadband provider, considered both a money-maker and must-have service. Analysts say that Charter is well-positioned to poach more customers from phone companies, which typically only offer slow DSL service in much of Charter’s rural footprint.

Gore: Malone is the Darth Vader of cable.

But customers may find with Malone’s involvement, that service may come at a price. Malone was criticized heavily in the 1980s and 1990s for leading the charge for customer rate increases. TCI’s captive customers in Tennessee found their cable bills increased between 71-116 percent in just three years during the 1980s.

Former Sen. Al Gore, Jr., at the time called Malone the head of a “Cable Cosa Nostra” and the Darth Vader of big cable. The cable executive was a frequent target of lawmakers flooded with constituent complaints about poor cable service and accelerating prices.

In 1999, The Guardian noted Malone was an admirer of telecom oligopolies:

He is scathing about regulatory attempts to prevent monopolies and mergers. Governments, he says, are “antediluvian” in their approach to the emerging new world economic order. Instead of trying to prevent mergers and collusion between media and communications companies, Malone says governments should actually promote the creation of “super-corporations” (such as his own) with enough capital to exploit the potential of new technology.

That attitude may soon be back in play with the cable industry’s increasing focus on expanding broadband service as their new primary revenue generator.

Bright House Networks first boosted Internet speeds in January and is now back with a price boost.

The cable provider’s Turbo High Speed Internet increased earlier this year from 20 to 30Mbps for downloads. Its Lightning tier went up even more — from 40 to 60Mbps. Even Business Class customers saw speed increases to 70Mbps. But now prices are up as well — as much as $5 a month more for “upgraded broadband services,” a higher cable modem rental fee, and $3 more for television packages:

• Standard Cable TV service is up $3, from $65 to $68 a month
• Late fees are increasing by an extra $0.50;
• The cable modem rental fee that used to be $2 a month has increased an additional $1.50 — now $3.50 per month.

Price increases will not affect customers on promotional offers or certain bundled service packages combining multiple services.

The fee that bugs many customers the most is the company’s modem rental fee, which applies regardless of the age of your equipment.

“I told the customer service rep that I’ve had this modem for a couple of years and it’s not like altered or improved,” Pete Dooley of Satellite Beach, Fla. told Florida Today. “She said ‘You know the economy is today. They just needed more money.’ I guess you’re just supposed to casually accept it.”

The rest of the rate increases were attributed to the cost of cable television programming.

Jeff Kagan, a cable industry analyst told the online news service cable television rates have roughly doubled over the last decade.

Windstream Communications is under investigation by the Governor’s Office of Consumer Protection because of allegations the company is advertising broadband speeds and performance the company simply cannot deliver its customers in Georgia.

A Windstream employee in a company retail office in Dawsonville told an undercover CBS Atlanta photographer that the company can offer Internet speeds up to 24Mbps. He guaranteed service no slower than 6 to 12Mbps. But Mark Creekmore, who lives in Dawsonville, reports his speeds sometimes barely reach 1Mbps during the afternoons.

Duane Hartness, a Windstream customer, says Windstream has oversubscribed their service by continuing to sell broadband on a network that is overcrowded as-is, which slows speeds for every customer.

“Every customer they add to their oversubscribed DSLAM increases their revenue while further degrading your bandwidth,” Hartness said. “Lacking competition, they can ignore any and all complaints.”

Creekmore wants every Windstream customer in Georgia that is dissatisfied with their broadband service to file complaints with the state agency.

“The more complaints, the more likely the Office of Consumer Protection is to take action,” Creekmore said. “Please make sure to include that you are not getting what you are paying for and any other personal detail that would help them understand what you have gone through. If you have had multiple communications with Windstream, please include those details as well. In short, the more detail the better.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WGCL Atlanta Windstream Exposed for Not Providing Speeds Promised 3-7-13.mp4[/flv]

WGCL — CBS Atlanta reports there are new developments in Georgia regarding Windstream: It is under investigation by the governor’s office for misleading subscribers with broadband speeds the company cannot actually deliver.  (3 minutes)

The FCC finds Windstream is the worst of the worst among DSL providers, only giving customers advertised speeds 81 percent of the time. AT&T, Georgia’s largest phone company, doesn’t do much better.

Windstream is the worst-performing DSL provider in the country according to the Federal Communications Commission, with just 81 percent of customers getting the broadband speeds marketed.

After complaints about the company helped derail H.B. 282 — a bill Windstream heavily lobbied for that would have eliminated possible competition from community-owned providers — Windstream representatives quickly began promising upgrades.

“We’re asking our customers to be patient with us because we’re on it. We understand that they have issues and we’re working to upgrade their network,” Bettye Willis, a regional vice president at Windstream, told the CBS station in Atlanta.

Willis added Windstream was committed to solving its Internet speed problems, but not for everyone.

The company released this map showing planned service upgrades for “two-thirds of the communities it serves” in Georgia. But the company warned not everyone would receive improved service. For the remaining one-third, “take it or leave it” broadband service will continue.

Stop the Cap! has developed a sample e-mail message Georgia residents can use to petition the state legislature to vote NO on H.B. 282, the latest Big Telecom corporate welfare bill to kill competition from publicly-owned broadband networks. With thanks to Mark Creekmore, one of many rural Georgians suffering with DSL “service” from Windstream Communications, we have jointly created this letter to illustrate the folly of this bad bill. We may need to send this to members of the state Senate as well.

We realize many of you are served by AT&T, Comcast, or other rural providers, so this letter should be tailored to include the horror stories that you have experienced with your own provider. Make sure you change the relevant sections, including references to your local town’s provider (things that should be changed in your letter are highlighted in blue below) before sending your e-mail to House members today:

Dear Rep. -or- Sen.  [insert name]

I am writing to tell you that I do not support H.B. 282 — the Broadband Municipalities Act, and neither should you.

This proposed legislation is a solution in search of a problem. No community I know of gets interested in entering the broadband business on a whim. But when you live in a rural area served by a single provider that delivers poor service, as I do, it becomes understandable why some communities seek a public broadband solution as a last resort.

At its core, this is a bill designed to protect the broadband status quo at the cost of Georgia’s economic development and its citizens’ need for quality broadband service.

[Share several sentences here detailing the problems you have with your provider.]

Georgia has a long way to go to meet the broadband speeds available in cities like Chattanooga, Tenn. That city’s municipal power company offers 1,000Mbps service to residents that cannot buy those speeds from any other provider. That has attracted companies in this state to move to get the kind of service they just cannot get from our providers. Comcast and AT&T are hardly going out of business in Chattanooga and actually claim to welcome the competition. But things are much worse here in rural Georgia, where just getting 12Mbps service is a real challenge. That is because the local phone company has oversold its network and is too crowded, slowing speeds to a crawl. I’d welcome competition even more, but there just isn’t any.

Consider this: While Dawsonville suffers with Windstream’s oversubscribed DSL service as our only practical option, Thomasville residents can get 22Mbps of service over a fiber to the home network owned by the local community. Rose.net is hardly a financial failure either. It has been so successful, the city eliminated the local property tax. If you pass H.B. 282, Dawsonville will never have a chance, because no other provider is interested in serving us and the local community will never be able to because Windstream arguably already does.

If you believe H.B. 282 will stimulate rural broadband investment, you need to read Windstream CEO Jeff Gardner’s own statements during a February 2013 conference call to investors. He noted Windstream plans to cut capital expenses and investments this year and even more the next, including those made right here in Georgia. Gardner noted that Windstream’s rural customers are largely captive with no competitive alternatives, making extra investment unnecessary. That means we have to live with the service we are lucky enough to get at the high prices we are forced to pay. In effect, we are told to live with what we have or go without. This is an embarrassment to our state which boasts of its high-tech communications capability and is home to several major data centers.

The bill’s logic is also lacking. Private telecom companies enjoy the benefits of state taxpayer dollars in several ways, ranging from access to public rights of way to receiving federal stimulus dollars to incentivize rural broadband expansion. To date, Windstream’s only help for Georgia seems to be wiring 250 homes in Blue Ridge. If local communities decide they need a better broadband solution, allowing out-of-state corporations like Windstream to tie their hands and dictate terms is an outrage. We have been here before in the last century when giant electric utilities refused to provide adequate service in rural Georgia, so those communities managed it themselves with municipal utilities.

It is clear to me, despite a few inadequate revisions to the bill since its introduction, H.B. 282 is a disaster for Georgia’s telecommunications future. It is little more than protectionism for incumbent providers who will continue to treat rural Georgians like second class citizens, delivering service that falls far below what was advertised, yet costing the same as big city folks pay. If my community decides it is essential for our future to do better than what Windstream is willing to offer, making the town work through an expensive qualification process analyzing census blocks is nothing more than a deterrent to keep them from even trying.

With all the problems we face in Georgia today, spending time protecting Windstream from competition is not on my list and it certainly should not be on yours.

I respectfully ask you reject H.B. 282 in full, regardless of current or future revisions. The next time a telecommunications company comes by your office to lobby you on bills like this, let them know the best way they can protect themselves from municipal broadband is to deliver the good service Georgians deserve at a fair price. If they manage that, there would be no demand to build these alternative networks in the first place.

I look forward to hearing your views on this critical matter to me.

Respectfully,

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