Time Warner Cable customers in the Dallas Metroplex will soon see broadband speeds rise as high as 300Mbps as the company’s Maxx upgrade project arrives, bringing along a metropolitan-wide Wi-Fi network available at no charge to Time Warner Cable broadband customers.

The first noticeable presence of the Wi-Fi expansion will be found at area businesses as Time Warner recruits commercial broadband customers to host its hotspots. As spring arrives, the company will accelerate the installation of Wi-Fi antennas around the metropolitan region.

Home Maxx upgrades will deliver dramatically faster broadband speeds at no extra charge:

• Standard 15Mbps service rises to 50/5Mbps;
• Turbo is boosted from 20Mbps to 100/10Mbps;
• Extreme increases from 30/5 to 200/20Mbps;
• Ultimate, formerly 50/5 is increased to 300/20Mbps.

Existing customers will also be able to swap out their existing DVR boxes for a new Arris Enhanced DVR offering six tuners and a 1TB internal drive.

Because the conversion will drop analog channels, Time Warner Cable is offering free Digital Transport Adapters through April 21, 2016, as long as customers order the boxes by Aug 19. Many Time Warner Cable customers may end up avoiding charges for the DTA equipment even after that. Several packages from Time Warner waive the DTA fees.

The official list of metro Dallas locations getting the Maxx upgrade includes:

Addison, Allen, Arlington, Bedford, Carrollton, Cedar Hill, Cockrell Hill, Colleyville, Commerce, Coppell, Dallas, DeSoto, Double Oak, Euless, Farmers Branch, Farmersville, Flower Mound, Frisco, Garland, Grand Prairie, Grapevine, Greenville, Highland Village, Hutchins, Irving, Kennedale, Lancaster, Lewisville, McKinney, Mesquite, Murphy, Pantego, Plano, Princeton, Richardson, Rockwall, Rowlett, Sachse, St. Paul, Sunnyvale, The Colony and Wylie.

Dallas faces imminent competition from AT&T U-verse upgrades.

Cox Communications is planning to expand its gigabit residential broadband service in Phoenix and Omaha and will be increasing the speeds of its cheapest Internet tiers to stay competitive with CenturyLink’s discounted DSL.

A source inside Cox told Broadband Reports the speed changes will begin later this month and will take about six weeks to reach all of Cox’s service areas across the country.

• Starter Internet ($34.99 – 50GB usage cap), now offering 1Mbps/384kbps will increase to 5/1Mbps;
• Essential Internet ($48.99 – 100GB usage cap), now 5/1Mbps will be increased to 15/2Mbps.

Cox also offers Internet Preferred ($66.99 – 250GB usage cap) offering 50/5Mbps and Internet Premier ($77.99 – 300GB usage cap) with 100/10Mbps. Some markets also offer Internet Ultimate ($99.95 – 400GB usage cap) with 150/20Mbps service.

The company’s gigabit plan, Gigablast, is being sold for $99 a month ($70 if bundled with cable television). It has a 1TB usage cap. For now, the service is delivered to a very limited number of homes (about 5,000) over special fiber connections serving primarily wealthy enclaves and new housing developments. The bulk of Cox’s gigabit service expansion this year is expected to cover about 150,000 homes where additional fiber service will be deployed. But most Cox customers will only see the fastest speeds made available in 2016 when DOCSIS 3.1 will allow Cox to use its existing coaxial cable infrastructure to deliver super fast speeds.

Cox customers who exceed their usage allowance are usually warned by letter and asked to upgrade to a higher tier of service. But Stop the Cap! readers who subscribe to Cox tell us the company usually backs off if you threaten to cancel service over the matter.

Verizon’s FiOS expansion is still dead.

Verizon Communications signaled today it plans further cuts in investments for its wireline network, which includes traditional copper-based telephone service and DSL as well as its fiber-optic network FiOS.

“We will spend more CapEx in the wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the wireline side,” Verizon’s chief financial officer Fran Shammo told investors this morning. “Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS.”

Instead of expanding its FiOS fiber to the home network to new areas, Verizon is trying to increase its customer base in areas previously wired. It is less costly to reconnect homes previously wired for FiOS compared with installing fiber where copper wiring still exists.

Verizon continues to lose traditional landline customers, so the company is increasingly dependent on FiOS to boost wired revenue. The fiber network now accounts for 77% of Verizon’s residential wireline revenue.

Wherever FiOS exists, it has taken a significant number of customers away from cable competitors. FiOS Internet has now achieved 41.1% market penetration, with 6.6 million customers, up 544,000 from last year. Of those, the majority want broadband speeds they were not getting from the cable company. At the end of 2014, 59% of FiOS Internet customers subscribe to broadband speeds above 50Mbps, up from 46% at the end of 2013.

Despite the success of FiOS, Verizon’s senior management continues to devote more attention to its highly profitable Verizon Wireless division, spending an even larger proportion of its total capital investments on wireless services.

In 2014, Verizon spent $17.2 billion on capital expenditures, an increase of 3.5% over 2013. But only $5.8 billion was spent on maintaining and upgrading Verizon’s landline and FiOS networks, down 7.7% over 2013. Verizon Wireless in contrast was given $10.5 billion to spend in 2014. The company is using that money to add network density to its increasingly congested 4G LTE network. In many cities, Verizon Wireless is activating its idle AWS spectrum to share the traffic load and is accelerating deployment of small cell technology and in-building microcells to deal with dense traffic found in a relatively small geographic area — such as in sports stadiums, office buildings, shopping centers, etc.

Verizon Wireless is branding its network expansion “XLTE,” which sounds to the uninitiated like the next generation LTE network. It isn’t. “XLTE” simply refers to areas where expanded LTE bandwidth has been activated. Unfortunately, many Verizon Wireless devices made before 2014 will not benefit, unable to access the extra frequencies XLTE uses.

With Verizon increasing the dividend it pays shareholders, the company is also cutting costs in both its wired and wireless divisions:

• Verizon Wireless’ 3G data network will see a growing amount of its available spectrum reassigned to 4G data, which is less costly to offer on a per megabyte basis. As Verizon pushes more 4G-capable devices into the market, 3G usage has declined. But the reduced spectrum could lead to speed slowdowns in areas where 3G usage remains constant or does not decline as quickly as Verizon expects;
• Verizon will push more customers to use “self-service” customer care options instead of walking into a Verizon store or calling customer service;
• The company will continue to move towards decommissioning its copper wire network, especially in FiOS areas. Existing landline customers are being encouraged to switch to FiOS fiber, even if they have only landline service. Copper maintenance costs are higher than taking care of fiber optic wiring;
• Verizon has accelerated the closing down of many central switching offices left over from the landline era. As the company sells the buildings and property that used to serve its network, Verizon’s property tax bill decreases;
• Verizon will continue cutting its employee headcount. Shammo told investors in December, Verizon Communications cut an extra 2,300 employees that took care of its wired networks.

New York will see at least $1 billion in investments to expand and improve rural broadband in upstate New York to bring Internet access to every home in the state by 2019, if the state legislature approves the budget for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New-New York Broadband Program.

New York Lieutenant Gov. Kathy Hochul traveled to the North Country to unveil the spending plan in the broadband-challenged Adirondack region.

“Governor Cuomo’s program will be the largest universal broadband deployment in the nation,  investing up to one billion dollars in both public and private resources to connect every New Yorker to high-speed Internet,” Hochul told the audience. “With a state investment of $500 million in capital funds from bank settlements the program will incentivize the private sector to expand high-speed broadband access to under-served New Yorkers. The plan will elevate broadband speeds in under-served areas to previously unheard levels including a minimum speed of 100Mbps, more than ten times the federal definition of broadband.”

New York’s newest broadband initiative comes courtesy of an unexpected windfall of more than $5 billion in legal settlements with crooked banks and mortgage companies that defrauded state residents and helped trigger the Great Recession.

At least $500 million of the settlement fund would be set aside for broadband expansion, with providers required to match any funds received from the state. Time Warner Cable is likely to be awarded a significant percentage of the money, used to expand cable infrastructure into sparsely populated areas that have never met the company’s Return On Investment requirements.

The Cuomo Administration expects little opposition to the plan, because the bulk of the broadband money would be spent in Republican-controlled rural districts and won’t come from taxpayers’ pockets.

Hochul

Republican assemblyman Dan Stec’s 114th district is a case in point. Hamilton County has little or no access to broadband service and Stec’s constituents in nearby Essex, Saratoga, Washington and Warren counties have spotty coverage. He’s thrilled the state will likely spend money on broadband in his district.

“There are towns in my district that don’t have good access to the Internet,” Stec said. “Moms and dads will drive their son or daughter and park in the parking lot of the public library or park in the parking lot of Town Hall to access a broadband wireless connection. That’s crazy.  It’s nice to see the governor making the infrastructure investment that needs to be made in the North Country and frankly in all of upstate.”

Although speaking in the Adirondacks, the former congresswoman turned lieutenant governor said there are plenty of areas in western New York that also desperately need broadband access. Regional economic development committees will be responsible for identifying the most broadband-challenged areas where funding should be prioritized.

“I had [served] seven counties including Wyoming, Livingston, Ontario, Niagara, and Genesee,” Hochul said, referring to parts of the 26th Congressional District between the cities of Buffalo and Rochester she lost in the 2012 election. “The Southern Tier has challenges as well. We have a map that shows the areas which do not have the access and so we know where to have a laser focus on increasing that availability. We know New York City is in good shape. The urban areas are in good shape. So this is very much a rural initiative.”

Despite the unlikely case for any significant broadband funding headed downstate, the governor is attempting to carefully balance his overall spending initiatives between upstate and New York City, the latter now demanding a larger share of the settlement money for downstate. To avoid a budget battle between the two regional factions, Gov. Cuomo intends to bundle his spending programs together in a package presented to the state legislature as part of today’s State of the State address.

New York’s latest Broadband Availability Map, excluding well-covered downstate regions – Areas in white have no broadband access.

“He’s going to present them as part of a package: the New York State Opportunity for All program,” said Hochul. “This is one of the most significant announcements he’s going to make because it’s going to affect the lives of so many millions of people in our state. In this day and age the fastest road to opportunity is the information highway. Probably the comparable analogy would be the interstate highway system back in the 1950’s. That was able to connect communities and enhance commerce. It was transformative. It was essential in its day. That’s the opportunity that lies before us.”

Ironically, the state-funded initiative is likely to deliver faster broadband to rural New York than their more urban neighbors receive. Under the program, grant recipients will have to pledge to deliver at least 100Mbps speeds to customers, except in the most rural areas where the minimum speed requirement will be set at 25Mbps, with upgrades to come later. Most urban residents receive between 3-10Mbps DSL from Verizon or Frontier Communications and 10-15Mbps from Time Warner Cable, the largest cable company in the state. Verizon FiOS delivers even faster broadband to customers in New York City and Long Island, and selected suburbs in Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany.

Providers will be encouraged to use state-owned institutional fiber networks, including one laid along the length of the New York State Thruway, and other government infrastructure wherever possible. That is likely to mean fiber broadband will constitute a major part of the initiative. That pleased the Fiber to the Home Council, which advocates for fiber to the home broadband service.

“The [council] commends Governor Andrew Cuomo on an ambitious plan to hit 100 Mbps in every New York home by Jan. 1, 2019,” read a statement from the Council. “This $500 Million investment into the NYS Broadband Program Office will make high-speed Internet affordable in underserved communities by incentivizing private investment, something the FTTH Council strongly supports.”

The state’s chief digital officer Rachel Haot claimed New York is doing more than any other state to invest in high-speed broadband.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/2015 Opportunity Agenda NY Statewide Broadband Access for Every New Yorker 1-16-15.mp4[/flv]

Upstate New York officials discuss the broadband problems in rural New York and how they spent years trying to get attention in a state where government is often focused primarily on the interests of New York City. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul announces a $1 billion statewide broadband improvement program. (44:42)