Winston-Salem Time Warner Cable customers can expect to pay around 4% more for cable service in 2012.

Time Warner Cable’s annual rate increases have now reached the Carolinas.

The company is mailing letters to customers that announce rate hikes for off-contract clients in the $2-4 a month range, including price increases for Road Runner broadband that will now cost between $49.45-$57.95 a month.

“Our new prices reflect dramatically higher programming costs, additional programming and features, and continued investment in our network and customer service,” said Time Warner spokesman Scott Pryzwansky. “Time Warner Cable invested more than $350 million in capital in the Carolinas over the past year to make our network even more robust and to enable our customers to get the services and features they want.”

The company also invested heavily in lobbying lawmakers to keep community-owned broadband competition at bay, helping pass a measure through the Republican-controlled legislature that makes municipal broadband competition much more unlikely.

The result is another year of unfettered rate increases for customers in cities like Winston-Salem:

• Cable TV increases from $10.23 to $11.49 for broadcast basic, $64.99-$69.49 for standard analog service, $80.99-$85.49 for digital cable;
• Broadband increases from $47.95 to $49.45 for customers who also have digital cable, $52.95 to $55.95 for customers with any other tier of cable TV, $57.95 for standalone broadband service;
• Telephone rates are unchanged.

Customers can avoid some of the price increases through creative bundling, threatening to take your business elsewhere, or by signing up for alternative providers:

1. Customers on discounted promotional packages, retention deals, and term contracts will not face the rate increases until their promotional rates or contract expires;
2. If you are unhappy with the rate increase, consider calling Time Warner and telling them to cancel your service 1-2 weeks from today’s date.  Then wait for them to start calling you with promotional “win-back” offers that deliver at least a year of substantial savings off regular rates;
3. If you are a broadband standalone customer, consider signing up for Earthlink under their six-month promotion for just under $30 a month.  You will continue to be billed by Time Warner Cable and receive the same speeds and service with two exceptions: no PowerBoost (a temporary speed increase during the first few seconds of downloading), and you lose your Road Runner e-mail address (which you are not actually still using, are you?)  Get a Gmail account, don’t worry about speed gimmicks, and save $28 a month.  At the end of six months, sign up for Time Warner’s Road Runner service under their promotional rate, which is around $30 a month for a year.  Total savings over the 18 month combined promotional rate term: $504!

More than two years after Time Warner introduced DOCSIS 3 speed upgrades in New York, Time Warner is finally completing broadband upgrades for their customers in the Carolinas.  The latest cities scheduled to get the company’s Wideband (50/5Mbps) and Road Runner Extreme (30/5Mbps) services are Wilmington, Jacksonville and Morehead City. The new services will be available by early 2012.

Most customers in eastern North Carolina and parts of South Carolina still get Standard service speeds of 10Mbps download, 512kbps upload.  After the upgrade, a boost in upstream speeds to 1Mbps for Standard service customers is expected.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Save Rural Broadband Texas.flv[/flv]

For over 50 years, Valley Telephone Cooperative has provided telecommunications services to rural communities in South Texas. VTCI was among the first providers in the world to guarantee 100% of its customers access to DSL broadband and now the innovative co-op is doing right by their customers by delivering advanced fiber-to-the-home service to residents in Roma and Rio Grande City.  That is service folks in large Texas cities can’t count on getting from the biggest phone and cable companies around.  Cooperatives like VTCI deliver the innovation that big phone and cable companies simply don’t deliver to rural America.  (7 minutes)

Days after the citizens of Longmont, Col. turned their backs on an expensive lobbying and astroturf campaigned fueled (not by choice) by Comcast ratepayers, the so-called “community activists” opposed to the community using its own fiber network as it sees fit evaporated into dust, but not before one celebrating citizen took out a giant ad in the local Times-Call newspaper:

As Christopher Mitchell from Community Broadband Networks discovered, “citizen activism” has an expiration date when the industry money stops flowing:

If there had been a shred of local legitimacy among the “Look Before We Leap” group that was run by Denver-based strategists, it probably would have kept its website up for longer than a few days after the election. If I were them, I would want to keep a record for the future.

But they don’t. Because they were just a bunch of paid public relations people working a job. They didn’t oppose Longmont’s initiative, they didn’t know anything about it. They were collecting a paycheck.

And when the money ran out, the days of their website were numbered in the single digits.  The only thing left of lookbeforeweleap.org is a cached copy courtesy of Google.  (And by the way, Squarespace, the hosting company, wants the site owner to contact them.)

Americans for Prosperty's Phil Kerpen on Glenn Beck's show opposing Net Neutrality

Comcast’s propaganda campaign fooled no one.  Borrowing from the cable industry’s bag of old tricks, Look Before We Leap conflated Longmont’s fiber optic network with a few failed Wi-Fi projects run years earlier in concert with Earthlink in other states.

The editors at Times-Call had to respect Comcast and its merry band of dollar-a-holler followers for at least being bold.  After all, they tried to convince voters “that the city having control over its own property was somehow ‘risky.‘”  But of course the cable company would prefer Longmont stay out of the comfortable duopoly it has with phone company CenturyLink.

The newspaper had little time and patience for the antics of “Americans for Prosperity” either.  The hilariously misnamed group funded by large corporations to convince people to vote against their own best interests considers Net Neutrality and community broadband self-empowerment evidence of Marxism — at least that is what policy director Phil Kerpen said on Glenn Beck’s now defunct paranoia festival on Fox News Channel.

Longmont doesn’t put out the welcome mat for corporate influence peddlers.  Voters believe local government can be an effective steward of community resources, something Comcast subscribers don’t believe applies to a cable company that shovels hundreds of channels most people never watch and expects annual rate increases to help pay for them.

Times-Call’s Tony Kindelspire:

Ask a local businessperson how Longmont having its own electric utility is working out for them. We have some of the cheapest rates in the country.

It takes leadership to stand up against big business lobbyists to act on behalf of what you think is right, not what’s going to raise you the most amount of campaign cash the next time around. How very, very refreshing it was to see, and I hope it’s a lesson that spreads far and wide.

So do we.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas)

Republicans in the Senate are falling in line behind their colleagues in the House in voting to repeal the Federal Communications Commission’s anemic Net Neutrality rules.

Virtually every Republican in the Senate is expected to vote in support of a resolution introduced by outgoing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) that would strip the FCC of its authority to impose the new rules, which would prohibit Internet Service Providers from interfering in the free flow of Internet content across their networks.  Nearly every Democrat in the Senate is expected to oppose the Republican-backed measure in a vote expected later today.

Republicans serving at the FCC and in Congress claim the federal agency has no congressional mandate to oversee the Internet.  The agency itself under Chairman Julius Genachowski has refused to fully enable its authority by reclassifying the Internet as a telecommunications service.  Because the agency’s role to oversee the conduct of the country’s service providers is at issue, it has left the FCC in a grey area, with its authority challenged both politically and in the courts.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) claims Net Neutrality rules are completely unnecessary because providers have already promised they will not tamper with traffic and, in his words, “This is a another big government solution in search of a problem.”

Hutchison said enforcement of Net Neutrality would stall broadband Internet development.

“It will increase costs and freeze many of the innovations that have already occurred under our open Internet system,” she said in a statement.

Democrats like Sen. Maria Cantwell from Washington State think otherwise.

Cantwell pointed to Comcast’s secretive effort in 2007 to throttle the speeds of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic.  Comcast initially denied it was interfering with torrent traffic, until eventually admitting it was.  The FCC sought to fine Comcast for the practice, but the cable giant sued the FCC and won in federal court.  The judge in the case ruled the FCC didn’t appear to have the authority to regulate Internet traffic or impose the associated fine.

Cantwell believes sensible Net Neutrality policies will prevent further instances of provider interference.

“These providers think if [they] can control the pipe [they] can also control the flow,” Cantwell said. “Why allow telcos to run wild on the Internet charging consumers anything they want based on the fact that they have control of the switch?”

Reporters questioned Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller about Net Neutrality, noting the measure opposing FCC involvement won support from several House Democrats.

Rockefeller pointed to the universal support for the anti-Net Neutrality measure on the Republican side as evidence this has become a partisan political issue.  Rockefeller hopes his Democratic colleagues in the Senate will see it the same way.

“There’s still 53 of us [Democrats], and if we stay together we’ll win,” Rockefeller said. “I think we’re going to prevail.”

Should the measure pass, President Barack Obama indicated he will veto it.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/C-SPAN Net Neutrality 11-9-11.flv[/flv]

C-SPAN talks with National Journal reporter Josh Smith about Net Neutrality’s prospects and the background issues surrounding Net Neutrality.  (3 minutes)

Genachowski

The cable industry is expanding so-called “lifeline Internet service” to more households in an effort to combat what a government agency calls “a persistent digital divide.”

Next spring, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Charter Communications will launch low-speed Internet service for $9.95 a month for two years.  The offers will echo Comcast’s Internet Essentials, which launched earlier this year as part of a deal with the government to win approval of the cable company’s merger with NBC-Universal.

The Federal Communications Commission calls the effort “Connect to Compete,” and suggests the public-private initiative will help rural Americans and low-income minorities get affordable Internet access. A study by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration found just 55% of black households and 57% of Hispanics currently subscribe to broadband.  More than 72% of Caucasian households and more than 81% of Asian homes use broadband by comparison.  The rural southern states of Mississippi (52%), Arkansas (52%) and Alabama (56%) have the lowest broadband penetration rates in the country.  In contrast, more than 80% of Utah residents have broadband in their homes.

“In this difficult economy, we need everyone to be working together on solutions,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. “Broadband is a key to economic and educational opportunity and these kinds of commitments to close the digital divide are powerful.”

But not every poverty-stricken American will qualify for the discount programs.

Cable operators are following Comcast’s lead, restricting access to families with at least one school age child enrolled in the free school lunch program.  Customers must not have existing broadband service during the last 90 days and customers with past due balances cannot sign up.  Don’t have children or fell behind on your cable bill?  No discount Internet for you.

Pilot programs will be launched by each operator in around a dozen cities total starting next spring, with plans to roll programs out nationally by the start of the 2012 school year.  Broadband speeds, usage limits, and other fees were not disclosed.  Comcast’s Internet Essentials operates at 1.5Mbps with upload speeds up to 384kbps.

Comcast’s program sells a netbook computer loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition for around $150.  The $250 computers expected to be provided by Microsoft will include Windows 7 Home Premium operating system and Microsoft Office.  An additional vendor will sell refurbished computers to interested program participants for around $150.

The program will primarily reach urban residents who cannot afford current Internet service plans that are sold for $40-45 a month.  Rural residents are unlikely to benefit much because most cable operators do not deliver service in rural areas.

CenturyLink announced its own version of discounted DSL Internet in October to sell for $9.95 a month, but with numerous “gotcha” fees and surcharges.

One group unlikely to take advantage of the program: older householders, particularly those ages 65 and older, where just 45% have broadband at home.  The biggest reason the rest don’t?  They don’t believe they need the Internet at any cost.