If residents in rural Kentucky want Time Warner Cable to offer broadband service, they better be prepared to pay for it.

As Time Warner customers consider the company’s latest rate increases, which now include a $10 modem rental fee and an increasingly common $4.99 “Wi-Fi Fee” if you don’t use your own wireless router, there are other customers signing contracts for residential Internet service from Time Warner at prices as high as $410 a month.

Jack Prindle lives in the Big Bone community near Union, Ky., — close enough to Cincinnati to be a suburb, but rural enough to be bypassed for broadband. Two dozen of his neighbors live along a nine-tenths of a mile stretch of Big Bone Church Road, which isn’t exactly a priority for Time Warner Cable. The families have spent a decade trying to entice anyone to offer broadband Internet access. Insight Communications (Time Warner’s predecessor) and Cincinnati Bell have never shown much interest. Time Warner Cable, however, has been engaged in a type of cat and mouse game, offering service at ever-escalating prices only to change its mind at the last minute.

“Within the last year, I have signed contracts with Time Warner for Internet service starting at $300 a month, with a three-year contract, only to have them come back and raise it to $350 for five years, and then $410 a month with a commitment of five years,” Prindle wrote in the Community Recorder. “Then only to be told a month later they were not going to provide Internet. Others of the 24 have similar bizarre stories concerning Time Warner and Cincinnati Bell.”

“Prindle’s story is an example of what is wrong with rural broadband in the United States,” writes Cynthia Rawley, who shared the story with Stop the Cap! “Unchecked cable and phone companies get federal dollars and the benefit of a fake broadband map that has no relationship to reality, leaving many to believe there is no rural broadband problem to solve. But there is.”

Union, Ky.

Rawley points out the FCC’s official National Broadband Map shows the two dozen homes around Prindle are all provided 5-50Mbps broadband service by both Time Warner Cable and Cincinnati Bell, despite the fact neither offers any broadband service to anyone in the vicinity.

“Boone County Judge-executive Gary Moore wrote to inform the FCC of this error and failed to get a response,” Prindle noted. What bothers him even more is his tax dollars have paid to subsidize rural Internet service he cannot get at any price.

“Some basic research reveals that Time Warner has received millions of taxpayer dollars to provide broadband Internet in rural areas,” Prindle notes. “The commonwealth of Kentucky has given over $100 million to Internet providers alone to provide broadband Internet in rural areas alone. Opensecrets.org reports that Time Warner spent $4,950,000 in lobbying efforts of federal, state, and local governments in 2015. With this amount of money changing hands, the conspiracy theorists among us see a 20/20 episode coming.”

Prindle better have his rabbit ears ready to watch, because at the rate providers are not expanding rural broadband, he will have a long wait before being able to watch that 20/20 episode online.

Dear Readers,

It was another great year at Stop the Cap! and we are very grateful for our growing readership and your involvement in the fight against data caps and for better broadband.

Phillip Dampier

Since 2008, Stop the Cap! has exposed the lies about the need to limit your unlimited broadband. We tirelessly check what company executives tell their investors and Wall Street and what they tell consumers and the press about the successes and challenges providing broadband Internet access. The chasm between the two is wide. While companies like Comcast have spent years telling shifting stories that usage caps are not usage caps at all, that limits are needed to ensure fair access to broadband by all of its customers, and that usage-based billing is only designed to force heavy users to subsidize the investments Comcast makes in faster broadband, company officials tell Wall Street a much simpler (and honest) story: usage caps are about monetizing broadband usage to boost profits.

There has never been anything fair about “fair usage policies” for wired broadband. Rationing Internet usage at a time when fiber optic lines are being installed at a rate not seen since the dot.com boom and the arrival of the next generation standard for delivering broadband over cable television lines simply does not make sense. But it makes a lot of dollars.

Customers continue to make it quite clear to all who choose to listen: usage caps and the industry’s version of usage-based billing are both unacceptable.

Tens of thousands of complaints about usage caps arrived at the FCC in 2015, while the agency continued to drag its feet on a much-needed review of their impact on competition. “Cord cutting” is no longer just a theory. While providers openly engage in wound licking over video subscriber losses, they also quietly appreciate the fact they own the broadband pipes that their new online competitors depend on. Worried that Hulu, Netflix, and Sling TV are stealing your customers? With a crafty usage cap, customers learn soon enough the money “saved” cutting the cord will instead be spent covering overlimit fees incurred using broadband to watch television. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Comcast is by far the biggest menace we will fight in 2016. Their multi-year “experiment” in Internet rationing continues to spread like a virus into new markets, mostly in the deregulatory/hands-off states in the southern and western U.S. The “free market” paradise that was supposed to bring robust competition has too often brought higher bills and usage limits instead. To observers, Comcast’s decision to cap its customers in Chattanooga, Tenn., seems crazy. Comcast faces robust competition from EPB Fiber Optics and AT&T. EPB doesn’t cap its customers and AT&T U-verse wouldn’t dare. But Comcast has decided to cap anyway.

In 2015, consumers continued to despise Comcast (while also throwing Time Warner Cable under the bus for lousy service and high prices), despite CEO Brian Roberts’ reflexive promise he was solidly committed to improving Comcast’s image with customers. Capping customers’ usage while creating a $30-35 “insurance plan” to protect customers from Comcast’s overlimit fees would seem counter-intuitive, or at least ironic, to improving customer relations. Yet Roberts continues to tell investors with a straight face customer reaction to caps remains “neutral to slightly positive.” (Perhaps at the online equivalent of Mistress Raisin’s S&M Club, but likely nowhere else).

In addition to fighting usage caps, Stop the Cap! also taught consumers how to fight for a better deal. We attracted over two million visitors to Stop the Cap! in 2015, many looking to cut their cable and phone bills. We showed them how. These articles were among the most visited for 2015:

#5: How to Get a Better Deal for Verizon FiOS; $79.99 Triple-Play Offer With $300 Rebate Card (14 comments, originally published in December, 2013)

#4: How to Get Verizon Wireless’ 4G $30 Unlimited Use Hotspot Feature Added to Your Account (47 comments, originally published in July, 2011 and no longer timely)

#3: Source: FCC Will Get Serious About Data Caps if Comcast Moves to Impose Them Nationwide (149 comments, first appearing in May, 2015)

#2: Updated! How to Score a Better Deal From Time Warner Cable and Save Over $700 a Year: 2015 Edition (150 comments and first updated in March, 2015 and again over the summer)

#1: How to Score a Better Deal With AT&T U-verse; $28/Mo for 18Mbps, $33/Mo for 24Mbps (112 comments and originally published in December 2013)

Our audience is global. Most of our readers are located in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but we recorded visitors from 209 countries in 2015.

The interconnection wars between cable and phone companies and online video providers like Netflix also helped bring readers to Stop the Cap! In fact, our busiest day in 2015 came on June 23rd when 14,362 unique visitors arrived to read our story: AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable Implicated In Content Delivery Network Slowdowns.

In 2015, Stop the Cap! published 452 news stories. Since 2008, we’ve archived 4,494 original articles here.

How do people hear about us? The top five referring websites in 2015:

Once people hear about us, many become regular readers and participants. We recognize our top-five participants who frequent the comment section found at the bottom of every Stop the Cap! article:

#5: Limboaz, with 23 comments in 2015

#4: AC, with 27 comments

#3: BobinIllinois, with 27 comments

#2: Paul Houle, with 28 comments

#1: Joe V, with a whopping 67 comments in 2015.

Welcome to 2016. The fight continues.

We appreciate your financial support and you will find a donate button on the right that allows you to make contributions with a credit card or bank account. Stop the Cap! does not accept industry money and is fully funded with contributions from readers like you. Your donations allow us to subscribe to news-gathering and research services, pay costs to support this website, fund software upgrades, and help cover expenses involving testimony before regulatory bodies. Providers may be getting rich, but we certainly are not, which is why making a regular contribution to Stop the Cap! will make a big difference in how far we can take this fight.

Thanks for your support!

P.S. – You can follow breaking stories from us on Twitter (@stopthecap) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/stopthecap/). You can follow my own views on broadband and other matters via my Twitter account (@phillipdampier). We intend to beef up our social media presence this year so stay tuned!

Sincerely,

Phillip Dampier – Your Editor

Stop the Cap! has received a growing number of complaints from Comcast customers in Georgia who are paying the cable company an extra $35 a month to get back unlimited Internet access that is performing worse than ever before for online video streaming.

J.J. LaFrantz in North Druid Hills reports his Internet speed for streaming videos dropped from 60Mbps under Comcast’s usage cap regime to less than 20Mbps after agreeing to pay for Comcast’s unlimited use insurance plan.

“Right after I paid The Great Satan their extortion to get unlimited service back, my Internet speeds dropped,” LaFrantz tells Stop the Cap!

LaFrantz has been in touch with Comcast several times about the speed degradation, with each representative providing a different excuse:

It’s the cable modem. “Comcast loves to blame customer-owned equipment for Internet problems, urging the unknowing to pay endless rental fees for Comcast equipment that supposedly fixes everything,” said LaFrantz.

It’s the holidays. “With the kids home from school, apparently Comcast cannot manage to handle the strain, or so they seem to suggest,” said LaFrantz.

It’s everyone but Comcast. “If their speed test performs adequately enough for them, it is no longer their problem, it is yours.”

Mysteriously, after Comcast “reprogrammed” his cable modem, his speed returned to normal.

Jakfrist posted a similar complaint on Reddit after he signed up for Comcast’s $35 insurance plan:

The speed test shows slower than I am paying for but still a reasonable speed but videos that previously started instantly are now saying I have to wait an hour to start so it can buffer out (iTunes Movies on AppleTV).

Like LaFrantz, a call to Comcast eventually led to the company reprogramming Jakfrist’s modem, which also made the video streaming issues disappear:

How much will your next broadband bill be?

After calling Comcast the first guy had no clue what I was talking about and I got escalated to another guy. The new guy tried to tell me that it was because I was using my own modem and it would be resolved if I used their modem.

I explained that I had opened a terminal window and was running a ping to google, Ookla (the speed test org), Bing, Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes. The only two experiencing issues / delays were iTunes and Netflix so my modem appears to be fine. They also asked if I had tried their video streaming service to see if it was slow as well. I just kinda laughed and said no thanks.

He asked me how old my modem was and tried to convince me my modem was bad again and all would be solved if I just leased a modem from them. I insisted my modem was fine that it doesn’t choose to filter out video content. He then told me that they would send a tech out to look at it.

I insisted that everything inside my house was fine and if they wanted to send someone out to check the things outside my house that would be fine but I wasn’t going to take a day off of work to have someone take a look at something I know is set up correctly.

He sighed deeply and said that he would see if he could update some settings in my modem. All the sudden my speed test went from 20Mbps to 60Mbps.

I ran the test on Netflix and told him even with the 60Mbps I was still only pulling 720p on Netflix and iTunes was even worse. He put me on hold for a couple minutes and reset my modem again and afterwards Netflix and iTunes seem to be functioning perfectly.

Customers not paying Comcast the extra $35 a month to rid themselves of usage caps are not getting off scot-free either.

Jeff Wemberly reports his Comcast usage meter is recording unprecedented levels of usage he has never seen on his broadband account before the caps.

“We were well aware of Comcast’s new 300GB usage cap and began closely monitoring how we use our broadband service,” Wemberly writes. “We even have the kids streaming 100-150GB of streaming videos from a grandfathered Verizon Wireless unlimited data/hotspot account every month instead of using Comcast (serves Verizon right for jacking the price up – now we’re going to use it until we drop). We have three years of usage data from our router and we were certain we’d be using no more than 225GB a month after making that change.”

Instead, starting the same month Comcast’s cap went into effect, their reported usage more than doubled.

“Their meter is absolute bull—- reporting more than 700GB of usage every month starting after the caps went into effect,” Wemberly writes. “They aren’t just putting their finger on the scale, they are sitting on it!

Wemberly’s router reported the expected usage drop, with the family turning in 217GB of usage in November and 189GB so far this month. But Comcast’s meter reports 711GB in November and 748GB so far this month.

“We started getting the usage warning 11 days into November and 14 days in December,” Wemberly tells Stop the Cap! “It recorded 63GB of usage on Dec. 19, a day the family was out Christmas shopping. If someone was into our Wi-Fi, the router would have reported it. It doesn’t.”

Next month, Wemberly expects to begin getting bills that run $80 higher after Comcast’s overlimit fee grace period ends. Comcast told him its meter cannot possibly be inaccurate.

“You are forced to pay the extra $35 so you don’t have to pay $80,” Wemberly said. “The Gambino crime family must be kicking themselves wasting time with loan sharking and shakedowns. They should have learned from Comcast and extorted people legally with data caps.”

Wemberly intends to say goodbye to Comcast when AT&T’s U-verse with GigaPower arrives in his neighborhood.

“Paying AT&T $70 a month is cheap compared to Comcast’s endless greed,” Wemberly said. “We can’t wait to cancel.”

Frontier Communications has topped AT&T’s penchant for grandiose Fiber to the Press Release announcements with a new gigabit fiber to the home service now being promoted in Connecticut, despite being available to only two homes in a single upscale subdivision in North Haven.

Frontier FiberHouse is Frontier’s answer to Verizon FiOS, says Joseph Ferraiolo, Frontier’s regional general manager in New Haven County. Ferraiolo told the New Haven Register Frontier has introduced the service to a pair of homes in Lexington Gardens, a new single-family subdivision.

Frontier’s expansion of the service in 2016 does not appear to be exactly aggressive, with plans to only wire up to 200 newly built homes in the immediate area.

Frontier’s fiber network relies on a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) and is intended to replace copper telephone wiring.

Ferraiolo admits Frontier is currently favoring new housing developments where fiber can be dropped in a conduit/pre-existing trench during construction without the cost of tearing up yards and streets. But he also claims Frontier will make a commitment to any municipality that gets the fiber service that it will be available to every part of the community, not just those likely to be most profitable. If Frontier keeps its promise, it will be the first time the phone company has provided customers with universal access to uniformly high-speed broadband. Even its acquired FiOS networks in Indiana and the Pacific Northwest are not guaranteed to be available to every resident.

“We think this is a good option for us: new builds, small complexes,” Ferraiolo said. “The developer is very happy with it and we’re very happy with it.”

Customers like William Morico will believe it when they see it.

“We have been trying to get ‘high-speed’ Internet in our neighborhood for years, well before the Frontier disaster,” Morico writes. “All we want is the 12-18Mbps service that is advertised and available elsewhere in New Haven. [We] cannot get any answers from Frontier. Even their customer service and tech staff are frustrated with this company. It’s time for the state gig project.”

The company claims it is “exploring” other rollouts of Frontier FiberHouse in Stamford and New Haven, but there are no specifics.

Some observers question the timing of Frontier’s fiber announcement, noting state and local officials are still considering a private-public partnership that could lead to a public statewide gigabit fiber network in Connecticut. News that a private company is willing to shoulder the entire expense of a fiber project could be used in legislative efforts to derail Connecticut’s CT Gig Project. But Frontier has offered no guarantees whether or if it intends to blanket its service area across the state with fiber or limit FiberHouse to a de-facto demonstration project in a handful of homes in new housing developments.

Frontier Communications had to be chased by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey to improve broadband speeds for at least 28,000 DSL customers who thought they were buying 6Mbps DSL service but ended up with maximum speeds of 1.5Mbps or less.

Frontier today agreed to a settlement with state officials to spend an extra $150 million to boost DSL speeds for rural customers around the state and offer deep discounts for affected customers until they can receive at least 6Mbps service. Today’s settlement has no impact on a separate class action lawsuit brought by Frontier customers who accuse the company of throttling broadband speeds to save money and reduce traffic on its network.

The agreement is the largest, independently negotiated consumer protection settlement in West Virginia history and is expected to improve broadband service over the next three years.

“This agreement is a game changer for the Mountain State,” Morrisey said. “The settlement helps consumers receive the high-speed service they expected, while directing significant monies to help fix connectivity issues that consistently keep our state from achieving economic success.”

For at least two years, Frontier customers sent Morrisey’s office complaints stating they were not getting the speed and performance Frontier advertised for its DSL service. While the company told both customers and investors it had blanketed West Virginia with speeds “up to 6Mbps,” many customers discovered the phone company locked their modems to receive no better than 1.5Mbps.

Attorney General Morrisey

Frontier denied any allegation of wrongdoing and says it entered into the settlement to resolve disputed claims without the necessity of protracted and expensive litigation. But it will cost the company at least $150 million in additional upgrades, not including the $180 million Frontier already earmarked for broadband expansion in West Virginia, partly subsidized by the ratepayer-funded Connect America Fund.

About 28,000 customers identified by Frontier with modems the company provisioned for service at speeds of 1.5Mbps or lower will begin seeing an ongoing credit applied to their bills beginning Jan. 25, 2016, reducing the price of Frontier’s DSL service to $9.99 a month.

Affected customers can verify if they are included in the settlement on a special website Frontier has set up for its West Virginia customers.

The discounts will continue individually for each customer until the company can demonstrate it can deliver the 6Mbps speeds customers in West Virginia paid to receive. New Frontier DSL customers with speeds no better than 1.5Mbps will also qualify for the discount. Those with modems locked at speeds above 1.5Mbps but still getting less than 6Mbps will not benefit from this settlement, but may still get relief from a separate class action lawsuit covering customers in the state being heard in Lincoln County.

Last week, Lincoln County Circuit Judge Jay Hoke rejected an effort by Frontier to have the class action case dismissed. The company insisted its terms and conditions forbade customers from taking Frontier to court, requiring them to pursue arbitration instead.

Judge Hoke rejected Frontier’s arguments, finding the phone company “buried” the arbitration clause in fine print on its website and on the last pages of customer billing inserts. Hoke also ruled Frontier was attempting to retroactively apply its arbitration clause years after customers initially signed up for broadband service.

“We are finally going to get our day in court,” Michael Sheridan, a Frontier customer in Greenbrier County and Stop the Cap! reader told the Charleston Gazette. Sheridan is suing Frontier over its poor performance in West Virginia. “We think this lawsuit is the best chance we’ll ever have of bringing real Internet to rural West Virginia.”

Frontier argued if customers were dissatisfied with its DSL service, they could have canceled but never did. The company did not mention many of the affected customers have no other options for broadband service except satellite Internet, which receives poor reviews.

“We respectfully disagree with the court’s ruling,” said Frontier spokesman Andy Malinoski. “In our view, arbitration provides for fair resolution of consumer concerns that is quicker, simpler, and less expensive than lawsuits in court. We plan to appeal.”

Frontier’s decision to appeal might take longer and cost more than addressing problems for at least some of the affected customers.

Judge Hoke also took a dim view of Frontier’s style of disclosing changes to its terms and conditions.

‘On the website, computer users must scroll to the bottom of the page and click on a “Terms & Conditions” link that’s “buried among 25 other links,” then click on two other links to find the arbitration provision that denies customers’ rights to a jury trial,’ Hoke wrote in his order. ‘There’s no button to click or box to check that allows customers to agree to Frontier’s terms. In monthly bills, the arbitration clause shows up one time on the “fourth and last page” of an insert and another time in “miniscule font,” Hoke found.

Customers would have to be psychic to guess Frontier had important news restricting their right to take a dispute to court.

“There is no reason whatsoever for a customer to turn to the last page,” Hoke wrote. “Additionally, the bills contain no prompting that customers should flip to the last page for information concerning Frontier’s desire to alter the customer’s right to a jury trial.”

While Frontier pursues its appeal at the state Supreme Court, Frontier is expected to lose million in revenue from the settlement with the Attorney General.

“The reduced rate gives Frontier a strong incentive to raise speeds for these customers,” Morrisey said.

Another provision in the settlement requires Frontier to pay $500,000 to the state’s Consumer Protection Fund. That payment will offset investigative and monitoring expenses in addition to helping defray the costs of transitioning consumers to higher Internet speeds.

Frontier spokesman Andy Malinoski said the company had planned to address the issues all along. He said the settlement will accelerate the improvements.

West Virginians seeking more information about the maximum speed their modem is provisioned to receive can call Frontier at 1-888-449-0217 for more information.

Those with further questions can contact the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division at 800-368-8808 or visit the office online at www.wvago.gov.