Mediacom, regularly rated America’s worst cable operator by Consumer Reports, is earning its bad reputation when it left one Iowa retirement community with extended outages that began Dec. 20 and did not get resolved for more than two weeks.

Dozens of elderly residents at the Good Life Retirement Apartments in Norwalk, Iowa were unable to talk to anyone except a national technical support center that never connected the dots about the broader outage and only arranged individual service calls that never addressed the larger problem.

When the Des Moines Register’s consumer watchdog began receiving calls, Mediacom finally noticed.

The optics of delivering bad service to a retirement community populated primarily by 70+ year old retirees on fixed incomes that depend on cable television for entertainment delivered the cable company yet another public relations blow.

A Mediacom official finally acknowledged there was a bigger problem. Phyllis Peters, communications director for Mediacom, told the newspaper the outages were due to a “rare and broader issue” that affected customers across Des Moines.

Affected customers have been given credits for the extended outages, finally resolved Jan. 4, but most would have rather received working service.

“With this being a senior community, we don’t get to go out to the movies at night,” Edna Haines told the Register. “Our TV is our entertainment.”

Mediacom claims they are addressing their poor reputation for customer service with two new initiatives:

• Customers left endlessly on hold can select a new call-back feature to request a local employee call back the customer at a pre-selected time;
• Mediacom’s national customer service center (1-800-332-0245) now uses speech recognition to help direct calls to the appropriate department.

Time Warner Cable announced late last week it would add 650 call center jobs in South Carolina in 2013.

Most of the new positions will be in Lexington County at a newly expanded call center in West Columbia.

The company said it was increasing telephone sales and support positions by 50 percent in the state and would make a $24 million investment in its operations this year.

Gov. Nikki Haley said Time Warner Cable chose South Carolina for its business-friendly climate.

“The ultimate celebration in South Carolina is when a company expands,” Haley said at an event announcing the expansion. “It’s the biggest compliment to a county, it’s the biggest compliment to a state because it shows that there is true commitment in taking care of the businesses that we already have.”

In July, Haley further demonstrated that commitment by signing a bill promoted by Time Warner Cable and other telecommunications companies that would make it next to impossible for communities to construct and operate their own broadband networks in a state woefully underserved by the cable company and AT&T.

As Christopher Mitchell from Community Broadband Networks points out, the new law is corporate welfare at its finest, requiring local governments to avoid undercutting the rates charged by incumbent phone and cable companies, even if the government could provide the service at reduced cost.

“It effectively prohibits municipalities from operating their own broadband systems through a series of regulatory and reporting requirements,” said Catharine Rice, president of the SouthEastAssociation of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (SEATOA). “These practically guarantee municipalities could never find financing because the requirements would render even a private sector broadband company inoperable.”

The majority of the new jobs are expected to start at salaries under $40,000 a year. In May, Frontier Communications opened its own call center in Horry County that pays much lower salaries than the call centers it replaced.

In separate announcements, Time Warner Cable noted it planned to “consolidate” call center positions in other locations, which means employees in other cities and states will either lose their jobs or accept invitations to transfer to other facilities, potentially for lower pay.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WLTX Columbia 650 New Jobs in SC At TWC 1-4-13.flv[/flv]

WLTX in Columbia favorably reports Time Warner Cable’s forthcoming hiring spree in their area.  (2 minutes)

Time Warner Cable is expanding its footprint in the capital region of New York with the acquisition of independent Princetown Cable Company, which serves around 600 subscribers in Princetown, Duanesburg and Rotterdam in Schenectady County.

Time Warner already manages cable service for most cable subscribers around the Albany-Schenectady region, but bought Princetown Cable to further solidify its holdings.

Princetown Cable began service in 1990 serving rural areas ignored by then-dominant TCI Cable (later AT&T Cable, then Comcast).

Most customers signed up to get better reception of television signals from nearby Albany and Utica.

Princetown Cable’s lineup of around 100 channels ($82.50/month for digital cable) is dwarfed by Time Warner, and its broadband service is comparatively slow and expensive:

Time Warner Cable agreed to pay $1.2 million for the system, which breaks down to around $2,000 per subscriber.

Eight channels are missing from Raleigh-area televisions.

Time Warner Cable dropped eight analog channels from its lineup in Raleigh recently, advising customers they will need either a digital transport adapter (DTA) or standard set top box to get those channels back.

But one Raleigh customer tells Stop the Cap! those DTA boxes are hard to come by at the moment, forcing some to get costly set top boxes instead.

“We have been told three times by Time Warner Cable there is a multi-week wait for the free boxes, but we can get all the set top boxes we want today, for more than $6 a month each,” complains Rachel, who has three TV’s that need a box solution. “You think they would have waited for enough equipment before they took the channels away.”

Now missing from the analog lineup: C-SPAN, CMT, Oprah Winfrey Network, VH-1 Classics, Discovery Fitness & Health, Lifetime Movie Network, TruTV and the Golf Channel.

Jim DuBreck thought he had nothing to worry about when Time Warner sent him a postcard alerting him those eight channels were only going to be available in digital starting this month. He told ABC11 he already has a digital TV. Time Warner did not tell him that was not enough to keep watching.

DuBreck later learned the cable company not only converted the channels to digital, it also encrypted them. His digital TV would still need either a set top box or DTA. Only he is still waiting for the five DTA boxes for his own televisions.

Time Warner told the station they have seen a much higher demand than anticipated for the adapters. So, there may be some temporary delays before receiving one. DTA boxes are free for two years, set top boxes are not.

Customers better get used to it. Time Warner is gradually converting their systems to digital lineups, so as time goes by, more analog channels will disappear.

Time Warner Cable explained why:

“Moving analog channels to digital frees up capacity in our network to bring customers faster internet like we just did last week when we boosted the speeds of our standard internet service by 50 percent. Providing channels digitally also allows us to offer customers more because it’s dramatically more efficient: We can deliver up to four HD channels, or as many as 12 standard-definition digital channels, using the same capacity as it takes to carry one analog channel.”

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WTVD Raleigh Cable customer upset over Time Warner changes 12-14-12.flv[/flv]

WTVD in Raleigh helps Time Warner Cable customers understand where some of their analog channels are going.  (3 minutes)

Enjoy arrest and deportation.

If Time Warner Cable was hoping to attract new customers, allowing employees to arrange for their arrest and deportation is probably not the best way to accomplish that.

But that is precisely what happened to a Burlington, N.C., mom who tried to order cable service for her daughter with a fake Social Security number. An off-duty local police officer working part time as a security guard in the cable office overheard the conversation and arranged for the woman’s arrest.

Now 27-year old Lorena Yanez-Mata faces deportation to Mexico because she is in the United States illegally.

Yanez-Mata tried to use her individual taxpayer identification number to order cable service. The cable company rejected that, insisting on a Social Security number. So she arrived at the cable store with a counterfeit card with a random nine digit number.

When the security officer overheard the conversation, Time Warner Cable says he acted on his own initiative to contact local police, who arrested Yanez-Mata as soon as she left.

Yanez-Mata was charged with obtaining property by false pretense because of the phony Social Security number. But her prospects are likely to be more serious when she arrives in a Charlotte immigration court for possible deportation.

Time Warner Cable tried to distance itself from the debacle, claiming it is against their policy to share personal information with law enforcement and the security officer was not following any company procedure or direction. The cable company has no interest in bringing charges against the woman.

The company did not explain what would happen to the security officer who apparently disregarded the cable company’s policies when he choose to share potentially confidential, personal information with authorities. Nor did the company say whether it planned to issue new directives to avoid similar situations in the future.

Although Triad area residents and the local media used the incident to debate the issue of illegal immigration, another question remains: should an off-duty police officer working as a security guard act on private information he overhears and initiate a police investigation contrary to the interests of his employer?

[flv width=”604″ height=”424″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WFMY Greensboro Burlington Mom Faces Deportation After Trying To Get Time Warner Cable 12-12-12.flv[/flv]

WFMY-TV in Greensboro used the story of the Burlington mom to address the larger issue of why people illegally immigrate to the United States. We are wondering how Time Warner plans to handle employees sharing customer information with the authorities. (2 minutes)