Even Sir Patrick Stewart, famed Star Trek: The Next Generation starship captain, can’t “make it so” when it comes to Time Warner Cable in New York City.

Stewart, who just moved to the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, ran into a level 10 force field trying to get his cable service established.

He did what so many other consumers do when they run into a brick wall of customer service bureaucracy. He took it to Twitter:

The man who helped defeat the Borg couldn’t survive Time Warner Cable’s dreadfully poor customer service meted out to customers in the Big Apple (it scores a less than impressive 1.5 stars on Yelp), despite the eventual intervention from one of the company’s social media representatives employed to put out Twitter and Facebook fires. Unfortunately, it was too late:

Stewart is not alone. LeVar “Geordi La Forge” Burton has been there too (along with many of the 1,100+ others who retweeted Stewart’s dilemma):

Earlier this year, Bell Canada announced a blockbuster $3.38 billion offer to buy Astral Media, Inc. It is just the latest rush towards media concentration in Canada as the country’s largest cable and phone companies acquire a growing number of television networks, cable services, radio and broadcast television outlets, magazines, and other media.

Bell Canada already owns CTV – a major broadcast network, and TSN sports. Now it is back for more — Astral Media, the company that owns HBO Canada, The Movie Network, Family, Viewers Choice and lots more.

If this deal wins approval, one company will control 37.6% of TV viewing in Canada, more than twice the amount of its largest competitor. It means Bell will be able to set rates for some of Canada’s most popular cable networks and shows — putting competitors at a major disadvantage and forcing you to pay more to watch.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Say No to Bell Canada.flv[/flv]

Say No to Bell’s ad campaign fighting Bell Canada’s attempt to buy Astral Media.  (1 minute)

The federal government has to approve this deal, and a growing number of competing media companies, consumer groups, and politicians are coming together to oppose it.

Stop the Cap! believes Bell Canada owns too much already, and has repeatedly demonstrated that when it flexes its marketplace muscle, consumers pay more for less service. Add your voice against this deal by submitting a letter to Canada’s Ministers of Heritage and Industry, the Competition Bureau, the CRTC and your Member of Parliament and visiting the other opposition websites noted below.

No company needs to own and control 79 TV channels, 107 radio stations and more than 100 major Canadian news, entertainment, and cultural websites.

Even smaller Canadian cable companies fear this deal. Cogeco Cable, Eastlink, and Quebecor (parent company of Vidéotron), have joined forces to launch saynotobell.ca, a website to help consumers fight back. Quebec-based consumer group Option consommateurs has its own online petition in French, and Openmedia’s Stop the Takeover Coalition includes a range of pro-consumer forces opposed to the deal:

• OpenMedia.ca
• the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC)
• the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)
• Canada Without Poverty and the CWP Advocacy Network,
• the Canadian Media Guild (which represents over 6,000 media workers, including those from CBC, Reuters, the Canadian Press, and Shaw Media),
• the Consumers’ Association of Canada,
• the Council of Canadians (Canada’s largest citizens’ group),
• the Council of Senior Citizens’ Organizations of British Columbia (COSCO),
• Union des consommateurs.

Some of the arguments against the deal to consider:

• Bell Canada’s TV audience share would be 50% greater than the share of any TV network in the US, Japan, UK, Australia, France, and Russia. It would allow one corporation to control the programming (including news) on a scale not seen outside of countries like Italy, Brazil, and Mexico. When politicians have that much control of the media, they use it to influence viewers. Would Bell do any different?
• Bell can set the rates, terms, and bundling requirements for popular cable programming and services. They have already shown a willingness to tell independent ISPs they must set usage limits on their customers just as Bell does already. What would stop them from insisting you subscribe to more services in order to watch the programming you want?
• Mergers=job losses and cost cutting to pay for inflated bonuses and “cost savings” to help finance these blockbuster deals. Without competition, original Canadian productions can be slashed to the bone or canceled altogether. Why deliver quality when you can limit viewers’ alternative choices instead?
• America allowed media consolidation in radio and television and turned vibrant local stations into corporate money-machines at the expense of local news, original shows, and local content. How many radio stations in the United States now operate like automated electronic jukeboxes? How many local TV newscasts signed off for good to “save money.” Can Canadian local news, weather, and informational programming survive Bell’s ax? If it happened in the United States, it can happen in Canada too.

Ensure diversity by disconnecting this Bell deal permanently, and tell your elected leaders to stop allowing endless media consolidation.

[flv width=”576″ height=”344″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Globe and Mail How much of a competition threat is Bells Astral deal 8-24-12.flv[/flv]

The Globe and Mail considers the issue of Bell’s takeover bid for Astral Media. How will it affect Canadian consumers? (2 minutes)

In a new twist, Comcast has announced rate increases for cable television that are roughly at the rate of inflation (2.3%) — the lowest rate increase for the company since 2001 — but is also hiking rates for Internet service at a substantially higher rate.

The company claims the Internet rate increase is partly due to the increased number of channels on its cable systems in Oregon and southwest Washington, as well as the cost to launch new interactive applications and multi-platform content that customers want and value.

Comcast’s rate increase for video represents the new reality for the cable business — companies continue with 7%+ increases in cable TV rates at the risk of cord cutting, analysts say. With cable television packages increasingly seen as ripe for cutting as they grow more expensive, cable operators are turning to broadband — a service customers can’t live without — to make up the difference.

Comcast had not touched broadband rates in the Pacific Northwest for seven years, until the company began hiking them in 2011. Monthly rates for the popular “Performance” Internet service (15Mbps) are going up again this year, from $48.95 to $51.95, according to The Oregonian. Prices are higher for standalone broadband service. Comcast’s Digital Starter TV package is increasing to $67.49 a month. Rates for customers on promotions will not  increase until those offers expire.

But some customers complain Comcast is now charging nearly $200 a month for its triple-play package.

One customer told the newspaper after his introductory triple play promotion expired, the bill rose to $190 a month for phone, Internet, and cable service with two DVR boxes. The customer does not have any premium movie channels.

The Oregonian has tracked Comcast’s rates in the Pacific Northwest for almost a decade. The staircase of climbing prices for cable television is leveling off as Comcast makes up the difference from its Internet rates.

The newspaper noted Frontier Communications, which provides competition for Comcast in the suburbs of Portland, has given Comcast only a slight headache.

Frontier continues to offer its barely-advertised FiOS television package for around $65 a month, but customer complaints about Frontier’s service in the area have been reflected by Comcast’s growing subscriber numbers.

One Oregonian reader summed up his feelings about Frontier:

Frontier was atrocious. I don’t just mean bad, I mean an embarrassment to humanity […] which chimpanzees and dolphins laugh at us for putting up with. I’ve had Frontier service for a little over a year now only because there is nothing else where I live.

The nightmare started with them coming out hook up DSL at my new house, but instead of hooking me up, [they tore] out the demarc box on the house and left with it,  lost all records of ever having talked to me, much less scheduling an appointment.

After finally getting Internet service a week late, the original [service order] showed up leading them to bill me for multiple accounts, which took five months to  resolve. They never were able to prove to me I actually owed what I ultimately paid (I got them to within one bill’s worth of my calculated value and gave up).

Half of the time I’ve held off paying my bill until a day or two before the due date so it’s too late to mail a check and their online payment system is down, forcing me to call in my payment and pay a $3 service fee.

All of that is on top of the blatant theft of forcing customers who already own modems to pay a “modem rental fee” for a modem they aren’t renting.

Analog cable service is on the way out in Montreal.

Vidéotron Ltd. has stopped accepting orders for analog cable service from new customers as it prepares to make the transition to all-digital operation sometime in 2013.

The cable operator, dominant in Quebec, wants to dump analog service to make room for additional HD channels and faster broadband service, and although the company has retained a few dozen analog channels in some areas for the benefit of hotel operators and budget-minded seniors, the time has come to turn the lights out on the 60 year old technology.

Vidéotron is transitioning its customers hanging on to analog service in chunks, according to a report in the Gazette.  The vast majority of those customers are seniors, but hotel rooms also comprise a substantial percentage of the 412,000 holdouts.

Vidéotron experimented with a partial transition to digital in the Gatineau region, cutting analog service to just 30 channels. To entice customers to switch to digital, Vidéotron offered free digital set-top boxes to existing analog customers and special promotional packages that gave them digital service at the analog price. Company officials say it is unlikely customers across the Island of Montreal would get similar deals, but some price concessions on equipment are likely.

Vidéotron hopes the transition will make room for up to 100 new HD channels on a system that currently has just 71. The cable operator is facing increasing competition from Bell’s Fibe TV and satellite service, which provides a larger selection of HD channels, particularly for Anglophones in the province.

Spending money to earn more money is a fiscally sound principle of doing business, but short term investors often decry increased spending as harmful to the value of a company’s stock and dividend payout. That is why Hawaiian Telcom (HawTel) earns mixed reviews from Wall Street about the company’s aggressive infrastructure improvement project, a fiber to the neighborhood network that intends to bring television, phone, and faster broadband service to an increasing number of Hawaiians.

HawTel’s stock price has bounced up, down, up, and then down again as investors digest the company’s ongoing effort to reinvent itself as a 21st century telecom company.

The Old HawTel

HawTel’s fiber buildout began on the island of Oahu in 2011, eventually passing 27,400 homes on the island. At the end of 2011, 1,600 (6%) of those homes signed up for the service. That’s an acceptable number, especially for a service barely promoted. HawTel does not mention the television service on its primary website, and approaches potential customers one-on-one with in-person and targeted mail marketing.

At the end of the second quarter or 2012, HawTel TV had 6,400 subscribers. The company hopes to have an additional 50,000 homes enabled for its TV service by the end of 2012, with the goal of enabling 240,000 households across Hawaii over the next five years. HawTel hopes to eventually capture 30% of the Hawaiian market.

HawTel’s principal competitor is Oceanic Time Warner Cable, which provides traditional cable service across the Hawaiian Islands. HawTel had been at a substantial disadvantage competing with Time Warner’s television package and faster broadband service. But the fiber upgrades are allowing at least some customers to purchase speeds up to 50/10Mbps, slightly faster than what the cable operator offers.

Time Warner has taken note of the phone company’s re-emergence as a strong competitor, targeting Oahu with special promotional offers that lock customers in place with triple play discounts designed to make it inconvenient to switch providers.

The New HawTel

Unfortunately for HawTel, fiber upgrades do not come cheap, and the company’s earnings have taken a hit.

Capital expenditures totaled $41.2 million for the six-months ended June 30, 2012, up from $35.4 million for the six-month period a year ago due primarily to investments in broadband network infrastructure and expansion of video enabled households.

Hawaiian Telcom reported an 18 percent decline in second quarter earnings, which it blamed primarily on broadband network expansion.

The company also announced it lost another 6% of traditional landline customers during the second quarter, but that was offset by expansion in its broadband and television service. For HawTel, the solution to ending landline losses is to upgrade their network to compete with the types of communications services consumers are interested in buying today.

But those plans can and do conflict with at least some stock traders who are interested primarily in short term financial results. Spending can cut into profits, so some analysts downgrade stocks of companies spending the most, even if only to compete more effectively down the road.

So far, HawTel executives have not been discouraged carrying their network expansion plans forward. In July, Hawaiian Telcom announced it would acquire Wavecom Solutions Corporation’s local exchange carrier business in a stock purchase transaction valued at $13 million.

Wavecom’s undersea fiber network

The acquisition would give Hawaiian Telcom access to Wavecom’s fiber optic network connecting the main Hawaiian islands. Wavecom, formerly known as Pacific Lightnet, Inc., serves more than 1,700 customers across Hawaii.

In an application with the Federal Communications Commission, HawTel officials said access to Wavecom’s 400-mile undersea telecommunications cable network will permit the company to expand and enhance its broadband and television services beyond Oahu to other Hawaiian islands, and help position the company to effectively compete with Time Warner.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Hawaiian Telcom TV Tour.flv[/flv]

Watch a HawTel-produced video tour of the company’s new TV service.  (4 minutes)