Time Warner Cable would like to thank the city of Charlotte and the state of North Carolina for the generous handouts of taxpayer-funded corporate welfare that helped make their newly-christened $82 million data center possible.

In return, Charlotte residents pay the nation’s highest cable bills, according to a piece in the Charlotte Observer.

Time Warner Cable maintains a cozy relationship with state and local officials — friendly enough to help win the company a state Job Development Investment Grant worth up to $2.9 million in public tax dollars in return for hiring 225 workers in their eastern national data center. Critics contend Time Warner was going to need to hire workers with or without the grant.

According to WhiteFence, the average Charlottean paid $51.18 for standalone high-speed Internet services in October.

The group surveys pricing from utility providers nationwide and builds a national price index for different services, including broadband.

No city pays higher prices that Charlotte, N.C., according to the group. The WhiteFence Index also shows Internet pricing is rising steadily, up from less than $40 charged this past May.

The Libertarian Party of North Carolina is probably the biggest opponent of corporate welfare handouts in the state:

By taking money from the taxpayers and giving it to businesses in the form of “corporate incentives,” our state and local governments are playing a game of Reverse Robin Hood. They are robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. The Libertarian Party of North Carolina denounces all corporate welfare programs as fiscally irresponsible and calls for their immediate abolition.

Millions of dollars are taken every year from our taxpayers and stashed into various funds and programs at all levels of government. The purpose of these funds is supposedly to attract businesses to our area and help them expand, under the theory that this will create jobs and promote general prosperity.

This theory has two fundamental defects. First of all, the government has no place in deciding which jobs should be created and maintained. A free market is infinitely better equipped to respond to the economic needs of businesses and consumers. When the government starts funding already successful companies, it becomes harder to compete in the marketplace if you have a new company with an innovative idea or service.

More directly, we can not have general prosperity until we rid ourselves of our excessive tax burdens. The first cause of economic prosperity is when consumers have money to spend. But we have less and less spending money, as governments take more and more from our paychecks. And then they use that money taken from us as legal bribes to entice their corporate favorites to come to North Carolina.

Cable customers in Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming can be forgiven if they cannot remember the name of the cable company that provides them with service. Originally Bresnan Communications, then Cablevision’s Optimum West, customers are now learning Charter Communications could soon be their new service provider.

James Dolan, CEO of Cablevision Industries, last week acknowledged he had received “unsolicited interest” in the cable properties in the western United States, and told investors he may sell the systems for an undisclosed amount.

Cablevision acquired the systems formerly owned by Bill Bresnan two years ago, investing tens of millions in upgrades to bring them closer to modern standards. Cablevision has received praise from many subscribers for improved service and more competitive rates. But a sale could change that. Charter Cable is perennially rated among the worst cable companies in the United States by Consumer Reports.

Should Charter acquire the systems, it will also inherit a major tax fight initiated by Cablevision, protesting its Montana property tax bills for 2010 and 2011.

Cablevision is upset tax authorities defined the Optimum West operation as a single telecommunications company, not a cable company. That decision effectively doubles its tax rate from 3 to 6 percent — the same rate CenturyLink pays in the state.

If an appeals process finds the state erred in its decision, 29 counties will have to refund millions that Cablevision paid under protest.

Tax officials warn if Cablevision’s tax rate is cut in half and other companies reap similar rewards, homeowners and small businesses will cover the difference. Revenue director Dan Bucks warned that could mean annual tax bills $110 higher on a home assessed at $200,000.

A community-owned cable system that critics called “a municipal broadband failure” is proving to be anything but as it aggressively launches a broadband speed war and is narrowing its losses on the road to profitability.

MI-Connection is the community-owned cable system serving Mooresville, Davidson, and Cornelius, N.C.

Originally acquired in 2007 from bankrupt Adelphia Cable, MI-Connection has been a favorite target for municipal broadband critics who have painted the operation as an experiment gone wrong and a financial failure. But the system’s latest financial results and its forthcoming free broadband speed upgrades tell a different story.

Residents will see major boosts in their broadband speeds for no additional charge in December thanks to a broadband service upgrade. Meanwhile, competitor Time Warner Cable has announced new fees for cable modem rentals that will raise many customer bills by $4 a month. (MI-Connection does not charge customers a rental fee when they have just one cable modem on their account.)

The speed increases will provide the fastest download-upload speed combination in the area, thanks to faster upstream speeds. These upgrades launch Dec. 10:

• 8/4Mbps service upgrades to 10/5Mbps
• 12/4Mbps service upgrades to 15/5Mbps
• 16/4Mbps service upgrades to 20/5Mbps
• 20/4Mbps service upgrades to 30/10Mbps

Also on that date, MI-Connection will launch its fastest Internet tier yet, tentatively dubbed Warp Speed, offering 60/10Mbps service with a free wireless router for bundled customers, selling faster service at up to $20 less per month than what Time Warner charges:

• $99.95/month broadband service only
• $89.95/month when bundled with one other service
• $79.95/month when bundled with phone and television service

Warp Speed will be the fastest residential broadband available in Mecklenburg and Iredell counties.

MI-Connection hopes accelerating improvements in broadband will also accelerate additional earnings. MI-Connection continues to earn the bulk of its revenue from television, with broadband and phone lagging behind. But the biggest growth in revenue year over year comes from broadband service.

Last summer, MI-Connection reached another milestone — it delivered its first cash payments back to the communities that took a chance on owning and running their own telecommunications provider. Although the total amount of $277,000 was modest, and the company still has to pay down debt incurred from purchasing and upgrading the cable system, it was a symbolic victory against anti-government, anti-municipal broadband naysayers.

More elusive is tracking the amount of money saved by residents finding Time Warner Cable and area phone companies ready and willing to offer stunning rate cuts in customer retention efforts.

Stop the Cap! has tracked some of those offers over the past several years, based on reader input.

Time Warner Cable’s retention department has offered North Carolina customers with active competition in their area prices as low as $100 a month (after taxes and fees) for triple play packages that include a free year of Showtime and 30/5Mbps broadband. Customers who only want broadband and television have been able to negotiate rates averaging $70 a month, especially after pointing out MI-Connection provides a year of its own phone, broadband, and TV service for $89.99 a month, including three free months of HBO.

“Year after year, renewing these prices just takes a phone call mentioning you received a flyer from MI-Connection offering more for less,” says Stop the Cap! reader Sam, who we contacted this morning for an update on our earlier story in April. “Whether you stay with Time Warner or switch to MI-Connection, you can easily save dozens of dollars a month just mentioning one provider to the other.”

Courtesy: Davidson News

Sam remains a Time Warner Cable customer based on what he calls “a simple matter of economics and what my wife wants to spend.” But he still supports the fact MI-Connection is there, even though it has created some early headaches for Mooresville, Davidson, and Cornelius.

“The conservatives have demagogued MI-Connection to death to win seats in local government but recently have stopped attacking it as an outright failure and are now claiming they want to make it successful so they can sell it off in a few years, probably to their pals at Time Warner,” Sam reflects.

“At the rate MI-Connection is cutting their losses, it might actually be profitable then,” Sam argues. “Selling it would be stupid. But a lot of the current crowd is hellbent on selling it no matter what, mostly for ideological reasons, and after Time Warner buys it for cheap, we’ll all pay even more when they put the rates back up.”

Critics of MI-Connection have help from various astroturf groups, backed largely by telecommunications companies who oppose government involvement in broadband. Particularly notorious is the “Coalition for the New Economy,” which issues negative reports about municipal broadband while burying the fact the group is funded in part by AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and other Big Telecom lobbyists.

The “Coalition” issues various reports mostly summarizing news accounts about community broadband that highlight struggles and ignore successes, while concluding that community broadband is interfering with private providers trying to hurry upgrades into neglected areas.

“A report from some group that lies never brought better broadband access to anyone in North Carolina,” Sam said. “MI-Connection has become a thorn that must be pulled from Time Warner’s backside because MI actually does provide better service.”

Moffett

I spend my days listening to Big Telecom company earnings conference calls so you don’t have to. On this morning’s call with Time Warner Cable investors, Sanford Bernstein’s Craig Moffett raised his hand yet again for another round of questioning Time Warner Cable executives for news on when the company will begin gouging their customers with Internet Overcharging schemes like usage-based billing. It is rare when Moffett does not ask Time Warner about when it plans to get the Money Party started with even higher prices for the company’s broadband customers.

Both Rob Marcus (chief operating officer) and Irene Esteves (chief financial officer) do their best to assuage Moffett his dreams of usage pricing may still someday come true (we’ve underlined some important points):

Craig Moffett – Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division: Rob or Irene, maybe you could just update us a little bit on your latest thinking with usage-based pricing, what’s been happening in Texas? And with the cable modem fee, which is obviously not a step in usage-based pricing, does that put off anything that you would otherwise do in moving toward usage-based pricing over the next couple of months? How should we think about that?

Robert D. Marcus – president and chief operating officer: So we’re now in Texas, the Carolinas and the Midwest with usage-based pricing. [We’re planning to introduce it] in the Northeast [in] the next month or so. And I think by year-end, we’ll be 100% across the footprint with [usage pricing] available [on] Internet Essentials, as we call it. I think that although the customer uptake of Internet Essentials is still small, it’s a very important principle that we’ve established, one that usage and price relate to one another. And secondly, we think it’s very important that we give customers who use less a choice to pay less. And whether or not there is a significant uptake of the service, we think those are very important principles to have established. So we’re in no way reducing the emphasis on that product because the numbers are still relatively small.

Irene M. Esteves – chief financial officer and executive vice president: And as far as the modem fee, we’re looking at that as part of our overall pricing strategy on [High Speed Internet]. We shouldn’t think about it as separate and apart from what our customers are paying us for the overall service. We think  it makes sense given what the competition is charging.

Some residents afflicted by last week’s Hurricane Sandy are cringing over a newspaper ad run over the weekend in the Staten Island Advance from Time Warner Cable depicting a shipwrecked boat laying sideways on shore, asking area businesses, “Is your phone company leaving your business high and dry?”

“How fu** distasteful can you be,” tweeted one offended resident of the hard hit area. “So glad I have FiOS.”

Verizon joined the ensuing Twitter discussion thanking the customer for the shout-out, and letting him know the company was there if he needed them.

Time Warner Cable, apparently caught unaware of the tasteless ad, frantically sought out additional information about where it ran, claiming it ordered its ad agency to cancel it before Hurricane Sandy arrived. The company said it was looking into the matter, admitting the ad is “upsetting” under the circumstances.