The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced more than $103 million in federal grants and loans to 16 states to help expand broadband, or high-speed, Internet access to unserved and underserved areas of rural America:

The providers involved offer a mix of technology, ranging from traditional cable companies like Inter Mountain Cable and Crystal Broadband Networks — to Wireless ISPs like Wichita Online, serving southwestern Oklahoma, to rural telephone company DSL provided by companies like Hemingford Cooperative Telephone and the Coleman County Telephone Cooperative.

What most rural providers have in common are much-higher prices for slower speed service over what urban customers pay, and a regular need for resources to update capacity and the number of potential customers served.  Most of these grants and loans are expected to cover some of those costs.

Ouch. Rural Americans pay substantially higher prices for broadband service than city-dwellers do. This is current pricing from Inter Mountain Cable, which serves parts of rural Kentucky.

When Time Warner Cable introduced its SignatureHome service, the company claimed it wanted to deliver a comprehensive experience to its most premium-customers.  But oddly, the best broadband speeds, phone service, and digital cable TV lineup from the cable company didn’t include any premium movie channels.

“I was ready to sign up for SignatureHome, but I assumed it included major premium channels, and it didn’t,” says Stop the Cap! reader Liam in Los Angeles.  “I thought it would be a real money-saver but I would rather have the premium channels than their phone service, which I don’t actually use as I depend on my cellphone.”

Scott elected for a cheaper promotional bundle foregoing phone service and the fastest Internet speeds, choosing to stick with Road Runner Turbo service.

“Powerboost on their Turbo product is more than enough for me and I don’t need faster upload speed — if SignatureHome included the premiums I would have taken it,” he says.

Now Time Warner has introduced an addition to their super-deluxe package — SignatureHome Premium View, which bundles HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel and Moviepass with everything else on offer for $30 more a month — $229.99.  The package excludes Starz!, a premium movie channel Time Warner has barely promoted over the years.

With many markets increasing prices to as high as $15 for channels like HBO, getting five premium networks for just under $30 isn’t a bad deal, assuming you watch them and benefit from SignatureHome‘s other features.

“When my promotion expires, I’ll consider this new option,” Scott says.  “Yes, I realize $230 for cable service should really be an outrage, but the way the company is pricing services these days, the more you bundle, the less you ultimately pay compared to trying to build your own package of services.”

That may be exactly the point.  For customers who rely on Time Warner for phone, broadband, and cable-TV, SignatureHome can be a reasonable value if you crave the company’s highest 50/5Mbps broadband speeds.  Building a comparable bundle on your own is much more expensive.  Now the same is true for premium movie channels, which run between $11-15 a month each a-la-carte.

[flv width=”534″ height=”320″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/NY1 Signature Home Arrives 12-9-10.mp4[/flv]

NY1, Time Warner Cable’s 24 hour news channel in New York City, talked about the introduction of SignatureHome last December.  (2 minutes)

Accidents can be forgiven, but when AT&T’s repair crews take nearly a week to fix them, they are rarely forgotten.

More than 350 residents of Burbank, Calif., learned that first hand when they lost their AT&T landlines for six days, after an unrelated construction crew accidentally cut a telephone cable.

For more than a few impacted residents, AT&T took their sweet time fixing the problem, costing area businesses thousands of dollars and leaving hundreds of customers mystified.

The accidental cable cut on Front Street Aug. 13 left consumers reaching for their cellphones and local businesses trying to convince their own customers they had not gone out of business.

The Glendale News-Press shared the misery:

Brian Schneider of Schneider & Associates Claim Services said he has been without phone service since Monday morning.

“It’s really destroying my business, I feel very helpless,” Schneider said. “I feel like I’m living in a Third World country with no telephone.”

He estimated a loss of $6,000 to $7,000 a day because customers cannot reach him.

“Customers are sending emails asking if we’re still in business,” Schneider said. “I have 25 employees who are going to be adversely affected by this.”

Compounding matters is the fact that he just rolled out a marketing campaign to attract new customers.

“It’s not easy to get new clients in this environment, and then they call and the phone just rings and we don’t pick it up — bye-bye new client.”

AT&T claims they had to dig down at least 12 feet to reach and repair the affected cable, and told the newspaper it would take up to a week to restore service, and it did.  But many customers were infuriated they were kept in the dark on the company’s progress, and others had trouble convincing AT&T to forward affected calls to unaffected cellphones and other working numbers.

AT&T said reimbursements for lost service, finally restored six days after the cable cut, were not automatic.  Customers seeking a refund have to call the company’s customer service line and request one.

Gone

After more than a decade of “beep, beep,” Time Warner Cable is retiring Geococcyx californianus, the ground foraging cuckoo better known as the Greater Roadrunner.

It’s all part of a “brand refresh,” Time Warner’s Jeannette Castaneda tells Fortune.  The idea is to “create excitement around the eye-ear symbol.”  For now, the “Road Runner” name will remain — just the mascot disappears.

When Road Runner was first introduced in 1995 in Elmira, N.Y., it was designed to be a localized high-speed online portal, originally called the “Southern Tier On-Line Community.” Portals were all the rage in the 1990s, designed to serve as a unified home page to help users find content more easily.  When the cable modem broadband service finally spread to other markets, it was branded ‘LineRunner.’

But Time Warner’s marketing people decided the company’s best strategy to convince users that paying at least double the price they were paying for dial-up was worth the investment when you considered how fast cable broadband service was, and how it would outperform any dial-up connection.  The cable company spent months negotiating with Warner Bros. to license the use of the roadrunner in the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons.  The company even changed the name of their broadband product to Road Runner to drive home the speed message.

The "eye-ear" branding that replaces it.

Over the years, Time Warner has blanketed customers in postcard mailers, advertising, and billboards showcasing their broadband mascot, but no more.  While Time Warner Cable would not provide exact reasons for the brand change, we suspect there are several factors involved:

1. The cost to license the roadrunner character from Warner Bros.  In 1998, regional Time Warner representatives shared that the licensing agreement with Warner Bros. was costly and complicated.  Warner Bros. maintains strict control over their licensed characters and how they are used.
2. In the past, emphasizing speed was essential in convincing consumers to drop their old provider for the cable company’s alternative.  But broadband penetration in most of Time Warner’s markets has already reached a high level and most of those still refusing to take the service are not going to be convinced by speed arguments.  For these holdouts, lack of interest and the cost of the service are the most important factors, and the roadrunner character does not speak to these concerns.
3. 

   Canis usagecapus

   The telecom industry, notably cable, has spent years trying to retire the phrases “Internet access” and “Internet Service Provider.”  They don’t even like the word “broadband.”  For them – it’s High Speed Internet (HSI) or “High Speed Online.”  They have put the words “high speed” in the very term they use to describe Internet access.

4. Time Warner Cable believes in their unified bundling of services.  They aggressively pitch all of them together at a discounted price and have de-emphasized the branding that used to be associated with individual package components.  For example, Time Warner didn’t retire the name “LineRunner” when they rebranded their cable modem service Road Runner.  They simply re-used the name for their telephone service.  Time Warner tested LineRunner in the Rochester, N.Y. market before ditching the product for a Voice Over IP service they now like to call “digital phone.”  Today, most of Time Warner Cable’s most visible ancillary branding is done for their triple-play packages.  Remember “All the Best?”

Fortune thinks the retirement of the roadrunner may also have something to do with the company’s desire to implement an Internet Overcharging scheme:

TWC, like other big ISPs, is a leading proponent of imposing bandwidth caps on its Internet users. Imagine the possibilities for illustrating articles about this topic – Wile E Coyote (perhaps wearing a TWC ballcap) tripping up the Road Runner with piano wire, or finally getting his revenge and hurling the obnoxious bird off a cliff.

Cogeco Cable customers are about to pay for the company’s tragic financial results from its Portuguese operations in the form of broad-based price increases the company is selling as service “improvements.”

July’s financial results for Cogeco, which owns cable systems in Ontario, Quebec, and Portugal, are not good.  With mass subscriber defections and downgrades from Cogeco’s Portuguese cable system Cabovisao, company officials have decided to write off their European investment, resulting in a $56.7 million loss in the third quarter.

Tempering the damage is the company’s decision to raise broadband prices for Canadian customers by $2 a month for their Standard broadband package, soon to be priced at $48.95.

(Courtesy: 'Gone' from Fort Erie, Ontario)

“To add insult to injury, they are calling these changes ‘improvements,'” writes Stop the Cap! reader Claudette, who is a Cogeco customer in Ontario.  “In fact, the only thing Cogeco is improving is their skill at overcharging us.”

Cogeco's financial mess in Portugal.

Cogeco has sent letters to subscribers notifying them about the “improvements,” mostly in the form of a name change for the company’s ‘Standard’ plan, soon to be renamed ‘Turbo 14.’  They have also launched a new section on their website to break down the changes.

The only benefit Cogeco is introducing for customers with their Standard plan is a slight bump in usage allowances, from 60 to 80GB.  But that change comes with a major catch.  Cogeco charges customers a $1.50/GB overlimit fee with a monthly maximum overcharge of $30.  When ‘Turbo 14’ premieres Oct. 1, the maximum overlimit fee will jump to $50 a month.

“That is a total ripoff, because the next plan up with bigger allowances — just over 100GB a month — costs nearly $77 a month, for a whopping 16Mbps,” she adds.  “They just raised our rates last July and now they want more.”

Cogeco is punishing their premium customers even more by taking the maximum overlimit fee cap completely off their DOCSIS 3-based Ultimate 30Mbps and 50Mbps plans.  Available in some Cogeco service areas at prices of $60 and $100 a month respectively, the plans come with usage limits of 175-250GB.  The sky is the limit for overlimit fees, racked up at $1 per gigabyte.

Cogeco customers are outraged, and have begun shopping for alternatives, just like their counterparts in Portugal who have put their cable service on the chopping block.

The ongoing Portuguese financial crisis has been met with tax increases and benefit reductions by the government, and Portuguese consumers have responded with wholesale cord-cutting, cancelling Cabovisao cable-TV service in droves.

Cogeco's systems in Ontario (click to enlarge)

“You now have customers squarely opting out of [cable TV],” said Louis Audet, Cogeco’s president and chief executive officer. “These are economic circumstances that we have not, nor has anyone here, witnessed in North America. These are very unique to the circumstances in Portugal.”

At least Audet hopes they are.

With fewer competitive choices in the rural and suburban Ontario and Quebec markets Cogeco favors, consumers have a tougher time finding alternative providers, but not an impossible one.  Many are dropping Cogeco’s phone and broadband packages, moving to Voice Over IP or cell phone service for the former, and independent broadband providers like TekSavvy for the latter.  TekSavvy still retains unlimited use plans and has been traditionally more generous with allowances for the usage-based plans the company also sells.

Investors have been placated with a boost in Cogeco’s dividend payout… for now.  But many have adopted a “told you so” attitude about the company’s controversial decision to invest in overseas cable to begin with.

Scotia Capital analyst Jeff Fan said he had a negative view about Cogeco’s Portuguese venture.

“We hope this paves the way for a sale,” he wrote in a note to investors, “as Portugal is still cash-flow negative and dilutes the strong Canadian results.”

In fact, many investor groups dream of an even bigger sale — of Cogeco itself.

Joseph MacKay of Mackie Research said Canada’s fourth-largest cable company is ripe for a takeover by a larger cable operator, presumably Rogers or Shaw Communications.  Rogers already blankets Ontario with cable services, so Cogeco’s operations in eastern provinces would be a ‘natural fit’ for the company.  Shaw’s interest in expanding eastward could also get a boost from the buyout of Cogeco.

But one significant roadblock remains — the controlling interests of the Audet family, which have no intention of selling and control enough voting shares to stymie a hostile takeover.  In fact, despite the poor showing of the company’s Portuguese operations, the Audet family claims to be interested in acquiring other providers and expanding Cogeco’s size.

With the benefit of a two-dollar rate increase and the proceeds of Internet Overcharging, they’ll be in a position to put more dollars toward that goal.