Spectrum customers still stuck with 100/10 Mbps Standard Internet speed may want to reboot their modems and check if they have gotten a free speed increase this week.

Stop the Cap! has heard from customers in the following areas, all reporting their Standard Internet speed has doubled to 200/10 Mbps:

• Rochester, N.Y. and surrounding Finger Lakes region
• Buffalo, N.Y., and parts of Western New York
• Central Florida, including Winter Springs

Charter Communications has already upgraded just over half of their Standard Internet customers nationwide to 200/10 Mbps. Upgrading the remaining 40% of customers has taken over a year and is still a work in progress. Charter may have delivered these recent speed hikes in part to placate customers notified this month their broadband service was increasing an additional $5 a month.

Spectrum’s other speed tiers remain unchanged.

Spectrum internet customers in parts of Central Florida and South Texas are getting twice the download speed they used to receive thanks to a series of quiet service upgrades still in progress.

Customers in parts of suburban Orlando, including Seminole County, first noticed the speed upgrade in April in towns like Lake Mary. Parts of Kissimmee saw a service upgrade earlier this month. Some neighborhoods in Orlando also began reporting speed upgrades as of mid-May. Some parts of Pasco County, north of Tampa, also received a 200 Mbps upgrade, particularly in planned communities.

Charter Communications is gradually upgrading capacity in the area, formerly served by Bright House Networks. Spectrum traditionally does not announce speed upgrades until an entire service area is complete, which will likely happen in parts of Florida and Texas by early this summer.

In South Texas, San Benito is one of the communities between Brownsville and McAllen seeing Spectrum’s usual download speed doubled from 100 to 200 Mbps.

The speed upgrades come without any additional charges and usually appear automatically. Spectrum has been slowly upgrading its national service footprint to offer the new, higher-speed 200 Mbps Standard service tier. For more than two years, customers in many AT&T landline areas in the midwest and south have had 200/10 Mbps service, designed to help keep the cable company competitive with AT&T’s fiber offering. But service remains stubbornly fixed at 100/10 Mbps in just under half of Spectrum’s service area, particularly in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and West regions.

Stop the Cap! expects Spectrum to upgrade all of its service areas to provide 200/10 Mbps service. It remains uncertain exactly when that will happen, however.

Downdetector shows a major service outage for Spectrum customers in Central Florida.

A widespread service outage affecting Spectrum customers in central Florida that began Sunday caused a crowd of 100-150 customers to turn out at a Spectrum office on Semoran Boulevard in Orlando this morning to switch cable boxes or cancel service.

Customers lost television service Sunday evening and the outage continues in many areas, leaving thousands without service for more than 14 hours. Orange County Public Schools spent this morning without internet service, also provided by Spectrum. The school district e-mailed parents:

“OCPS families, we want to make you aware that throughout our community the internet and networks are down throughout due to issues with Spectrum. This outage is impacting many of our schools. At this time, Spectrum cannot provide a timeframe for restoration of service. We want to make you aware that contacting schools may be limited due to the outages. We also want to assure you our digital classrooms are always prepared to adjust to such circumstances as they can use blended methods for learning so instruction can continue regardless of problems with the internet. Thank you for your support. We will update you as we get new information.”

Many customers are angry about what they perceive as a deterioration in service after Charter Communications acquired Bright House Networks.

“It seems like since Spectrum has taken over from Bright House, every time the wind blows, the cable and the boxes go out and you have to come down here and stand in a line to change a box. It’s a waste,” Spectrum customer George Roberts told WFTV.

Communities affected include: Orlando and surrounding suburbs, Cape Canaveral, Sanford, Daytona Beach, Sky Lake, Palm Coast, and beyond.

“The storms last night caused damage to operations impacting customers in the Central Florida region,” said Spectrum spokesperson Joe Durkin. “I won’t speculate on completion but as Spectrum engineers are working to restore full video services to our customers and as time goes on – some areas are coming back. We confirm there’s no internet outage at all that could still be affecting Orange County Public Schools.”

Spectrum, like most cable operators, will not issue a service outage credit unless customers specifically request one. The best way to do that is to login to Spectrum’s website and use online chat or call your local cable office and ask for a service outage credit.

WFTV in Orlando reports angry crowds gathered at a Orlando Spectrum cable store to switch boxes or cancel service because of a service outage impacting Central Florida. (2:08)

Frontier’s acquired service area in central Florida is depicted in orange.

Frontier Communications failed to attract any credible bids for its Florida service area it hoped to sell to raise cash to help pay down its massive debts, now reaching 23 times the size of the market value of its outstanding shares of stock.

Frontier’s money problems come largely from its 2016 $10.54 billion acquisition of Verizon Communications’ wireline operations in California, Texas and Florida (CTF). That added to Frontier’s debt, which now amounts to $17.8 billion, racked up mostly through acquisitions and merger activity.

After acquiring the ex-Verizon service areas, customers fled because of Frontier’s poor performance. Customers complained about lengthy service interruptions, inaccurate billing, and poor customer service. Frontier executives originally trumpeted the CTF acquisition as a crown jewel in the company’s portfolio. To some analysts, it now appears to be an albatross around the company’s neck, threatening to create serious financial problems when some of the company’s bond-financed debts mature in 2021 and 2022.

In February, a source told Bloomberg News the company could not expect to sell off its territories in one transaction, because there weren’t likely to be any buyers. Instead, Frontier offered buyers pieces of its network with the hope of attracting regional telecom companies, private equity and hedge fund investors, or local fiber optic service providers. In late May, Frontier revealed it had received multiple bids for pieces of its Florida operation, but no offer was adequately high enough to proceed.

Now that an asset sale appears to be unlikely, Frontier executives are in talks with their bondholders to figure out what will come next. It is a critical moment for the company, which is currently paying over $1.5 billion in interest annually, at an average interest rate of 8.1%. Refinancing debt could prove costly as interest rates have risen. Another option is bankruptcy reorganization, which other telecom companies have done to shed debt.

Frontier’s executives are in a difficult position. If they set the asking price for their assets too high, there will be no buyers. If they adjust prices downwards, it could attract fire sale buyers and signal the marketplace the company is desperate, weakening the value of its remaining assets.

“The Florida sale wasn’t going to de-lever the company meaningfully, but it would have given them a little more flexibility to handle their 2021 and 2022 maturities,” Lindsay Gibbons, an analyst at Creditsights, Inc., told Bloomberg News. “The problem is that they have a weak negotiating position. If they sold Florida for less than what they paid, it wouldn’t look good and it puts a watermark on the other asset values.”

A January 911 outage that crippled the emergency response system across the Tampa area came under scrutiny this week at a Hillsborough County government hearing on the matter.

“As a consumer and as a business owner, I’ve not been satisfied with the transition nor do I trust anyone from the company standing up here at the podium and saying ‘trust me.’ I’d like to see something that is guaranteed,” said Commissioner Victor Crist. “I would like to see something in writing that is guaranteed to my voters, my constituents and this board. Can I be clearer than that?”

Taking much of the heat from the clearly exasperated county commission was David Frezza, Frontier’s vice president of network operations.

“We deeply regret that the event on January 31st impacted the emergency services,” Frezza told the county commissioners.

In January, emergency 911 lines suddenly went out of service in several Florida counties around the Tampa Bay area for several hours. Frontier’s explanation initially blamed contractors and an accidental fiber cut.

But at this week’s hearing, Frezza blamed the outage squarely on CenturyLink, which he said removed both main and backup fiber communications cables for a road widening project underway near Clewiston, a small south-central Florida town on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. CenturyLink is the local phone company serving that area. That alone was apparently enough to interrupt 911 service in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Sarasota, Manatee, and Polk counties.

Frontier’s service area in the Tampa region.

The outage took Frontier several hours to track down, which all the more irritated county commissioners because CenturyLink sent advance notice about the work project, although Frezza denied CenturyLink gave the company enough details to recognize its potential danger to the 911 system.

“I assure you that had CenturyLink alerted us to the intent to work on both the primary and secondary paths simultaneously, we would have taken action to prevent such actions,” Frezza said. “Frontier recognizes that regardless of these circumstances, we are ultimately responsible for the quality and resiliency of the services we provide.”

But Freeza also admitted the company had room to improve line mapping and marking to help other telecom companies identify critical Frontier infrastructure. Before the outage, Frontier tracked maintenance notifications via e-mail. But now Frezza said Frontier will do it over the phone.

After several problems dealing with Frontier, including a widely criticized transition from Verizon’s billing systems to Frontier’s own system, county commissioners seemed reluctant to give Frontier just one more chance to explain.

“You have to give us peace of mind,” Commissioner Stacy White said. “We have to be able to tell the citizens of Hillsborough County with a straight face that we and Frontier have everything in place to reduce the likelihood that our 911 systems aren’t going to be knocked down.”

Frontier spokesman Bob Elek said the company had already implemented an improved backup system with two additional network paths for 911 calls and a third on the way.

“We have created enough redundancy in the network to ensure any future events should have backup to make sure it flows smoothly,” said Elek. The county commission curtly told Frontier to “put it in writing and come back.”

One county is not taking a chance with Frontier again. Manatee County officials report they are permanently cutting the cord on Frontier and moving to an internet-based call routing system that will be managed by Motorola. The county made the move after it gave up trying to get their questions and concerns resolved.

“What happened should never have happened. However, just trying to get answers out of them at this point has been hard to do,” said Jake Saur, the county’s chief of emergency communications. “It is set up in two geographically diverse locations, so if one side is knocked down or taken out, the other side takes it up. We don’t believe there will be outages like Frontier.”

WTVT in Tampa covered the Hillsborough County, Fla. hearing regarding Frontier’s 911 failures in January, 2018. (2:01)