Charter Cable told a Howell, Mich. family that lost everything in a major house fire they owed the cable company $1,600 for cable equipment, remote controls — even the batteries — that were consumed in the blaze.

Kerry Cacchione, her three children and her husband Jeff lost every single possession they owned in the fire seven weeks ago.  The Cacchione family, like many home renters, neglected to purchase all-important renter’s insurance, and without it, all of their furniture, clothing, and other valuables were gone for good.

When the family returned home to see the property, undergoing repairs paid for by their landlord, they were confronted with an enormous bill from Charter Communications, their cable company.

“$1,600, and they [charged us] for every remote, every battery, every modem, every cable box, and every DVR box,” said Cacchione.

The Cacchione family took the bill to Charter Cable and begged for forgiveness, telling employees there was no way they could afford to pay that cable bill.

Kerry reports Charter was unsympathetic and refused to waive the charges, leading her to ask WXYZ’s “Call for Action” to intervene.

With the threat of more bad publicity on the 6 o’clock news, Charter Communications decided to wipe out their bill.

Charter is among the most intransigent cable companies when it comes to demanding compensation for cable equipment destroyed or damaged in fires.  The company always relents when confronted with the prospect of bad publicity, such as when a customer service representative told one tornado victim in Alabama she would wait on the phone while she searched through debris in the neighborhood for lost cable equipment.

Every renter should always have renter’s insurance, which typically will cover damaged cable equipment. It’s very affordable and protects renters from losses. Many consumers believe landlords carry insurance which will protect them in the event of a natural disaster or fire, but those insurance policies protect the landlord’s property, not renters’ possessions. The peace of mind afforded by renter’s insurance can make all the difference in a major loss like the one experienced by the Cacchione family.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WXYZ Detroit Losing It All 8-31-11.mp4[/flv]

WXYZ in Detroit comes to the rescue of yet another family falling victim to an enormous cable bill from equipment lost or damaged in a house fire.  (3 minutes)

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KDFW Dallas Charter’s Excuse-o-matic 8-29-11.mp4[/flv]

Charter Cable left one North Texas family with lousy cable and poor Internet service for months, even scattering a new drop line across their backyard and leaving their cable connection exposed to the elements.  Despite repeated calls for assistance, all this family got were excuses, even going as far as telling them the local town wouldn’t allow Charter to bury their new cable line.  When a reporter from KDFW-TV ambushed a Charter Cable repairmen sent to assist with the family’s Internet service, all that changed.  In hours, the cable the company claimed couldn’t be buried was, and Charter even offered service credits.  (2 minutes)

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Frontier Communications’ DSL service delivers abysmal results for customers looking for quality time with Netflix.  For the second quarter running, the independent phone company’s ability to keep up with Netflix’s high quality video is about on par with a garden slug in a triathlon — yes, it may eventually reach the finish line, but you’ll be dead before it happens.  Even more embarrassing for Frontier, their service is occasionally beaten by Clearwire, a wireless ISP with a bandwidth throttler that can reduce your online experience to the painful days of dial-up if deemed to be using “too much.”

“Frontier sucks,” writes Stop the Cap! reader Doug in Charleston, W.V. “After they took over where Verizon fled, my ability to watch Netflix online became a source of endless frustration, so now I limit myself to mailing DVD’s back and forth.”

Remarkably, Charter Cable, which does poorly in customer satisfaction surveys, is again the runaway winner, followed by Comcast, the heavily usage-capped Cable One, Time Warner Cable, and Cox.  Verizon and AT&T only deliver middling performance.

Time Warner Cable will acquire cable systems in western Tennessee and Kentucky owned by NewWave Communications for $260 million in cash, the company announced this morning.

Some 70,000 subscribers are affected by the sale, expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.  It marks Time Warner’s first entry into the state of Tennessee, currently dominated by Comcast and Charter Cable.  In Kentucky, Time Warner already serves around 100,000 customers.

The transaction will make NewWave Communications, already a tiny cable operator, even smaller as it plans to continue serving 80,000 customers in Arkansas, Illinois, Missouri, and South Carolina and those formerly served by Avenue Broadband in Indiana and Illinois.

Time Warner’s cash deal increases speculation the company also remains interested in acquiring Insight Communications, another cable operator up for sale with systems in the same region served by NewWave.  Time Warner Cable favors large regional operations serving contiguous territories.  But if a bidding war erupts, CEO Glenn Britt has warned the company won’t pay a premium price for mergers and acquisitions.

NewWave’s subscribers have been through a lot in the last decade.  Many were originally served by aging cable systems owned and operated by Charter Cable, who sold them to NewWave with mixed results.  NewWave’s public image is tarnished to some degree by some of its vocal, disaffected customers.  The company endures a “NewWave Communications Sucks” Facebook page and blog posts like, New Wave Communications: The Worst ISP in America.  The most frequent complaints: poor service and oversold broadband slowing down in the evenings.

Competition for NewWave is primarily from the phone companies, often AT&T and Frontier Communications.

Stop the Cap! reader Cal believes AT&T cannot be reasoned with about Internet Overcharging until you threaten to cancel.

While a significant number of customers have already pulled the plug on AT&T DSL and U-verse service over their recently-introduced Internet Overcharging schemes, some are telling Stop the Cap! they have no plans to actually disconnect service until AT&T threatens to charge them overlimit fees.

For some AT&T customers, there is no suitable alternative to the phone company.  Rural customers without a cable provider, or those who are faced with two bad choices — AT&T or Charter Communications — say they are going to test AT&T’s resolve to actually overbill them.

Cal is an AT&T customer is Missouri.  His alternative?  Charter Cable, which has an Internet Overcharging scheme of its own and delivers what he calls “third world service” in his community.  Given a choice, he intends to stay with AT&T as long as possible, pulling the plug only after his third warning of exceeding the phone company’s new broadband usage limits.  He thinks AT&T’s customer service won’t ultimately let it come to that.

“My sister works for an AT&T call center where she lives, and there was some training on the subject of handling the company’s usage caps,” Cal reports. “Get the right representative or supervisor and they can make virtually anything go away with a few keystrokes, especially if you are prepared to cancel your service over the issue.  While they may not cancel the caps, they very well may credit back any overcharges.”

Cal says his family does not intend to change their usage habits one bit.  He’ll change providers before he rations his Internet usage.

“I maintain control over our Internet access here, they don’t and sure as hell won’t,” he said.  “We do not do illegal downloads and we don’t allow torrenting or anything else that can get my kids into trouble, but we do use a Roku box and watch Netflix instead of buying pay movie channels with programming not suitable for my family to watch.”

Cal says his five children are home-schooled, which makes daily Internet access an essential part of the education process.  Many companies that provide home-schooling materials increasingly require a broadband connection.  While not as bandwidth hungry as Netflix video streaming, with five children in the home, usage adds up fast.

“It is not hard to do 260GB of usage a month, which puts us just over their U-verse limit, and I’ll be damned if I am going to pay AT&T another $10 for 10GB over,” Cal says.  “This is another reason why the Obama Administration is no better than the last one — they are all masters of big corporations who will rob us blind and use the money to pay off Congress to look the other way.”

Cal used to be a Charter Cable customer, but left when that company implemented its own Internet Overcharging scheme.

“I told Charter with their lousy service they were lucky I was a customer, but after putting usage limits on, I left,” he reports.

Cal’s neighbor thinks he has an even better way to battle AT&T.

“My neighbor will cancel service under his name and sign up under his wife’s and bounce between them whenever AT&T threatens to send him a bigger bill; he has already been doing that for years back and forth between AT&T and Charter on new customer deals,” Cal says.

Cal, and many other readers touching base with us, believe AT&T is not very responsive to customer complaints unless customers threaten to cancel service, and they believe AT&T will only change its mind when shareholders see the usage limits as counterproductive.

“AT&T can buy enough people in Washington to make street protests irrelevant, but their shareholders sure won’t like it when they see customers and revenue dropping,” Cal notes.  “If you can’t get cable, you are stuck with AT&T, so you have to keep the pressure on — file complaints with the Better Business Bureau, the FCC, and Congress.  Make them spend more money defending their policy than they earn from its proceeds.”