Charter Communications customers that fall past-due on their cable bills can expect a personal visit from a contractor looking for payment or your cable equipment if you refuse to pay and get disconnected.

Spectrum’s designated “door collector” in several states is Makotek, which claimed in a Craigslist ad recruiting new workers that it “is contracted by Spectrum to handle non-pay work orders for their entire New York footprint. We are now hiring for our office in all areas in Central N.Y.”

While its recruiting and training videos emphasize its workers should be polite and professional, the firm prominently displays a shark in its logo.

“Door collectors” are usually sent by cable operators after service is disconnected from the office for non-payment. Their mission is to collect past-due payments anyway possible, even if it takes a post-dated check. A training video emphasizes the psychology employed by door collectors to get paid or retrieve the company’s equipment from customers who won’t or can’t bring their account current.

Employees are advised to park their truck near a utility pole to send an impression permanent service disconnection is imminent. They are also advised to repeatedly return to a customer’s home to find someone authorized to cut them a check or make a credit card payment. The training video details how to respond to the myriad of excuses customers can give for not paying, and what to do when a customer becomes irate. At all times, employees are told to stay focused on one thing: payment in full.

Makotek is not the only door collector employed by the cable industry. Boxco manages door collections for Comcast and its help wanted ad suggests the caliber of candidates it apparently attracts:

REQUIREMENTS- If you have worked Comcast, you know the drill. ** Excellent Verbal Communication skills – SPANISH SPEAKING is a plus! **Weekdays til 9pm and Saturday work hours ** NO FELONY or Aggravated Misdemeanor Conviction in past 10 Years ** Pass yearly or on demand Drug Screen ** YOU WILL NOT ENTER ANY HOME WITHOUT AN ADULT PRESENT ** Clean Cut Appearance with friendly attitude. ** Presentable Car or Late Model Truck/Van in good running condition ** Active Cell Phone-(with Text Messaging)

Here is how Makotek trains its workers to rescue past-due cable accounts. Take away message: They have already heard every excuse. (18:03)

Just days before the finalizing of the acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Charter Communications, customers in Central New York were a week away from the completion of Time Warner Cable’s Maxx upgrade program targeting Syracuse and other communities in the region. But once Charter took over, all upgrades were put on hold, leaving some customers with Maxx speeds of 300Mbps while others languished with top speeds of 50Mbps.

Good news for those customers, at least. In a communication with the New York State Public Service Commission, Charter told regulators it intends to focus its efforts on completing those upgrades over the course of 2017. In fact, it will likely be the only region of New York targeted for speed upgrades of up to 300Mbps this year. For other upstate cities including Buffalo, Rochester, and Binghamton, Charter has upgraded its top speed to 100Mbps for those willing to pay approximately $105 a month and a one-time upgrade fee of $199.

Sometime this year, those New York communities still not able to buy 300Mbps will commence a full transition to all digital and encrypted cable television service, a prerequisite for the faster broadband speeds. Charter has a deadline of 2019 to introduce up to 300Mbps service across all areas it services in New York State. The company seems to hint it will achieve that well before the deadline, which likely means sometime in 2018.

In February, the cable company also reported it had completed building out new service to an additional 2,860 homes across 49 counties and approximately 250 municipalities. But the company is committed to expanding service to approximately 145,000 New York households, which means it has a long way to go. This week, Charter formally applied for an extension of the deadline, blaming utility pole owners for taking too long to “make-ready” utility poles for cable service and admitting it will fall short of regulator expectations.

The areas where Charter has most recently managed to complete expanded service areas include:

• Albany County for approximately 281 passings, including the Village of Menands, Towns of Colonie, Bethlehem, and New Scotland, and the City of Albany.
• Erie County for approximately 336 passings, including areas such as the Towns of Amherst, Boston, Orchard Park, Derby, and the City of Buffalo.
• Kings County for approximately 285 passings in Brooklyn.
• New York County for approximately 553 passings in the City of New York.
• Saratoga County for approximately 373 passings, including the Towns of Milton, Northumberland, Stillwater, Clifton Park, Ballston Lake, Halfmoon, and Wilton, and the City of Saratoga Springs.
• Sullivan County for approximately 84 passings, including the Towns of Fallsburg, Liberty, Victor, Thompson, and the Village of Woodridge.
• Ulster County for approximately 143 passings, including the Towns of Rochester, Ulster, and Saugerties, and the City of Kingston.
• Wayne County for approximately 78 passings, including the Towns of Macedon, Walworth, Newark, and Williamson.

Charter Communications has begun forcing some former Time Warner Cable customers into new Spectrum packages and pricing without their permission, causing customers to lose channels, pay higher prices, and have to exchange working cable boxes at a cost of up to $24.

The cable operator has begun “sweeping” accounts looking for customers it deems to have paid too little for too long or who are getting grandfathered cable channels the company feels they are no longer entitled to receive.

One of the first cities to be hit with Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge’s ‘account sweeps for more cash’ initiative is Lexington, Ky., where longtime customers are discovering their cable service is missing more than a dozen channels with no warning or explanation.

Daniel Fitzgerald discovered many of his cable channels were gone, replaced with a message that his subscription no longer included the cable channels that had been a part of his Standard cable package for years.

“I thought, ‘What the hell? I just paid the cable bill,’” Fitzgerald told the Herald-Leader last week at his tiny Lexington apartment he shares with his disabled 16-year-old son.

It turns out he wasn’t paying enough to satisfy Charter Communications.

A Spectrum representative told Fitzgerald that he hadn’t been paying Time Warner enough for the standard cable package. If he wanted those channels back, his monthly bill for cable and internet would jump $36 a month, from $103 to $139, effective immediately. No new channels, no new features, just a new much higher bill. To add insult to injury, the representative didn’t much care for the cable box Time Warner Cable provided him several years earlier and demanded its replacement, for a $24 service fee to send a technician out to check his service and replace his equipment.

When Fitzgerald attempted to negotiate with the cable company that claims it’s a “new day” for how cable companies treat their customers, the representative promptly cut him off.

‘This is Spectrum’s deal, take it or leave it,’ he was told.

“It was bull crap,” Fitzgerald said. “They don’t give us any notice, they just spring it on us in the middle of the month. And then they tell us we’re getting an ‘upgrade.’ This isn’t an upgrade, it’s the same channels we already had!”

Fitzgerald was not the only customer affected with Charter’s “surprise ‘upgrade,'” according to Lexington city officials, whose phones have rung off the hook about cable channels being held ransom for steep rate increases.

City officials who called on Spectrum to explain themselves eventually heard back from the cable company in a terse e-mail claiming Charter has begun performing “sweeps of customer accounts” looking for customers who have got too good of a deal from the cable company. Those customers are then summarily “repackaged” with no warning. Charter was busy “repackaging” a lot of Fitzgerald’s neighbors in his Alexandria Drive apartment building as well.

Rutledge told Wall Street investors this quarter it was all a part of Charter’s commitment to “move prices in the right direction.”

At Ximena McCollum’s home in Lexington, Charter cut off the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in-progress. When McCollum called Spectrum, she was informed she was “repackaged” as well, and could get her basketball game back for the right price: $45 more every month.

The customer service representative told her the channels she claimed she was getting were no longer part of her subscription.

“So if I had been getting them, I shouldn’t have been getting them,” McCollum said last week. “I told her that I’ve lived in this house for seven years. I’ve always had the same channels. She kept insisting that I wasn’t supposed to be getting these channels unless I paid them some ridiculous price. You could tell that she was confused and reading from some sort of script they had given her. Finally, I said, ‘Just cancel my subscription. I cut the cord.”

The Herald-Leader reported the “repackaging” comes down to one issue: money. Charter wants more, a lot more in some cases.

Rutledge has repeatedly claimed Time Warner Cable was effectively giving away the store and kowtowing to appease customers with lower rates when they complained about their cable bill. As far as Rutledge is concerned, the iron hand of discipline for former Time Warner customers is long overdue.

Rutledge promised he will force higher cable prices this spring as the company starts driving customers out of the Time Warner Cable packages into more expensive Spectrum packages. The company does that by allowing bundled discounts and promotions to expire on existing Time Warner packages, which results in sometimes-shocking rate increases of $50 or more per month. When customers call to complain, they are pushed towards slimmed-down Spectrum TV packages that cost slightly more than what customers used to pay and include more than a dozen fewer cable channels.

No one is exempt from being herded into Spectrum’s vision for the future. Even some of the city government’s office televisions have gone dark after “repackaging.”

Mossotti

City councilwoman Jennifer Mossotti got the Spectrum treatment as well, told if she wanted to keep her cable service, she needed to pay $21.50 more a month. Mossotti assumed she could whittle that amount down by dropping her Time Warner Cable phone service, but Spectrum told her that would cost her even more because it would break up her triple play bundle, resulting in an even bigger rate hike.

Lexington officials claim they feel held hostage by Charter and the ransom the city and its citizens have to pay doesn’t get them better service, just the same service they used to have for more money.

“It’s frustrating to the Nth degree. People are calling our offices daily about this,” Mossotti told the newspaper. “We felt like we at least had a little leverage with Time Warner. You could talk to them and usually you could work something out. With Spectrum, everything falls on deaf ears.”

In the face of the public relations disaster this is causing Charter in Kentucky, company representatives are trying to shift the blame on to customers, claiming they have been freeloading channels that have been part of legacy cable packages from years earlier that were either grandfathered or long forgotten, and Charter is simply tidying up.

For example, a local man who lives on Social Security benefits and who received the same cable lineup for 20 years “has only been paying for the Starter TV package,” Jason Keller, Charter’s senior director of government affairs, told city officials in an April 10 email. “The most recent sweep of customer accounts is what knocked out the channels, since he wasn’t paying for them. However, we’ve now repackaged him into a new service offering that has restored the channels and provides him with a new HD box.”

Keller did not respond to calls from the Herald-Leader asking how many Lexington customers now face higher cable prices.

In a prepared statement, Charter spokesman Michael Pedelty wrote: “Time Warner Cable was providing some programming inadvertently to a small number of customers whose packages didn’t include them. We want our customers to have the best quality and most reliable video experience. Earlier this year, we started a network project that adds an element of security and ensures individual channels are encrypted and available exclusively to those who subscribe to them.”

A few Lexington area residents told Stop the Cap! they felt abused by the entire process.

Barbara Montgomery, a subscriber of Charter (and two of its predecessors) claims she faced a higher bill after many of her channels disappeared a few weeks ago.

“We were ‘repackaged’ and told it would cost us $34 to get channels back,” Montgomery told us. “The [Charter] guy literally told us ‘tough luck, honey!'”

Edgar, who withheld his last name, reported that a Charter representative came close to accusing him of being a cable thief for getting channels he was not supposed to receive.

“I had this cable package for 27 years, no less and no more, and the last two companies – Insight and Time Warner Cable – let me keep paying for it year after year and I never saw any reason to change it,” he told us. “But Charter did, and on their own. One day the channels were there, the next day they were not. They tell you it’s too bad but that is way things are with Spectrum and they keep telling me their internet service is better, but I am 92 years old and don’t even have a computer.”

The experience of customers in Lexington may explain why tens of thousands of former Time Warner Cable customers are dropping Spectrum like a hot rock when the rate increase hits. For Rutledge, who was rewarded with a $98.5 million pay package in 2016, charging current customers a lot more for cable service more than makes up for the former subscribers they manage to drive off. For him, customers either get with the Spectrum program or they can go somewhere else, if there is somewhere else for customers to go.

From: Charter Communications’ 1Q 2017 investor presentation

Those experiencing the Spectrum Treatment are switching to AT&T U-verse, although AT&T is trying very hard to get them to sign up for DirecTV instead.

Montgomery tells us AT&T really doesn’t want their cable business, but they will sell her an expensive cell phone or satellite TV.

“AT&T is a happy hog making a lot of money in the cell phone business, but they sure don’t want to spend much on giving me TV service, and told me I’d be happier with satellite TV,” she said. “If I wanted satellite TV, I would have called DirecTV or Dish myself.”

The other option for parts of Lexington is Windstream’s Kinetic TV, a fiber to the neighborhood service available in some Windstream service areas. But Kinetic TV is getting mixed reviews from customers who have the service, and for those that want broadband, Kinetic speeds don’t cut it for many.

While Rutledge figures out how to spend his eye-popping compensation package, those on fixed incomes like Fitzgerald who live on less than $1,000 a month are trying to figure out where they will get the extra money to pay Charter.

Fitzgerald was giving the cable company $103 a month for standard cable television with no premiums and internet service. Now Spectrum wants 35% more for the same service he used to get.

A nearby neighbor told Fitzgerald and the newspaper their Spectrum bill went up $18 a month.

“A five dollar increase, OK, fine, I guess I could deal with that,” the neighbor said. “But twenty bucks just because a new company comes in? This is felonious. What am I gonna do, tell Social Security that I need $20 more every month because Spectrum wants it? It doesn’t work that way.”

“There ain’t much you can do about it, though,” Fitzgerald told the neighbor. “They’re the cable company.”

A typical crowd at a Charter/Spectrum store still displaying Time Warner Cable signage. (Image: Sherry T.)

Your patience is appreciated as I spent the last two days more offline than online, courtesy of “problems” with Charter Communications and their confusion factory.

The good news: The local employees I have dealt with have been both polite and professional and are trying to be helpful, and I’ve always recognized this as true with both Time Warner Cable and now Charter.

The bad news: Corporate policies, the merger, and confusion over glacially slow integration of Charter and TWC’s separate billing and provisioning systems can leave customers caught in the middle. Also, despite the well-intentioned assistance provided by the offshore call center workers (Sandheep, Moanwalla, and someone I think was named Sunshine), their abilities to navigate Charter’s own service and provisioning systems properly left plenty to be desired. Much of their efforts had to be redone from the beginning stateside.

Phillip Dampier’s Charter/Time Warner Cable Account — Born 2004, Died 2017.

We will be back with regular articles tomorrow, assuming our internet service is functioning properly, and look for a write-up of my experiences navigating around Charter’s new policies towards their adopted TWC and Bright House customers.

To be sure, I was not alone having problems with Charter. I have never seen such crowds at Charter Cable Stores, where 20 people were ahead of me in line at one location, almost 30 at another. Nearly half brought their equipment back with new, higher bill in hand. They had enough after their bill increased $20-80(!) dollars, all thanks to Charter’s “pro-consumer merger benefits.”

Yes, a higher bill and a package of fewer channels.

It was stunning to think Charter had lost several hundred thousand TWC customers in just three months, but not after what I witnessed yesterday. It is entirely believable they will be losing a lot more, all thanks to higher prices and intransigence on giving loyal customers the kind of deals new customers get.

Charter/Spectrum: Same s***, different name.

An email from Charter/Spectrum announcing minor speed upgrades. (Image courtesy: pspfreak)

Former Time Warner Cable customers that never received Maxx upgrades are now getting a minor consolation prize from Charter Communications: a minor broadband speed boost at no additional charge.

Customers eventually receive an email message from Charter/Spectrum advising them of the upgrade. For Standard Internet customers, the email reads:

Dear Valued Customer,

We just made your fast Internet speeds even faster. And the best part is, you don’t have to do a thing.

We know that today there is more to see, learn, play, share and do online than ever before. That means more streaming video, more music and movie downloads, more photo sharing and more gaming. You have more devices in your home than ever before, from laptops to game consoles, e-readers to smartphones, which means you need more speed so everyone can do what they need to, and all at the same time if they want to. That’s why we have increased your Internet speeds from 15Mbps to 20Mbps.

This speed increase for our customers is just our way of saying thanks. Enjoy your faster speeds!

Customers in western New York were upgraded over the past weekend, while some others have quietly been getting upgrades over the last two weeks. At press time, we have confirmed two tiers have been upgraded, but others may have as well. Customers need to disconnect the power cable from their modem for 10 seconds and plug it back in to get the new speeds:

• Time Warner Cable Standard Internet: Was 15Mbps, now 20Mbps. (Speeds are overprovisioned and may report somewhat faster during speed tests).
• Time Warner Cable Ultimate Internet: Was 50Mbps, now 60Mbps. (Speeds are overprovisioned and generally report 70/6Mbps during speed tests).

Stop the Cap! reader Howard in Albany, N.Y. reported his area was upgraded over the weekend, and we can confirm customers in the Rochester/Finger Lakes region in western New York are now also getting the higher speeds.

Legacy Time Warner Cable customers can report their experiences in the comment section. We’d be particularly interested in knowing if these upgrades also happened for Turbo and Extreme customers.