Stall, stall, stall. While Charter Communications and AT&T are working towards improving their broadband service offerings for Kentucky’s largest city, both companies are doing everything possible to slow down the arrival of their nemesis: Google Fiber, which is preparing to wire Louisville for gigabit fiber to the home service.

This past February, Louisville Metro Council unanimously passed a new ordinance called “One Touch Make Ready,” designed to streamline telecom provider access to utility poles, which are getting crowded with at least three telecom companies vying for consumers’ business. The ordinance was passed with the support of Google, which seeks a minimum of red tape from local permit and zoning bureaucracies and its competitors while network engineers begin installing fiber optics across the city. Installing Google Fiber on utility poles may involve moving other providers’ wiring to make room for Google, which in some cases could mean 4-5 different utility companies having to visit each pole to move their wiring. In the past, Google asked the pole owner for access, which has not always been forthcoming on a timely basis. The new ordinance requires the pole owner to respond to access requests within 30 days. If no response is forthcoming, Google can approach the city for a permit to hire a contractor to do all the relocation work on their behalf.

“Such policies reduce cost, disruption, and delay, by allowing the work needed to prepare a utility pole for new fiber to be attached in as little as a single visit—which means more safety for drivers and the neighborhood,” Google wrote on its blog. “This work would be done by a team of contractors the pole owner itself has approved, instead of having multiple crews from multiple companies working on the same pole over weeks or months. One Touch Make Ready facilitates new network deployment by anyone—and that’s why groups representing communities and fiber builders support it, too.”

Louisville, Ky. (Image: Chris Watson)

About two weeks after the ordinance passed, AT&T made it clear they did not support it and took the city to court, claiming it had no right to regulate its utility poles.

“Louisville Metro Council’s recently passed ‘One Touch Make Ready’ Ordinance is invalid, as the city has no jurisdiction under federal or state law to regulate pole attachments,” said AT&T spokesman Joe Burgan. “We have filed an action to challenge the ordinance as unlawful. Google can attach to AT&T’s poles once it enters into AT&T’s standard Commercial Licensing Agreement, as it has in other cities. This lawsuit is not about Google. It’s about the Louisville Metro Council exceeding its authority.”

Time Warner Cable (now Charter Communications) joined AT&T, adding the city is violating the cable company’s corporate constitutional rights by effectively seizing their property (cable lines) and granting a right for third parties to manipulate, move, or manage those lines without Time Warner Cable’s permission.

“The ordinance is simply unworkable,” said Time Warner Cable’s attorney Gardner Gillespie, a partner in the D.C. law firm Sheppard-Mullin. “It does not provide any meaningful way for Time Warner Cable to know what changes have been made to its existing facilities or to assure any damage is promptly cured.”

Gillespie also claimed customers could endure poorer service and outages as a result of unauthorized contractors relocating Time Warner Cable’s equipment, often without the cable company’s knowledge.

City officials dismissed the concerns, but failed to get either lawsuit dismissed.

Charter executives have also opened a new opposition front against Google Fiber’s presence in the city, accusing city officials of unfairly favoring the search engine giant while continuing to burden Charter with a franchise agreement that requires the cable company to provide free cable in city buildings and offer channel space and studio facilities for the city’s Public, Educational, and Government Access channels.

At present, Google is not obligated to provide any of those services and has also won a unique regional franchise that covers the city of Louisville and nearby suburbs in a single agreement. The Metro Council has also granted Google its own public right-of-way access for installing various communications infrastructure. Both AT&T and Charter claim they are only getting involved because they believe they should be given equal treatment. Critics contend they are attempting to slow down Google Fiber, which could begin offering service by fall of 2017.

Time Warner Cable began offering Maxx-upgraded service in March 2016, offering residents up to 300Mbps. AT&T is gradually expanding its U-verse with GigaPower gigabit broadband service in locations around Louisville.

It is hard to imagine there are still cable systems serving customers with nothing more than a slim lineup of standard definition cable television channels in 2016, but not if you live in three Berkshire towns over the New York-Massachusetts border where Charter Communications will finally introduce HD television and internet service starting next week.

Lanesborough, West Stockbridge, and Hinsdale all suffer from the pervasive lack of broadband common across western Massachusetts. But these communities, along with Charter’s cable system in nearby Chatham, N.Y., are benefiting from regulator-mandated upgrades as a condition of approving Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Charter Communications has almost no presence in New York, except for 14,000 customers in Plattsburgh and the seriously antiquated system in Chatham that isn’t too far from the dilapidated systems serving the Berkshires on the Massachusetts side of the border. Like in Chatham, customers in the Berkshires pay for service similar to what cable customers received in the 1980s – no video on demand, no internet access, and a capacity-strained system that lacks enough bandwidth to offer HD channels.

The upgrades will cost about $6,000 per customer — numbering 2,500 in Chatham and another 800 in the three towns in Massachusetts. Charter is paying the bill. Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable will make things easier for the cable operator, because it will extend fiber connections between the Charter systems and existing Time Warner Cable infrastructure nearby.

In Massachusetts, Charter’s upgrades require customers to install new set-top boxes in time for the switchover on Aug. 2. A week later, on Aug. 9, internet access will be available at the two speeds Charter traditionally offers — 60 and 100Mbps.

Most customers care a lot less about improved cable television and are more concerned about getting broadband. Western Massachusetts’ broadband problems have affected property values and kept businesses from relocating or expanding in the area. Few areas in the northeast have languished with inadequate internet access more than Massachusetts communities west of Springfield.

The large consortium of 44 communities working under WiredWest have spent years working towards community-owned fiber to the home service in the western half of the state, but the project ran into political interference at the state government level. Lanesborough had been part of the WiredWest collaborative effort, reports iBerkshires. With Charter’s upgrade, the community may decide to drop out of the project, even though it would likely deliver superior broadband service over what Charter will offer.

Charter Communications is promising its Southern California customers it won’t bungle the transition from Time Warner Cable to Charter Communications like Frontier Communications did with former Verizon customers.

“We purchased all of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. With this transaction we acquired everything,” company spokesman Justin Venech said. “We’re able to take more time in the integration process and not rush to make changes.”

Charter will take up to 18 months to make its presence fully known in areas formerly served by Time Warner Cable, and then primarily under its brand name known as Spectrum.

Time Warner Cable customers will be able to keep their current service and packages even after the transition, at least for a while.

But not all customers are happy about Charter’s slow transition plans. Customers waiting for Time Warner Cable Maxx upgrades, some already in progress, may be out of luck. Charter’s new management team put an indefinite hold on Time Warner’s more aggressive upgrade plans in favor of Charter’s much more modest commitment to offer customers two broadband speed tiers – 60 and 100Mbps over the next 18 months. Customers in the northeast and midwest have been told there are no longer any definitive dates for the introduction of Maxx, which offers free speed upgrades up to 300Mbps.

Almost all of Time Warner Cable’s executive management has been escorted out of the company’s Manhattan headquarters, severance pay and benefits in hand. In fact, Charter plans to abandon Time Warner Cable’s Manhattan headquarters altogether and shift top management to its plush Connecticut office. Most workers will be reassigned to other locations yet to be announced, some possibly upstate.

Charter has already begun repricing service and packages that will resemble Spectrum offerings, at least for new customers across Time Warner Cable and Bright House territories. The packages will not carry the Spectrum brand just yet, however.

Time Warner Cable subscribers in Otsego County, N.Y. have been able to watch WBNG-TV, the CBS affiliate in Binghamton, since there has been a cable company called Time Warner Cable. But as of yesterday, that is no longer the case. In Baxter County, Ark.,  Suddenlink customers suddenly lost KARK (NBC) and KTHV (CBS), two stations from Little Rock, after the cable company decided it would henceforth only carry KYTV (NBC) and KOLR (CBS) instead. Part of the problem for subscribers is those two stations are located in Springfield, Missouri, a different state.

Time Warner Cable wasted no time yanking WBNG off the lineup of their Oneonta and Cooperstown cable systems. WBNG received a letter informing them of the decision on June 16. Two weeks later, the channel was replaced with WKTV from Utica, which is a secondary affiliate of CBS (WKTV has been an NBC affiliate for decades, but through the use of digital subchannels, WKTV has managed to lock down affiliations with CBS, NBC, CW, and Me-TV). Time Warner argues Otsego County is in the Utica television market, such as it is, so there is no reason to spend more to put Binghamton stations on the lineup as well.

Oneonta, N.Y. is located between Binghamton and Utica.

Another cable company with cost-cutting fever is Altice-owned Suddenlink, which stopped carrying the two Little Rock-based broadcast stations in northern Arkansas on June 7, leaving KATV (ABC) as the only central Arkansas-based news outlet on the cable provider’s Mountain Home-area system.

The decision to drop the two Little Rock channels was made at the corporate level, local employees told The Baxter Bulletin, and the Mountain Home office had no input in that decision and were not allowed to talk about it.

The mayor of Mountain Home sure is, however.

“We’ve had a lot of people calling in, coming by the office,” Mayor Joe Dillard told the newspaper. “Several have been in a couple times. I do not understand why we got two of our main channels in the state taken away.”

An authorized Suddenlink spokesperson finally admitted it was about the money.

“In recent years, local broadcast station owners have begun asking for increasingly larger amounts of money in exchange for allowing us to renew contracts to carry their stations,” said Gene Regan, senior director of corporate communications for Suddenlink. “To help keep down the costs of providing services to our customers, we have made the decision to drop out-of-market stations that duplicate network affiliations with other existing in-market stations.”

That policy has been gradually implemented in a growing number of Suddenlink-served communities, which are often exurban or rural towns located between two larger metropolitan areas. These are the areas most likely to receive multiple network affiliates from different nearby cities.

Suddenlink has standing orders from Altice to look for savings wherever possible, but none of those savings are returned to subscribers. The loss of the stations has not reduced anyone’s cable bill and Suddenlink recently moved TBS and INSP — a Christian cable network — to a more costly Expanded Basic tier. In place of the two networks dropped from the Basic package are home shopping networks that actually make Suddenlink money – Evine Live and Jewelry TV.

“I’m disappointed,” Anna Hudson of Bull Shoals told the newspaper. “I have friends in Little Rock, in Batesville. I like to know what’s going on in Arkansas, not in Missouri. It doesn’t help when the Legislature is in session, that will not be covered by the Springfield stations.”

Despite vociferous denials to New York regulators that Altice’s unique way of cost-cutting expenses in Europe would mean the same in the United States, a Suddenlink employee in the Appalachians found herself visiting a nearby Kroger supermarket recently to pick up some “forever” postage stamps after the office’s postage meter machine stopped working.

“Nobody paid the bill, leaving us to raid petty cash to get some mail out,” the Suddenlink employee told Stop the Cap! “They got the problem resolved later that week, but this was only the most recent of several incidents that make it clear our new owner doesn’t like us spending any money.”

Suddenlink employees in West Virginia needed money to get a broken ice machine in their office fixed and got the third degree instead of a quick answer.

The Wall Street Journal reports during a March “investment committee” meeting, Altice’s bean counters pelted employees with questions about the nature of the ice machine business in the United States and whether it would be smarter to buy or lease.

“A complete waste of people’s time and energy,” said the former Suddenlink employee.

In North Carolina, call center employees are updating their resumes after watching job positions slowly get eliminated starting this past April.

“Since that time, rumors have been spreading that the call center [itself] may be closing soon,” shared another employee. “And if you’re paying attention the writing is on the wall that the rumors are true. But no one from upper management or corporate will share any information.”

When Altice took over Cablevision, employees were stunned when top executives dined in the staff canteen on their first day after the deal closed. That was never the style of former CEO James Dolan and other executives who avoided hobnobbing with anyone too far from the executive suites. Dolan himself often used a helicopter to travel back and forth from the office, occasionally with bodyguards.

Charles Stewart, chief financial officer of Altice U.S., warns everyone better get used to it.

“[Cost discipline is] our whole philosophy,” Stewart said. “It triggers a discussion at a very nitty-gritty level, which is where the difference is made.”

With a commitment to slash $900 million in expenses out of Cablevision alone during 2016, that’s a lot of discipline. Employees are echoing their French counterparts at Altice’s SFR-Numericable when they call life at Suddenlink and Cablevision “a culture of fear,” watching workers exiting each week without being replaced. Much the same happened in Europe, despite commitments not to engage in job-cutting. In both cases, Altice claims the slow but steady trickle of employee departures are “normal churn,” not layoffs.

Altice designed its “investment committee” to be an authoritarian hellhole on purpose. Those who dare to attend the weekly meetings, which extend for hours, face micro-scrutiny of every expense brought before it, with employees peppered with questions to justify their expenses. The same occurred in France, where Altice officials debated how often they should pay to vacuum the carpets and clean the restrooms.

Employees figure out soon enough it is easier not to ask (or to simply buy what you need on your own), before enduring a prolonged debate on mundane topics like using new or recycled toner cartridges.

“It creates consternation for about two months,” admitted Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei. “Then people realize, ‘Boy, I really don’t want to go to the investment committee. We just got 500 printers a year ago; we can probably extend their life one more year.’”

While Altice has a deal with regulators not to layoff “customer-facing” Cablevision employees in New York, it is already slashing one of Dolan’s pet projects: Freewheel, a Wi-Fi powered wireless phone, SMS, and data service.

Coming next: Channel Renewal Battles. Altice executives believe it’s time to declare total war on channel carriage costs, even it leads to prolonged channel blackouts.

“We have about half of our programming lineup that’s up for renewal very soon,” Goei said. “There are clearly a lot of channels that we’d like to get rid of.” But Goei also told the Wall Street Journal many of the networks he doesn’t want are part of broader programming deals that require all of a company’s channels to be carried.

So what is next? Altice has stated emphatically it wants to be either the largest or second largest cable operator in the U.S. That guarantees more acquisitions, probably beginning next year. Cox and Mediacom — both privately held — may decide not to sell, which means Altice will have to refocus on taking over Charter Communications, which itself just absorbed Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, or divert to making acquisitions in wireless — T-Mobile or Sprint, perhaps, or content, which likely means one or more Hollywood studios.