Spectrum workers on strike march in the 2017 Labor Day parade in New York City. (Image courtesy: IBEW/Local 3)

Charter Communications’ list of addresses of some of its “locally based contractors” turned out to be self-storage locations, leading to accusations the company could potentially be in default of its franchise agreement with New York City.

Charter agreed to use city-based contractors wherever possible to maintain and upgrade its expansive cable system in the Big Apple. But an audit by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications found only seven of 26 vendors Charter uses are in the city, despite claims by Charter that 77% of its vendors are NYC-based.

On its own, the violation might seem minor, except for the fact Charter Communications has left 1,800 of its best-trained workers in New York and New Jersey out on strike for 11 months, the longest unresolved labor action of 2017.

Workers’ demands, presented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3, have been largely ignored by Charter, in part because the company can find replacement workers outside of the area.

Charter’s denial of the accusation it was in violation of its agreement to use local labor included an attempt to broaden the definition of “located,” followed by an effort to change the subject to what the company alleges are more than 100 acts of vandalism committed by striking workers or those sympathizing with them.

“We continue to meet our franchise obligations, and our response to their findings is included in the report,” a Charter spokesman told the New York Daily News over the weekend.

Although union resources supporting the striking workers have been tested to their limits, the union and most of its members persevere. But it remains a difficult struggle, with some members on the verge of losing their apartments, and many more now relying on food banks and public assistance.

The dispute began after the former Time Warner Cable employees were transitioned to Charter Communications. Charter announced it wanted to pull out of the union’s pension and healthcare plans and replace them with a company-sponsored healthcare offer and a 401(k) retirement plan.

“They basically said that until we agree that they don’t have to contribute to our pension and health plan, they won’t talk about anything else,” Chris Erikson, business manager of Local 3, told the Daily News last fall. “That’s a gun to our head, they said ‘Take it or leave it.’ And our membership understands the value of what’s at stake here, and they decided to leave it.”

Efforts by large corporations to abandon employee care and retirement plans administered by the unions themselves is part of a broader national attack to make unions irrelevant, argue union defenders. The replacement plans offered by Charter are greatly reduced from what Local 3 fought for and won from Time Warner Cable.

“The practical side of the medical plan that the members have is: my son had a kidney transplant and I got the bill from Columbia Presbyterian hospital and it was $96,000. My share of that was 200 bucks. If I was in Charter’s medical plan I’d probably have to take a loan to pay the hospital bill – that’s with coverage,” Erikson told The Guardian.

Charter can certainly afford to cover its workers’ needs. The company’s CEO was the highest paid in the country in 2016, earning $98 million. The impact of the Trump tax cuts also delivered soaring profits for Charter Communications as a whole.

Profits for the fourth quarter of 2017 hit $9.6 billion, compared with $454 million during the same period in 2016. Profits for the year reached $9.9 billion, compared with $3.5 billion in 2016. Charter earned $41.6 billion in revenue in 2017.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks the strike has gone on for too long.

“It’s been almost a year that Local 3 workers have been on strike. It’s far past time for management to come to the table with a fair deal,” he said.

Charter Communications has introduced internet-delivered cable television packages that its cable TV subscribers have requested for years, including one offering a true a-la-carte lineup of network TV channels and the customer’s choice of 10 cable channels for $25 a month.

Spectrum Choice was soft-launched this week and is a companion to a larger internet-delivered package of TV services targeting cord-cutters called Spectrum Stream, which is also available in many areas.

Although Spectrum customers can visit the order page to sign up for Spectrum Choice immediately, when we tested it this afternoon we found the website was not able to complete an order. It turns out Spectrum is initially “hand-selecting” about 100,000 customers in selected areas for Spectrum Choice, but won’t disclose exactly where those areas are. We know from some reviews, it is available in parts of Ohio.

For now, would-be customers can try building their own package from at least 65 cable networks, including several networks Spectrum usually bundles into higher cost Silver and Gold packages. For example, Turner Classic Movies, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, and FX Movie Channel are all available to choose. Spectrum Choice also offers all three major cable news networks as well as Spectrum News (where available). ESPN, ESPN II, FOX Sports, NBC Sports Network, and NFL Network are also available for sports fans. Even Music Choice is included.

Spectrum Choice customers are not tied down with a bloated package of channels, except for the included large bundle of local stations, which includes ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, MyNetworkTV, PBS, and independent/foreign language over the air stations. The availability of public television is a rarity among online cable TV alternatives. In most areas, digital subchannels like Grit and MeTV are also included, depending on what networks are provided by stations in your area. You will also get several shopping channels, C-SPAN I, II, and III, and local Public, Educational, and Government Access channels as seen on your local cable system.

If you visit their website can complete an order online, you are qualified to receive their service. If there is no option to move forward to complete an order, you are not qualified to sign up at this time, but check back later or call Spectrum and ask.

The service relies on the Spectrum TV app (available on iOS, Android, Roku, and Xbox One) and the Spectrum website to stream video programming to customers, and no set-top box is required. DVR service is not worth the effort or cost. It requires a traditional DVR set top box and you can only watch recorded shows on the television connected to the DVR. Be aware there are also restrictions viewing some channels outside of the home, just as Spectrum’s cable TV customers already understand:

Linear OOH: Watching a live channel while away from home
VOD OOH: Watching on-demand content while away from home
TVE App Name: TV Everywhere App Name – Independent apps used by programmers or viewing on their websites
VOD Parity: Cable TV and Spectrum Choice customers get access to the same on-demand programming options.

Details (click the name of the package for more information):

Spectrum Choice TV

If you don’t mind Charter/Spectrum choosing your channel lineup, a second option offers more channels for about the same price.

• 7-day money back guarantee/trial, then $15 for the first month
• To get the service, you must have an internet-only plan or an internet + voice plan from Spectrum. You cannot be a current traditional cable TV subscriber
• After the first month, the service costs $25 per month for the first two years, including the Broadcast TV Surcharge, but excluding tax
• After 24 months, price increases to $30 a month
• Your assigned Spectrum TV username and password will also work on websites that authenticate you as a qualified cable TV customer
• Premium channels are $7.50 each for HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, Starz, and Starz Encore or bundle all-five for $15 a month for two years. Epix is also available a-la-carte.

Spectrum Stream TV

• $21.99 a month (not including $3 Broadcast TV Surcharge) for 25+ pre-selected channels including local stations and major basic cable networks
• All features included with Choice TV work similarly except the lineup is not a-la-carte. But you may get more channels at a comparable price.
• After two years, the price increases to $26.99. Starting in year three, the price rises again to $34.99.
• The same $15 promotion for five premium movie networks noted above applies, if interested.

Spectrum’s promotion of Stream TV. (1:00)

Charter Communications will have to face a courtroom to answer accusations the cable company intentionally sold internet service at speeds it knew it could not provide to its customers in New York.

New York State Supreme Court Justice O. Peter Sherwood rejected a motion by the cable company to dismiss New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s 2017 lawsuit accusing Time Warner Cable (now owned by Charter) of systematically shortchanging as many as 640,000 New York internet customers by falsely advertising internet speeds it knew it could not deliver, often with at least 900,000 outdated company-provided cable modems incapable of supporting the higher speeds the company promoted.

“Today’s decision by the New York Supreme Court marks a major victory for New York consumers — rejecting every single argument made by Charter-Spectrum in its attempts to block our lawsuit,” said Schneiderman. “This decision ensures that our office can continue to hold Charter-Spectrum to account for its failure to deliver the reliable internet speeds it promised consumers, ripping you off by promising internet speeds it simply could not deliver.”

Charter’s Defense: Spectrum’s Ad Claims for Fast Internet Service are: “Prototypical instances of non-actionable puffery.”

Charter’s lawyers attempted a variety of legal strategies to get Schneiderman’s lawsuit tossed, including undermining the cable company’s own marketing efforts. Lawyers argued the court should ignore Charter’s claims it sold a “blazing fast, super-reliable connection” that could “stream Netflix and Hulu movies and shows effortlessly” as nothing more than “prototypical instances of non-actionable puffery.”

Scheniderman’s office claimed it was much more than that.

N.Y. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

“Spectrum-TWC failed to maintain enough network capacity in the form of interconnection ports to deliver this promised content to its subscribers without slowdowns, interruptions, and data loss,” stated Schneiderman. “It effectively ‘throttled’ access to Netflix and other content providers by allowing the ports through which its network interconnects with data coming from those providers to degrade, causing slowdowns. Spectrum-TWC then extracted payments from those content providers as a condition for upgrading the ports As a result, Spectrum-TWC’s subscribers could not reliably access the content they were promised, and instead were subjected to the buffering, slowdowns and other interruptions in service that they had been assured they would not encounter.”

Charter also claimed it was not legally responsible for meeting its own advertised speeds because the company only sold speeds “up to” a level, without guaranteeing customers would get the speeds it advertised.

Even if a judge found Charter lacking in its legal defense, lawyers for the company more broadly argued that under FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s net neutrality order, state courts and regulators had no power to regulate or oversee broadband providers because “regulation of broadband internet access service should be governed principally by a uniform set of federal regulations, rather than by a patchwork of separate state and local requirements,” according to Charter’s attorney Christopher Clark.

Justice Sherwood uniformly rejected all of Charter’s arguments to dismiss the case:

• Improper state venue for the lawsuit: “Spectrum-TWC fails to identify any provision [of law] that preempts state anti-fraud or consumer-protection claims, or reflects any intention by Congress to make federal law the exclusive source of law protecting consumers from broadband providers’ deceptive conduct.”
• False advertising: “This court finds that, contrary to defendants’ contentions, the FCC’s goal of promoting competition through [the Internet Transparency Rule], the FCC stated that the rule was intended to ensure consumers had the “right to accurate information, so [they] can choose, monitor, and receive the broadband internet services they have been promised. New York’s Executive Law and Consumer Protection Act […] require that [providers] refrain from fraud, deception, and false advertising when communicating with New York consumers.
• Netflix/YouTube slowdowns: The issue of interconnection agreements between content providers and Spectrum-TWC are matters for the court to consider because it is not an attempt to regulate those agreements. “Rather, the complaint simply alleges that Spectrum-TWC misled subscribers by claiming that specific online content would be swiftly accessible through its network, while it was simultaneously deliberately allowing that service to degrade […] and failing to upgrade its network’s capacity to meet demand for this content.”
• “Up to” speeds: Spectrum-TWC claimed that advertising speeds “up to” a certain level was not misleading because consumers understood this to mean the maximum speed, not average speed. In Spectrum’s argument, it claimed “reasonable consumers understand this is not a promise of ‘minimum’ performance, but rather ‘maximum’ performance.” But the judge disagreed. “Defendant’s theory is contrary to New York law regarding ‘up to’ claims” when those speeds are “functionally unattainable as a result of the defendants’ knowing conduct.”

Schneiderman’s office is seeking civil fines and restitution from Spectrum-TWC for customers in New York.

There are three tiers of Citizens Broadband Radio Service users – incumbent users (usually military) that get top priority access and protection from interference, a mid-class Priority Access License group of users that win limits on potential interference from other users, and unlicensed users that have to share the spectrum, and interference, if any.

Charter Communications wants to license a portion of the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band to launch a new wireless broadband service for its future mobile customers and potentially also offer its own rural broadband solution.

The CBRS band has sat largely unused except by the U.S. military since it was created, but now the Federal Communications Commission is exploring opening up the very high frequencies to attract wireless broadband services with Priority Access Licenses that will assure minimal interference.

One of the most enthusiastic supporters of CBRS is Charter/Spectrum, which has been testing a 3.5 GHz wireless broadband service using CBRS spectrum in Centennial and Englewood, Col., Bakersfield, Calif., Coldwater, Mich., and Charlotte, N.C. Those tests, according to Charter, reveal the cable company “can provide speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps at significant distances,” which it believes could become a rural broadband solution for customers outside of the reach of its wired cable network.

But Charter’s interest in CBRS extends well beyond its potential use to reach rural areas. Charter’s primary goal is to offer wireless connectivity in neighborhoods for its forthcoming mobile phone service. Charter plans to enter the wireless business this year, selling smartphones and other wireless devices that will depend on in-home Wi-Fi, CBRS, and a contract with Verizon Wireless to provide coverage everywhere else.

Charter wants to keep as much data usage on its own networks as possible to reduce costs. It has no interest in building a costly, competing LTE 4G or 5G wireless network to compete with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. But it is interested in the prospect of using LTE technology on CBRS frequencies, which are likely to be licensed at much lower costs than traditional mobile spectrum.

Primary Economic Areas

There are several proposals on the table on how to license this spectrum. Large wireless companies want Priority Access Licenses (PALs) based on Partial Economic Areas (PEAs) — 416 wireless service areas the FCC established as part of its spectrum auctions. PEAs are roughly equivalent to metropolitan areas and typically cover multiple counties surrounding a major city. Major wireless carriers are already familiar with PEAs and their networks cover large portions of them.

Charter is proposing to license PALs based on county lines, not PEAs, which will likely reduce the costs of licensing and, in Charter’s view, will “attract interest and investment from new entrants to small and large providers.” If Charter’s proposal is adopted, its costs deploying small cell technology used with CBRS will be much lower, because it will not have to serve larger geographic areas.

The FCC envisioned licensing PALs based on census tract boundaries, which would result in licenses for areas as small as portions of neighborhoods. That proposal has not won favor with like wireless companies or cable operators. The wireless giants would prefer licenses based on PEAs, but companies like AT&T seem also amenable to the cable industry proposal.

Charter’s proposed CBRS network would likely allow the cable company to offload a lot of its mobile data traffic away from Verizon Wireless, reducing the company’s data costs. Charter’s deployment costs are relatively low as well, because the backhaul fiber network used to power small cells is already present throughout Charter’s service areas.

Just how far into rural unserved areas Charter’s CBRS network can reach isn’t publicly known, but it would likely not extend into the most difficult-to-serve areas far away from Charter’s current infrastructure. But if the FCC establishes county boundaries and a requirement that those companies obtaining priority licenses actually serve those areas, it could help resolve some rural broadband problems.

He’s dead. Death notice for Richard Peartree published in the Democrat & Chronicle on Oct. 13, 1992.

Charter Communications’ inability to exercise common sense judgment in helping their customers is demonstrated once again by what we call: The Case of Mrs. Peartree and Her Curious Cable Bill. 

Theresa Peartree, a retiree living in Rochester, N.Y., and a customer of “the cable company” under its various names for more than 30 years, has a problem.

Spectrum won’t talk to her. About anything.

Peartree called the cable company to ask why her bill has increased a few dollars a month starting last fall. Spectrum effectively told her it’s none of her business because the account is in the name of her ex-husband, who died in 1992.

Time Warner Cable and Greater Rochester Cablevision — the former names of what today is Spectrum, understood Peartree’s situation and were willing to talk to her about her account, although nobody bothered to suggest she change the name on the account along the way. Spectrum will not talk to her, until she obtains a certified copy of her ex-husband’s death certificate and walk it down to the company’s notoriously overpacked customer service center on Mt. Hope Avenue in the city. Peartree is 89 years old and walks with a cane.

Spectrum’s customer service told Peartree it was easy to get a copy of a death certificate because “they’re a public record.” But most Spectrum customer service representatives are not attorneys or legislators, because if they were, they would have realized the advice they were giving about death certificates in New York was dead wrong.

So Mrs. Peartree and Spectrum are at an impasse. She took her plight to a local talk radio show and finally to David Andreatta, a feisty and occasionally exasperated columnist for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where he usually covers the insanity of local and state politics.

He visited with Peartree and listened in on the legal advice being given by the cable company’s call center employee.

Andreatta knows Spectrum’s claim that death certificates are public records was not quite right:

No, they’re not. In New York, they’re semi-public. If the deceased person has been dead for 50 years, his or her death certificate is public record. If not, only spouses, parents, children or siblings of the deceased are entitled to the death certificate. Exes don’t count.

Others eligible to obtain a death certificate under the law are those with a medical need, a documented lawful claim to receive a benefit or a court order from a state judge.

Peartree has none of those. Her declaration that, “TV is my life,” is a metaphor. Her cable isn’t a “medical need” and her desire to learn why she’s being charged $4 a month more isn’t a “benefit.”

Peartree (Photo courtesy of: Rochester Democrat & Chronicle/Shawn Dowd)

In short, Peartree is trapped by Spectrum. She cannot even close her account because they won’t talk to her. The only chance she has, assuming the public shaming of Spectrum proves ineffective in getting them to budge, is to present herself as a hardship case at the Monroe County Office of Vital Records in hopes of getting them to produce a copy.

But in Monroe County, where the county government prides itself on holding the line on the property taxes (already among the highest in the country) but makes up the difference by charging astronomical fees for almost any county service, that photocopy will cost her $40 — ten times the amount her bill increased last fall.

“They take my money every month,” she told Andreatta, showing him her checkbook with hers being the only name on the account. “They take my money, but they won’t answer my questions.”

“I know they say you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, Spectrum, but believe this: Richard is dead and the house you think is his isn’t his,” Andreatta wrote. “It would take a few minutes for your customer service rep to transfer the account in Richard’s name to Peartree’s and tell her why her bill rises $4 a month.”

But so far they won’t. But we can at least answer her question. The additional fees are the result of an increase in Spectrum’s bill padding Broadcast TV Surcharge ripoff and a more recent rate increase on certain cable equipment rental fees.

Andreatta is somehow not surprised:

Ever since Time Warner was rebranded as Spectrum, more readers have asked me to write about their problems with the cable TV and internet provider than any other topic.

I’ve always declined, mostly because their problems were so generic. Their internet was slow. They didn’t want to pay for channels they didn’t watch. That four-hour window for home service.

It was, like, join the club. Cable companies by any name have always been a racket, regularly ranking below airlines, banks and drug makers in opinion polls. What could I do about it?