Prism is CenturyLink’s fiber to the neighborhood service, similar to AT&T U-verse.

Western Eagle County will be among the first areas in Colorado to get CenturyLink’s fiber-to-the-neighborhood service upgrade, dubbed Prism TV.

“Eagle County is joining the first 10 markets to get Prism TV,” said Abel Chavez, CenturyLink’s director of state and local government affairs.

The phone company plans to introduce the service gradually once franchise renewal agreements with the county are complete.

The upgrade is an important once for Eagle County, which will see improved service well before residents in larger Colorado cities like Denver.

“Since we already have a franchise here, this is an opportunity to do two things — upgrade it and test it in a rural market,” Chavez told the Eagle Valley Enterprise. “In this case, a small mountain community is going to have something that Denver doesn’t have yet and it’s all going in on our existing network. We’re not adding to our footprint.”

CenturyLink’s service area includes towns in the western half of the county, Eagle and Gypsum. Comcast is the dominant cable provider in Colorado and has the largest market share of customers in the eastern half of the county.

CenturyLink primarily markets Prism as a television service, although it also supports 25Mbps broadband, depending on line quality.

Much like AT&T U-verse, Prism provides a fiber broadband connection to a box positioned in the neighborhood. From that box, the customer’s current copper telephone line is used to bring an enhanced version of DSL inside the home that divides bandwidth for Internet access, telephone, and cable television service.

A typical triple-play, new customer Prism package in Las Vegas runs around $115 a month, price-locked for 24 months. The whole house DVR and HD channels add another $10-15 a month after the first three months.

Included in the package:

• 10Mbps broadband
• CenturyLink Home Phone with Unlimited Nationwide Calling
• Prism TV (120 channels)
• Free installation, first set-top box included ($8.99/mo each additional box), DVR with up to four concurrent recordings

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CenturyLink Prism Demo Summer 2013.flv[/flv]

CenturyLink produced this demonstration video of Prism TV’s capabilities. CenturyLink does not seem to emphasize improved broadband service as part of the Prism experience in its marketing. (2 minutes)

xfinity=5GB

Comcast is introducing a new 5GB optional usage cap for customers subscribing to their Economy Plus ($29.95 – 3Mbps/768kbps) tier willing to limit their Internet usage in return for a $5 discount.

“The Flexible-Data Option is specifically designed for casual or light Internet users who typically use 5GB of data or less a month,” says a new Comcast FAQ on the subject. “It provides a $5 credit if your total monthly data usage is less than or equal to 5GB per month.”

Comcast admits only a tiny percentage of customers subscribe to the Economy Plus tier, and those are the only customers receiving letters offering a discount for keeping Internet usage low.

The company says it will inject a message into subscribers’ web browsers notifying them when they reach 90% of their usage allowance. If customers do happen to exceed 5GB of usage per month, there are repercussions. First, they automatically lose the $5 credit. Instead, they will be charged $1 per gigabyte in overlimit fees.

“We believe this monthly option is fair because it allows our eligible customers who use less data to now pay less,” writes the company.

But unlike Time Warner Cable’s trials of 5 and 30GB usage-capped plans that limit the overlimit fee to $25 a month, Comcast has no disclosed maximum, which means a customer consuming 200GB a month could face a $195 overage usage penalty.

Comcast notes the option is being offered later this month on a trial basis and only in the Fresno area. Customers can drop the usage capped option at any time.

Comcast discontinued its formal 250GB usage cap in May 2012, but it has not abandoned interest in usage limits or consumption-based pricing.

In Tucson, Comcast is testing variable usage caps with an overlimit fee of $10, which includes an extra 50GB of usage. In Nashville, all customers face a hard 300GB usage cap.

Time Warner Cable has repeatedly admitted very few customers have shown any interest in usage capped broadband plans.

Comcast is in hog heaven thanks to Pennsylvania’s generous handouts from its corporate welfare system.

This week, Philadelphia residents are pondering why the city is hounding entrepreneurs and middle class, at-home workers with new taxes and fees while the nation’s largest and richest cable company, Comcast, is receiving enormous tax breaks and government handouts.

Welcome to the United Corporations of America, where taxpayers front at least $80 billion in corporate welfare handouts, according to the New York Times. Comcast is the fourth biggest recipient of corporate welfare in Pennsylvania, dwarfed only by a giant oil company and two Hollywood studios that have learned how to cash in by filming movies inside the Keystone State. The average Pennsylvanian contributes $381 in taxes per year that gets diverted to multi-billion dollar corporations. At least 18 cents of every dollar in the state budget is now spent on corporate welfare programs.

The budget busting handouts have continued without interruption, even during The Great Recession. Elected officials believe the only way to keep big business from picking up and moving to another city or state is to keep making them offers they cannot afford to refuse. But local taxpayers can’t afford to make up the difference. While the economy was melting down from 2008-2010, Philadelphia-based Comcast scored $18 million in tax abatements, credits, and other government handouts. At the same time, local officials faced with upside down city budgets enacted controversial new taxes and business fees on some of the city’s smallest businesses, ranging from bloggers, freelance writers, to independent contractors and consultants.

Pennsylvania is easily among the top-tier of states handing out corporate welfare. In 2011, the Commonwealth collected $4.89 billion in business taxes. But it promptly returned $4.84 billion in tax credits to the state’s biggest businesses. Government benefits for Philadelphia for-profits totaled over $200 million that year alone. Many of the state’s biggest companies receive nearly as much in tax credits, grants, and other benefits that they pay in state and local taxes. Some incentive programs are so broadly written, businesses doing “business as usual” qualify for enormous tax breaks.

Take, for example, Comcast subsidiary QVC. Pennsylvania’s “film incentive program” handed the home shopping network $7.05 million in tax credits just for hawking jewelry from studios inside Pennsylvania. It did not matter QVC had been pitching products from those studios before, during and after the subsidy program handed out the award. Comcast had no plans to move the studios either, but it pocketed the corporate welfare just the same.

While Comcast was building up enough financial resources to acquire NBC-Universal, Philadelphia’s city budget was in tatters. Officials looking for creative ways to boost the local tax base didn’t tap Comcast for the money. Instead, they declared bloggers were now required to get a “business license” to operate within city limits. In fact, the city argued, every person, partnership, association and corporation engaged in a business, profession or other for-profit activity within the city of Philadelphia must now file a Business Privilege Tax Return. The cost just to apply for the business license? $300. Sorry Nathanial, the lemonade stand has to close because you didn’t cough up the $300 before erecting the card table in the front yard.

The “blogger tax” appeared to be sufficiently overreaching (thanks to excoriating coverage in the local media) to provoke the city to begin to phase it out, but no worries — Philadelphia has since found another source of revenue — Comcast? No, of course not. The real money is in taxing strippers. From The Philly Post:

So Mayor Nutter’s effort to tax lap dances—which reached its, er, climax last week in a Philadelphia courtroom — might be somewhat sympathetic if it had been cast as a way to crack down on the general level of skeeviness in the city. After all, it’s a fairly common rule of economics that if you want less of something, just tax it. That’s the logic behind Nutter’s anti-obesity effort to put a tax on sugary drinks, after all.

But nobody’s making that argument. (To be fair, City Hall hasn’t made much of a public argument of any sort, with officials saying they can’t comment on pending litigation.) So we’re forced to assume that the city, always desperate for revenue, is simply finding new ways of taxing its citizens — going after strippers the way you and I might check the folds of the couch for loose change.

And since strip club attendees already pay the city’s amusement tax just to enter the strip club, it seems reasonable to conclude that asking them to pay again when they witness actual stripping is thus a direct tax on stripping itself. It’s a tax on work.

There probably are not enough deep-pocketed lap dancers inside the City of Brotherly Love to cover Comcast’s tax tab. Just for building its new headquarters in Center City Philadelphia, the company was awarded an extra $42.75 million in government subsidies. But it did not stop there. In 2011, the cable company received an extra $18 million in miscellaneous gratitude corporate welfare categorized generally as “assorted grants and credits.” No other Philadelphia business came close to competing with Comcast’s taxpayer-provided gift basket. In return, Comcast showed its gratitude to Pennsylvania by declaring itself a Delaware-based corporation that was exempt from paying the state’s corporate income tax.

Comcast has filed a patent application that would let the company expand its Wi-Fi network by turning customers into human Wi-Fi hotspots and convincing them to offer Comcast Wi-Fi from rental cars, bicycles, and buses.

FierceCable found the patent application, called “Mobile WiFi Network” that would let the cable company build a dynamic mesh network of mobile hotspots that could be used by its customers. But instead of placing permanent Wi-Fi antennas on buildings or light posts, Comcast wants a patent to extend its network by using vehicles and people that can be positioned exactly where Comcast needs better wireless coverage.

In one example, Comcast’s proposed roving rental car fleet would use incentives to convince renters to activate the car’s built-in hotspot in return for free or discounted services.

“The offer may indicate that if the rental car is dropped off at one or more designated parking spots, the driver will receive a discounted car rental rate, free parking, a coupon for items sold at the designated parking spot, etc. In this manner, the driver may be incentivized to assist in managing the network of transceivers to improve the coverage area. A driver wishing to accept the offer may press a button on the car’s computing display, or other computing device (e.g., using a smart phone application) to respond to the offer with an acceptance,” Comcast states in the patent application.

If a driver says no, Comcast can up the ante with an even better offer in response. If that does not work, Comcast can expand its Wi-Fi network dynamically in other ways.

“It should be understood that the process could be implemented by placing transceivers in or on any other mobile unit, such as bicycles, Segways, buses, police cars, taxis, boats, persons, dedicated vehicles, etc. or any combination of such mobile units,” Comcast wrote.

Last month, Comcast announced it would activate a public Wi-Fi network over wireless routers supplied to customers on a secondary channel.

Triplett

Anthony Triplett used his job as a Comcast subcontractor to hunt for unsuspecting female victims while installing cable service — customers he would later return to rape and strangle.

On Friday, a Cook County judge sentenced the murderer to life in prison.

Judge Kevin Sheehan agreed with prosecutors who called Triplett both a sociopath and a psychopath, treating his victims with all the reverence of a used facial tissue.

Sheehan said Triplett’s defense was ludicrous, calling it a “wicked web of lies.”

“You were dancing like an ant on a sugar cube,” Sheehan said.

Triplett was found guilty of raping and strangling 23-year old Polish immigrant Urszula Sakowska,  whose lifeless body was found in a bathtub inside her Chicago-area home back in 2006.

Triplett is also facing charges in the death of 39-year old Janice Ordidge, a Comcast customer in Hyde Park.

Victims’ families say Comcast has a lot to answer for after subcontracting cable work out to Premier Cable Communications, a third-party company accused of maintaining shoddy hiring practices. Comcast is under scrutiny for doing nothing to stop Triplett after being informed he was being questioned by police in the death of Ordidge.

Both Comcast and Premier are being sued for allowing Triplett to continue working, which lead to his encounter with Sakowska.

Assistant State’s Attorney Brian Sexton said Triplett “obviously could not help himself” from committing the sexual assaults and killings.

“This is the most dangerous individual you will ever see in this courtroom — and that’s saying a lot for 26th Street,” Sexton told the judge, calling Triplett “every woman’s nightmare.”

“This is who you killed!” he shouted at Triplett while holding a photo of Sakowska.

Sakowska’s fiancé, Grzegorz Magiera, said he will never recover from her loss, which would have never happened had she not called Comcast.

“I can still see her in our house, smell her and feel her warm embrace,” Magiera said in a victim impact statement read by prosecutors. “My life will never be the same as it was before. No one will ever be able to replace my Urszula. She was my one and only. She was my angel.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WLS Chicago Comcast Killer Sentenced to Life 7-19-13.mp4[/flv]

WLS reports Comcast-contracted cable repairman Anthony Triplett was found guilty of rape and murder and is yet to face murder charges in a second case. Triplett used his “house calls for Comcast” as a hunting ground for female victims. (2 minutes)