Inmates at the Liberty County Jail in Texas managed to outwit Comcast’s set top boxes to watch “hours on end” of soft-core pornography for free, courtesy of the cable company.

Jail Warden Tim New claimed he spent weeks trying to get Comcast technicians out to the county facility to fix the problem — one that Comcast denied could be happening.

“4 Dorm watching porno channel again,” read one February security log obtained by ABC News. Just three days later, a guard wrote, “One of the TV’s had porn on it. Told them to change the channel.”

“I believe that Comcast just couldn’t believe that their system had been manipulated,” Capt. Rex Evans with the Liberty Count sheriff’s office told ABC.

It turns out bypassing the cable boxes effectively opened every channel up for viewing.

It finally took a threat from County Judge Craig McNair to cancel Comcast service in the jail to get the cable company to dispatch a technician.

“Once Liberty County made us aware the inmates had access to Cinemax, we took the necessary steps to block access to the channel,” a representative for the cable company said.

Inmates told KPRC that there would be “a lot of fights” because of the porn sessions and that showers had become “hell” because of Cinemax.

[flv width=”624″ height=”372″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KPRC Houston Nightly porno TV shows for inmates prompt action by county leaders 2-29-12.flv[/flv]

KPRC-TV in Houston covers a porn scandal inside Liberty County jails.  Public safety officials blame Comcast for not pulling the plug on the adult programming.  (3 minutes)

Last week’s shocking development that Cablevision, a major cable operator in greater New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut is not going to raise rates in 2012 is bad news for other cable operators itching to raise rates once again this year.

Cablevision’s decision was made as the company continues to battle Verizon FiOS, the phone company’s fiber-to-home-service across its service area.  Verizon has been playing hardball with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and Cablevision in its metro New York service area, offering up to $500 in rebates to sign new customers.  That level of vicious competition has been great for consumers, but lousy for Wall Street.

Investors were not pleased with Cablevision’s pass on rate hikes and its intention to invest a lot more in system upgrades than originally planned.  Wall Street loves increased revenue and hates it when companies spend it on their customers.

With all of this competition breaking out, Comcast and Time Warner Cable may be more than a little uncomfortable sitting down at an antitrust hearing later this month to discuss their new agreement with Verizon to cross-market cable and mobile service.  In return for the cable industry signaling they will never compete with Verizon’s mobile phone offering, Verizon has generously purchased the cable industry’s leftover spectrum and agreed to pitch cable TV subscriptions to Verizon Wireless customers.  With this new “non-aggression treaty,” will there still be a need to offer $500 gift cards and cut-rate prices to attract new customers?  Consumer groups think not.

A greater percentage of Cablevision’s service area is served by Verizon’s fiber network than either Time Warner Cable or Comcast.  Competition is forcing Cablevision to rethink the usual cable industry plan for financial success — force channels customers don’t want and raise rates up to 5% a year to pay for the “increased costs of doing business.”  Consumers are fed up with $150 monthly cable bills and will take Verizon up on an offer than cuts rates $50 a month and hands over up to $500 just for saying “yes” to FiOS.

Angelakis

Comcast says it admires Time Warner Cable for risking subscriber wrath over plans to introduce usage-based billing Time Warner says will be optional for customers in southern Texas.  But Comcast admits it is not brave enough to try similar pricing schemes themselves, fearing a customer backlash.

“We have a very high customer satisfaction rating and we don’t really want to rock the boat on [our broadband product],” Comcast chief financial officer Michael Angelakis told an audience Tuesday at a Wall Street bank-sponsored media and telecom conference in San Francisco. “I give them credit for trying different things, [but] we have real momentum in that business and the goal is to keep it.”

Comcast was a spectator of the consumer and political backlash against Time Warner Cable when it last experimented with usage pricing in April 2009.  Within two weeks, Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt shelved the plan under pressure from both customers and lawmakers.

Now Time Warner Cable wants to reintroduce the concept as an option for customers of a new “Internet Essentials” discounted broadband tier that would include a $5 monthly discount if customers kept usage under 5GB per month.

Some veterans of the 2009 battle suspect Time Warner is trying to slowly slip usage pricing past customers waiting to fight its return by first suggesting it is only an option, but later herding broadband customers into usage based plans by substantially raising the price of flat rate service.

“Looks like a trial run the company could easily expand to all of their Internet customers,” shares Stop the Cap! reader Jeff in San Antonio, Tex., one of the cities that will participate in the upcoming usage-based plan. “I have a hard time believing Time Warner is going through all the effort developing usage meters and billing support for usage pricing just to market a handful of customers a $5 discount.”

Jeff, who helped fend off the cable company’s original Internet Overcharging experiment in 2009, suspects Time Warner’s earlier attempt to market a “flat rate” broadband option at $150 a month could still be a blueprint for how the company could push customers out of their unlimited plans.

“They can claim they want to keep unlimited Internet, but have remained silent about how much they will charge for it,” Jeff says. “We need something in writing that this company will not gouge customers with the fine print going forward.”

Stop the Cap! posed several similar questions to Time Warner Cable’s Jeff Simmermon, director of digital communications, through the cable company’s blog.  The company, to date, has offered no response.

Noted online petitioner Change.org will be promoting a petition to stop bandwidth capping this week.

Perhaps best known for hosting an appeal which influenced Bank of America to drop their proposed $5 monthly ATM card fee, Change.org will be presenting the ‘no data capping’ petition on various social media sites in an attempt to gain signatures.

The petition’s letter, directed to AT&T, Comcast, the Federal Communications Commission, and all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who practice data capping, demands that they return to a billing model of unlimited access for a reasonable monthly fee.  Telecommunication providers have a responsibility to improve service, not lower it, the authors argue, particularly in light of the fact that taxpayer-funded broadband pipelines already exist, which the providers are not using.

Petition author David K. Smith argues that data caps contradict the Internet’s inherent purpose.  In the petition page’s linked article, “Why Data Caps Are Censorship,” he states that as the Internet is exponentially growing, one can always access more information than any data cap could allow, resulting in censorship from “the Big Picture.” The article maintains that exclusion from the total amount of information available results in “leashed” users having an incomplete perspective due to restricted access, and that incomplete, fragmentary information is useless.

“Now is a great time to be signing and sharing this petition,” said Smith.  “We have Change.org’s attention, and more and more articles are appearing to protest bandwidth injustices.  I feel this is a critical fight for our freedom to information.”

Change.org online help assets suggest that one of the most effective ways to gain signatures is for advocates to place a link to the petition under appropriate news and technical articles, along with a paragraph describing its relevance to the subject discussed.

[Stop the Cap! encourages readers to sign this (and other) petitions which declare the practice of Internet Overcharging unacceptable.  Whether it’s data caps or throttled speeds, customers deserve an unlimited, unthrottled Internet experience they pay good money to receive.  As financial reports show, today’s unlimited pricing formula delivers enormous profits to broadband providers, even as their costs to provide the service continue to decline.]