CenturyLink’s Prism TV

CenturyLink has stopped expanding its cable TV alternative Prism TV, and will no longer promote the service to its customers.

“Due to emerging market trends in video content and delivery, we do not plan to expand our Prism TV service offering,” CenturyLink spokesperson Francie Dudrey told Fierce Cable, in a statement delivered at the NAB Show yesterday. “We will continue to provide service and support to our current Prism TV subscribers and make the service available to qualified customers who request it in the markets where we currently offer Prism TV.”

As Stop the Cap! reported last month, CenturyLink is planning to pull back on residential broadband upgrades and services it was expecting to sell on its improved internet platform after the company announced senior management changes. One key sign CenturyLink was moving away from Prism TV was the sudden retirement of Duane Ring on March 30. Ring, a 34-year veteran at CenturyLink had been recently promoted to help oversee CenturyLink’s residential broadband upgrades and was instrumental to the launch of Prism TV in 2005.

Wall Street and activist shareholders had pushed CenturyLink hard to replace long time CEO Glen Post III, who had recently turned bullish on costly residential broadband upgrades. Post’s replacement, former Level 3 CEO Jeff Storey, wants to refocus CenturyLink on its more profitable commercial customers.

Ironically, Level 3 was acquired by CenturyLink in 2016. Now some of Level 3’s top executives will firmly control CenturyLink itself. Shareholder activists were pleased with CenturyLink’s new direction under Storey’s leadership, arguing CenturyLink shouldn’t be devoting significant resources or funding to its legacy phone and copper broadband businesses. CenturyLink will now move away from home broadband services and towards commercial and enterprise broadband, metro ethernet, and cloud/backup services. About two-thirds of CenturyLink customers are commercial enterprises.

CenturyLink will now promote DirecTV to its residential customers instead of Prism TV.

Longer term, a growing number of analysts suspect CenturyLink’s new management will want to sell off some or all of CenturyLink’s residential customers to refocus the business entirely on its commercial customers. The company refused to discuss that issue at this time. CenturyLink may find a difficult market for would-be buyers. Frontier Communications, a regular buyer of wireline assets, is itself mired in debt and financial difficulties.

Investors continue to be skeptical of the merits of costly network upgrades for the nation’s copper wire phone networks. In areas where fiber-enabled phone companies compete directly with cable, price wars can develop, reducing profits and the incentive to invest.

AT&T is staying committed to its wireline network in the face of two significant natural disasters by replacing beyond-repair copper wiring with fiber optics.

The phone company has recently notified the Federal Communications Commission its existing facilities in parts of California that were damaged by last year’s wildfires will be replaced by fiber optic infrastructure.

Fierce Telecom notes customers affected by the Nuns, Tubbs, Redwood and Sulphur fires will be served by a new optical fiber network in portions of Sonoma, Ukiah, Santa Rosa, and Lower Lake.

“The circuits will be transferred to fiber based NGDLC systems,” AT&T said in a FCC filing. “The transfer of these circuits does not compromise the capacity of the cabinets.”

In Florida, as a result of last September’s Hurricane Irma, AT&T will migrate its irreparably damaged copper wire network that strings throughout the Florida Keys to a new fiber to the home network.

AT&T’s decision to maintain its wired networks comes in contrast to Verizon’s 2013 attempt to scrap its copper facilities on Fire Island, N.Y. and certain New Jersey barrier islands left devastated by Superstorm Sandy. Verizon hoped to replace traditional landline service with a wireless alternative known as VoiceLink. A firestorm of protests over the service’s limitations, sound quality, and reliability forced Verizon to scrap the plan in New York and install its FiOS fiber-to-the-home network instead.

Frontier Communications, mired in $18 billion in debt, is preparing to sell a package of landline assets in California, Texas, and Florida the company acquired just two years ago in a $10.5 billion deal.

A Bloomberg News report indicated the sale is part of an effort to boost available funds and repair a damaged business plan that has left the company with a massive debt load and an ongoing departure of customers unhappy with Frontier’s products and services.

Frontier has posted falling revenue for the last five consecutive quarters and the company has spent much of 2017 attempting to borrow more money and refinance the debt it already has, accumulated in part from its acquisitions of sold-off wireline assets owned by AT&T (Connecticut) and Verizon (multiple states).

Frontier has a poor record of successfully transferring customers to the company’s billing and backend systems, which has often caused service disruptions and billing errors. Bad publicity followed Frontier in Texas, Florida and California where the company acquired 3.7 million new voice lines, 2.2 million broadband customers, and 1.2 million FiOS accounts.

What makes Frontier’s properties in those three states valuable is the widespread availability of fiber-to-the-home service. Potential buyers, including private equity firms and other non-traditional bidders, see a future in providing valuable fiber backhaul connectivity to forthcoming 5G wireless networks, which require fiber connections deep into neighborhoods to connect small cell technology with the provider’s network.

Bloomberg reports the assets are likely to be split up and sold in parts, instead of a single package. That could mean Frontier will sell off each state independently or the split could be based on technology, with fiber assets sold separately from Frontier’s acquired copper wire networks in the three states. Frontier may have trouble finding buyers for legacy copper service areas that have never been upgraded with fiber optic service. Frontier is also increasingly unlikely to upgrade those areas itself.

An undisclosed number of Frontier Communications customers in West Virginia were without phone service during the Christmas-New Year’s Day holidays because of copper thefts and slow repair crews that did not begin repairs for up to two weeks after the outages were reported.

Hardest hit was Mingo County, where multiple copper wire thefts caused significant service outages starting Dec. 20 in Matewan, Delbarton, and Varney. Many customers were without phone service over the Christmas holiday, and some are still without service two weeks later. One of them is Arlene Gartin at the two-month old Mudders restaurant, which depends on pickup and delivery orders.

“This has devastated us,” Gartin told WSAZ-TV. “Seventy-five percent of our business was our delivery and without the calls I’m hanging on by threads.”

In Iaeger in McDowell County, residents on Coonbranch Mountain report their Frontier phone and internet services have been out of service for two weeks. Carl Shrader told WVVA-TV that service went out on Dec. 23 and remained so throughout Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Mingo County, W.V., on the Kentucky border.

“We had a windstorm come through, and up here where the church is, at the top of my driveway, it blew the power line and the telephone line down,” said Shrader. “If you get a fire around your house, and the phone lines is down, how can you notify the fire department? If you have a burglar coming in on you, how can you phone and say, ‘9-1-1, I need help! There’s a burglar here.’ You can’t!”

Cell service in this part of West Virginia is spotty, making landline service very important for many West Virginia residents who live and work around the state’s notorious mountainous terrain.

Customers affected by service outages report long hold times calling Frontier and very little information or updates about outages. Many residents report Frontier’s outages are frequent and often take a long time to fix. Some have been told Frontier’s repair crews are short-staffed and busy elsewhere.

That comes as a surprise to officials at the Communications Workers of America who confirmed Frontier announced a “voluntary” reduction in force program on Dec. 20, seeking employees willing to accept a buyout offer. If enough workers do not take Frontier up on their offer, more than 50 Bluefield-based employees and about 30 in Ashburn, Va., are at risk of being laid off.

WSAZ-TV in Huntington, W.V. reports a significant number of residents in Mingo County have been without Frontier telephone and internet service because of copper wire thefts for the last two weeks. (1:49)

WVVA-TV in Bluefield/Beckley, W.V. reports some residents waited two weeks for Frontier repair crews to show up after a windstorm. (1:49)

Verizon Communications will decommission its existing copper wire facilities in multiple markets in Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia starting in 2018.

In a series of requests filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Verizon is asking to compel customers to switch service to Verizon’s FiOS optical fiber network or find another provider. While Verizon’s fiber network has a better reliability record than Verizon’s deteriorating copper facilities, some residential customers may be compelled to pay more for FiOS service than they used to pay for landline and DSL service over Verizon’s copper network. Their phone service may also no longer work in the event of a power failure.

“We will offer the service at a special rate for customers who migrate from copper to fiber as a result of the retirement of our copper facilities,” Verizon said, but the company did not guarantee that rate would not reset to regular priced FiOS service down the road.

Businesses may also have to invest in technology upgrades to switch to fiber optic service when Verizon pulls the plug on copper-delivered services.

The wire centers (central offices) where copper decommissioning is planned are disclosed in these company documents (click on links below to see if you are affected):

DELAWARE

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-DE
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-DE
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-B-DE

MARYLAND

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-MD
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-MD

MASSACHUSETTS

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-MA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-B-MA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-MA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-B-MA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-03-A-MA

NEW JERSEY

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-NJ
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-B-NJ
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-NJ
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-B-NJ
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-03-A-NJ

NEW YORK

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-NY
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-B-NY
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-NY
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-B-NY
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-C-NY
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-03-A-NY

PENNSYLVANIA

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-PA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-B-PA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-PA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-B-PA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-03-A-PA

RHODE ISLAND

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-RI
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-RI
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-03-A-RI

VIRGINIA

• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-A-VA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-01-B-VA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-A-VA
• Copper Retirement ID No. 2017-02-B-VA