If Windstream was hoping to make a splash with its new Kinetic IPTV service, Time Warner Cable certainly isn’t reaching for a towel.

Kinetic debuted in April in Lincoln, Neb., the first community to get Windstream’s fiber to the neighborhood TV service. Three months after being introduced, it’s available in about half of the city. But it is not proving much of a threat to incumbent Time Warner Cable because Windstream set rates roughly the same or higher than what the cable company charges.

In fact, a Stop the Cap! reader contemplating a trial run of Kinetic was quickly dissuaded when he learned Windstream charged $10 more than what he already paid Time Warner Cable.

“Windstream either does not understand Time Warner’s pricing or is artificially trying to limit demand for the moment,” our reader tells us. “I have to believe it is one or the other because the alternative is they don’t know what they are doing and are creating an experiment built to fail. When I told Time Warner I was toying with the idea of trying Kinetic, they cut my bill another $30 a month and Kinetic is now dead to me.”

Time Warner Cable’s customer retention department is well positioned to keep customers because it can sell faster Internet speeds at a lower price than Windstream has offered so far. The phone company obviously has no interest in starting a price war in Lincoln:

• Windstream Kinetic offers packages ranging from $39.99-$129.98/mo;
• Time Warner Cable offers packages ranging from $19.99-$129.99/mo.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports other customers have had similar experiences.

Ryan Pryor said he inquired about Kinetic, but the price quoted was slightly more than what he now pays for a similar bundle with Time Warner and would have offered a slower Internet speed. So he chose to stick with what he has.

Where Windstream has had some success is attracting current satellite customers. Jason Smith was tired of losing satellite service during storms and since he was already a Windstream DSL customer, upgrading to Kinetic made sense.

“The picture quality has been very impressive,” Smith told the newspaper. “The one thing I noticed was how much better the picture looked than on DirecTV with the same HDMI connection to my TV.”

Smith is also happy with a more capable whole house DVR and the fact Windstream offers wireless set-top boxes.

But Smith also admitted he wasn’t sure if we would stick with the service long-term. A significant disadvantage of Kinetic is its reliance on copper wiring part of the way between Smith’s home and Windstream’s central office. All fiber to the neighborhood projects have bandwidth limitations that would not exist with a straight fiber to the home upgrade. Kinetic’s limits become clear when trying to watch three HD signals at once while being on the Internet. He can’t. Kinetic limits customers to two HD video streams at a time, compared with DirecTV’s five. Broadband speeds slow if other members of the household are also accessing telephone and television services.

With competition like that, Time Warner Cable has done little to strengthen its position, with no immediate plans to upgrade service in the city. All that has changed recently is a channel realignment that groups like-channels together starting at channel 100. Time Warner began that nationwide channel realignment in Syracuse, N.Y., in the spring of 2013. More than two years later, that change is only now reaching Lincoln.

Bryan Brooks, the Windstream vice president of business development, did not offer the newspaper many specifics about how Kinetic was performing, except to say demand has met expectations.

With AT&T’s arrival in the Mexican wireless marketplace with its purchase of Iusacell and Nextel, América Móvil is responding with plans to build a new state-of-the-art $50 billion fiber-to-the-home network for Mexican consumers.

According to El Economista, América Móvil has a five-year plan to construct a 311,000 mile fiber network that will offer phone, broadband, and television service. The move comes in response to media reports AT&T is exploring delivering a video package over its acquired wireless networks within the next two years. The network will support broadband speeds that are faster than what most Americans along the border with Mexico can receive from AT&T and CenturyLink’s prevalent DSL services.

In comparison, U.S. phone companies like Verizon have stopped expanding its FiOS fiber to the home network and AT&T largely relies on a less-capable hybrid fiber/copper network for its U-verse service.

Competition in Mexico has forced providers to upgrade their networks to compete for customers while those in the United States tend to match each other’s prices or advocate for industry consolidation to maximize revenue and keep their costs as low as possible.

América Móvil’s broadband service Infinitum Telmex has already attracted 22.3 million broadband customers — a number likely to rise once it can enhance its online video streaming service Clarovideo.

Hong Kong Telecom Group (HKT) chief technical officer Paul Berriman believes copper phone wiring is a thing of the past and is nonplussed by efforts to wring a few more years of life out of infrastructure that cannot reliably support high-speed Internet and is costly to maintain. The only solution that makes sense is to get rid of the copper and replace it with fiber optic wiring.

While America talks about 1Gbps limited rollouts, he is thinking about speeds ten times faster with his announcement Hong Kong Telecom is preparing to launch 10 gigabit service across the territory and was continuing its efforts to tear out obsolete copper wiring.

The man partly responsible for ensuring Hong Kong’s broadband future is a fast and reliable one says HKT has 1.6 million broadband customers — 530,000 on fiber to the home service and 200,000 on less-desirable VDSL2 with vectoring, which still relies in part on copper wiring. He is not happy with copper wiring’s performance and support costs and wants it out of his network. His minimum target speed is 100Mbps and if he finds a building that for any reason does not deliver more than 30Mbps at all times, he instructs engineers to immediately tear out the copper and replace it with fiber.

Berriman

Overall, Hong Kong has an average Internet speed of 87 megabits per second, according to figures by Akamai. “Our (HKT) average is about 116Mbps,” he said. It is about to get much faster. The two major wired fiber competitors are HKT and HKBN and both compete fiercely for broadband customers.

HKT has three tiers of unlimited use fiber broadband (regular prices shown in U.S. dollars, prices lower for certain bundles and promotions):

• 300/300Mbps for $64.21/mo;
• 500/500Mbps for $77.10/mo;
• 1000/1000Mbps for $90/mo.

When the 10Gbps upgrade is complete, HKT is likely to further boost speeds and/or cut prices.

Berriman acknowledges that the densely packed multi-dwelling apartments and condos common across Hong Kong makes large fiber projects less expensive than elsewhere in the world, but believes costs can be managed by deploying incremental upgrades. For example, HKT today has fiber extending into 85 percent of Hong Kong’s buildings and can connect fiber to 79 percent of homes in Hong Kong within three days of receiving an order.

Depending on a customer’s requirements, HKT can save money by serving DSL over short lengths of existing in-building copper wiring for customers not subscribed to ultra-fast broadband speed tiers. The length of wiring is short enough to guarantee speed is not affected for these customers. When customers do need the fastest speeds, fiber is strung directly to their apartment. Despite this, HKT is progressively migrating away from “fiber to the basement” to an all-fiber network to simplify its facilities and increase reliability, especially as the demand for faster speeds continues to grow.

“Once we get to 50 or 60 percent usage of the fiber in the building we start to look at converting the rest to get rid of the [older DSL] electronics,” Berriman said.

HKT also operates a mobile network it acquired from “Sunday” in 2006 and has also bought out Telstra’s share of the formerly joint owned CSL. The wireless company has a 31 percent market share and 4.6 million customers on two different networks — one supplied by ZTE and the other from Huawei. To supplement its wireless mobile network and offload traffic, HKT also operates 14,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across Hong Kong and is a leader in the use of EAP-SIM, which makes it easy for connections to be handed off between its mobile and Wi-Fi networks without interruption.

If you want to order a product or service online from Frontier Communications, forget it. A source tells Stop the Cap! the company was dropping online e-commerce functions from its Frontier.com website because it could never get online ordering working properly. Perhaps the company can get an estimate here to revamp their site. Furthermore, you may consult with a Business and Personal Online Reputation management company if you’re having difficulty improving your brand reputation on the internet.

Sure enough, the latest iteration of Frontier’s website today blazes with banners requesting customers call the company or use “live chat” to handle any orders for service. Perhaps it’s time that they resort to topnotch Website development in order to save their customers.

“They still offer the function of self-service — allowing customers to view their bills, set up auto payments, make one time payments, etc., but they are removing the ability for customers to order any service at all,” said our source.

In light of Frontier Communications’ decision to halt online ordering functions due to persistent issues, ensuring a reliable payment method for their remaining services becomes paramount. Partnering with a reputable Payment provider is the key to maintaining a seamless payment experience for their customers. By integrating advanced payment solutions, Frontier can offer secure options for bill payments and auto payments, alleviating concerns related to financial transactions.

A trusted Payment provider not only ensures the safety of customer data but also enhances the user experience by providing efficient and hassle-free payment processes. As Frontier continues to focus on self-service features, collaborating with a reliable Payment service can contribute significantly to customer satisfaction, building trust and loyalty even in the absence of online ordering functionalities.

Yesterday’s phone company can’t manage a website with online ordering.

“This company can’t manage to figure out how to build a website that supports ordering of products, so they are just going to kill that function,” the source added. “Customers will be able to see what products they can get within a specific zip code, but that’s it. If they want to order, they are going to be forced into the already overloaded call center.”

Frontier’s ability to handle its acquisitions of landline customers from Verizon and AT&T have caused problems in the recent past, including customers losing service, getting improperly billed, or experiencing missed service calls. With Verizon customers in Florida, Texas, and California likely to join the Frontier family, our source tells us they will be shocked to see how backwards Frontier’s online presence is compared with Verizon.

“I’m sure our former Verizon and AT&T customers as well as our future Verizon customers will enjoy going back to the Stone Age when they couldn’t do what they needed to do online and would have to pick up the phone to call into a Contact Center,” the source said. “We might as well just have a Frontier Wikipedia page for crying out loud.”

Just don’t try ordering online.

Frontier has also adopted this novel disclaimer explaining why its advertised DSL speeds often don’t come close to actual speeds in the fine print:

“Actual speeds may vary and are not guaranteed. Performance metrics based on Frontier lab validation under ideal network environment simulating “best case scenario” without network congestion, other factors cause by consumer behavior, or factors caused by third-party providers’ behaviors. Consumers may not be able to replicate the performance shown in the performance metrics.”

In plain English: “Our advertised DSL speeds are theoretically possible… in a lab… on Moonbase Alpha… as long as you don’t try to use the service… and nobody else does either.”

“Please let your readers know that there are some Frontier employees who want to do right by our customers and want to give them the best service possible, but our expertise and opinions are rarely valued,” the source said.

Windstream this week introduced its fiber to the neighborhood service Kinetic – its attempt to bring a competitive triple-play package of broadband, home phone, and television service to about 50,000 homes initially in Lincoln, Neb.

“We’re extremely excited to launch Kinetic in Lincoln,” said David Redmond, president of small business and consumer at Windstream. “Over the last year, we have heard loudly and clearly that this community is excited and eager for an alternative TV service. Windstream is confident that residents that sign up for Kinetic will find a highly interactive experience and a smarter way to watch TV than cable or satellite.”

The project in Lincoln will test consumer reaction and help the company plan if or how it plans to expand the service across many of its other service areas across the country.

Powered by the Ericsson Mediaroom platform, Kinetic is Windstream’s effort to squeeze about as much use of its existing copper wire infrastructure as possible. Like AT&T U-verse, Kinetic requires a fiber connection part of the way to customers, but continues to rely on existing copper telephone wiring already in the subscriber’s neighborhood. In effect, it’s an enhanced DSL platform that will split available bandwidth between television, Internet access and home phone service.

One unique aspect of Kinetic is its use of a next generation, compact whole home DVR that can record four shows at the same time, supplemented with wireless set-top boxes ($7/mo each), that allow subscribers to take the service to any television in the home without wiring. A subscriber can even move a television out into the yard and not lose service.

Remarkably, Windstream — an independent telephone company — completely de-emphasizes its own phone service in its up front promotions. Unless customers dig deeper into the Kinetic website, they will find prominently featured double play packages of television and Internet service starting at $59.98 a month. Telephone service is offered (and priced) almost as an afterthought, bundled into various packages for $5 extra a month. Phone customers get unlimited nationwide local and long distance calling.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Windstream Kinetic TV 4-2015.flv[/flv]

Windstream produced this introductory video to its new Kinetic TV service, offered initially to 50,000 homes in Lincoln, Neb. (1:20)

We added the pricing details for Home Phone service.

The biggest limitation Windstream faces marketing the service is its legacy network of copper wires. Customers can only qualify for the service if the connection between their home and Windstream’s central office is good enough to sustain the speeds required to handle all three services at the same time. The company is focusing Kinetic squarely on customers looking for a cable television alternative to Lincoln’s only other provider — Time Warner Cable. That may be because Kinetic remains disadvantaged in the broadband department.

The highest Internet speed a Kinetic customer can buy is 15Mbps, which is the speed Time Warner Cable offers in its “Standard” package. Time Warner currently sells up to 50/5Mbps in Lincoln — more than three times faster than Windstream’s Kinetic. Many Windstream DSL customers have complained they don’t come close to the speeds they are paying for, particularly during peak usage periods. A Facebook group with over 500 customers exists to discuss exactly that issue. Whether it will be different for Kinetic customers is not yet known, but the company’s lawyers are prepared for that possibility.

Windstream’s Whole House DVR is only about the length of its remote control.

“Windstream cannot guarantee speeds or uninterrupted, error-free service,” the company says in its terms and conditions. “Internet speed claims represent maximum network service capability speeds.  Actual customer speeds may vary based on factors including simultaneous use of multiple devices, use of other Windstream services, customer device capabilities, Internet and Network congestion, website traffic, content provider service capacity, customer location, network conditions, and bandwidth devoted to carriage or protocol and network information.”

At least there are no usage caps.

Kinetic subscribers are also warned that just like DSL broadband, line quality will impact the kind of television service received.

“Kinetic TV includes digital channels (including local channels), one receiver and up to four standard direct video streams to the customer residence,” Windstream notes. “Of the four standard direct video streams per residence, customer’s location will determine both high definition (“HD”) availability and the maximum number of HD video streams (between one and four) a customer can view and record in HD at any one time, regardless of the number of receivers in the residence.  The remaining streams will be standard definition.”

Kinetic’s channel lineup is comparable to that of Time Warner Cable, with some minor exceptions. Time Warner imports some regional over the air channels from adjacent cities, Windstream does not. Certain channels like Turner Classic Movies are available on Kinetic, but only for customers subscribing to the most expensive tier. Time Warner offers that channel on its less expensive Standard tier.

Limited bandwidth may limit your broadband speeds and the number of HD channels you can watch at any one time.

Time Warner Cable spokesman Mike Hogan took indirect shots at both the City of Lincoln and Windstream in response to the introduction of Kinetic.

“Lincoln residents can count on the fact that Time Warner Cable will offer the best choices for TV, Internet, home phone and home security to the entire city — in sharp contrast to competitors who only serve select areas, or won’t even say where they will or won’t serve,” Hogan said in an email to the Journal-Star.

That’s a reference to Windstream’s refusal to specify exactly where in Lincoln Kinetic is available.

Stop the Cap! surveyed more than 100 Lincoln-area addresses this morning and found Kinetic available primarily in wealthy and newer neighborhoods south and southeast of the city center, including zip codes such as 68516. A review of real estate transactions across the city of Lincoln showed home prices in this area are well above other parts of the city. That suggests Windstream is targeting the service to higher-income neighborhoods during its initial rollout, which plans to reach up to 45 percent of city households.

Although Windstream officials expect to bring Kinetic to about 80% of Lincoln, the city has given the company 15 years to complete the project. Further expansion may also depend on how customers respond to Kinetic.

With plenty of time, Windstream may choose to turn its attention elsewhere, eventually introducing the service in other cities across its 18-state service area of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas, before it gets around to wiring urban poor neighborhoods in Lincoln.

Cable industry defenders believe Time Warner Cable and Windstream are being treated differently by city officials. Hogan notes the cable company is required to serve the entire metropolitan area, unlike Windstream that critics contend may be interested only in cherry-picking the low-hanging fruit.

Windstream’s announcement leaves just two significant independent telephone companies without IPTV offerings: FairPoint and Frontier Communications.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KLKN Lincoln New television service in Lincoln 4-16-15.mp4[/flv]

KLKN in Lincoln covered the Windstream event introducing Kinetic TV to Lincoln and talked with company officials about what the new service offers Lincoln and how much it costs in comparison to Time Warner Cable, the area’s incumbent cable company. (2:29)