A second fiber cut in two weeks left 30,000 Queens residents with no cable service for hours. (Image: CBS New York)

A second major cable outage in two weeks left 30,000 Queens customers of Charter Communications without phone, TV and internet service Tuesday, after vandals severed the company’s fiber optic cables.

A Long Island man was arrested Wednesday night at his Long Island home for allegedly causing the first outage, which wiped out service in the same area for almost 16 hours on June 26.

The NYPD issued a press release stating Michael Tolve (48) of Wantagh, N.Y. was charged with criminal mischief and is alleged to have cut fiber cables and removed a digital memory card from a nearby surveillance camera to avoid being detected. He was later identified from other surveillance camera footage.

Charter Communications claims Tolve is a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 3, one of the unions that has been involved in a strike against Charter for several months. He worked as a fiber technician for both Charter Communications and its predecessor Time Warner Cable for 14 years. The cable company puts the damage estimate for the first cable cut in June at $67,000. Charter claims it has experienced 106 malicious cable cuts in its New York-area network since unionized cable technicians went on strike on March 28. The company has filed police reports on all of them.

“It’s disappointing that one of our employees would unlawfully sabotage the infrastructure we all work so hard to maintain and inconvenience our customers in this way,” Charter spokesman John Bonomo said in an email. “We intend to support the prosecution of these crimes to the fullest extent of the law, as they put our customers’ well-being in jeopardy, cause local businesses to suffer, and are a general inconvenience for all.”

Both fiber cuts strategically affected the largest possible number of customers with the least amount of effort. Charter officials said they detected the fiber cuts and dispatched repair crews immediately, but restoring service was “a gradual process” that took several hours.

Update (7/17): The Queens district attorney’s office has declined to press charges against Tolve, and all charges against him have been dropped pending an additional investigation.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announces his opposition to Net Neutrality at a FreedomWorks-sponsored event at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday proposed overturning the landmark 2015 Obama-era Net Neutrality rules that prohibit broadband providers from giving or selling access to certain internet services over others.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, named by President Donald Trump in January, said at a speech in Washington he wants to reverse rules that boosted government regulatory powers over internet service providers. Proponents who fought to get the rules passed said his proposal would set off a fierce political battle over the future of the internet regulation.

The rules, which the FCC put in place in 2015 under former President Barack Obama, prohibit broadband providers from giving or selling access to speedy internet, essentially a “fast lane,” to certain internet services over others.

The rules reclassified internet service providers much like utilities. They were favored by websites who said they would guarantee equal access to the internet to all but opposed by internet service providers, who said they could eventually result in rate regulation, inhibit innovation and make it harder to manage traffic. Pai said he believed the rules depressed investment by internet providers and cost jobs.

“Do we want the government to control the internet? Or do we want to embrace the light-touch approach” in place since 1996 until revised in 2015, he asked.

A federal appeals court upheld the rules last year. The Internet Association, a group representing Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc, and others, said the rules were working and that reversing them “will result in a worse internet for consumers and less innovation online.”

Pai said his proposal will face an initial vote on May 18 but he would not seek to finalize a reversal of the Obama rules until the FCC takes public comment, which could take several months.

Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the rules “took internet policy down into a dark and horrible abyss” and said the FCC will “expunge Net Neutrality regulations from the internet.”

Internet providers such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, and Comcast Corp have argued that the Net Neutrality rules have made investment in additional capacity less likely. Comcast chairman and chief executive Brian Roberts said Pai’s proposal “creates an environment where we can have a fresh constructive dialogue.”

Democratic Senator Edward Markey predicted Pai’s plan to overturn the rules would face a “tsunami of resistance.”

Democrats and advocates of the rules called for a massive public outcry to preserve them. In 2014, comedian John Oliver in his HBO show owned by Time Warner Inc., helped galvanize support for Net Neutrality.

“I am confident that the millions of Americans who weighed in with the FCC in support of the open internet order will once again make their voices heard to demonstrate how wrongheaded this approach is,” said Senate Democrat Leader Charles Schumer.

Republicans said Democrats should work with them to pass a legislative fix to set internet rules. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell praised Pai for working to reverse “the Obama Administration’s eight-year regulatory assault on all aspects of our economy.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Tom Brown, Diane Craft and David Gregorio)

Altice USA today unveiled faster broadband service for Cablevision customers in the Tri-State Area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. You can now subscribe to faster service plans topping out at 300Mbps for residential customers and 350Mbps for commercial accounts.

Altice was required to boost internet speeds in New York State as part of winning approval for the buyout of Cablevision from the state’s Department of Public Service (formerly the Public Service Commission). But customers in New Jersey and Connecticut will also benefit.

New Internet Services
(bundling TV and phone service can reduce these prices and customers may need to call 1-888-298-9771 to change service if grandfathered on older plans):

Prior to the upgrade, the fastest speed most customers could get from Cablevision was 101Mbps. Based on pricing, the best value for money is the 200Mbps plan if you are looking for faster service. A $55 charge monthly charge for 300Mbps is $35 more than the logical rate step between lower speed tiers. Standalone customers would effectively pay $114.95 a month for 300Mbps vs. $79.95 for 200Mbps.

Altice has achieved the internet speed requirement imposed by New York regulators more than a year ahead of schedule. The same cannot be said for Charter Communications, which has canceled Time Warner Cable Maxx upgrades that were already underway in former Time Warner service areas. Customers may have to wait until 2019 in New York (later elsewhere) for Charter to upgrade all of its service areas to support 300Mbps. Altice’s other owned-and-operated cable operator – Suddenlink Communications, is also still laboring to boost broadband speeds and has left usage caps and usage billing in place for its customers in mostly smaller cities across the United States.

WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone will unveil gigabit speed broadband across five U.S. cities by the end of this year.

In Evansville, Ind., and Auburn, Ala., WOW! will be the first provider in town delivering gigabit internet speeds to residents and businesses, with only a modem upgrade required to get faster service. In the wealthy community of Gross Pointe Shores, Mich., WOW! is bringing gigabit broadband over an expanding fiber to the home network. Customers in Knoxville, Tenn., and Huntsville, Ala. will also see faster speeds towards the end of this year.

WOW! provides competing cable service in 20 markets, primarily in the midwest and southeast, including Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Maryland, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.

“In many of our markets, we are already offering the highest speeds available with our 600Mbps internet service,” said WOW! CEO Steven Cochran. “By enabling 1 Gig Internet over our existing coax plant and through our targeted fiber to the home investment, WOW! is demonstrating its commitment to continually innovate and deliver products that help our residential and business customers to connect.”