Charter Cable customers in Mesa County, Col., experiencing the latest service outage from the cable company were told to “quit whining” and “check your attitude” when they called Charter’s customer service line to ask when the problems would be fixed.

“If Mesa County didn’t whine so much, maybe something would be done,” one Charter representative told a customer in Grand Junction.

“Talking to [Charter] is like trying to put socks on an octopus,” said Dillard Jenkins.

Stop the Cap! reader June Jones found that to be true when she complained to Charter about not being able to reach 911 on her Charter phone during the recent outage.

“I was unhappy after the representative literally told me ‘that’s not our problem, get a cell phone like everyone else’,” Jones said. “I was so shocked being talked to that way I didn’t know what to say. I am 76 years old and in all my life I have never heard a company use that tone with me. The next thing I heard was, ‘is there anything else? I didn’t think so’ and she just hung up.”

Alex Danders waited on hold 35 minutes to speak to a representative about the Charter Internet outage at his business. He later wish he hadn’t.

“All I wanted to know is if they knew when it was going to be fixed and the guy told me ‘to check my attitude’ and later told me to ‘go screw yourself’ and disconnected me,” said Rodriguez.

Charlotte Conboy is a Charter customer who has had trouble with Charter for the last six months. Her two home-based businesses have suffered from no Internet access during frequent outages.

“If […] their company [had] issues [affecting their offices], they would have it fixed right away” said Conboy. “They say that’s beside the point and I get hung up on.”

A county official calling to find out when repairs would be completed was told, “we have excellent service and do not appreciate your complaint for one incident of interruption of service.”

The latest outage took out Internet service for schools across Mesa County for several hours two days in a row. Teachers scrambled to change their lesson plans to work around the outages.

“I’ll tell you the last couple of weeks the last three weeks or so I’ve been out talking to people, they’re furious, people are upset I mean this is our primary communications,” commissioner Scott McInnis told KKCO. “In exchange for using the right of way we expect them to deliver a service that the reasonable person would say ‘hey the quality of this service is good’ and we expect that [they will] deliver that.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KKCO Grand Junction County Commissioners get involved with Charter issues 1-15-15.flv[/flv]

KKCO in Grand Junction reports that hundreds of area residents are outraged about ongoing problems with Charter Cable and the rude responses they get when they call Charter’s customer service line. (3:23)

The ongoing problems with Charter Cable and the company’s surly responses to customers prompted a stern letter from the Mesa County Board of Commissioners to Charter Communication’s senior manager of Government Relations. They plan to meet with senior Charter officials today to discuss the matter.

Dear Mr. Rasmussen;

Today we have received multiple complaints from businesses and residents of Mesa County regarding interruption of Charter’s Cable Service. Currently, District 51 Schools are without service and we have been informed that service has been down for several hours.

Please note that this is unacceptable for Charter subscribers who feel that they can go to no one for resolution. When calling the customer service line they are told multiple ‘reasons’ for the outage, including responses such as ‘we have excellent service and do not appreciate your complaint for one incident of interruption of service,’ and ‘If Mesa County didn’t whine so much, maybe something would be done.’

Timely resolution of this issue would be prudent. We are requesting immediate and prompt dispatch of a response team to fix the system post haste; as well as a heightened awareness of the frustration Mesa County subscribers are having with your Customer Service Department. Good faith compliance is implied with the franchise agreement. We have also been informed by the City of Grand Junction that they have also heard from frustrated citizens regarding this issue.

Sincerely,
Mesa County Board of Commissioners
Rose Pugliese, Chair
John Justman
Scott McInnis

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KKCO Grand Junction School district loses phones and internet again 1-16-15.flv[/flv]

The entire Mesa County school district lost Internet access for a second day after another Charter Cable outage. KKCO reports parents and staff are concerned. (3:08)

 Thanks to reader June Jones for tipping us about this story.

Comcast Internet-only customers looking for speeds up to 100Mbps will pay Comcast an unprecedented $88.95 a month for a package containing the company’s Blast! broadband service with a rented cable modem.

The company has begun informing subscribers of the first of its 2015 rate increases that took effect in some areas on Jan. 1.

“We have worked very hard to hold down price adjustments, and there are no price changes for our Limited Basic ($16.10), Digital Preferred ($85.90) or Internet Essentials ($9.95) services,” said Bob Grove, Comcast’s vice president of public relations. “While we continue making investments in our network and technology to give customers more for their money, including more video across platforms, better experiences like X1 and faster Internet service, we periodically need to adjust prices due to increases we incur in programming, business costs and new technology. On average, nationally, the customer bill will increase by 3.4 percent.”

Some will pay more than others. Here is a sample:

• Customers with DVR service face a $2 rate hike for the monthly DVR service charge, which now stands at $10 a month;
• Digital Premier, which includes an assortment of premium movie channels, is rising from $131.75 to $140.35;
• The hourly service charge for service calls is increasing from $33.80 to $35.80;
• Each extra cable outlet in your home will cost a one time service fee of $33.20, up from $32.75;
• Any pre-existing outlet in your home will now be charged a one time activation fee of $22.95, up from $22.05;
• Service upgrades that require an in-home visit will be charged $28.45, an increase from $26.30;
• The in-home wiring service protection plan that covers you in case of an inside cable wiring or service deterioration problem will see a price increase of $1 to $4.95 a month. Customers without the plan will now pay $35.80 an hour for service calls.

Cable television customers face an increase of more than 100% for the company’s Broadcast TV surcharge introduced in 2013. In most areas, the fee is rising from $1.50 per month to $3.25. A previously announced $2 increase in modem rental charges will raise the cost of using Comcast-supplied equipment including Comcast’s Gateway to $10 a month.

Comcast is also introducing a new compulsory regional sports network surcharge of $1 a month for all XFINITY TV packages starting with Digital Starter and higher tiers and XFINITY 450 Latino.

Customers with analog-only televisions using a DTA converter box to handle digital cable television channels on these older sets face an even more dramatic price hike. Customers that used to pay as little as $0.50 for Digital Adapter Additional Outlet Service will now pay $2.99 a month.

Premium channels such as HBO have seen price reductions, possibly in response to declining subscriber numbers. HBO drops to $15 a month and all other premiums decrease to $12 a month.

Comcast customers looking for the biggest bang for their buck should consider bundled service packages which discount Internet, television, and telephone service. Current customers should also consider letting Comcast know they are shopping the competition for a better deal. Ask them to lower your rates if they want you to stay.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has set a goal that every resident of New York State should have access to at least 100Mbps broadband no later than 2018.

The governor will kick off his latest broadband expansion effort with the launch of his $500 million broadband expansion program, dubbed the New New York Broadband Fund, a follow-up to the state’s $70 million public-private effort to expand broadband that began in 2012.

Much of the money awarded in the 2012 broadband expansion effort went to Wireless Internet Service Providers, institutional broadband networks, middle-mile fiber projects not accessible to the public, and emergency service network upgrades. Another $5.2 million was awarded to Time Warner Cable to expand broadband service to 4,114 households in the Capital, Central, Finger Lakes, Mid-Hudson, Mohawk Valley, NYC, North Country, Southern Tier and Western regions of New York State. In June, many of the top funding recipients also received honors from the governor’s office in the first annual New York State Broadband Champion Awards.

Gov. Cuomo

Despite the money, the 2012 effort did not make a significant dent in the pervasive problem of broadband availability in upstate New York.

While Gov. Cuomo is committed to a target speed of 100Mbps within the next four years, more than one million New York households still cannot access broadband that achieves the state minimum — 6.5Mbps. That includes 113,000 businesses.

The governor’s solution is to subsidize private businesses with more tax dollars to resolve the broadband problem, with a significant part of the next round of funding likely to reach more institutional and public safety networks off-limits to the public, middle mile network expansion that can build state-of-the-art fiber rings that do not connect to end users, and an even bigger amount handed to Time Warner Cable (or Comcast if the state approves a merger with Time Warner Cable) and rural phone companies like Frontier Communications. Much of the money awarded to last mile providers like cable and phone companies will placate those that have stubbornly refused to expand further into rural areas unless taxpayers pick up some of the expense.

“In some of these areas, there’s just not a business case for these [service] providers to build out,” said David Salway, director of the New York State Broadband Program office. “The cost far exceeds what the revenue might be for that area.”

An unintended consequence of the broadband funding effort could be taxpayers subsidizing the establishment of for-profit monopolies in rural corners of the state. Although Salway told Capital NY he wanted to make sure New Yorkers had a choice, he clarified he was referring to a choice in technology, not service providers.

That must come as a relief for Verizon. The state’s largest phone company has petitioned state officials in the past for a gradual mothballing of New York’s rural landline network in favor of switching customers to wireless voice and broadband over Verizon’s cellular network. Theoretically, taxpayers could end up subsidizing the demise of rural New York landlines and DSL if Verizon seeks money from the rural broadband fund to expand its wireless tower network in rural New York. Time Warner Cable almost certainly will also seek more funding, probably in excess of the average $1,264 paid to the cable company for each of the 4,114 additional connections it agreed to complete during an earlier round of funding.

While rural broadband remains an important issue in New York, the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable is on the front burner and Salway, like the governor, had little to say. But Salway did offer that he did not believe the merger “would reduce [access] as much as further our goal” for expansion.

Guidelines for grant recipients are expected to become available just after the governor’s State of the State presentation in January, with ground-breaking on projects likely to start by mid-summer of 2015.

A Nashville web developer who signed up for usage-cap exempted Business Class service in one of Comcast’s usage-based billing trial cities received a bill for nearly $3,000 in early termination fees after he was unable to transfer his Comcast Internet service to his new address.

Adrian Fraim followed the lead of other savvy Comcast customers who have managed to avoid the company’s usage caps by signing up for cap-free Business Class service. For years, Comcast has offered small businesses a commercial service for only slightly more than residential service, without any usage limits. But any customer is free to sign up.

Fraim thought he was getting a good deal and was happy with his broadband service, but Comcast took him to school when he tried to move service from Antioch to his new address in Clarksville, which he later discovered was outside of Comcast’s service area. The cable company treated his move as a violation of his three-year service contract and billed him an early termination fee of $2,789.

“I was just blown away,” Fraim told WSMV-TV. “That’s way too much money for somebody like me to be able to pay. They kept telling me the same thing, ‘you’re under contract, that’s what the contract says.'”

Only Fraim has never seen a printed Comcast contract. The company only offers its general service agreement and acceptable use policy online and it implies commercial customers are under a one-year contract.

In fact, Comcast’s terms require early-canceling customers to pay 75% of the amount they would have paid on their monthly bill under contract and 100% of any waived custom installation fees. A customer with a $100/mo broadband bill would owe a termination fee of $75 a month for each of up to 36 months of service.

“I didn’t think that was fair, to pay an early termination fee, because I wanted to keep their service,” Fraim said. “And due to them not offering it in my area, I feel like I was being punished because they don’t offer the service here.”

Comcast didn’t seem to care about Fraim’s predicament until reporters called the cable company.

Faced with the prospect of leading the local evening news, Comcast turned Fraim’s frown upside down and finally relented.

Spokesman Alex Horwitz said Comcast does have early termination fees, but because of the extenuating circumstances, “the new location is not serviceable by Comcast,” they will waive the fee.

Comcast has not modified its contract to offer that “get out of penalty jail free”-card to other customers, so be certain to carefully consider the term length of your contract and be sure you have no plans to move outside of a Comcast service area before signing it, unless you have very deep pockets.

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WSMV talks with Nashville web developer Adrian Fraim who discovered a nasty surprise when he moved outside of Comcast’s service area – a $2.789 early termination fee. (2:08)

Russian Internet Service Providers have been strongly encouraged to upgrade their service and speeds as a matter of national pride as the Kremlin encourages broadband improvements across the vast expanse of the country.

Responding to the call, regional ISP Onlime, operated by Russian telecom giant Rostelecom, has introduced new broadband packages to subscribers at prices that would make most North Americans drool:

• “100 for 500” is Onlime’s most aggressive promotion, offering unlimited 100Mbps service for 500 Russian rubles, equal to $11.47US a month on promotion. The regular rate after the promotion expires should run around $20 a month;
• 15Mbps budget Internet is regularly priced at $6.88 a month;
• 30Mbps standard service costs $9.18 a month;
• 60Mbps turbo service runs $11.47 a month;
• 80Mbps deluxe service was tariffed before the “100 for 500” promotion, and its everyday price is $16.06 a month.

Meanwhile, Russian wireless mobile operator Vimpelcom also runs wired broadband service in parts of Russia and is boosting speeds without raising prices. Customers signed up with “Beeline” in the Moscow Oblast, including the communities of Moscow, Domodedovo, Zelenograd, Sergyev-Posad, Serpukhov, Chekhov, and Lyubertsy will now receive up to 30Mbps service. You can’t beat the price. At just 350 Russian rubles, that is just over $8 a month in U.S. dollars.

The speed increases start Nov. 10.