Time Warner Cable reports it has unleashed major broadband speed upgrades for a handful of communities in New York and Los Angeles and is now delivering speeds up to 300Mbps.

After overhauling its network and neighborhood nodes, residential customers in Costa Mesa and West Hollywood, Calif., Staten Island and the Woodside neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., should now be getting faster broadband speeds ranging from 50Mbps for Standard (formerly 15Mbps) to 300Mbps for Extreme (formerly 50Mbps) service.

“These significant speed increases and network enhancements will allow our Internet customers to get the most out of their TWC experience,” said Time Warner Cable CEO Robert D. Marcus. “With this service transformation, our customers can enjoy all the ways they use TWC Internet even better, including streaming video, downloading music and more.”

Time Warner Cable’s senior vice president for corporate development Mike Roudi said Time Warner Cable expects to roll out similar upgrades nationwide over the next two years. But Comcast may have other ideas if it successfully completes its merger with Time Warner Cable by this time next year.

The cable company’s progress in rolling out upgrades is not as fast as their new top broadband speeds. Time Warner only expects to reach 200,000 customers with the new speeds by the end of June. The next areas scheduled for upgrades include:

• California: Covina, Cypress, Hoover, Crenshaw District and Jefferson Park areas of Los Angeles;
• New York: Upper Manhattan and more neighborhoods in Queens and Staten Island.

Time Warner said it expects to complete upgrades in New York and Los Angeles by the end of this year. No timeline was provided to start upgrades in other cities. Affected Time Warner customers will be contacted about replacing their existing DOCSIS 2 modem and getting set-top boxes for the all-digital television conversion that accompanies the upgrade.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TWC Talks About New Customer Experience in NY LA 4-22-14.mp4[/flv]

Time Warner Cable’s Mike Roudi explains how the cable company is upgrading customers for faster broadband speeds and all-digital television service in this company-produced video. (1:49)

Your cable bill is going up… a lot.

Within five years, the average cable television subscription will reach $125 a month, primarily because of rapidly rising sports programming costs that are enriching already wealthy sports teams and players.

Professional and college sports are benefiting from the largesse of sports channels and networks all competing for the rights to televise games. Until a decade ago, those rights typically went to the highest paying broadcast television network. But as traditional cable sports networks like ESPN find themselves competing with more than three dozen other cable networks and regional sports channels, bidders need ever-deeper pockets to stay in the running. With cable customers footing the bill, the sky has been the limit.

Cable companies that routinely complain about runaway inflation in sports programming costs suddenly go silent when they get a piece of the action. Take Time Warner Cable, for example. A substantial amount of the company’s recently announced rate hike they blame on “increased programming costs” comes from networks they own and operate. A network dedicated to just one team – the Los Angeles Dodgers, will cost subscribers slightly less than $5 a month. SportsNet LA was created around Time Warner’s 25-year rights deal to show Dodgers games. The cable company is paying $8.3 billion for the privilege. Another network, dedicated to the Los Angeles Lakers, also costs Time Warner Cable customers $4 a month whether they watch or want the channel or not.

Out east, the Yankees Channel YES costs subscribers around $3.50 a month — a bargain compared to the Dodgers — with prices expected to increase further in the years ahead. ESPN, by far the largest sports network, insists on more than $5 a month from every customer even if they have never watched the network.

Every year, prices are rising for sports programming, and fast. The lucrative billions in revenue are now turning up in players’ salaries, provide piles of money to “non-profit” educational institutions with college sports teams, and are inflating the overall value of the teams for their owners.

The inflation spiral is accompanied by a framework of entitlement, where owners, players, and schools now expect regular increases in payments to secure television rights. Those costs are passed on directly to every subscriber, because few sports networks will allow themselves to be sold “a-la-carte” only to those who actually want to watch.

With even more sports networks launching on the horizon, the average cable bill that now costs about $90 a month will increase by $35 a month to reach $125 a month within a few years, according to the Los Angeles Times:

The dispute over telecasts of Dodgers baseball games exemplifies the problem with the current setup. Time Warner Cable wants to charge Southern California subscribers slightly less than $5 a month to watch the games on a Dodger channel. Area TV distributors (such as DirecTV, Cox Cable and AT&T U-verse), fearing a consumer backlash, are resisting. If Time Warner and the Dodgers win, it’s a lucrative deal — for them. Not so for those who don’t care to watch. Even Dodger fans, blacked out now, aren’t really winners. The system denies all of us meaningful choices. All subscribers end up subsidizing programming we never watch.

In effect, because of the way channels are bundled, all pay-TV subscribers (roughly 100 million households) are subsidizing sports. The subsidy is substantial. The Pac-12 conference estimates it will receive $3 billion in TV revenue over a 12-year period. For ESPN, it’s much more. If roughly 90% of pay-TV households purchase the bundle that includes ESPN, that network alone will receive just short of $6 billion in revenue in a single year.

That’s a major subsidy, and, given a Cox Cable representative’s estimate that only 15% to 20% of viewers regularly watch sports programming, it’s paid mostly by viewers who neither watch nor wish to subsidize ESPN programming. These viewers swallow the bitter inflationary pill in order to watch other channels in the bundle.

Both college and professional sports teams benefit from the subsidy. The winners include UCLA and UC Berkeley, taxpayer-supported institutions, and USC and Stanford, preeminent private, nonprofit institutions that also benefit from federal money. UCLA alone reportedly received $14.5 million in TV revenue over the last year. Americans are accustomed to college athletic programs that make money, but do we really want these revenues to be generated on the backs of angry consumers who must pay a sports subsidy every time they purchase subscription TV?

Despite its pending merger with Comcast, Time Warner Cable is still promising to boost broadband speeds by the end of this year in New York City and Los Angeles.

The TWC Maxx program was announced before the merger, but Time Warner says it is still going ahead with upgrades and produced a video showing some of the behind-the-scenes work in Los Angeles.

Although the video doesn’t show much more than people pointing at equipment displays and maintaining equipment racks, it does include an interview about what Time Warner is doing to prepare for infrastructure upgrades serious enough to need a bigger air conditioner for the building.

Time Warner does warn customers they may experience brief service interruptions as a result of the work.

When complete, Time Warner Cable customers in both cities will have all-digital television service and major broadband speed upgrades:

These upgrades may be modified if/when Comcast takes over, and Time Warner has not disclosed which cities will get the upgrades next.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TWC Behind The Scenes at a Los Angeles Hub Time Warner Cable 3-26-14.flv[/flv]

Jay Gormley, a former reporter for KTVT in Dallas now working for Time Warner Cable takes customers on a tour of a Los Angeles Time Warner Cable hub slated to get service upgrades. (2:01)

Los Angeles has filed a $10 million lawsuit accusing Time Warner Cable of skimming off money owed to the city as part of its franchise fee agreement with the cable operator.

The Los Angeles Times reports Time Warner has been allegedly stiffing the city for years when money was desperately needed to help ease budget problems during the Great Recession.

“Time Warner owes L.A.’s taxpayers millions of dollars for the privilege of having its franchise,” city attorney Michael Feuer said during a City Hall news conference announcing the lawsuit. “This is a day where we are standing up and saying enough is enough.”

The 24-page lawsuit claims despite earning more than $500 million a year from Los Angeles-area customers, Time Warner blatantly refused to live up to its obligations to the city by not paying $2.5 million in franchise fees and public, education and governmental channel fees in 2008 and 2009 and an additional $7.2 million in fees in 2010 and 2011. The city contends that once in 2008 and again in 2011, Time Warner Cable withheld more than $5 million in fees the city said it was owed. The company finally paid a portion of the disputed fees, Feuer said, but then subtracted the same amount from its franchise fee payment, resulting in another underpayment, reports the newspaper.

The city has negotiated with the cable company over the dispute for some time, to no effect.

The Arris IP805-M DVR, produced for Time Warner Cable

Time Warner Cable customers in New York City and Los Angeles will get a major set-top box upgrade from a next generation DVR allowing six programs to be recorded and once and viewed anywhere in the home.

Arris filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission seeking certification of its new IP805-M set-top, branded with the Time Warner Cable logo.

The new device includes six internal tuners, 1TB of recording space, and a “whole house” platform that will let customers watch recordings from other televisions or portable wireless devices within the home. The new DVR is capable of transcoding traditional QAM channels into IP video.

Time Warner Cable will unveil the new box later this year as part of plans to upgrade service in New York City and Los Angeles under the TWC Maxx project. Customers in other cities may have to wait for the device to become available.

Time Warner has fallen behind many other cable operators, satellite providers and phone companies that offer superior DVR equipment.

Arris’ newest piece of equipment, caught by FierceCable, is just one of the upgrades the company announced last week.