Bright House Networks customers in central Florida are not excited by the news Charter Communications is still pursuing Bright House Networks, and both companies recently agreed to extend the deadline by 30 days for a final deal to be placed on the table.

Charter had bid $10.4 billion to acquire Bright House, which serves customers mostly in the south, including the cities of Tampa and Orlando.

“We look forward to completing the transaction as planned, and our teams are working together to make that happen,” Charter chief executive Tom Rutledge said. Reuters had recently reported Bright House was preparing to “abandon” the Charter deal, believing it was better off with sn existing cooperation agreement with Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus was paid $34.6 million in 2014, four times the amount he earned in 2013, thanks to generous stock awards.

Marcus’ pocket change base salary of $1.5 million represented a pay raise of 50% over the $1 million he took home in 2013, according to a statement filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Marcus’ real money came from stock awards worth $24.7 million, which represented more than 10 times the amount of his stock bonus the year before.

Time Warner Cable paid their top executives handsomely in 2014, in part to convince them to stay with the company as its merger with Comcast worked its way through the regulatory process. Marcus oddly won an extra incentive bonus in 2014 — $7.95 million if he agreed to stay with Time Warner long enough to collect an $80 million golden parachute severance package if the merger with Comcast was approved.

Unsurprisingly, Time Warner Cable praised itself for the effectiveness of its ‘Stay and Get Paid’ effort, showering top executives with cash bonuses to ‘tough it out’ through 2014.

“The company’s executive team remains in place and—as evidenced by the company’s 2014 operating and financial results—was intently focused on achieving the company’s short and long-term goals despite the uncertainty and challenges during the pendency of the transaction,” TWC said in its proxy.

Evidently that also means Time Warner was not in a position to find replacements willing to accept less than $34 million in compensation that would be capable of delivering similar results.

Marcus

Even as some of the largest investment banks on Wall Street are assembling a $24 billion loan package to further Charter Communication’s next effort to acquire Time Warner Cable, CEO Robert Marcus has learned not to take his eyes off the day-to-day business of running the country’s second largest cable operator.

Marcus turned up late last week at Le Parker Meridien in New York to speak at the 2nd Annual MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit, largely an affair putting Wall Street investors together with top cable executives to learn about industry trends.

Immediately peppered with questions about the failed merger between Time Warner and Comcast, Marcus sought to turn the page on the deal that would have handed him an $80 million golden parachute.

“The horse is dead,” Marcus said in response to continued questions about the deal.

But Marcus did say he felt the deal was rejected for reasons that were never explained to him or the industry, which could have an impact on future cable mergers and acquisitions. Regulator-inspired uncertainty could make some companies think twice about pursuing the next big deal, but so far that does not seem to apply to Charter Communications — still hot on the trail for a deal with the much larger Time Warner Cable.

Marcus claims he understood Time Warner Cable’s image with customers was a real problem that needed to be addressed immediately after becoming the company’s new CEO in  January 2014.

“The residential business was where the work needed to be done,” said Marcus.

Reliability became the top priority for Marcus’ team.

“It trumped features and functionality,” Marcus said, noting that if its network performed as it should, that would result in fewer calls into its customer care centers and reduced “truck rolls” to customer homes, saving Time Warner Cable time and money and improving its image. Marcus claims those efforts paid off.

“It works, we’re not pixelating, and we don’t have [huge] outages,” Marcus said.

Under Marcus’ leadership, Time Warner has adopted a “non-sexy stuff” approach to the cable business, focusing on making sure its existing products work before jumping into new products. That may explain why Time Warner has traditionally been behind other operators introducing vast broadband speed increases, cloud-based set-top boxes with improved user interfaces, more TV Everywhere contract arrangements allowing Time Warner customers to access online video content from third-party cable network websites, and the largest on-demand video libraries.

Not much is likely to change for the time being. Marcus reiterated his plan for major network upgrades under his Time Warner Cable Maxx program remain on track to reach 75% of Time Warner Cable service areas by the end of 2016.

When Maxx upgrades are complete, customers are transitioned to an all-digital television platform and Standard broadband customers move from 15/1Mbps service to 50/5Mbps at no additional charge. Although the top speed for Time Warner Cable broadband is currently 300/20Mbps in Maxx markets like New York, Los Angeles, Austin and Kansas City, Marcus said he was ready to bring 1Gbps broadband to Time Warner Cable customers sometime in late 2016, after DOCSIS 3.1 equipment becomes available.

“As the market evolves to that place, we’ll make it available,” Marcus said.

Recent movement at the Federal Communications Commission to introduce additional oversight over the cable industry has not made much impact at Time Warner Cable, which plans business as usual.

“I live in a different world than Chairman Wheeler in terms of the competitive dynamic,” Marcus said. “We’re fighting it out everyday in the trenches to gain and keep High Speed Data subscribers. The idea we would pull back and not press any competitive advantages of product enhancements we’re capable of delivering, just feels counter-intuitive and bad business.”

The idea that policy changes in Washington would somehow impact the investment in and introduction of new and better services from Time Warner Cable was ridiculous to Marcus.

“I cannot translate that into holding back the product and I can’t imagine what the policy objective would be that would encourage holding back the product,” Marcus said.

Frontier Communications, just hours after passing its first hurdle  — from the Federal Trade Commission — to go ahead with its proposed $10.54 billion acquisition of Verizon’s wireline assets in California, Florida and Texas, is already being discussed as the most likely buyer of FairPoint Communications, which serves former Verizon customers in the northern New England states of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

Wall Street is turning up the pressure on FairPoint to sell its money-losing operation to a larger company that could use economy of scale to rescue a business that has already declared bankruptcy once and lost over $136 million last year. FairPoint also recently settled an ongoing dispute with its unionized workforce which makes the company a more likely takeover target.

FairPoint CEO Paul Sunu put out the for-sale sign during last week’s first quarter earnings conference call, admitting to investors FairPoint is considering mergers and acquisitions as a seller or buyer as part of the company’s overall strategy.

Barry Sine, a telecom analyst with Drexel Hamilton, said the company’s 18,000 mile fiber optic network across the three states it serves is the crown jewel of FairPoint and would be a valuable addition to a larger phone company’s portfolio. FairPoint continues to rapidly lose residential customers as they switch to cellular phones, cable company phone service, or broadband-powered Voice over IP services like Ooma. But FairPoint is picking up customers in the commercial sector, including wireless carriers seeking cell tower backhaul connections, hospitals, and other institutions using FairPoint’s fiber network.

Frontier, headquartered in Stamford, Conn., already has substantial assets in the northeast, including AT&T’s former service area in Connecticut. Picking up northern New England would not be much of a challenge for a company already serving 28 states with more than 17,000 employees and could soon pick up millions of new customers in the south.

Vermont Public Radio reports troubled FairPoint Communications, which serves customers in northern New England originally serviced by Verizon, is likely up for sale and could be acquired by a company like Frontier Communications by 2017. (2:54)

You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

With Frontier’s attention currently occupied by its latest Verizon transaction, analysts do not expect to see a deal with FairPoint struck before 2017. That could allow Frontier’s rivals — CenturyLink and Windstream to approach FairPoint first. But neither of those two companies have recently been active acquiring new landline service areas.

Many of FairPoint’s largest shareholders purchased defaulted bonds when FairPoint went bankrupt, and hope to rack up a substantial return when FairPoint is sold to a larger company.

Frontier has a better record of working well with unionized workers than FairPoint, so it was no surprise the unions representing FairPoint workers are not upset with the news the company could be sold.

A spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Vermont told Vermont Public Radio the union is aware of speculation about a future sale of the company and would welcome the opportunity to be a partner with “a more successful business” than FairPoint.

The would-be CEO picked to head the illegitimate child of the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger wants your sympathy and understanding over the loss of bulging signing bonuses, pay packages, and benefits with the demise of the cable company that never was: GreatLand Connections.

While about 2.5 million customers in Minnesota, Indiana, and Kentucky braced for the arrival of their new cable company — one that lacked letterhead, much less any track record or experience — executives shared a box of tissues contemplating the wasted stress of moving their children from one exclusive private school to another in the ‘barren cultural wasteland’ of the midwest.

“The people aspect of this is just breathtaking,” said GreatLand’s never CEO Michael Willner, who has now been sidelined by Time Warner Cable twice – once when the company he used to oversee, Insight Communications, was absorbed into the Time Warner hegemony and now a second time, when the rug was pulled out of the cable company he was hired to run. “For 14 months this deal was meandering through the regulatory process, for whatever reason they just decided that after all the planning and all the money and all the people commitment and people who had moved to other cities, and planning to move for other cities for new jobs – there were even a few people who were told they wouldn’t have jobs after the close – they just decided there was no way to do the deal. It was unprecedented.”

Willner can keep on smiling.

Willner told his sad tale to Multichannel News, noting (thank goodness) there wasn’t a giant warehouse in the midwest full of GreatLand truck decals looking for a new home. In fact Willner spent the last 14 months preoccupied with filling 15-20 top senior vice president and vice president management positions, dangling lucrative pay and bonus offers to convince executives to move their elite east coast families to a state like… Kentucky. Time Warner Cable treasurer Matt Siegel, his biggest catch, had already bitten and was considering his new home options.

Meanwhile, nervous employees of the systems scheduled to be thrown overboard by Comcast forced Willner to personally stop by their offices several times over the past 14 months to reassure them they did not have anything to worry about.

“All the people going to GreatLand were Comcast people,” Willner said, claiming, “These employees loved working for Comcast. I had to convince them that life would be OK with us. It took me awhile.”

Willner did not bother reassuring affected customers.

In the end, it was all for naught.

“When they said ‘We’re done,’ we were done too,” Willner cried after the Comcast-TWC deal swirled in the bowl.

Despite the “unprecedented” disruption, Willner and his would-be executives all landed on their feet. Siegel went back to Time Warner Cable, most of the other executives stayed with Comcast and Willner himself did not have to skip a beat, instantly resuming his old job as CEO of video software company Penthera Partners.