It took the four commissioners of the New York Public Service Commission just 20 minutes to vote unanimously to undo the multi-billion dollar 2016 merger of Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable, by revoking its approval for failing to meet the public interest.

“Charter’s repeated failures to serve New Yorkers and honor its commitments are well documented and are only getting worse. After more than a year of administrative enforcement efforts to bring Charter into compliance with the Commission’s merger order, the time has come for stronger actions to protect New Yorkers and the public interest,” said Commission Chair John B. Rhodes. “Charter’s non-compliance and brazenly disrespectful behavior toward New York State and its customers necessitates the actions taken today seeking court-ordered penalties for its failures, and revoking the Charter merger approval.”

If the order withstands inevitable court challenges, it would be the first time a regulator drove a large cable operator out of business in a state for bad conduct. It would also make history, achieving similar notoriety to the 1981 case of Tele-Communications, Inc., vs. Jefferson City, Mo., when TCI’s national director of franchising personally threatened the mayor and the city’s cable consultant if their franchise was not renewed. When the city voted to award the franchise to another cable operator, TCI refused to sell its system, withheld franchise fee payments, and alternately told the city it would either strip its cables off utility poles in spite or let them “rot on the pole” rather than sell at any price.

Without modification, the Charter/Time Warner Cable merger was a bad deal for New York

After Stop the Cap! and other consumer groups participated in a detailed review of Charter Communications’ proposal to acquire Time Warner Cable, the Public Service Commission adopted many of our pro-consumer suggestions to ensure the merger benefited the people of New York at least partly as much as the executives and shareholders of the two companies. New York State law demands that telecommunications mergers must meet a public interest test to win approval. On its face, the Commission found the Charter/Time Warner Cable proposal failed to meet this test. The state received detailed evidence showing Time Warner Cable’s existing upgrade plan offered a better deal to New York residents than Charter’s own proposal. Time Warner Cable also maintained a large workforce in New York in call centers, direct hire technicians, and its corporate headquarters.

After a detailed analysis, the PSC rejected the merger for failure to meet the public interest. At the same time, it also offered Charter a way to turn that rejection into a conditional approval. If the company agreed to “enforceable and concrete conditions” that would deliver positive net benefits for New Yorkers to share in the rewards of the merger deal, the Commission would approve the transaction.

Charter has complied with most of the deal conditions demanded by the Commission. The company has boosted its broadband speeds across the state ahead of schedule, committed to at least seven years of broadband service without data caps, introduced an affordable internet access program and temporarily maintained an existing offer for $14.99 slow-speed internet access available to any New York customer, and agreed to maintain jobs in New York (with the exception of a 1.5 year strike action ongoing in New York City affecting technicians).

But the most costly condition for Charter to meet is also the one it has repeatedly failed to meet — its commitment to wire unserved rural areas, largely in upstate New York. Charter committed to a timetable to roll out high-speed internet access for 145,000 homes and businesses that currently lack access to any internet provider.

Charter’s merger deal meets Gov. Cuomo’s Broadband for All Program

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announcing rural broadband initiatives in New York in 2015.

This rural broadband expansion condition was integral to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Broadband for All program, promising to make broadband access available to every resident and business in New York State.

Cuomo’s broadband program depended on several sources to accomplish its goal:

• State/Private Funding: The state invested $500 million of $5.7 billion dollars it earned from settling lawsuits against big banks and insurance companies over the improprieties that helped trigger the 2008 Great Recession. This money was designed to incentivize the private sector to expand high-speed internet access in underserved/unserved areas. Recipients had to provide a 1:1 financial match of whatever grant funds were given, putting the dollar value of this part of the program at over $1 billion.
• The FCC: The Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund (CAF) offered funding to incumbent providers to expand service in certain areas in New York. Some $170 million of that funding allocated to the state was declined, principally by Verizon, which showed little interest in expanding its rural broadband network. A bipartisan effort to retain and divert those funds into the New NY Broadband Program was successful, allowing the state to fund several rural broadband projects Verizon was not interested in.
• Charter/Time Warner Cable Merger: To win approval of its merger in New York, Charter agreed to pass an additional 145,000 homes and businesses in less densely populated areas across the state. The company was required to file regular updates on its progress and coordinate with the state the exact locations it planned to serve. This was to ensure Charter would not spend money wiring areas already receiving broadband expansion funding.

For the program to be successful, it was essential that duplication of expansion efforts be avoided. As the program’s public funding wound down, the state discovered it lacked enough money to attract private bidders to serve the last 75,628 locations around the state that remained without a service provider, deemed too remote and expensive to serve. The state awarded over $15 million in state funds and an additional $13.6 million in federal and private funding to Hughes Network Services, LLC, which will furnish satellite-based internet service to those locations. That solution prompted loud complaints from residents discovering they were baited with high-speed internet access that realistically could provide gigabit speed, and suddenly switched to satellite service that cannot guarantee to consistently meet the FCC’s 25/3 Mbps broadband standard and comes with a data cap of 50 GB (or less in some instances) a month, rendering its usefulness highly questionable.

Bait rural upstate customers with the promise of Spectrum internet access, switch to expanding service in New York City instead

Rural broadband for urban customers.

The Cuomo Administration may also have to temper its excitement for successfully completing the Broadband for All program if Charter fails to deliver service to the homes and businesses the state expected it would. In fact, the Commission today accused Charter of substituting broadband expansion in dense urban areas where the company would undoubtedly offer service with or without an expansion commitment for the rural upstate areas it originally promised to service. By adding one customer in a converted loft in Brooklyn while deleting a customer it planned to serve in upstate Livingston County, Charter would save a substantial sum. In all, the Commission alleges Charter’s attempts to count urban areas as “newly passed” while leaving rural upstate areas unserved could save the company tens of millions of dollars.

The company’s failure to meet its rural buildout commitment began almost immediately. Despite a requirement to complete an initial buildout to 36,250 homes and businesses by May 18, 2017, Charter only managed to reach 15,164 premises — just 41.8% of its goal. As a result, the Commission began talks with Charter to get the company back on track and monitor Charter’s claim that utility companies were stalling approval of Charter’s pole attachment requests. The Commission even offered its staff to assist Charter with a comprehensive database tracking pole attachment issues, in hopes of facilitating prompt resolution of any problems that delayed service expansion.

To further assist Charter, the Commission set a new schedule of Charter’s buildout obligations for the period between December 2017 and May 2020, comprised of roughly 20,000-23,000 new passings during each six month period, a significant reduction from the original requirement of 36,250 new passings in the first buildout phase.

To incentivize Charter to stay on track, the Commission also required the company to establish a $12 million Letter of Credit to secure Charter’s obligations. If Charter missed further deadlines, the state could draw funds each time Charter missed a target, typically in $1 million increments.

On Jan. 8, 2018, Charter filed its first report under the new settlement on its buildout progress. The company claimed it exceeded its target by reaching 42,889 homes and businesses in the previous six months. The company also began airing commercials inserted into cable channels seen by Spectrum customers around the state, proclaiming it was expanding service ahead of schedule.

On closer inspection, however, the PSC discovered the most innovative part of Charter’s new-found success was inflating the numbers of new passings by including over 12,000 addresses in New York City and several upstate cities, 1,762 locations where Spectrum service was already available, and more than 250 addresses that were in areas that already received state funding to expand service. In addition to not being rural areas, Charter’s existing franchise agreements would have compelled the company to offer service to most of these addresses with or without the PSC deal conditions.

The state informed Charter it planned to disqualify 18,363 passings from the December report filed on Jan. 8, which meant Charter again failed to satisfy the required 36,771 passings it was supposed to have finished by mid-December. The Commission also removed addresses Charter unilaterally added to its 145,000 buildout plan where other providers already offered service or were planning to with the assistance of already-awarded grant funding.

The many fines for Charter Communications

The Commission has fined Charter $1 million for missing its December targets and another $1 million for not making good on correcting its earlier failures. On Friday, it fined Charter once again for another $1 million, reaching a total of $3 million in fines. The PSC also directed its Counsel to bring an enforcement action in State Supreme Court to seek additional penalties for past failures and ongoing non-compliance with its obligations. Earlier this month, the PSC referred a false advertising claim to the Attorney General’s office regarding Charter’s misleading ads about its progress expanding rural broadband in New York.

The number of alleged misdeeds by Charter has been amply covered by Stop the Cap! in our own investigative report.

In fact, to date, the Commission says Charter has never met any of its rural buildout targets. In response, Charter claimed it effectively did not have to, arguing that once the merger was approved, Charter was under no obligation to answer to the Commission’s regulatory requirements respecting broadband rollouts. Under federal deregulation laws, the state cannot regulate broadband service, Charter argued.

$12 million is a small price to pay when saving tens of millions not expanding rural service

The Commission also suspects that Charter’s $12 million Letter of Credit is a small price to pay for reneging on its broadband commitments.

“It appears that the prospect of forfeiting its right to earn back all of Settlement Agreement’s $12 million Letter of Credit does not seem to be an appropriate incentive where the company stands to save tens of millions of dollars by failing to live up to its buildout obligations in New York,” the Commission wrote.

A 4-0 Vote to Kick Charter Spectrum Out of New York

What has gotten the company’s intention is a 4-0 unanimous vote to cancel the approval of the company’s merger agreement with the state, which effectively puts Charter out of business in New York. The Commission ordered Charter to file a plan within 60 days detailing how it plans to cease service in New York and transition to another provider without causing any service disruptions for customers.

Such a move is unprecedented, but not unwarranted in the eyes of the Commission, which claims it gave Charter ample warnings to correct its bad behavior.

“Both the Commission and the DPS [PSC] Staff have repeatedly attempted to correct Charter’s behavior and secure its performance of the Approval Order’s Network Expansion Condition,” the Commission wrote. “Charter continues to show an inability or a total unwillingness to extend its network in the manner intended by the Commission to pass the requisite number of unserved or underserved homes and/or businesses, which make evident that there was not – and is not – a corporate commitment of compliance with regard to this important public interest condition.”

Now the company faces a requirement to file a six-month transition plan to end service in all areas formerly served by Time Warner Cable in New York State by early 2019. The Commission has also made it clear it is done talking and negotiating with Charter, denying all requests for a rehearing.

“Charter’s repeated, continued, and brazen non-compliance with the Commission-imposed regulatory obligations and failure to act in the public’s interest necessitates a more stringent remedy,” the Commission concluded.

The New York Public Service Commission holds a special session to fine Charter Communications and revoke its merger with Time Warner Cable. (Hearing commences at 5:00 mark) (25:24)

Rural Roane County, Tenn.

Earlier this month, a standing room only crowd packed the offices of Rockwood Electric Utility (REU) in Rockwood, Tenn., despite the fact the meeting was held at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning.

Local residents were there on a work day to listen to area providers and local officials discuss rural broadband access. Most wanted to know exactly when the local phone or cable company planned to expand to bring internet access to the far corners of the region between Knoxville and Chattanooga in east Tennessee.

Comcast, Charter, and AT&T told Roane County Commissioners Ron Berry and Darryl Meadows, State Sen. Ken Yager (R-Kingston), and the crowd they all had a long wait because the companies couldn’t profit offering rural broadband service to the county.

“That is what our shareholders expect and the way we operate in a capitalistic society,” declared Andy Macke, vice president of external affairs at Comcast.

“The biggest challenge for all of you in this room is what they call the last mile,” said Alan L. Hill, the regional director of external and legislative affairs at AT&T Tennessee. “It is a challenge. We all face these challenges.”

In short, nothing much had changed in Roane County, or other rural counties in southeastern Tennessee, to convince service providers to spend money to bring internet service to the region. Until that changed, AT&T, Comcast and others should not be expected to be on the front lines addressing rural internet access. Successive governors of Tennessee have long complained about the rural broadband problem, but the state legislature remains cool to the idea of the state government intervening to help resolve it.

Gov. Haslam

In 2017, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam noted Tennessee currently ranked 29th in the U.S. for broadband access, with 34 percent of rural Tennessee residents lacking access at recognized minimum standards. In splashy news releases and media events, Haslam sold his solution to the problem — the Broadband Accessibility Act, offering up to $45 million over three years to assist making broadband available to unserved homes and businesses.

In reality, the law authorized spending no more than $9.5 million annually on rural broadband grants over the next three years. It also slashed the FCC’s broadband standard from 25/3 Mbps to 10/1 Mbps, presumably a gift to the phone companies who prefer to offer less-capable DSL service in rural areas. In the first year of awards, 13 Tennessee counties, none in the southeastern region where Roane County lies, divided the money, diluting the impact to almost homeopathic strength.

Critics called Haslam’s broadband improvement program “The Smoke and Mirrors Act” for promising a lot and delivering little. At current funding levels, broadband service can only be expanded to 5,000 of the estimated 422,000 households that lack access to internet service, and then only with the award winner’s matching financial contribution.

The demand for rural broadband financial assistance is obvious from the $66 million in requests received from 71 different utilities, co-ops, and communications companies in the first year of the program, all seeking state funding to expand rural broadband. Only a small fraction of those requests were approved. AT&T applied for money targeting Roane County and was turned down. AT&T’s Hill expressed sympathy for the county’s school children who need to complete homework assignments by borrowing Wi-Fi access from fast food establishments, area businesses, and larger libraries. But AT&T’s sympathy will not solve Roane County’s broadband problems.

What might is Rockwood Electric Utility, the municipal power company that sponsored the broadband event.

REU is a not-for-profit, municipally owned utility that has successfully served portions of Roane, Cumberland, and Morgan counties since 1939. By itself, the community-owned utility is no threat to companies like Comcast, because it offers service in places the cable company won’t. But if REU partnered with other municipal providers and offered internet service in larger nearby towns and communities to achieve economy of scale and a more secure financial position, that is a competitive threat apparently so perilous that the telecom industry spent millions of lobbying dollars on state legislatures like the one in Tennessee to ghost-write legislation to discourage utilities like REU from getting into the broadband business, much less dare to compete directly with them. AT&T, Charter, and Comcast also fear how they will compete against municipal utilities that have successfully delivered electric service and maintained an excellent reputation in the community for decades.

Tennessee law is decidedly stacked in favor of AT&T, Charter, and Comcast and against municipal utilities. Although the state allows municipal providers to supply broadband, it can come only after satisfying a series of regulatory rules designed to protect commercial cable and phone companies. It also prohibits municipal providers from offering service outside of existing service areas. That leaves communities served by a for-profit, investor-owned utility out of luck, as well as residents in areas where a rural utility lacked adequate resources to supply broadband service on its own.

Haslam’s Broadband Accessibility Act cynically retained these restrictions and blockades, hampering the rural broadband expansion the law was supposed to address.

For several years, Sen. Janice Bowling (R-Coffee, Franklin, Grundy, Marion, Sequatchie, Van Buren and Warren Counties), has tried to cut one section of Tennessee’s broadband-related laws that prohibits municipal providers from offering service outside of their existing utility service area. Her proposed legislation would authorize municipalities to provide telecommunication service, including broadband service, either on its own or by joint venture or other business relationship with one or more third parties and in geographical areas that are inside and outside the electric plant’s service area.

In her sprawling State Senate District 16, a municipal provider already offers fiber broadband service, but Tennessee’s current protectionist laws prohibit LightTUBe from offering service to nearby towns where service is absent or severely lacking. That has left homes and businesses in her district at a major disadvantage economically.

Sen. Janice Bowling (R-Tenn.) discusses rural broadband challenges in her 16th district south of Nashville and her bill to help municipal utilities provide broadband service. (4:20)

“In rural Tennessee, if we have what is called an industrial park, and we have electricity, you have running water, you have some paved roads, but if you do not have access to fiber at this point, what you have is an electrified cow pasture with running water and walking trails. It is not an industrial park,” she complained, noting that the only reason her bill is prevented from becoming law is lobbying by the state’s cable and phone companies. “We can no longer leave the people of Tennessee hostage to profit margins of large corporations. We appreciate what they’re doing. We appreciate where they do it, but in rural Tennessee we will never meet their profit margins and so we can no longer be held hostage when we have the ability to help ourselves.”

Sen. Yager

Her sentiment in shared by many other Tennessee legislators who serve rural districts, and her Senate bill (and House companion bill) routinely receive little, if any, public opposition. But private lobbying by telecom industry lobbyists makes sure the bill never reaches the governor’s desk, usually dying in an obscure committee unlikely to attract media attention.

That reality is why residents of Roane County were meeting in a crowded room to get answers about why broadband still remained elusive after several years, despite the high-profile attention it seems to get in the legislature and governor’s office.

“‘It is a critical issue as I said. It is not a luxury. It is a necessity. I certainly understand your frustration,” responded Sen. Ken Yager. “This problem is so big I don’t think one person can do it alone, one entity. It’s going to have to have partnerships. One thing this bill encourages is for your co-ops to partner with one another to bring broadband in.”

The bill Sen. Yager refers to and endorsed at the meeting was written by Sen. Bowling. Sen. Yager must be very familiar with Bowling’s proposals, because she has appeared before the Senate Commerce & Labor Committee he belongs to year after year to promote it. On March 3, 2018, the bill failed again in a 4-3 vote. But unbeknownst to those in attendance at the public meeting, Sen. Yager himself delivered the fourth “no” vote that killed the bill.

Undeterred, Bowling promises to be back next year with the same bill language as before. Perhaps next time, voters will know who their friends are in the legislature, and who actually represents the interests of big corporate cable and phone companies.

Australia’s speed-challenged NBN is looking for scapegoats and finds video game players an easy target.

In 2009, Australia’s Labor Party proposed scrapping the country’s copper wire networks and replacing virtually all of it with a state-of-the-art, public fiber to the home service in cities from Perth to the west to Brisbane in the east, with the sparsely populated north and central portions of the country served by satellite-based or wireless internet.

It was a revolutionary transformation of the country’s challenged broadband networks, which had been heavily usage capped and speed throttled for years, and for large sections of the country stuck using Telstra’s DSL service, terribly slow.

The National Broadband Network concept was immediately attacked by the political opposition as too expensive and unnecessary. Conservative demagogues in the media and in Parliament dismissed the concept as a Cadillac network delivering unnecessarily fast 100 Mbps connections to 90% of Australians that would, in reality, mostly benefit internet addicts while leaving older taxpayers to foot the estimated $43AUS billion dollar bill for the network.

The leaders of the center-right Liberal Party of Australia promised in 2010 to “demolish” the NBN if elected, claiming the network was too costly and would take too long to build. As network construction got underway, the organized attacks on the NBN intensified, and it was a significant issue in the 2013 election that defeated the Labor government and put the conservative government of Tony Abbott into power. Almost immediately, most of the governing board of the NBN was asked to resign and in a series of cost-saving maneuvers, the government canceled plans for a nationwide fiber-to-the-home network. In its place, Abbott and his colleagues promoted a cheaper fiber to the neighborhood network similar to AT&T’s U-verse. Fiber would be run to neighborhood cabinets, where it would connect with the country’s existing copper wire telephone service to each customer’s home.

Abbott

Unfortunately, the revised NBN implemented by the Abbott government appears to be delivering a network that is already increasingly obsolete. Long gone is the goal for ubiquitous 100 Mbps. For Senator Mitch Fifield, who also happens to be the minister for communications in the Liberal government, 25 Mbps is all the speed Australians will ever need.

“Given the choice, Australians have shown that 100 Mbps speeds are not as important to them as keeping monthly internet bills affordable, when the services they are using typically don’t require those speeds,” Fifield wrote in an opinion piece in response to an American journalist complaining about how slow Australian broadband was while reporting from the country.

The standard of “fast enough” for Senator Fifield also seems to be the minimum speed at which Netflix performs well, an important distinction for the growing number of Australians watching streaming television shows and movies.

Unfortunately for Fifield, network speeds are declining as Australians use the NBN as it was intended. While perhaps adequate for a network designed and built for 2010 internet users, data usage has grown considerably over the last eight years, and the government’s effort to keep the network’s costs down are coming back to haunt all involved. Several design changes have erased much of the savings the Abbott government envisioned would come from dumping a straight fiber network in favor of cheaper alternatives.

Right now, depending on one’s address, urban Australians will get one of four different fiber flavors the revised NBN depends on to deliver service:

• Fiber to the Home (FTTH): the most capable network that delivers a fiber connection straight into your home.
• Fiber to the Neighborhood (FTTN): a less capable network using fiber into neighborhoods which connects with your existing copper wire phone line to deliver service to your home.
• Fiber to the Basement (FTTB): Fiber is installed in multi-dwelling units like apartments or condos, which connects to the building’s existing copper wire or ethernet network to your unit.
• Fiber to the Distribution Point (FTTDP): Fiber is strung all the way to your front or back yard, where it connects with the existing copper wire drop line into your home.

In suburban and rural areas, the NBN is depending on tremendously over-hyped satellite internet access or fixed wireless internet. Customers were told wireless speeds from either technology would be comparable to some flavors of fiber, which turned out to be true assuming only one or two users were connected at a time. Instead, speeds dramatically drop in the evenings and on weekends when customers attempt to share the neighborhood’s wireless internet connection.

Instead of improving the wireless network, or scrapping it in favor of a wired/fiber alternative, the government has set on so-called “heavy users” and blamed them for effectively sabotaging the network.

Morrow

NBN CEO Bill Morrow recently appeared before a parliamentary committee to discuss reported problems with how the NBN was being rolled out in regional Australia. Morrow blamed increasing data usage for the wireless network’s difficulties, singling out slacker video game addicts for most of the trouble, and was considering implementing speed throttles on “extreme users” during peak usage periods.

Stephen Jones, Labor’s spokesperson for regional communications, questioned Morrow on what exactly an “extreme user” was.

“It’s gamers predominantly, on fixed wireless,” said Morrow. “While people are gaming it is a high bandwidth requirement that is a steady streaming process,” he said. Discover the ultimate in sports betting and online casino excitement with crickex bangladesh. Gamers may also visit the online pokies for convenient and thrilling games.

Morrow suggested a “fair-use policy” of speed throttles might be effective at stopping the gamers from allegedly hogging the network.

“I said there were super-users out there consuming terabytes of data and the question is should we actually groom those down? It’s a consideration,” he said. “This is where you can do things, to where you can traffic shape – where you say, ‘no, no, no, we can only offer you service when you’re not impacting somebody else’.”

The NBN itself has regularly dismissed claims that online gamers are data hogs. In an article written by the NBN itself, it stressed gameplay was not a significant stress on broadband networks.

“Believe it or not, some of the biggest online games use very little data while you’re playing compared to streaming HD video or even high-fidelity audio,” the article stated. “Where streaming 4K video can use as much as 7 gigabytes per hour and high-quality audio streaming gets up to around 125 megabytes per hour, (but usually sits at around half that) certain online games use as little as 10MB per hour.”

The article admits a very small percentage of games are exceptions, capable of chewing through up to 1 GB per hour, but that is still seven times less than a typical 4K streaming video.

In fact, the NBN’s own data acknowledged in March 2017 that high-definition streaming video was solely responsible for the biggest spike in demand. NBN data showed the average household connected to the NBN used 32% more data than the year before. When Netflix Australia premiered in March 2015, overall usage grew 22% in the first month.

So why did Morrow scapegoat gamers for network slowdowns? It’s politically palatable.

“They always have someone to blame for why the NBN doesn’t deliver, they have every excuse except the one that really matters, which is the flawed technology,” said the former CEO of Internet Australia Laurie Patton. “In this case for some reason shooting from the hip [Bill Morrow] had a go at gamers and gamers are not the problem.”

As long as Australia continues to embrace a network platform that is not adequate robust to cope with increasing demands from users, slow speeds and internet traffic jams will only increase over time. In retrospect, the decision to scrap the original fiber to the home network to save money appears to be penny wise, pound foolish.

Two weeks ago, New York State’s telecommunications regulator gave Charter Communications 14 days to fully and unconditionally agree to the terms and condition of the 2016 Merger Order that granted the cable company permission to acquire Time Warner Cable. On the last day, hours before the deadline expired, Charter agreed, sort of.

“This replacement letter hereby clarifies that Charter ‘unconditionally accept[s] and agree[s] to comply with the commitments set forth in the body of [the Merger Order] and Appendix A’ as set forth in Ordering Clause 1 of the Merger Order,” wrote Adam E. Falk, senior vice president for state government affairs at Charter Communications.

Unwilling to stop there, Falk decided to make the unconditional acceptance… conditional.

“While Charter’s acceptance of these commitments is unconditional, this acceptance remains subject to applicable law,” Falk wrote. “Charter does not waive its positions as to the meaning or proper interpretation of its commitments (including Charter’s position that the negotiating history of Appendix A must guide such interpretation), or any of its legal rights including its right to seek review of the Commission’s June 14, 2018 Orders and the Commission’s interpretation and application of the January 8, 2016 Order.”

That final paragraph signals the Public Service Commission/Department of Public Service that Charter intends to continue insisting that the language in Appendix A governs, defines, and characterizes the entire Merger Order — an argument the Commission had refused to accept because it gave a foundation for Charter officials to claim they were in full compliance with their commitment to roll out service to an additional 145,000 unserved New York residents. Appendix A omits the purpose and intent of the expansion commitment, explained elsewhere in the Merger Order as providing broadband service in New York’s unserved rural areas. Charter had attempted to count as “new passings” any new expansion of its cable lines, including those in wealthy gated communities and upscale condos, refurbished apartments in New York City, and new housing developments — all likely to receive service without the Merger Order.