Cox Communications is requiring cable customers to add a cable box to their television set(s) or they will start losing channels as the company continues its nationwide effort to digitally encrypt all of its television services.

Customers in Las Vegas are the latest to be pushed to add a digital adapter, dubbed a “minibox” by Sept. 27 or they will start losing channels. By Nov. 9, all cable channels are expected to be encrypted and on Dec. 6, local stations will also be encrypted and viewable only with a cable box or similar equipment.

Cox calls the move a customer-pleasing “upgrade.”

“It will enable us to implement more advanced services down the road,” Cox spokesman Juergen Barbusca told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We deployed home automation in the last couple of years and home security. We are trying to get as much bandwidth out of your cable potential as possible and one way to do that is to go completely digital.”

Cox customers with a basic Starter package of more than 40 channels at $24.99 a month will get two miniboxes free for two years. Those with the second tier Essential package ($75.99) with more than 90 channels will get two miniboxes free for one year. You read that right. If you pay Cox more, you get free boxes for half the time lower-paying customers do. Each additional box is $2.99 a month. A traditional HD-capable set-top box from Cox rents for $8.50 a month.

Cox’s miniboxes are more advanced that traditional digital adapters provided by some other cable companies, supporting service like Music Choice, HDTV, parental controls and an on-screen program guide.

Customers are generally okay with getting the boxes for free, but are convinced it will cause their cable bills to rise in the years ahead.

“I’m not happy with that. That’s more money and I’m only getting basic service. I’m already at $146 a month for cable, internet and phone,” Cox customer Monique Patton said. “Not everybody can afford that. It’s too expensive now. They’re not giving us what they should for our money.”

(PRNewsFoto/Fido Cable)

You may soon have a choice of cable companies, but don’t expect any savings doing business with the competition.

South Carolina-based Sky Play, LLC has launched a new cable service it claims is available across the U.S., offering competitive broadband and later phone and television service.

The service, known as Fido Cable, is dependent on leasing access from cable companies including Cablevision-Altice, Charter-Bright House-Time Warner Cable, Cable One, Comcast, and Cox as well as telephone company AT&T.

“We believe that people deserve to select which internet company they would like to utilize as opposed to being stuck with one or two options of service from companies who constantly raise their rates and offer no thought of the customer they service,” said David Wheeler, vice president of Sky Play. “Fido Cable is available to everyone in every major city and surrounding cities throughout the U.S.”

The company’s claims about the aspirations of American cable subscribers may be true but after Stop the Cap! called the company and obtained price quotes, it is clear any savings doing business with Fido Cable are illusory at best. Fido has a single page website that needs work, including correcting “Cable Vision,” when it actually meant “Cablevision.” Details about service and pricing was scant, so we called the company to get prices for two large cable operators: Time Warner Cable and Charter.

The company claims it offers internet access today and will be offering voice services across its national footprint and television in “select cities.” For purposes of obtaining pricing information, we quickly learned our home city of Rochester, N.Y., is not select enough for Fido Cable.

Fido Cable (which has no relationship with the Canadian prepaid mobile provider “Fido,” owned by Rogers Communications), says internet and voice plans start at $39.99 a month, but not for TWC or Charter customers.

In fact, Fido does not seem to offer any new customer promotional pricing. Their quoted rates were consistently higher than their cable company hosts charge their own customers. No wonder cable operators allowing Fido to compete using their systems are not breaking any sweat over the “competition.”

For instance, Fido charges a $120 installation and $15 modem fee for both Time Warner Cable and Charter customers. The representative claimed the modem fee was a one-time charge and customers were allowed to supply their own equipment. In comparison, both Charter and Time Warner Cable agreed to waive any installation fees for new customers. Time Warner Cable charges a $10 monthly modem rental fee and Charter includes the modem in the price of its service.

Fido Cable charges $65 a month for 15/1Mbps service. Time Warner Cable’s equivalent plan costs $59.99 a month for the service and modem rental (deduct $10 a month from TWC’s price if you buy your own modem). A 50Mbps plan from Fido costs $120 a month, but it’s $119 a month from Time Warner Cable (again, deduct $10 if you supply your own modem).

For Charter customers, a 60/4Mbps plan is priced $59.99 direct from Charter, but if you choose Fido Cable you will pay $5 more a month: $65. A 100/7Mbps plan from Charter is priced at $99.99, or you can pay Fido $105.

Here are more details about Fido internet plans we obtained today:

Time Warner Cable Service Areas

• 10/1Mbps: $55
• 15/1Mbps: $65
• 50/5Mbps: $120

Charter Cable Service Areas

• 60/4Mbps: $65
• 80/5Mbps: $99
• 100/7Mbps: $105

A 2-year price guarantee applies to all pricing.

The long wait for fiber optic broadband in the city of Boston is finally over.

In a surprise announcement with Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Verizon officials, Verizon announced it will commit to at least $300 million in investments over the next six years to bring fiber to the home service to residents of the metro area.

Construction of the fiber-optic network will be completed on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis according to customer demand. Initially, the project will begin in Dorchester, West Roxbury and the Dudley Square neighborhood of Roxbury in 2016, followed by Hyde Park, Mattapan, and other areas of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. The city has also agreed to provide an expedited permitting process to encourage the project.

“Boston is moving faster than our current infrastructure can support, and a modern fiber-optic communications platform will make us a next-level city,” Walsh said in a statement.

“This transformation isn’t just about advanced new fiber-optic technology — it’s about the innovative services this platform will allow people to create and use, today and in the future,” Verizon Wireline Network president Bob Mudge said in a statement.

Bringing FiOS inside the city of Boston will challenge the de facto monopoly Comcast had held for years. The only alternative most residents have is Verizon DSL.

The dramatic turnaround came six months after Verizon adamantly told the Boston City Council Verizon FiOS expansion was dead. Verizon announced it would stop FiOS expansion in 2010 to concentrate on its existing FiOS commitments and better marketing the service to attract more customers.

The sudden end to FiOS expansion six years ago caught many cities by surprise. As a result, in several areas, the fiber service is only available in select suburbs and not city centers.

Verizon’s unions have also pushed for further FiOS expansion, but today’s announcement is expected to have no impact on plans by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to strike Verizon starting early Wednesday morning.

The partnership also covers Verizon Wireless and its plans to attach wireless equipment to city street lights and utility poles without a lengthy permitting process.

Verizon was also likely offered a much easier time securing a license to offer cable television service, a stumbling block Verizon has experienced in several large cities.

Echoing Google Fiber, Verizon will try to win itself some free marketing and buzz by giving residents a chance to compete to see what neighborhoods get FiOS first. A free online registration process will be used to assess demand and help Verizon prioritize its fiber-optic network construction schedule.

Verizon will also support digital initiatives for the income-challenged, including a $100,000 Digital Equity contribution to the city, offered to support a mobile hotspot lending program at the Boston Public Library enabling Internet access to families on an as-needed basis.

Boston neighborhoods marked “A” will be upgraded to FiOS first, followed by “B” and so on. The upgrade effort is expected to take at least six years.

Frontier Communications plans to leverage their existing fiber-copper infrastructure to offer broadband-powered television service for up to half of their national customer base over the next four years.

Like many Frontier initiatives, the company’s IPTV effort relies on minimal spending, with just $150 million in capital budgeted for the project, spread out over several years.

“Our plans are to introduce video service to more than 40 markets representing approximately three million households over a three- to four-year period,” said Frontier CEO Daniel McCarthy. “Once complete, video service will be available to about 50% of the 8.5 million households in Frontier’s existing footprint, not counting the pending Verizon acquisition.”

Frontier intends to sell the service to the 57% of customers it claims can receive at least 20Mbps broadband speed. The video streams will co-exist with customers’ data service.

“Our IPTV applications employ the latest very advanced compression technology,” said McCarthy. “[Each] HD television channel will require approximately 2.5Mbps of capacity, meaning a household with four HDTVs active at once will require 10Mbps of capacity into the home, leaving the remainder available for data usage.”

Frontier’s IPTV approach is similar to AT&T U-verse. The company will depend on fiber to the neighborhood service already in place in certain markets, coupled with existing copper wiring already on telephone poles or buried underground in each neighborhood. To further minimize expenses (and customer inconvenience), Frontier will rely on customer-installable wireless set-top boxes that can be relocated to any television in the home.

McCarthy

Frontier has experimented with its video service since last fall in its test market of Durham, N.C. That city also benefits from an extensive fiber upgrade undertaken by Frontier. Frontier’s website sells the service as Frontier FiOS TV, even though Durham’s fiber network was built by Frontier, not Verizon.

For customers, it will likely be a welcome change from Frontier’s ongoing dependence on its partnership with satellite provider Dish Networks to offer video service. One clue Frontier has not well withstood heavy competition from competing cable operators comes from the company’s latest quarterly earnings report. Frontier executives admitted voice service disconnects are accelerating beyond expectation and average revenue per customer dropped 1.1% to $63.14 for the fourth quarter of 2015.

Frontier also continues to feel the wrath of former AT&T customers in Connecticut that withstood a messy “flash cut” from AT&T to Frontier that left some customers without service for days. Despite the expiration of special pricing promotions for Connecticut customers resulting in the prospect of higher revenue, Frontier still recorded a $7 million decline from Connecticut alone, which it mostly blamed on customers ditching landlines. In the rest of the country, Frontier’s “legacy service areas” (those still dependent on aging copper infrastructure) delivered another $4 million decline in revenue for the quarter.

Where are those customers going? Cable operators continue to grab Frontier’s unhappy DSL customers and wireless companies continue to benefit from landline disconnects.

To prevent a repeat of Connecticut in the Frontier-acquired Verizon territories in Florida, California, and Texas, Frontier will keep Verizon’s service plans and only gradually shift services away from Verizon, with the ability to back out of the transition immediately if something goes wrong.

Frontier’s IPTV service will depend on the classic cable television model — 100+ local, network, and cable channels delivered in a bundle with broadband and voice service. At the outset, Frontier won’t be emphasizing skinny bundles of TV channels, but will allow existing Verizon FiOS customers to keep the slimmed down packages they already have.

DirecTV under AT&T’s ownership is turning out to be no bargain for customers finding it increasingly tough getting a promotional rate package with the satellite provider.

Fred Johnson has been a DirecTV customer in rural Iowa for almost six years and has had to call DirecTV every time his on-contract promotion nears an end. Off-contract customers generally do not receive the best promotions and DirecTV’s regular prices can make the average cable company blush.

“It is not unusual for DirecTV customers to get quoted rates of $80 a month for satellite television and then receive a bill for over $100 once the surcharges, rental fees, taxes, and other hidden fees are added to your bill,” Johnson tells Stop the Cap! “There are months when the bill can go up even higher with no explanation, and even the customer service department cannot explain all the mysterious charges.”

At the end of the usual two-year contract, it has become customary for many long time DirecTV customers to call and threaten to cancel if they cannot get a renewed promotional rate, and for years DirecTV had been happy to oblige.

In 2015, AT&T bought the satellite provider and is in the process of integrating it as part of the AT&T family of services, next to U-verse, AT&T Mobility, and traditional landline service. That is the year the discounts seemed to evaporate for customers like Johnson and Evelyn Wiedmer, who subscribes to DirecTV for the family’s recreational vehicle.

Recreational vehicle owners are among the most loyal to satellite television.

“We were just told our bill was going to increase $45 a month starting in February and there is little we can do about it,” Wiedmer tells us. “The call center lady mentioned that the new owner of DirecTV is going in a different direction with promotions and we no longer qualify for any specials, unless we also want to get an AT&T cell phone.”

Wiedmer and her husband are retired and travel the country in their RV and do not have room in the budget to pay AT&T an extra $540 a year for the same package of channels they used to get for about $65 a month.

“They apparently do not want us to be customers anymore because DISH Networks will sell us a comparable package for about $60 a month, which is much less than the $105 DirecTV is charging us starting next month,” Wiedmer writes. “It looks like DirecTV won’t be competing with AT&T U-verse and the cable company anymore at their prices.”

Critics charge that is exactly the point. Adam Levine-Weinberg called the AT&T-DirecTV merger “one more step towards oligopoly,” warning approval of the merger would remove a serious competitor for tens of millions of customers also served by AT&T U-verse.

“That means there [were] tens of millions of people who [had] a choice between AT&T and DirecTV (as well as the local cable company and satellite TV rival DISH Networks,” said Levine-Weinberg. “The merger [reduced] many consumers’ pay-TV options from four to three, giving the remaining companies more pricing power.”

AT&T is flexing that pricing power by pulling back on promotions and discounts. In addition to curtailing retention plans and promotions for existing customers, AT&T also announced rate increases for DirecTV that take effect tomorrow:

The monthly pre-tax price of DirecTV’s “Select” and “Entertainment” programming tiers will go up by $2, to $51.99 and $61.99, respectively. The “Choice” and “Xtra” bundles will increase $4 to $74.99 and $81.99, respectively; the “Ultimate” pack will go up $5 a month to $91.99; and the “Premier” bundle will grow by $8 to $144.99. That is well over $150 a month after taxes and fees are added, just to watch television. AT&T is also applying a 50 cent increase to a fee DirecTV charges for… selling television service. The so-called “TV Fee” will now cost $7.00 a month.

(Courtesy: zidanetribal17)

“You used to switch to satellite to save money, but now cable companies offer returning customers lower prices than what DirecTV will offer,” notes Johnson. “It’s almost like they want to drive customers away. It worked. Our neighbors are now collecting money to convince Mediacom to extend their cable down our rural street and after these price increases we finally have enough willing to contribute to switch to cable television and remove the satellite dishes from our rooftops.”

Wiedmer has also canceled her DirecTV service this week, switching to DISH Networks.

“Would you sign another two-year contract agreeing to pay $540 more a year for two years with nothing in return for the extra money?” Wiedmer asks. “AT&T and DirecTV can take a hike.”