New York regulators have turned down Time Warner Cable’s request to shut off past due phone customers late at night or on weekends to protect consumers.

The Public Service Commission today reaffirmed long-standing rules that allow phone providers to only disconnect customers for non-payment between the hours of 8:00am – 7:30pm Monday through Thursday and 9:00am to 3:00pm on Friday.

“We are saying ‘no’ to Time Warner’s request to waive our rules regarding when it would be authorized for suspensions and terminations of its telephone customers,” said Commission chair Audrey Zibelman. “The Commission’s rules applicable to Time Warner are consistent with the hours of operation of the Commission’s consumer call center which receives consumer complaints’ and requests for assistance. To ensure telephone consumers’ rights are protected, especially core customers such as the elderly and disabled, it is essential customers are afforded the opportunity to contact our call center if their telephone service is threatened with a potential suspension or termination.”

But Time Warner Cable was granted approval of most of its other regulatory reform requests:

• Time Warner Cable can now apply partial payments first to basic local telephone charges, then non-basic services;
• The cable company will not have to distribute White Page directories except on request in print or CD-ROM format;
• After six months of providing monthly service quality figures, the cable company can limit future reports to only reflect standards for “core customers,” if the PSC finds Time Warner is providing adequate service.

An enterprising reader of the Broadband Reports‘ AT&T Forum stumbled on proposed pricing for AT&T’s faster speed services for U-verse and, presumably, their planned fiber-to-the-home rollout in Austin, Tex.:

The prices are no bargain in comparison to the $70 a month Google charges Kansas City residents for 1,000/1,000Mbps service, but on the lower end, AT&T’s 45Mbps U-verse option is comparable to Time Warner Cable’s 50/5Mbps tier, which now sells for $65-75 a month on a one-year promotion:

Time Warner Cable’s latest broadband offers

Just a few years after cable systems began upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 to improve broadband speeds and performance through channel bonding, CableLabs is set to formalize next-generation DOCSIS 3.1 by the end of this month, allowing cable broadband speeds to reach well into the gigabits.

“We made a fairly bold assertion in October of last year that we would have them substantially complete and publicly issued by the end of 2013,” Matt Schmitt, director of DOCSIS at CableLabs said this morning. “This is quite a bit faster than we have ever pulled off before. It’s not a small project to do a new DOCSIS with a new physical layer underneath. It was an industry-wide effort and I tell you what, they’ve been busting their tails.”

Schmitt

Schmitt discussed the new standard at the DOCSIS 3.1 Engineering Pre-conference Symposium held in Atlanta.

The new standard for cable broadband was designed to protect the industry from competing technologies — notably fiber to the home service which offers immediate gigabit broadband capacity. DOCSIS 3.1 was designed to support up to 10/1Gbps speeds using larger spectrum bands cable operators are opening for data services after switching off analog cable television channels.

Cable operators are not expected to offer gigabit broadband service in most areas. Many operators still dedicate the largest amount of their available bandwidth to analog cable television channels. But DOCSIS 3.1 provides scalability as operators move towards digital television delivery. It also offers 50 percent more data capacity over DOCSIS 3.0 over the same spectrum.

DOCSIS 3.1 uses a new modulation scheme coupled with more robust forward error correction (FEC) to improve efficiency and performance. The new standard dumps Reed-Solomon FEC in favor of low-density parity check (LDPC) technology. DOCSIS 3.1 relies on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), also used by wireless carriers to boost performance over limited spectrum.

Despite the new standard, DOCSIS 3.1 will be fully backwards-compatible with DOCSIS 3.0, which means customers buying their own cable modems will not find them obsolete anytime soon. When a customer decides they want faster broadband speeds, the cable operator can advise if a new DOCSIS 3.1 modem is needed. In most cases, it will not.

Most cable operators are expected to take at least a year lab testing the new technology and waiting for vendors to incorporate support for DOCSIS 3.1 in future generations of cable broadband equipment.

Comcast, one of the more speed-aggressive cable operators likely to be an early adopter of DOCSIS 3.1, indicated it would probably be 2015 before customers can buy DOCSIS 3.1-powered products. But Comcast will begin trials next year, according to Jorge Salinger, vice president of access architecture.

Time Warner Cable plans to use the next generation of DOCSIS as they migrate from conventional MPEG-based video delivery to IP video transport on a Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP). But Time Warner Cable customers don’t usually get the fastest possible broadband speeds. For most of the country, the cable operator’s top speed is 50/5Mbps.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Speaker Interview with Ralph Brown of Cable Labs at Cable Congress 2013 in London 3-11-13.mp4[/flv]

Ralph Brown, chief technology officer of CableLabs, talked about DOCSIS 3.1 and the cable industry’s future technology needs in this interview from March 2013. (5 minutes)

A joint venture between Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable to explore the development of innovative new services delivered across cable and wireless networks has been terminated, according to Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer.

Speaking on a quarterly results conference call, Shammo acknowledged the companies still have a cross-marketing agreement selling Verizon Wireless service to Comcast and Time Warner Cable subscribers and pitching cable service inside Verizon Wireless stores. A Verizon spokesperson admitted the parties abandoned the effort to co-develop new products and services at the end of August.

Shammo pointed to Verizon’s recent buyout of Vodafone’s share in Verizon Wireless as one of the market changes that led to dissolving the partnership with the two cable companies. Shammo indicated bringing Verizon Wireless under the full control of Verizon Communications allows the company to develop, market, and distribute its own products and services across both Verizon Wireless and fiber optic FiOS platforms.

Had the joint venture continued, Verizon’s FiOS network might have suffered a competitive disadvantage, being unable to capitalize on the exclusivity of new services developed by Verizon to better compete against the two cable companies that share many Verizon service areas.

Verizon FiOS has already garnered a 39% market share with room to grow in major cities like New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington where Verizon has not yet completed its fiber optic buildout.

A new agreement between Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, and Univision Communications will add at least three new Latino-oriented cable networks to the television lineup beginning as early as next month.

The two cable companies have agreed to extend a carriage agreement with Univision TV as well as bring several new Univision networks to Time Warner Cable viewers. The complete lineup:

• UnivisionHD: The Univision broadcast network (Spanish)
• UniMás: The “second program” of Univision’s broadcast network (Spanish)
• Galavisión: A cable entertainment channel (Spanish)
• Univision tlNovelas: All telenovelas (soap operas), all the time (Spanish)
• FOROtv: The Mexico City-based 24 hour news channel (Spanish)
• El Rey Channel: A joint project of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and FactoryMade Ventures, launching to cater to second/third-generation young adult Latinos (English)

Many Univision shows are now subtitled in English, especially during prime time hours, to expand the potential viewing audience.

“Time Warner Cable is delighted to be able to work out our early renewal and expand our business relationship with Univision,” said Melinda Witmer, chief video and content officer for TWC. “Our comprehensive agreement expands the number of ways our Hispanic subscribers can enjoy their favorite entertainment, news, sports and telenovelas.”

The deal also allows Time Warner Cable to carry Univision content on streaming video and on-demand platforms.