Time Warner Cable's DOCSIS 3 service is marketed as "wideband"

Time Warner Cable has made its DOCSIS 3 wideband broadband service its star at the 2010 Cable Show in Los Angeles.  Demonstrating up to 290Mbps service, company officials are suddenly excited about the prospect of delivering 21st century broadband speeds just one year after foot-dragging their way through upgrade plans for their cable systems nationwide.

Time Warner Cable has been among the slowest to deliver channel-bonded broadband service to its residential customers.  Currently marketed mostly in areas where Time Warner faces competition from Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-verse, DOCSIS 3 upgrades deliver faster speed tiers to its customers and reduce congestion.  At the top end, Time Warner residential customers can purchase 50/5Mbps service for just under $100 a month.  Because of its premium price tag, the company hasn’t had too many takers.  As of the fourth quarter of last year, just 2,000 customers signed up.  But the trends are clear — if the price comes down, adoption rates will increase.

For business customers, the price isn’t cheap either.  In Cincinnati, for example, Time Warner business customers face $350 a month for 50/5Mbps service.  Contrast that with Comcast in San Francisco, which charges businesses $189 a month for the same thing.

If Time Warner Cable is as enthusiastic about wideband as it suggested during this year’s Cable Show, it should be firing up its upgrade plans to deliver the service to all of its customers and attempt some new marketing that brings service at a more aggressive price.

In New York, Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3 upgrades have so far skipped cities like Rochester, which faces only token competition from Frontier Communications’ DSL service.

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Time Warner Cable employees and chief marketing officer Sam Howe fall all over themselves, ecstatic with Time Warner Cable’s wideband broadband service, in this company-produced video taken at the 2010 Cable Show in Los Angeles.  (4 minutes)

Time Warner Cable is convinced subscribers are confused about the enormous number of channels that occupy today’s cable dials.  With today’s rapid growth in HD channels, the cable company is introducing some dramatic channel realignments for its customers in the Carolinas.

Next month, customers in the Triangle will join Time Warner Cable’s Common Digital Lineup, a project to align channel assignments throughout the two states.  When complete, all digital channels will be located in the same place on the dial throughout the Carolinas.  The company is also switching to a theme-based channel lineup.  Each category will have its respective channels grouped together.  Among them: news, general entertainment, sports, children’s programming, music, and movies.

For those in the northeastern states, this doesn’t represent anything new for the cable company — Time Warner Cable systems in New York, for example, have grouped digital channels into categories for years.

But the Carolinas realignment does make it considerably easier to locate HD channels, which will be aligned with their standard definition counterparts.  For example, CNN will soon be found throughout the Carolinas on channel 400.  Finding CNN HD becomes effortless – just put a “1” in front of the channel number — 1400.  The Disney Channel is on channel 200.  Disney Channel HD is easy enough to find — it’s now on channel 1200.  Even local channels are easier to deal with.  In Greensboro, for example, WXII, the NBC affiliate, will be on channel 120 for standard definition viewing or channel 1120 for HD viewing.

Complete channel lineup guides for the Carolinas are available from Time Warner Cable’s website.

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Time Warner Cable’s House Organ, News 14 Carolina, delivers plenty of airtime to spokeswoman Melissa Buscher, who gushes about the channel alignment changes completed in Charlotte this past March.  (3 minutes)

The new lineup will take effect for North Carolina customers on the following dates:

The new channel lineup will be grouped as follows:

• 100’s – Local Broadcasters & Local Programming
• 200’s – Kids & Family, Learning & Discovery, Faith & Inspiration
• 300’s – Entertainment, Home & Leisure, Shopping
• 400’s – News & Information, Music
• 500’s – Sports
• 600’s – Movies
• 700’s – Premiums, Pay-Per-View Events
• 800’s – International
• 900’s – Music Choice
• 1000’s – On Demand
• 1100 and above- High Definition

Meanwhile, a lot of other Time Warner customers would prefer to share their continued displeasure with Time Warner’s “new and improved” program guide and DVR configuration menus.  Mystro Navigator has mystified a large number of customers who can’t stand the software and don’t understand why Time Warner radically changed it in the first place.

One Raleigh customer complains the software upgrade turned his DVR’s fast forward and rewind buttons into mud.  The upgrade dropped the 4x fast forward option which rapidly scanned through recorded programming.  Fast forwarding through commercials has become a nightmare because the box automatically rewinds about 10-20 seconds behind the point where the customer stopped fast-forwarding.

Buffalo and Rochester, New York customers have also given the software a hostile reception.  Some customers in Buffalo have canceled Time Warner Cable over the upgrade and switched to Verizon FiOS. In Rochester, a few residents have noted it has become much more difficult to manage manual recordings or setting the DVR up to record series properly.  The most common complaints:

• No apparent “jump to end” in playback
• Fast forward and rewind are not accurate
• Finding shows by title is laborious at best
• Recording shows and series has become needlessly complex by the changed menu structure
• No apparent 4x fast forward and reverse
• Program descriptions are heavily truncated on DVR recordings
• Erasing and managing recorded shows often drops you out of the DVR menu
• DVR recording is not consistent
• Configuring Navigator to work with HD sets is confusing for the uninitiated
• Extremely sluggish channel changing, responsiveness

Dealing with Navigator and the Time Warner Cable remote control, especially in the dark, should be an Olympic event.  One Buffalo resident has thrown up his hands:

Time Warner reminds me of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Both have severe technology handicaps. I watched the governor get fired on The Apprentice because he couldn’t use a cell phone or send an email or use the simplest technology.

Time Warner can’t seem to design a clicker that works. Mine has 63 buttons and looks like part of a 767 cockpit console. Hello? All I want is channel, volume and on/off.

The Time Warner remote doesn’t have a single on/off button — it has two – a ‘system’ and a “power” button. The engineer who designed that monstrosity should be dragged through the streets by a mob of angry senior citizens who must fumble with that thing every day.

Some tips have been circulating informally among Time Warner Cable engineers about how to deal with Navigator’s temperamental behavior:

Navigator Guide Data:

1. Newly installed or downloaded guides can take up to 24 hours for all seven days of guide data to populate. In many cases, new installs may only go out by three days until a full 24 hours have completed.
2. When Setting Up Series Recording for your first week with Navigator: (and even thereafter if you can help it) DO NOT DELETE SHOWS IN THE MIDDLE OF RECORDING THEM! Let Navigator do at least one complete recording of a series. If you need to delete a series, do it through the Series Manager, but before the recording starts. If you delete a series in the middle of recording it, Navigator will think it made an error, and will keep looking out for more episodes to record of that series.
3. Navigator needs to see AT LEAST ONE instance of a series for the populated guide data to be able to record it. Remember, under Record Series With Options you can set up on what channel(s) the series should record, the number of episodes to keep, and set series priorities.

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Time Warner Cable produced these two videos to assist Navigator customers trying to understand how to record programming or set up their televisions to properly display cable programming.  (3 minutes)

The U.S. Copyright Group sells its services: "Congratulations! By reviewing our site you have decided to take the first step down an efficient, no-hassle and no-cost path to recovering losses due to illegal downloading and stopping film piracy. With well over seventy combined years of legal and technical experience, the US Copyright Group will work for you at no cost." For those they accuse of piracy, a quick and easy $1,500 cash settlement will make the nightmare go away.

Stop the Cap! already deals with a variety of ISP-invented Internet Overcharging schemes, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more profit-making schemes out there.  For 50,000 movie downloaders who grabbed copies of Steam Experiment, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man, Call of the Wild 3D, or Far Cry, chances are a letter like this sent to Verizon customers was in the mail a few weeks ago, warning your identity was about to be disclosed:

Dear Customer:

This is to notify you that Verizon has received a deposition subpoena requiring the production of records associated with the following IP address:

(xx.xx.xx.xxx)

Verizon has no information as to the purpose of the deposition subpoena or has the nature of the action or investigation being undertaken. Any questions you have should be directed to the party who issued the deposition subpoena.

Please be advised that, unless Verizon is served with a motion for a protective order or a motion to quash by 12:00pm on May 13, 2010, Verizon intends to produce the records by the date specified in the deposition subpoena. Motion papers can be served upon Verizon via fax number xxx-xxx-xxxx.

If you are a Time Warner Cable customer, chances are your letter never arrived.  That’s because the Internet Service Provider is fighting back against what it considers requests that have grown “out of control.”

A group of Washington, D.C. lawyers calling itself the U.S. Copyright Group has developed a profit-making business scheme seeking quick cash settlements from those accused of downloading copyrighted movies created by independent producers.  The group has filed thousands of requests for identities of those behind the IP addresses logged while downloading movies produced by its clients.  While this isn’t new — the record industry used to file lawsuits to discourage piracy — the U.S. Copyright Group is among the rare breed that treats the offense of copyright infringement as a for-profit business opportunity.

Only the Group’s methods may in fact cost every consumer, pirate or not, higher broadband bills as providers deal with tens of thousands of demands for identification.

Time Warner Cable is among the ISP’s that have had enough.

They’re upset after being included in the U.S. Copyright Group’s latest trawling effort against those who downloaded Uwe Boll’s Far Cry.  Critics say the only real crime was the movie itself.  But Time Warner Cable faces combing through 809 IP addresses identified as theirs in hopes of identifying the presumed-guilty offenders, who will later receive U.S. Copyright Group’s legal threats and offers for a settlement.  For a provider that says it receives only 567 IP identity requests a month, almost entirely from law enforcement officials, the prospect of dealing with 809 more over a single obscure movie is daunting.

Time Warner wants the requests quashed — telling the court if it has to reply to this volume of requests, it will not be able to fulfill urgent law enforcement requests that pertain to suicide threats, child abduction, and even terrorism.  Besides, at an average cost of $45 per request, someone will have to pay.  That someone is eventually you — all to fulfill the profit motivations of a group of DC lawyers.  Even worse, the group demanded compliance within 30 days, quite a demand for four full-time workers (and one temp) who make up the ISP’s Subpoena Compliance team.

For those receiving advance warning that their identity is about to be disclosed, the settlement offer package that is certain to follow weeks later leaves little doubt about what outcome the Group wants for these cases — a quick settlement and no time inside an actual courtroom.

Making your copyright infringement allegation go away with a $1,500 confidential settlement is as easy as writing your credit card number in the appropriate box. You can even earn reward points!

The group even offers an online, easy-to-complete PDF settlement form with spaces to enter your Visa, Mastercard, or Discover card number to pay the $1,500 settlement.  You don’t even have to admit you did anything wrong, as long as they get their money.  If you regret your decision later on, however, look out.  If you open your mouth in public or online to disparage the agreement or your participation in it, you automatically owe a $15,000 penalty (plus costs) for breaching confidentiality.  You also sign away your rights to challenge the group in court, even if it later turns out you were wrongly identified.

While the U.S. Copyright Group cashes settlement checks they only had to ask to receive, the group doesn’t seem to mind increasing everyone else’s costs.

Ars Technica notes Time Warner thinks the entire approach to these lawsuits may be invalid:

Filing lawsuits can be expensive; Most federal courts charge a $350 filing fee per case, along with a new set of paperwork. Each case also creates another docket to keep track of, making thousands of cases an administrative nightmare.

Instead of going this route, plaintiffs have gone the RIAA route, simply filing mass lawsuits against groups of “John Does,” in some cases by the thousands. But, says TWC, channeling its inner Ray Beckerman, “It is not evident from the complaint in this case that there is anything common to the 2,094 defendants that would justify joining them in a single litigation… Courts facing these identical circumstances have repeatedly held that a plaintiff may not join in a single action multiple defendants who have allegedly downloaded or facilitated the download of copyrighted material at different times and locations.

“Thus, if the plaintiff wants to sue these 2,094 defendants, it owes this court 2,094 separate filing fees, and it must file individual actions. Plaintiff then would be unable to combine together a single, massive discovery request with which to burden non-party ISPs such as TWC.”

Third, plaintiff lawyers keep expanding the scope of their subpoenas. The first complaint filed alleged 426 infringing IP addresses belonging to TWC subscribers. But when the company finally received a subpoena, it found requests for 809 IP addresses.

Taken together, said TWC, these “discovery abuses” mean that the judge should quash the subpoena. Alternately, the judge should limit the plaintiff to 28 TWC subpoenas each month.

Regardless of your views on piracy, compliance on the terms the U.S. Copyright Group demands raises the prospect of increased costs for providers like Time Warner Cable — the same increased costs used repeatedly as justification for rate increases.  Turning copyright compliance into a for-profit business may enrich a select group of DC lawyers, but ultimately every broadband customer could pay the price.

Arris WBM760 DOCSIS 3 Cable Modem

Time Warner Cable is demonstrating 290Mbps downstream coupled with 90Mbps upstream broadband in its booth at the 2010 Cable Show in Los Angeles.  A Time Warner Cable insider told CED magazine it was the first public showing of the company’s ability to provide faster service outside of a lab environment.

The new high speeds are achieved using DOCSIS 3 technology which can bond multiple “channels” on a cable system together to create additional bandwidth.

The demonstration relies on an Arris CMTS and cable modems manufactured by both Arris and Motorola, which are connected to Time Warner’s Los Angeles cable headend.

CED notes Time Warner Cable has plenty of room for broadband speed growth.

The company is achieving the speeds using 8 x 4 channel bonding. With TWC’s top tier rated at 50/5 Mbps, the demo shows speed increases of greater than fivefold on the downstream and 18-fold on the upstream.

The TWC engineer compared the MSO’s achievement with the 300 Mbps that Bell Labs demonstrated on DSL recently.

“What they’ve got is something in the lab that goes 10 feet, and what we’re showing is live from our headend 22 miles away. We can compete (using) DOCSIS,” he observed.

Such developments are all part of a larger company plan to develop and market additional services the nation’s second largest cable operator can upsell to its customers.  For now, 290Mbps service is more theoretical than practical at Time Warner Cable’s likely pricing.  But it illustrates cable remains technologically ahead of what most phone companies can deliver over non-fiber-to-the-home networks.

MediaPost’s MediaDailyNews reports Time Warner Cable is about to begin market testing a new super-deluxe package that moves beyond the “Triple Play” packages common in the cable industry today.  Targeting wealthy, premium cable customers, Time Warner’s new “Homesuite” service would include all the bells and whistles:

• Multiple DVRs for several rooms in the house, with can eventually be connected together to let you start a recorded show in one room and finish it in another;
• A full range of premium channels at a bundled discount price;
• Faster DOCSIS-3 broadband with free Wi-Fi in and outside the home;
• Enhanced digital phone service, perhaps with more calling features;
• Concierge-like customer service, which could allow Homesuite customers to jump to the front of the queue for everything from service installation, repair and customer service.

Other options might include access to Time Warner’s wireless mobile broadband (rebranded Clearwire service), extended hours for service calls, discounts on pay per view, more deluxe set top boxes, and in some areas, even home security systems.

For Chief Operating Officer Landel Hobbs, the idea of selling $100 a month Triple Play package promotions just isn’t good enough anymore.  Time Warner Cable, MediaPost speculates, is now looking at $250 a month as a potential target price for Homesuite clients.

Time Warner Cable customers in Charlotte, North Carolina will be the first guinea pigs for super premium cable.  Are there enough customers around in Charlotte to pony up $250 a month for service?

TWC has conducted a customer “segmentation” study allowing it to identify opportunities for up-selling. “Our analysis indicates that certain of our large and profitable customer segments continue to hold substantial untapped opportunity,” Hobbs said earlier this year.

TWC says in a recent government filing that it’s likely to continue to lose video subscribers, but is expecting to make up for it by persuading customers to take DVR service, premium channels and other add-ons.

Charlotte is a key market for TWC — a Time Warner Cable Arena is located in the city center. After launching there, “Homesuite” would presumably then roll out in other TWC principal areas, which include Ohio, New York, Southern California and Texas. The working “Homesuite” moniker could be altered.

Sen. David Hoyle (D-NC)

Retiring North Carolina state senator David Hoyle wants to save North Carolina cities from themselves.  Proclaiming that “cities are getting into the broadband business with little or no experience and competing with private enterprise who pay the taxes,” Hoyle continues his push to put a stop to municipal broadband projects in North Carolina.

A week after Hoyle and a few allies on the Revenue Laws Study Committee pushed forward a draft bill that would require public referendums that could be triggered even when making basic repairs to community-owned fiber networks, IndyWeek reports Hoyle doesn’t exactly come to the debate with clean hands.

Rebekah Cowell, in a piece called “Hoyle to municipal broadband: Drop Dead,” notes Time Warner Cable’s PAC contributed $6,000 to Hoyle’s final campaign in 2009.

Hoyle told Cowell he is not swayed by Time Warner Cable’s deep involvement in pushing the legislation forward, despite the generous contribution to his campaign coffers.

“The lobbyists don’t influence me,” he said. “I’m in the pocket of the people that provide jobs for this state, and Time Warner Cable employs 8,500 in this state, and I can’t imagine any one that would want to compete with that.”

Time Warner Cable told IndyWeek it doesn’t philosophically oppose municipal broadband projects, and claims Hoyle’s bill would only apply to a city that chooses to take taxpayer money to build a competing network as if it were a private provider. “We just believe that they should have to operate under the same rules as the private provider,” Melissa Buscher, director of media relations at Time Warner Cable told Cowell. “We do believe people in the community should have a say-so in how large amounts of public monies are spent.”

Buscher

Yet the legislation proposed by Hoyle actually impacts projects that receive no public taxpayer dollars.  Under his proposal, any municipal project seeking private bondholders has to endure an endless series of referendums on everything from initial system approval, construction, refinancing debt, extending service, upgrading the network, and even when basic system repairs are needed.

Time Warner Cable’s concern for public tax dollars only seems to extend to their potential competitors.  The cable operator itself gratefully accepted public tax dollars from the state Department of Commerce, the city of Charlotte, and the county of Mecklenburg to construct a $29 million dollar headquarters building in Charlotte.  Even in smaller communities, the cable operator enjoyed benefits from taxpayers who didn’t have a “say-so in how public monies are spent.”  In December, Marble Cliff Village Council approved an economic development agreement with Time Warner Communications including a five-year tax abatement worth $100,000.

North Carolina’s phone companies also benefit from state taxpayers.  As IndyWeek reports:

A 2009 analysis by Democracy North Carolina [shows] two telecommunications companies, AT&T and Embarq, both benefited from tax breaks on the purchases of telephone equipment that costs the state an estimated $31 million annually in lost revenue. In 2008, political action committees for AT&T and Embarq contributed $140,500 and $151,250, respectively, to legislative candidates, statewide candidates and party committees.

Hoyle apparently has no problem with losing that tax revenue.

Hoyle’s claims that municipal broadband projects hurt North Carolina consumers are untrue in cities like Wilson, the only community in North Carolina that successfully avoided a Time Warner Cable rate increase this year.

Time Warner customers in Wilson are benefiting from Greenlight’s competition. According to a December 2009 presentation before the House Select Committee on High Speed Internet Access in Rural and Urban Areas, Time Warner raised its prices for basic service in the Triangle—as much as 52 percent in Cary—but did not impose any rate hike in Wilson. Nor did the company increase prices in Wilson for the digital sports and games tier, while Triangle customers paid 41 percent more.

Cable and broadband consultant Catharine Rice of Action Audits gave the presentation; she advocates for municipalities that want to build their own networks.

The bill could hurt Wilson’s Greenlight service, even though it’s been installed. “The way the legislation is worded, and how I interpret it,” says Ovittore, “is that if the city of Wilson … had a resident who was digging in their yard—let’s say putting a new mailbox in—and accidentally damaged a strand of fiber, before that strand could be repaired the city would have to go through a referendum and vote, spending endless taxpayer dollars.”

A public referendum could also be required if Wilson wanted to connect an additional household to their existing system, Ovittore said.

Hoyle says that of the $30 million to build the network, Wilson used $12 million of it from the utility account. “People there are raising hell about their electricity bill, and it’s just not right,” he said.

Brian Bowman, Wilson’s public affairs manager, said the city borrowed the $28 million on the private market. As for Hoyle’s $12 million figure, Bowman said, much less—only $3.6 million— had been set aside from the electric fund by City Council in 1989; it was re-designated in 1999. “It has always been part of our funding package,” he said. As for the electric bills, Bowman said they were higher earlier this year because of the particularly cold winter, not the cost of the network.

Wilson accomplished its municipal broadband system without spending a nickle of taxpayer money.  Other North Carolina communities considering similar projects would run into overwhelming problems overcoming Hoyle’s telecom-friendly legislation because of its referendum requirements.

Hoyle told IndyWeek he doesn’t see the need for such projects anyway, claiming fast broadband is already universally available across the state.

“I’ve heard that BS, and it’s just not true—period,” he said. “Anybody that needs service has got served in this state and will continue to get served.”

Hoyle’s words sound a lot like those of Time Warner Cable, which also contends broadband availability is not an issue. “Based on a map of the state done in 2009 by Connected Nation, more than 92 percent of homes in North Carolina have broadband available to them,” said Buscher. “A vast majority of those have two wireline providers, some have wireless providers, plus satellite offers broadband to literally every home in the state. This isn’t an availability issue. Anyone who wants Internet service can get it today.”

Those claims are dubious. Chatham County Commissioner Tom Vanderbeck has advocated for rural broadband access since 2006 in an area where pockets still have only dial-up and DSL. Vanderbeck was recently appointed by the General Assembly to serve on the e-NC Authority, which promotes statewide rural broadband. He calls Hoyle’s bill anti-competitive, one that would discriminate against local government.

[…]

“Requiring a vote, when you have deep pockets that can fight it and put up as much money as they want, while making the project sound like a waste of taxpayer dollars—that would be a tragedy,” she adds.

Anyone who proclaims satellite fraudband represents a credible broadband competing alternative should be forced to use it.

Connected Nation, which Buscher relies on for her numbers, has a board dominated by telecommunications company executives, particularly AT&T.  With their private provider-stacked leadership, they can draw the maps anyway they please, particularly in ways that suggest there isn’t a broadband problem in North Carolina… or anywhere else.  Not as long as they are running it.