Cable ONE customers nationwide lost eight Turner Networks channels yesterday, despite the fact the cable company has a signed contract with Turner to pay for some of the networks that have gone dark.

“In an extraordinary act of retaliation and bullying, Turner Networks removed TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network from all Cable ONE systems without warning, when our prior Turner contract expired on October 1,” said Cable ONE CEO Tom Might. “This happened despite the fact that Cable ONE had signed new contracts and already agreed to pay an enormous nearly 50% rate increase for these three networks.”

Cable ONE was under pressure to carry all eight Turner-owned networks (in turn owned by Time Warner Entertainment) during contract renewal negotiations that included substantial fee increases. The cable company independently decided to boot five “less popular” networks from lineups nationwide: Boomerang, TruTV, TCM, CNN and CNN Headline News. It agreed to keep buying TBS, TNT, and Cartoon.

“We signed contracts for TBS, TNT and the Cartoon Network through the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), which allows for the purchase of individual channels rather than the entire bundle of eight,” said Might. “In a disgraceful punitive reaction, Turner Networks refused to recognize the NCTC contracts and immediately de-authorized all Cable ONE systems in order to ‘teach’ Cable ONE a lesson about the power of cable programmers to tie and bundle channels together and force carriage of unwanted bundles.  They refuse to give cable operators or their customers any choice about what they can or cannot buy.”

Turner Networks claims Cable ONE has no authority to buy a slimmed-down package of channels through the NCTC and must negotiate with Turner directly.

Cable ONE will automatically credit its customers for the missing channels. The cable company is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company and serves 730,000 customers in 19 states.

Cable ONE explains to its customers why eight Turner Network-owned channels are now missing from the channel lineup. (2 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Hawaiian non-profit customers of Time Warner Cable are receiving letters warning the cable company is terminating its discount program for charitable and community groups that could result in rates more than doubling for some customers.

Oceanic Time Warner Cable had provided free or heavily discounted cable or Internet service to qualifying organizations. Those discounts are ending, explains a letter obtained by Pacific Business News.

Time Warner Cable has adopted new policies regarding discounted or free service in light of IRS regulations that require 1099 forms to formalize the value of discounts or forgiven cable bills. The cable company is using the occasion to review its discount programs – ending some while tightening requirements for others.

“If we do not receive a reply from you within 30 days of this notice to update your account, it will be necessary for us to disconnect your existing services,” the letter explained.

Becky Dunning, managing director for the non-profit Honolulu Theatre for Youth called Time Warner to learn what “update your account” meant.

“The biggest thing is that when I called the number I was told that they aren’t offering discounted rates to nonprofits anymore, and that we’d have to pay their existing business rates; for our organization that means we would go from paying $106 a month to $227, which is a big difference — more than double,” Dunning said. “We can’t exist without Internet service.”

Dunning said the group would probably stay with Time Warner and attempt to make up the difference from somewhere in the organization’s budget.

Malone

So far Dr. John Malone isn’t getting very far with his ambitious plan to merge Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable into a single cable company, but that has not stopped him from trying.

GDP Insider reports Malone is quietly keeping the pressure on Time Warner Cable management to do a deal with Charter. Malone controls a substantial interest in Charter Communications.

Liberty Media, a holding company controlled by Malone, is spearheading the courtship under the direction of Greg Maffei, Liberty’s CEO. It’s a tall task, considering Time Warner Cable is a larger company than Charter.

Both men are betting they will get a friendlier reception after current CEO Glenn Britt retires at the end of the year.

TWC’s new chief financial officer, Artie Minson, isn’t exactly rebuffing Malone and Maffei.  Minson said that in the event of an acquisition or merger deal, the company will consider taking on more debt to help finance the transaction.

Many Charter shareholders are unconvinced such a deal is worth the amount of debt likely required to finance it, especially as cable television subscriber numbers continue to erode and the rate of new broadband sign ups has peaked.

Malone has argued a combined Charter-Time Warner Cable could realize savings in cable and broadcast retransmission fees through volume discounts.

If you thought waiting three days for a service call was too long, you haven’t talked with Tod Robberson, editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News. AT&T has scheduled his U-verse installation 23 years from now.

Robberson has been buried in AT&T promotional mailings pushing its U-verse fiber to the neighborhood service he was ready to sign up for two years ago, but wasn’t yet available in his neighborhood. Dozens of mailings arriving this summer indicated that finally changed and he was ready to see the back of Time Warner Cable:

I phoned one day after receiving my first notice. I signed up immediately for service. The friendly sales person told me because of high demand, she couldn’t set an installation date for sooner than two weeks. Whatever. Fine. We agreed on August 19, somewhere between 9 and 11 a.m. I couldn’t wait.

Then, on August 16, they called with bad news. They needed to delay the installation for another week. Big disappointment, but I could live with it, I thought.

A week later, they called again and said there was another delay. The lines in my area needed “conditioning.” Each week since then, I’ve received a call from an AT&T person telling me about the conditioning problem. I finally offered to get out my own bottle of conditioner and do it myself. They didn’t get the joke.

Finally, today, I escalated. I talked to Gilbert in Complaints. Gilbert the Problem Solver. He heard me out. I told Gilbert that AT&T had me at hello. I was just dying to get U-verse and was very frustrated that no one at AT&T would listen. I could swear he even giggled a little when I made the “bottle of conditioner” joke. Then he did some checking around and told me that, well, truth be told, I could be waiting another year before they got around to installing my service. That’s right, one year.

Turns out that Gilbert was optimistic. I went online today with AT&T just to make sure I didn’t misread the notice I got from AT&T. Did they really tell me that service was now available? Well, I couldn’t have signed up if it wasn’t. AT&T’s system is set up to block you if your neighborhood isn’t ready.

But now, the “due date” on my installation has changed. It reads: 12/31/2036.

Dallas is home to the headquarters of AT&T and was an early adopter of U-verse. But AT&T has won the right under state law to decide when and where it chooses to deploy the service, leaving a large number of Dallas residents waiting since its introduction in 2010.

For the foreseeable future, Robberson’s tree-infested, satellite-unfriendly neighborhood is stuck with one choice for pay television and broadband: Time Warner Cable.

*-Terms, conditions, and a whole lot more applies.

Austin residents are getting spoiled with promises of gigabit broadband — the first major city in the country offered a competitive choice of 1,000Mbps Internet providers — Google and AT&T.

But one of those claiming to offer a “100-percent fiber Internet broadband network that will deliver up to 1Gbps per second,” is already fudging on that commitment before activating its first fiber customer.

AT&T’s sudden interest in selling 1,000Mbps service came as a surprise to Austin residents that have been told for years their broadband service was fast enough as is. Grande Communications had been the choice for customers seeking the fastest speeds — they sell up to 110/5Mbps for $110 a month. Time Warner Cable still tops out at 50Mbps and AT&T’s U-verse, still not fully deployed in Texas, sold up to 24Mbps ‘screaming fast’ Max Turbo service as its top offering until recently, when AT&T began limited roll-out of up to 45Mbps service.

Mere hours after Google announced Austin as its next choice for Google Fiber, “me-too” AT&T was announcing it would build its own gigabit fiber to the home network in the same city. That was a complete 180 for AT&T, which has consistently argued that running fiber to the home was an unnecessary expense. While Verizon faced the wrath of Wall Street for its decision to launch FiOS — an all-fiber-network — analysts were complaining Verizon was spending too much while AT&T was spending considerably less on its fiber to the neighborhood U-verse system that keeps existing copper wire into the home.

Right from the beginning, AT&T has always accompanied certain terms and conditions for any fiber deployment — winning equal concessions that Google received from local officials with respect to pole attachment fees, zoning, permits, and other expenses. If those were not forthcoming, AT&T could walk away from its fiber commitment at any time.

On Monday, AT&T announced it had started deploying fiber for AT&T U-verse with GigaPower, with a plan to launch in December in neighborhoods with the highest number of votes to get the service. AT&T is taking names and numbers of interested customers seeking to show their interest in fiber service. No deposit or commitment is required to vote, but you will be placed on AT&T’s marketing mailing lists.

“Austin embodies innovation and social consciousness, and is the heart of a vibrant, ever-evolving tech culture and entrepreneurial spirit,” said Dave Nichols, president of AT&T Texas. “With our all-fiber U-verse services, we are building the foundation for a new wave of innovation for Austin’s consumers, businesses, and civic and educational institutions. It’s about engaging the full community and empowering the city and its people with all that technology can offer us. This investment will help attract new business and new jobs to Austin.”

Phillip Dampier

As long as those consumers, businesses, and jobs are within the first deployment zone for AT&T’s fiber network.

For the rest of this year and well into the next, that will be a very exclusive neighborhood.

AT&T’s press release claims it will “initially reach tens of thousands of customer locations throughout Austin and surrounding areas this year, with additional local expansion planned in 2014.”

The five-county Austin–Round Rock metropolitan area has a population of 1,834,303 residents. Assuming AT&T managed to offer fiber service to 100,000 residents — and that is a generous figure, that represents only 5.5% of Greater Austin. The old U-verse is still a work in progress in several Texas cities, so it could take years for AT&T to deploy fiber in Austin. Expect AT&T to start with the low-hanging fruit — multi-dwelling units such as apartments, condos, and other similar buildings, some that already have existing fiber connections in place.

AT&T may never get around to offering fiber to more rural locations in Austin’s suburbs: “There are many factors involved in stringing an advanced fiber network, so having your neighbors vote to be notified about U-verse with GigaPower is no guarantee we’ll get to your neighborhood first, but it does give us some idea of where we want to focus our efforts; and besides, things are always more fun when we work together.”

AT&T is already backing away from its commitment to offer gigabit service, at least initially.

“The December launch will initially feature symmetrical speeds of up to 300Mbps, […] with an upgrade to speeds up to 1 Gigabit per second when available in mid-2014, and at no extra cost,” AT&T writes in its press release.

Speaking of cost, nobody at AT&T is willing to give us one for the 1,000 300Mbps launch tier.

If AT&T is smart, it better set it lower than what Google is likely to charge, considering AT&T will initially only deliver less than 1/3rd of the promised gigabit speed.

While thinking about that, AT&T might also want to dump usage caps. The fastest U-verse tiers come with a 250GB usage allowance, which can really crimp a screaming fast fiber experience once your allowance runs out.