AT&T workers launched a two-day strike impacting operations in Connecticut, Nevada, and California.

Around 20,000 AT&T workers in Connecticut, Nevada and California are striking this afternoon in a two-day action to protest what union officials call the company’s lack of good faith during contract negotiations talks.

“Contract negotiations are never easy,” said CWA District 9 vice president Jim Weitkamp. “But when AT&T violates the law repeatedly, the process really can’t work. Given AT&T’s record profits, tax breaks and jaw-dropping executive compensation, there is no reason for them to insist on lowering the standard of living of a single worker.”

While 17,000 workers in the west and 3,000 employees in Connecticut walk picket lines, fellow AT&T employees in the southeast are still on the job after the company reached tentative deals with unions representing those workers.

AT&T says the new three-year deals with the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and North and South Carolina  bring wage and “modest pension increases,” according to the company.

Connecticut workers say AT&T’s proposed package in the northeast is not sufficient to address the high cost of living in the state.

But AT&T says declining numbers of landlines means cuts are inevitable. AT&T said in a statement Tuesday’s walkout was not in anyone’s best interest.

Connecticut picketers have been blocking the entrances of several AT&T facilities including in New Haven, where replacement workers appear to be honoring the picket lines after talking with striking workers. Unions are requesting customers not do business with AT&T during the strike.

Late reports indicate several cars with New Jersey license plates have hit three persons on one picket line. The union claims the vehicles were being driven by replacement workers, but no independent confirmation was available.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/New Haven Register ATT UNION ON STRIKE 8-7-12.mp4[/flv]

The New Haven Register talked with Tim Smith, a union worker on a picket line outside of an AT&T facility. The video shows picketers encouraging replacement workers to honor the picket line and not report for work.  (3 minutes) 

Four of the nation’s largest phone companies — two former Baby Bells, two independents — have very different ideas about solving the rural broadband problem in the country. Which company serves your area could make all the difference between having basic DSL service or nothing at all.

Some blame Wall Street for the problem, others criticize the leadership at companies that only see dollars, not solutions. Some attack the federal government for interfering in the natural order of the private market, and some even hold rural residents at fault for expecting too much while choosing to live out in the country.

This four-part series will examine the attitudes of the four largest phone companies you may be doing business with in your small town.

Today: CenturyLink — Our Commercial Customers Deliver 60% of Our Revenue; Our Attention Follows Accordingly

“Business customers now drive about 60% of our total operating revenues,” CenturyLink CEO Glenn F. Post III told investors in March. “Our focus on delivering advanced solutions and data hosting services to businesses are key factors in improving our top line revenue trend.”

With residential customers departing traditional landlines at an average rate of 5-10 percent a year, keeping customers has become an important priority for a number of phone companies, especially those who have plowed millions into mergers and acquisitions to build their businesses. For the past several years, CenturyLink has been acquiring small, regional independent phone companies, a former Baby Bell, and a competing landline provider Sprint used to think would be an important part of its business.

Century Telephone’s original customers were mostly cobbled together from acquisitions from other phone companies, including names like GTE, Central Telephone Company of Ohio (part of Centel), Pacific Telecom, Mebtel and GulfTel. But the biggest expansion of the company would come from acquisitions of Sprint-spinoff Embarq and former Baby Bell Qwest.

Today CenturyLink operates one of the nation’s largest independent phone companies, and serves markets large (primarily on the west coast) and small (rural communities primarily in the southeast, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin).

CenturyLink’s revenues have often been uneven, mostly because of its acquisitions, landline losses, and the effects from competition in its larger markets. While CenturyLink’s acquisitions grew the company, they also saddled it with landline networks that have proved inadequate to meet the growing needs of customers. With a disconnect rate running between 6.4% this quarter and 7.6% in the same quarter a year ago, residential customers are leaving their voice lines behind in favor of cell phones and broadband customers are departing for faster speeds available from cable operators.

These “legacy services” lost the company $124 million in revenue — an 8.1% decrease over the past quarter. As customers depart, so do CenturyLink employees that used to handle the old landline network.

To make up the lost revenue, CenturyLink has gotten more aggressive in other areas of its business:

• Increasing focus on business/commercial and governmental services, including managed hosting, cloud computing and other commercially-targeted broadband initiatives;
• Deployment of fiber to cell towers as a growing revenue source;
• Limited, but ongoing rural broadband expansion;
• Development of Prism TV — a fiber to the neighborhood service targeting residential customers.

CenturyLink calls these their four key initiatives towards revenue stability, stable cash flow, and growth.

In the business services segment, CenturyLink sees enormous revenue potential selling businesses access to data centers, co-location services, and ethernet-speed broadband. Last year, CenturyLink acquired Savvis, an important enterprise-level service provider and owner of 50 data centers. Phone companies like CenturyLink are also in a race with large cable operators to be the first to offer cell phone companies access to “fiber-to-the-tower” service to support exploding data growth on 4G wireless networks.

Faster DSL, Fiber to the Neighborhood-Broadband Key to Keeping Residential Customers Happy

CenturyLink’s network map showing both its own service areas, and infrastructure obtained from the acquisition of Qwest.

For consumers, CenturyLink has been moderately aggressive in some areas boosting speeds of its DSL services. The company claims 70% of their DSL-capable landline network provides speeds of at least 6Mbps. At least 55% supports 10Mbps or higher; over 25% can manage 20Mbps or faster.

The company’s Prism TV service, a fiber to the neighborhood upgrade comparable to AT&T U-verse, is now available to nearly 6.3 million homes and apartments in eight cities. By year end, CenturyLink says it will increase that to 7.1 million homes.

Prism represents a significant portion of CenturyLink’s investment in its residential business. So far, the results have not proven a major threat to the competition. CenturyLink added 15,000 Prism subscribers in the first quarter, but the company only has 8% of the market. Cable and satellite providers continue to dominate. But the company says Prism is helping to keep the customers they already have.

CenturyLink says it now taking Prism TV west into former Qwest territory, starting in and around Colorado Springs, Col.

Customers will likely be offered 130 channels starting at $59.99 a month with a free set top box (new customers typically receive a $20 monthly discount for the first six months of service).

The phone company will compete with Comcast, which sells 80 channels for $56 a month (new customers get a $26/mo discount for the first six months).

With CenturyLink providing a better deal, at least for television service, Colorado City officials hope the competition will bring down rates, at least for new customers. That may be exactly what happens, predicts Mark Ewell, a senior account executive with Windstream Communications.

“We could see some pressure on Comcast’s rates. I would like to see Comcast adopt a price model that doesn’t go up after a promotional period,” Ewell told The Gazette.

“CenturyLink is likely to be more of a threat to the satellite providers like DirecTV and Dish because they have a much higher market share in Colorado Springs than they do in most other markets because so many customers left Adelphia [acquired in bankruptcy by Comcast] when it had its financial problems. Those customers have already shown a willingness to leave the cable television provider and try another service.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CenturyLink Prism TV.flv[/flv]

CenturyLink shows off its new Prism TV offering in this company-produced video.  (2 minutes)

CenturyTel acquires Embarq and changes its name to CenturyLink to reduce the emphasis on its traditional landline business.

CenturyLink’s arrival in the triple-play business of phone, Internet, and television service could be the first serious competition Comcast has gotten outside of satellite providers. WideOpenWest had a franchise to provide service in 2000 but never did. Falcon Broadband won a franchise in 2006, but only provides service to around 1,500 customers in the Banning Lewis Ranch, Black Forest, and Falcon areas. Porchlight Communications received a franchise in 2007, installed service for 500 customers but ultimately never charged them. Porchlight’s IPTV service never worked properly with its chosen set top boxes. That fatal flaw put the company out of the cable business, and the company turned the porch light off for good, abandoning its franchise.

Rural Broadband: Unless the Government Delivers More Subsidies, Rural Customers Will Continue Waiting

In late July, CenturyLink announced it would accept $35 million from the Federal Communications Commission’s new Connect America Program (CAP) to deploy broadband to homes and businesses in rural, broadband-deprived parts of its service area.

CenturyLink has the capability to extend broadband to 100 percent of its customers, but not the willingness to invest the money to make that happen, critics contend. CenturyLink freely admits it applies a financial test when considering when and where to expand its DSL broadband service into its most rural service areas.

In short, the company must recoup its costs of deploying broadband within a certain time frame, and be confident that a certain percentage of customers are going to sign up for broadband service, before it will agree to make the investment. Virtually all of CenturyLink’s current service areas have already met or failed that test, which leaves an indefinite group of broadband “have’s” and “have-nots.”

To shake up the status quo, the FCC proposed to shift Universal Service Fund money, collected from all phone customers, away from landline service towards rural broadband deployment. This invites CenturyLink, and other phone companies, to run those financial tests again. With urban customers footing part of the bill, theoretically more homes should squeak past the return on investment test.

In fact, more homes will finally get CenturyLink broadband — around 45,000 in semi-rural and suburban areas where the costs to provide the service are not as great as in truly rural areas.  The FCC is offering to cover just short of $800 per household to cut the costs of deploying rural Internet access.

But CenturyLink complains the money is not nearly enough to solve the really-rural broadband problem.

“In very rural areas where we really have the greatest need for support, this amount, on a per-location basis, will not be enough to allow us to really do an economic build-out,” Post told investors this spring. “So we’re still in the process really of evaluating our opportunities….”

That will leave CenturyLink likely spending considerably more upgrading its urban landline network to support Prism TV instead of supplying rural broadband service.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CenturyLink History.flv[/flv]

Jeff Oberschelp, vice president and general manager of CenturyLink of Nevada discusses the past history of CenturyLink and where phone companies are going in the future in this company-friendly interview.  (6 minutes)

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WPRI Providence Call for Action Hotel guests not satisfied 8-5-12.mp4[/flv]

WPRI in Providence reports consumer satisfaction with many hotel chains is dropping as they follow the airline industry’s practice of charging extra for services usually included in the price of a ticket, or in this case, room. An increasing number of hotels are introducing new surcharges and fees for using their Wi-Fi networks.  (2 minutes)

AT&T loves corporate free speech rights, the same ones it is using to deny customers access to Google’s Play Movies service.

With wireless Net Neutrality rendered largely ineffective with the help of AT&T and Verizon Wireless’ extensive lobbying and legal threats, AT&T has leveraged its right to govern its own network by deciding to block its wireless customers from watching Google Play Store’s streaming movie service over its 3G and 4G networks. This block is enforced even though AT&T already throttles heavy “unlimited” users and charges others more for using more data.

Geek.com was the first to discover AT&T’s curious dislike of Google Play Movies, while leaving other streaming services like Netflix, HBO Go, YouTube, and others alone (for now):

Instead of The Anchorman […] I was greeted with an error message telling me that I was not allowed to stream this movie over the mobile network. Assuming it was just an error, I tried again and got the same message. After a few minutes of playing with settings, it became clear that I was not going to be able to watch this movie without WiFi.

Yes, it seems that AT&T has removed the ability to watch Google Play Movie files over their 3G and LTE networks. This only happens with Google Play Movies, and only on AT&T. […] Curiously enough, you can download or “pin” a Google Play Movie over 3G and LTE and the only warning you get is one from Google explaining that you might incur data costs.

AT&T and Verizon have both declared Net Neutrality violates their free speech rights as corporate citizens — rights further expanded with the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision.

When Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski sought to introduce mild Net Neutrality protections for the Internet, both companies threatened to sue (Verizon has a case pending) and conservative commentators launched into tirades about “an Obama takeover of the Internet.”

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Today the FCC approved a proposal by chairman Julius Genachowski to give the FCC power to prevent broadband providers from selectively blocking web traffic. And that’s just a ruse. Net Neutrality is not what this is really all about. This is about the feds wanting to control the Internet just as they control the public airwaves. They want to be able to determine who gets to say what, where, how often — they want to be able to determine what search services are providing what answers to your queries. It’s total government control of the Internet, and the regime has just awarded it to itself.

It’s another gleaming aspect of free speech, free market, private industry Obama has decided to take over as a Christmas present to himself and the Democrat National Committee and to Mr. Soros. He’s even beaten Hugo Chavez to the punch. Chavez is just talking about taking over the Internet in Venezuela; Obama has got it done.

Geek.com doesn’t think the Obama Administration is blocking Google Play over AT&T — AT&T is. They just cannot understand the reasoning why:

I can’t imagine any real world justification for this behavior. If you pay your carrier for an internet connection to your phone, should the provider really be allowed to control how you use that connection? What’s more is that this happened over AT&T’s high speed and mostly empty LTE network. I can easily create a wireless hotspot on this same phone and stream a video from the Nexus 7, using the exact same data connection to accomplish the exact same task. This move is confusing at best, and AT&T is going to quickly alienate customers eager to take advantage of their brand new LTE devices as they receive them.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Corporateland.flv[/flv]

Mark Fiore channels Disney-sentimentality schtick on a whole new level with his take on AT&T’s Pinocchio-CorporateLand dream come true: the right to be human. (1 minute)

ALEC Rock exposes the truth about how many of today’s bills are actually written and passed into law with the help of a shadowy, corporate-backed group known as the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). Counted among its members are: AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Comcast, FairPoint Communications, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon. ALEC works on elected members of state legislatures to deregulate phone and cable service, eliminate consumer protection/oversight laws, ban publicly-owned broadband networks, and let phone companies walk away from providing rural phone service at will.  (2 minutes)