Charter Communications will begin to buy out the early termination fees of customers wishing to switch to Charter Business services from their previous ISPs, Charter announced in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1kcv4dw). The offer would prevent early termination fees from discouraging prospective customers from switching, the release said.

The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) and 20 other California nonprofits urged the FCC in a joint filing Tuesday to “hold Comcast accountable to improve its affordable home Internet program and expand the service to include all low-income residents” as the FCC reviews the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable (TWC) merger. The groups urged the FCC to require Comcast to make all low-income households eligible for its Internet Essentials program instead of just those with schoolchildren. Comcast should also set goals for raising the percentage of eligible households that hold Internet Essentials subscriptions and coordinate with states that are major Comcast/TWC markets on closing the digital divide, the groups said. Only 11 percent of eligible households in California are currently Internet Essentials subscribers, the groups said. The FCC should also require Comcast to establish an advisory oversight committee on the Internet Essentials program and require Comcast to offer stand-alone Internet access at a reasonable rate, the groups said (http://bit.ly/WETP76).

The FCC should institute a rulemaking to “restore balance to the video marketplace” by limiting programmers’ ability to bundle channels, give discounts to large providers, control tier placement, or interfere with access to their content on the Internet, said Mediacom in a petition for expedited rulemaking filed Monday. The multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) marketplace has changed from being “dominated by cable operators to one in which the programmers (both broadcast and non-broadcast) clearly have the upper hand and are able to engage in coercive practices,” said the Mediacom petition. To address the problem, the FCC should allow MVPDs to offer limited a la carte programming of high priced content, or compel programmers to offer all MVPDs the same bundles they offer large carriers or unbundled networks. The commission should also prohibit blocking of Internet access as a negotiating tactic and require programmers to seek waivers justifying volume discounts, the petition said. “The Commission has the statutory authority to address the problems afflicting the video programming marketplace,” Mediacom said. “What it needs is the will to do so."

Public, educational and government (PEG) channels were moved to channels in the 180s and 190s in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina by Charter Communications, said American Community Television (ACT) and Southeast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors Friday in a news release (http://bit.ly/Ug1o2e). Charter also eliminated basic tier service to municipal buildings “claiming the municipal building is a commercial service, requiring local governments and schools pay twice the monthly fee” to be able to receive their own PEG channels, the groups said. Charter is “openly hostile to PEG access television and municipalities,” ACT said. Charter had no immediate comment.

NTIA said an improvement in access to 100 Mbps broadband service is primarily attributable to upgrades in existing cable systems, NCTA said in a blog post Friday (http://bit.ly/1moAWui). The data comes from a recent NTIA report on broadband speeds from wireless and wireline services from June 2010 to December 2013 (http://1.usa.gov/1r9PAf8). It said two-thirds of Americans have access to speeds higher than 100 Mbps, compared with 10 percent having access to that speed in June 2010, NCTA said. The report also said more than 99 percent of Americans have access to at least 6 Mbps through either wired or wireless connections, and 92 percent have 6 Mbps over wired, NCTA said. The upgrades that make speed increases are expected to continue “into 2014 and beyond,” said the association.

Several public interest groups united to oppose the municipal broadband amendment from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Tuesday before it passed. She successfully hitched the amendment to the Financial Services appropriations bill (HR-5016) in a 223-200 vote, and the bill itself passed Wednesday (CD July 17 p3). The amendment would stop agency funding from going to pre-empt laws in the several states that restrict municipal broadband. “After years of bipartisan (and often nonpartisan) local and federal support of local broadband projects as a critical economic development need, this amendment will cut off discussion of the promotion of broadband through local projects before it even begins,” said the letter (http://bit.ly/1t9RWdq) to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., from such groups as Common Cause, Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute and Public Knowledge.

CableLabs added features to its new home IP networking standard for what it calls a plug and play experience for configuring home networks, and is eyeing enhancements beyond HIPnet to integrate the Internet of Things with home networks. A new feature of service discovery lets users connect devices to home networks without having to locate and configure them, wrote CableLabs Lead Engineer John Berg on the blog of the cable industry research and development consortium (http://bit.ly/1qid2Jd). Integrating IoT with home networks may be possible with the home optimization platform, he wrote Wednesday of HOPnet. It seeks to provide a common platform for IoT functions like home security and automation and media streaming, and in the “very near future” a consumer could connect IPv4 and IPv6 devices to a cable operator’s IPv6 infrastructure and control IoT and IP video services through a common interface, wrote Berg. An “even more forward-looking technology” is the remote access platform, which would take HOPnet “to the next level by providing access to all the video, music, and other data in the home from remote locations, securely” and with high quality, he said.

Comcast is divesting over 3 million subscribers to Charter Communications (CD June 6 p7), but that won’t affect Comcast subscribers in many states with its systems. That’s according to a filing from the two companies and Time Warner Cable, which Comcast agreed to buy, posted Monday in FCC docket 14-57 (http://bit.ly/1r1YJGD). The states where Comcast subs won’t be moving to Charter are Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia, as well as Washington, D.C., said the three cable operators. Time Warner Cable subscribers in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington will become Comcast subscribers, the filing said. Charter subscribers in Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming will stay with Charter, the filing said.

AT&T’s U-verse TV service agreed to carry four Epix channels. Authenticated subscribers to the multichannel video programming distributor will be able to watch programs on epix.com, Epix and U-verse apps, on VOD and on Uverse.com, said the companies in a news release Monday (http://bit.ly/1kpp8bk). Epix is a joint venture of Lionsgate, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Viacom.

CEA hailed an International Energy Agency report on standby power use of network-enabled devices as a “significant undertaking,” even if it didn’t agree with all the report’s conclusions. The 175-page report by the Paris-based IEA warned that the number of network-enabled devices in use may soar to 50 billion by 2020, and that if “left unchecked,” their “corresponding energy demand” would exceed “the current annual electricity consumption of Canada and Germany combined.” IEA said “a vast majority of this energy would be consumed when devices are ‘ready and waiting,’ but not performing any particular function.” However, “contrary to implications of the IEA report, we find that consumer electronics now account for a lower percentage of electricity usage per U.S. household than they did just three years ago -- even as they've seen significantly higher market penetration in U.S. homes,” said Doug Johnson, CEA vice president-technology policy, in a statement Wednesday (http://bit.ly/W0UZKg). As CEA and its members “review the details of the new report, we appreciate the IEA’s recognition of the significant role that industry standards and voluntary agreements play in improving energy efficiency,” Johnson said. As the CE industry has learned from more than 20 years of experience with the Energy Star program, “market-oriented, flexible approaches are superior to regulatory mandates in advancing energy efficiency, while protecting innovation and competition in the fast-moving market for information and communication technology,” Johnson said. The CE and pay-TV industries have started work on “a new initiative focused on efficiency in small network equipment,” building on their recent agreement to curb energy use in set-top boxes, he said. “Given the rapid changes in the energy consumption characteristics of consumer electronics devices and high-tech products, it’s essential to develop and use up-to-date and accurate assessments of energy usage. Clearly, energy efficiency is best achieved when the public and private sectors work together.” CEA and NCTA have recently been refuting reports that cable and CE pay-TV devices use too much power (CD June 24 p16).