New York Threatens To Kick Charter Out of State After Broadband Failures (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications could lose its authorization to operate in New York State because of its failure to meet merger-related broadband deployment commitments, a key government official said. NY Public Service Commission (PSC) Chairman John Rhodes said that "a suite of enforcement actions against [Charter] Spectrum are in development, including additional penalties, injunctive relief, and additional sanctions or revocation of Spectrum's ability to operate in New York State," according to a PSC announcement last week. Charter agreed to expand its network in exchange for state approval of its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC). New York officials say that Charter has failed to meet its commitments, even though Charter claims it has. Rhodes accused Charter of "gaslighting" and noted that the PSC has already ordered Charter to stop making misleading claims about its broadband deployment progress. The PSC last month ordered Charter to pay a $2 million fine and complete the promised network construction. If Charter doesn't meet its merger-related obligations, the company will "face the risk of having the merger revoked," the commission said at the time. A revocation of the merger could force Charter to spin off its Time Warner Cable division in New York, but it wouldn't affect Charter's ownership of TWC in other states.

Comments

About f**king time.

[sconeu]

These telecoms make all these promises to get regulatory approval and then never follow through.

It's about time someone held them to account (even if it's minor).

Sadly, it likely is just posturing

[RevDisk]

Telecoms are big business, understand to regularly bribe politicians and typically have friendly endless court battles. Local and state governments can and will be overruled by federal courts. This has kinda be the way of things for decades. We pay telecoms substantial amounts to built broadband, in tax revenue. They don't spend the money. Or rather, they spend the money on everything except for broadband. They charge through the nose for relatively modest bandwidth (saving money on their backend). And then repeat.

Municipal ISPs can provide gigabit fiber, often with a backup of mesh WiFi of many/most areas, for very modest rates. Majority of the time it's not city employees doing the work, it's some outside small ISP doing everything. And they still pull a modest but respectable profit.

Until we reform the laws, which means addressing the corruption issues, the bandwidth picture is not going to change. Hell, you don't even need to do THAT. Just force telecoms to justify the money that they are given from taxes. It'd be hilariously easy to charge them with fraud.

Re:Cue whining of shills

[jellomizer]

Living in Charter/Spectrum territory. They have greatly increased internet speed for all the users with 100mbs as the baseline from 30mbs 2 years ago with TWC.
However their push was them saying how much they are going to expand coverage in the area. And NY should hold them to these claims. Bandwidth improvements is just a flip of a switch.