First cable companies insisted that people canceling TV service weren’t real. Then, as companies began noticing the last two quarters that people were actually canceling TV service due to cost, they began insisting those consumers really don’t matter all that much (which is only true when looking at the relatively massive size of some companies). The reality is that you can’t continue to impose rate hikes twice a year and not see some consumer response; the cable industry just doesn’t care because they feel these consumers are little more than a statistical blip.

The seriousness with which cable companies take consumer concerns about high prices is reflected in the way they continue to gleefully impose rate hikes on not only cable TV but DVR rentals and other services. When they do try their hand at the unfamiliar idea of lowering prices, the end result is often somewhat insulting, like Time Warner Cable’s new entry level cable tiers that offer no consumer value and are loaded with restrictions like the inability to bundle it with additional services, or even use a DVR.

Following in Time Warner Cable’s footsteps, Charter is illustrating what they think about cord cutters and those struggling financially, by sending out notices saying they’ll be hiking the price of, well, everything:

effective with your January Statement pricing will be adjusted for TV Install fees: New Primary Outlet Installation and Reconnection will be adjusted from $29.99 to $39.00; Change of Service Special Trip from $23.62 to $30.00; Additional Outlet with Initial Install from $9.87 to $9.99; Additional Outlet with Special Trip from $29.86 to $39.00; Labor Charge (formerly Hourly Service Charge) from $34.85 to $39.00; Inside Wire Service Call from $35.00 to $45.00; Ancillary Equipment Install with Initial Install from $5.99 to $9.99 and Ancillary Equipment Install with Special Trip from $27.15 to $35.00.

Public Access Fee will change from $0.52 to $0.55, Franchise Fee will change from $1. 13 to $1.17. Basic Service Tier from $12. 85 to $16.21 an increase of $3.36; Expanded Service Tier from $48.14 to $44.78 a decrease of (-$3.36). Customers in a promotion will not see this immediate price change; however, new pricing will apply at the end of your promotional period.

While Charter jacked up the price of essentially everything, they did reduce the price of their “Expanded Service” tier from $48.14 to $44.78. However, they actually increased the price of their entry-level “Basic” service tier $12.85 to $16.21. Why? As Charter customers in our forums correctly note, Charter was seeing more customers downgrading to their cheapest TV tier due to the economy, so they raised the price and lowered the price of the next level tier in the hopes they’d upgrade. Cable’s borderline disdain for cash-strapped customers couldn’t be any more clear, and it will be a historical cornerstone when the story of the inevitable (but glacial) Internet video (r)evolution is told.

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France was one of the first countries to impose laws that require ISPs terminate the service of users who repeatedly engage in copyright infringement. French anti-piracy outfit Trident Media Guard this week began tracking offenders, and will be submitting infringement claims to ISPs. ISPs must then tie the IP to a name, send letters to users, then ultimately disconnect them after repeat offenses. The size and expense of the operation is fairly staggering, as Torrent Freak explores:

The copyright holders will start relatively “slowly” with 10,000 IP-addresses a day, but within weeks this number is expected to go up to 150,000 IP addresses per day according to official reports. The Internet providers will be tasked with identifying the alleged infringers’ names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they fail to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for every unidentified IP address.

For scale, Time Warner Cable recently complained about similar lookup requests in relation to the “lawsuit-o-matic” campaign being conducted by the U.S. Copyright Group arguing that the maximum number of such requests they could handle was 28 per month; each of which Time Warner Cable claimed cost them $45. Of course in France, consumers are simply flocking to direct download, UseNet or other un-tracked piracy options, while ISPs are left footing the bill for the entertainment industry’s latest Sisyphean endeavor.

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Time Warner Cable, AT&T and CenturyLink/Embarq’s latest attempt (they’ve been trying since 2005) to pass a bill in North Carolina that would hinder communities interested in wiring themselves with fiber – seems to be seeing some opposition in the state. The Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday postponed considering the new law, which opponents say is little more than protectionism – intentionally layering projects like Wilson’s Greenlight fiber service (funded with private money) with bureaucratic obstacles. In an editorial last week, the Winston-Salem Journal put it this way:

These communities can’t wait until it will be profitable for a private company to serve them adequately. So, using the democratic process, they are asking their local governments to establish service for them. This is reminiscent of the early 20th century when small towns in this state developed their own electrical grids rather than wait for the big utilities to do so. If the telecoms don’t want local governments to establish these Internet services, they should rush into these areas and establish service now.

Of course dozens of these kinds of bills were passed over the last decade before many people realized what carriers were doing – namely refusing to serve areas (either with next-generation broadband or broadband of any kind) – then pushing for laws that would ban them from serving themselves.

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Time Warner Cable announced that the cable provider is now the nation’s third-largest broadband ISP, having just passed the 9 million broadband subscriber mark. They seem to be working from trend projections: Time Warner Cable actually ended 2009 as the country’s fourth biggest ISP, their earnings showing 8.9 million broadband subscribers to Verizon’s reported 9.2 million customers. Both of course trail AT&T and Comcast, AT&T’s earnings indicating that AT&T now serves 15.7 million customers, while Comcast’s latest report shows Comcast with 15.9 million broadband users.

“This is a great milestone for Time Warner Cable, and it further proves that our customers enjoy the speed and content our HSD products deliver, as well as the value seen when bundling this service with our video and phone offerings,” said Landel Hobbs, COO of Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable and Mr. Hobbs were greatly helped by the fact that Verizon’s all but giving up on rural DSL service, either selling or simply ignoring many of these Time Warner Cable markets. Instead, Verizon has made it clear they want to focus on wireless (especially LTE) service and more profitable FiOS markets.

Last we checked Verizon FiOS was available in less than 10% of Time Warner Cable’s overall markets, and Time Warner Cable doesn’t have to try very hard to lure subscribers that have grown tired of 7 Mbps (or often 3 Mbps or slower) DSL service.

Penetration of AT&T U-Verse is actually higher in Time Warner Cable markets – approaching 20%. But AT&T’s top broadband speeds max out around 24 Mbps at shorter loop lengths, and AT&T’s been struggling to get line-bonded VDSL service working.

Once you realize that less than a third of Time Warner Cable’s markets see any kind of real next-gen broadband competition (with Verizon’s FiOS deployment outside of major cities essentially done for now and AT&T line bonding a perpetual no show), you start to understand why the company’s been slower to upgrade to faster DOCSIS 3.0 technology. The faster speeds are only available in portions of New York City, with only 2,000 of Time Warner Cable’s 9 million customers signed up for 50 Mbps service.

“High Speed Data continues to be a growing part of our business and we look to keep adding new features and further enhance speeds as we move through 2010,” says Hobbs. Though Time Warner Cable has been slow on upgrades we expect several new market launches over the next month or two; one insider tells us faster “Wideband” service should soft launch in upstate New York in a matter of weeks, with a hard launch a month later. Localized upstate New York promotions would seem to confirm this.

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Time Warner Cable was successfully spun off from Time Warner early in 2008 in order to give both companies “greater operational, financial and strategic flexibility,” according to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. Now an insider tells Dow Jones the company has launched “Project Mercury” – an effort to rename itself sometime during 2010.

Given the spinoff the rebranding is an obvious move, though it may also help distance the company from last year’s public relations implosion when the company attempted to impose low usage caps and unreasonably high overage fees on their customers.

Good luck with that, Time Warner Cable.

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AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market – something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL’s employees, or about 2,300 workers.

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The article makes no mention of publicly available financial reports from broadband providers like Time Warner Cable that prove that at the same time their profits on broadband service are increasing, the company s costs to provide the service continue to decline, along with the dollar amounts they spend to maintain and expand that network to meet demand.

Dampier also notes how the Journal misidentifies Rep. Eric Massa (who is pushing for laws protecting consumers from over-charging) and omits the potential conflict of interest in ISPs pushing for high overages while at the same time crafting massive new Internet video empires. While the Journal does note that the average user consumes just 15 GB a month (that number is even less, according to a recent Cisco study) it omits just how low many of these proposed caps have been (Frontier thinks 5 GB a month is reasonable for an entire household).

The Journal also also helps the industry make caps sound more reasonable by measuring them in e-mails sent, an annoying and silly metric used by ISP marketing departments. Most importantly though, the Journal helps sell the idea that a shift from flat-rate pricing to the industry’s version of metered billing (not to be confused with pure per byte billing) is both necessary and inevitable. In reality, it’s neither, and the metered billing models we’ve seen proposed by carriers so far are little more than price hikes disguised as altruism and fairness.

It doesn’t inspire fresh confidence in the American press when a consumer covers the full scope of the metered billing discussion far better than the nation’s supposed top business paper and its corral of staff writers.

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