Charter Dangles Broadband Carrot at the FCC

Charter Communications has promised to expand the reach of its 100 Megabits per second high-speed Internet service tier by an additional 200,000 homes and go all-digital in every market if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) grants the MSO a temporary set-top waiver that will help Charter deploy a new downloadable video security system.

Those are two of three voluntary conditions and "additional assurances" Charter president and CEO Tom Rutledge outlined in an April 4 filing, delivered as the FCC continues to weigh Charter's request for a two-year waiver that would let the operator deploy set-tops capable of running the new downloadable security system alongside an integrated version of its legacy conditional access platform. The proposed dual-security box would not support a CableCARD interface.

To help Charter secure the waiver, here's what Rutledge is proposing:

• Charter will convert 100% of its systems -- including its entire rural footprint -- to all-digital within nine months after the end of the two-year waiver.
• Charter will make broadband Internet access service of 100 Mbps or greater available to 200,000 additional homes within two years of grant of the waiver. Charter declined to say how many of its 3.8 million residential cable modem customers currently have access to the MSO's 100 Mbps Ultra cable modem tier today, which is paired with a 5 Mbps upstream, but the vast majority of its plant has the pieces in place to deliver such speeds. According to a 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Charter ended 2012 with DOCSIS 3.0 deployed to 94 percent of its homes passed, "allowing us to offer multiple tiers of Internet services with speeds up to 100 Mbits download to our residential customers." About 98 percent of Charter's cable network supported 550 MHz or more of capacity at the end of 2012.
• Charter will continue to provide CableCARDs for new CableCARD devices (such as a TiVo DVR) until such time as a third-party retail device with downloadable security is available for use by Charter subscribers.