Thats great news for me as well..Im not in N.Y, I live in CT...they are close so that means Im next...I hope

Here's the article in plain black & white.

Adelphia completes WNY network upgrade

Published on April 16, 2006
Author:    Matt Glynn - NEWS BUSINESS REPORTER
The Buffalo News Inc.

When Time Warner Cable finishes its planned acquisition of Adelphia's Western New York cable system within a few months, it will take ownership of a spiffed-up technical network.

Adelphia has just completed a $24 million upgrade in several Erie and Niagara county communities. It was the last phase of a $100 million overall investment Adelphia made in its Western New York network starting seven years ago.

The upgrades have enabled Adelphia to deliver more services to its customers and have created a high-tech groundwork for the future, said Thomas M. Haywood, vice president of area operations. The improvements are also designed to limit the impact of any service breakdowns. Adelphia, which provides cable TV and high-speed Internet access to customers in 31 states, is headed for an identity change. But the network "rebuild," as Adelphia calls it, started long before Time Warner agreed last year to divide ownership of Adelphia's assets with Comcast.

This summer, Time Warner expects to complete its takeover of its share of Adelphia's assets. While Adelphia's name will go away, the improvements in the Buffalo area network are intended to keep the system competitive with satellite television and phone companies, Haywood said.

"The competition is here," he said. "If we did not upgrade or provide more services, our customers will obviously go elsewhere."

Satellite providers such as DirecTV and the Dish Network are vying for subscribers. Meanwhile, Verizon has been laying fiber-optic cable in some local communities, an upgrade that could someday allow it to pipe TV programming into homes.

"Competition is good for us, and good for the customers," Haywood said.

Verizon has started laying fiber-optic cable on its traditional copper network in Buffalo Niagara communities such as Hamburg and Orchard Park, said Cliff Lee, a Verizon spokesman. Downstate, the company has received approval for cable TV franchises in a few communi ties, but upstate, it is still working on building its network to that level.

Like Adelphia, Verizon is trying to strengthen itself against an expanded field of competitors. "Companies are competing with us where before, maybe they never considered that," Lee said. Ten years ago, he said, a cable TV company might not have thought it would get into the phone business.

Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group in New Hampshire, said that for TV service, satellite TV companies remain Adelphia's strongest competition. Verizon's capability for TV service isn't as advanced, and it is a more viable competitor on the high-speed Internet access front, he said.

Aside from a growing competitive landscape, Adelphia has endured upheaval within the past few years. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002 amid an accounting scandal under the Rigas family's leadership. The company's new executive leadership has moved the headquarters to Colorado from Coudersport, Pa.

Despite Adelphia's corporate woes, the cable system remains a prominent pay-TV provider and employer in the region, serving about 300,000 subscribers and employing about 1,600 local people. Haywood, who will continue working here for Time Warner following the planned transition, said there are no plans to reduce the local work force.

Last week, Adelphia filed another reorganization plan in bankruptcy court, hoping to resolve a dispute between some creditors and to put the company on track to emerge from bankruptcy. Adelphia's chairman and chief executive officer, William Schleyer, said he wants to complete the sale of the company's assets by July 31.

Compared with the headline-generating activity at Adelphia's corporate level and in the courts, upgrading Adelphia's Buffalo-area technical network has been lower-profile work.

The final, $24 million phase of the project began about three years ago, affecting more than a dozen municipalities in Erie and Niagara counties. Adelphia has more than 86,000 cable TV subscribers in those communities.

Adelphia's network upgrade centered on laying more fiber-optic cable, in order to increase transmission capacity to customers, said Steve Pawlik, the company's area director of engineering.

The upgrade allows higher bandwidth to be transmitted from Adelphia's receiving station in Lackawanna to each of its customers, Haywood said. The increased bandwidth allows for more digital channels and services including high-definition channels and Video On Demand, which allows viewers to watch programming at their convenience.

Pawlik describes the improvements as an effort to make the network as "future-proof" as possible, by anticipating the need for capacity for future services.

The network's reliability was also improved during the work, he said. Signals now pass through fewer electronic devices en route to a customer's home, so if an electronic component fails, far fewer homes are affected by the breakdown than before, Pawlik said.

The technology upgrades make it easier for Adelphia to trouble-shoot customers' problems remotely, Haywood said. As a result, Adelphia's trucks need to make fewer service calls to customers' homes.

Steve Edelman, area director of sales and marketing, said increased availability of Video on Demand acts as a customer retention tool: Once customers get used to its flexibility, they tend to want to keep it.

It remains to be seen whether the upgrades will help Adelphia improve its standing on an annual customer satisfaction survey by J.D. Power and Associates. In the most recent survey of 14 cable and satellite television companies, released last August, Adelphia's score ranked 13th. Time Warner was seventh, with a score slightly below the industry average. The survey was based on responses from about 11,500 U.S. households.

More changes could be coming for the Buffalo area system currently run by Adelphia: Its expected new owner, Time Warner, pipes phone calls over TV cables in other markets where it operates.

Phone service is the one significant service gap that remains for Adelphia, Leichtman said. "They've got pretty much everything that every other cable company in America has, except the phone part."

Time Warner has been very aggressive in providing phone service elsewhere, Haywood said. "I think this will be an item to deploy here in the near future," he said.

For a cable company, Leichtman said, phone service serves as a link to its other services. "It's part of the bundle. It's a big part of the bundle for high-speed Internet."

TheHalf™