THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 11, 1994 TAG: 9406110340
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: I1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940611 LENGTH: Medium
Cox, Hampton Roads' largest cable operator, said Friday it is cutting rates for its subscribers starting July 14 under reformulated guidelines handed it by the Federal Communications Commission.
{REST} But how much of a rate break its 196,000 local customers will get depends on where they live. The FCC's arcane formula for figuring out rates ended up giving Virginia Beach customers of the cable system's ``complete basic'' service the largest price break - $1 a month, to $21.22 monthly, Cox said.
The cable operator's subscribers in Knotts Island, N.C., will get the smallest savings, a 65-cent monthly reduction in their complete-basic rate.
At varying levels in between are rates for Cox's customers in Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake.
``Don't ask me to explain it. I can't,'' Franklin R. Bowers, Cox's local vice president and general manager, said of the city-to-city differences in prices. ``At least everybody's rates are going down.''
Bowers said dozens of factors were part of the FCC formula that determined cable prices. Cox would have liked to have equalized rates for all the communities. But that would have taken negotiations with city officials, and with a 30-day deadline for notifying customers bearing down, the cable operator simply ran out of time for such talks, he said.
Besides, Bowers said officials of one of the cities, which he declined to name, had indicated they weren't interested in the one-price-fits-all idea.
This is the second time in the past nine months that Cox and the rest of the nation's cable operators have been ordered by the FCC to adjust rates. The last time, last September, many cable operators actually raised prices for some customers. About half of Cox's local customers were handed rate hikes, for instance.
That angered some lawmakers, and the FCC decided to crack down with a second round of regulations that would make avoiding rate cuts much harder.
At one point, the FCC said it expected the second round to slash cable charges by an average of 7 percent nationwide. But the agency recently backed off that prediction.
The Cox cuts in Hampton Roads range from 2.9 percent to 4.5 percent.
Bowers said customers haven't exactly been carping about his system's charges. Even after the adjustments last September, he said, Cox received one letter of complaint.
The price reductions will chop nearly $6 million a year from Cox's local revenues, he said.
Other local cable operators - including Tele-Communications Inc., Falcon Cable and Insight Cablevision - plan to announce their price changes next week.
{KEYWORDS} CABLE TELEVISION
by CNB