Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about.
Members of Broadband for America
Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to an astroturf [...]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to [...]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of [...]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be [...]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way.
Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw launched [...]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail.
[FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's] proposal – to codify and enforce some general [...]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario [...]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them.
This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment of [...]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes.
Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by the [...]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta.
After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
The Good
Alberta is like [...]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.”
The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling more [...]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider.
PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community.
The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking their actual [...]
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I cant make it tonight, working until midnight but I hope some one takes some notes on what is said.
Heck if someone can video it, we can embed it here and everyone can watch.
We should stop the bandwidth cap! This is an outrage. Consumer needs for bandwidth is constantly increasing.
This is is like Intel saying it’s going to put a cap on processor speed. The need for faster processors and more internet bandwidth is going up. Time Warner should be making investments to increase bandwidth for it’s customers– not capping it.
This is just a ploy by Time Warner to gouge their customers and make more profit while reducing service.
Austin should not stand for it.
Just got back from the City of Austin Telecommunications meeting. There were about 30 people there, most for the Time Warner Cable issue. Because the issue came up at such late notice, it wasn’t on the agenda, and therefore the committee wasn’t allowed to discuss it.
However, 5 people signed up to talk about the caps.
Speaker one was concerned that Austin was a testing area. We’re so tech savvy and TWC is such a monopoly here, that any study of usage would be flawed. Caps are unreasonable & too low. It’s a move to curb online video like Hulu & Netflix. TWC is engaging in monopolistic pricing. Austin needs to open up the market. Talked about Sue Polinski-the first RR user. Used 1gb in 45 minutes. Overage fees are created to punish the customers.
Speaker two owner of local small business. TWC is responsible for his business since it’s all based on online. Asks committee to put it on the next agenda. Caps will hamper his business.
Speaker three – caps are problemistic. TWC has done nothing to build out infrastructure. Not pushing envelope. Performance is close to what it was when he started using RR. One of the committee members actually tried to refute his statement and was hushed by others. The other issue he has is that TWC is trying to push people to their own content.
Speaker four-web developer for IBM and on his own. He maintains a usage of about 2.7 gb/day by video chatting his family in England. He has no problem paying for bandwidth, but in his research he found that it costs TWC about 3 cents to provide service and they’re trying to charge us $1/gb overage fees. He thinks the reason is to kill off internet tv and radio.
Speaker four -game developer and writer. His point was very interesting, he thinks the real reason for this push is that TWC will then approach google, youtube, Hulu etc and make them pay TW huge fees to allow users to access their content. He thinks this is a golden opportunity for the City of Austin to revoke their contract because TWC would be giving preferential treatment to certain content providers, in violation of their contract. He mentioned Stopthe cap.com and that the committee members should check it out.
Speaker four took a more “hippie” approach and asked us all to ask ourselves “who actually owns the bandwidth…” and who does the city use for its bandwidth and what will happen to all the wifi from small businesses across the city.
Then we all got up and left.
That’s all folks.
BTW I’ve seen mention of the online petition going around, but there’s also one for Austin:
http://www.petitiononline.com/nocap/petition.html
“We’re so tech savvy and TWC is such a monopoly here”
That is pretty mush the same situation in Rochester. We have the Rochester Institute of Technology, and all these (former) kodak employees who are all tech savy. While it isn’t a monopoly, a duopoly is not much better.
Also, you mentioned video chatting. This is important to Rochesters extreamly large Deaf Community. The National Technical School for the Deaf is also here in Rochester (at RIT), students who do not live on campus I’m sure (can’t be 100%, not part of the community) use video chat through programs such as iChat, to communicate to their families at home. It really annoys me that they are hampering one of the largest forms of communication for people in the Deaf community.
I almost went tonight. There was a tweet from Chip R about an hour or so before the meeting that said tonight’s agenda was talking about Digital TV transition, and not TWC, so I decided to not go. I hope this will be discussed at a later time, though.
if you are in Austin, it’s on the CoA cable channel, channel 6 on TWC.
I recorded the people who spoke:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qoA_r-MwrU&feature=PlayList&p=FFB6FA5466627982&index=0
Thanks to the people who came down and spoke. Thanks also to those who came down and watched.
It was standing-room only in the commission room. I don’t think that’s ever happened on a night we didn’t have a public hearing scheduled.
There are ten speaker slots available for “General Citizen Communications” and all were filled. (Well, really 9, because one gentleman opted to put a statement on the record rather than speak.)
Later in the meeting, when we got an update from city staff, we were informed (as we expected) that the city doesn’t have any regulatory authority on the matter. That’s why I think the comments were helpful. They created a public record that demonstrates there is a community interest to justify commission action.
So, we’ll do what we can do to leverage city resources to address the TWC broadband situation. Again, thanks to everybody who participated tonight.