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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Ahh memory lane. Joe “Pags” for his Rochester connection on WHAM during Lonsberry’s absence, and Prodigy for the countless hours I spent on their gaming message boards as a teenager in high school.
It sounds like Josh at about 15:15 in the audio tried to plug this website. Hopefully Pags will check it out and publicize it in a future show.
Here are some relevant, although unreferenced, quotes from the linked Wikipedia article:
Price increases:
“In an attempt to control costs and raise revenue, Prodigy undertook two separate actions. First, Prodigy modified their basic subscriber plans by allowing only thirty e-mail messages free each month, while charging 10 cents for each additional e-mail message – a policy that was later rescinded. Then, in the summer of 1993, it began charging hourly rates for several of its most popular features, including its most popular feature, the message boards – another policy that was later rescinded, but not before tens of thousands of members left the service.”
Pioneering and unusual aspects:
“Unlike many other competing services, Prodigy started out with flat-rate pricing. When Prodigy moved to per-hour charging for its most popular services in June 1993, it resulted in tens of thousands of users leaving the service.”
I thought the name was vaguely familiar. I can’t endure anything on WHAM personally, and while Bob Lonsberry may be a nice guy, his voice on the radio drives me batty. I essentially left local radio behind several years ago and now basically can’t live without my XM Radio in the car and home.
And I was among the earliest users of Prodigy as well. Loved that clunky 640×480-style early graphical software designed to be the anti-Compu$erve, but perhaps deeper than AOL was around that time. People usually signed up for it based on promotions from Rochester Telephone. It was also basically flat rate, which kept bills rational.
When I started, on a Commodore 64 way back in 1985, telecommunications then usually meant calling a hobby bulletin board system on a 300bps modem. I started one myself in March 1986.
Online services on a national scale were usually the obscenely expensive day rates for Compu$erve, the impenetrable GEnie, PeopleLink, and the precursor to AOL, QuantumLink, which used special software to jazz up the look on Commodore-branded computers. On the west coast, a lot of folks liked The Well. In New England, there was Delphi which had a following.
By the late 1980s, most of us were getting into Fidonet, a network of BBS’s, running up to 9600bps modems (the US Robotics BBS SysOp program made that possible). PC Pursuit allowed people to connect and remotely control modems in other cities to call other hobbyist bulletin boards, and for many, that was our first home access to Usenet newsgroups.
By the early 1990s, Prodigy had arrived and the slow demise of some of the national dial-up networks began. AOL was the exception. BBS’s were still important until the second half of the 1990s when the Internet and, in particular, the World Wide Web became very important (the good ole web browser and graphical pages). As soon as Internet Service Providers popped up with dial-up access, and the “56k” modem arrived, that led rapidly away from BBS’ing and instead people were dialing up their ISPs and browsing the web. Prodigy was irrelevant at that point.
In the late 1990s, people were talking about ISDN phone lines and this future technology called DSL around here. But then cable modems arrived in 1998 and ISDN was dead on arrival. DSL arrived here in the mid 2000s I believe and was relevant to those who didn’t want cable.
I agree BTW, it did sound like a plug was on the way, but never happened. Oh well.
Point of this long reply is that there are lots of us around here who have been online and connected since the mid 1980s who have seen it all. We can evangelize companies that do the right thing by their customers, and efficiently expose the fact-free propaganda that comes from others looking for a quick payday. There isn’t much you can put past many of us. This new cap scheme for Road Runner would be an example of a put up job, if there ever was one.
Thanks for posting the discussion. When I sent you the link previously, part 1 of the discussion with Alex Duddly, Timewarner PR rep, wasn’t available. Joe Pags recently upload the first part. To listen, check it out here: http://a1135.g.akamai.net/f/1135/18227/1h/cchannel.download.akamai.com/18227/podcast/SANANTONIO-TX/WOAI-AM/4-2%20HR%203%20part1.mp3?CPROG=PCAST&MARKET=SANANTONIO-TX&NG_FORMAT=newstalk&SITE_ID=1229&STATION_ID=WOAI-AM&PCAST_AUTHOR=Joe_Pags&PCAST_CAT=On_Air&PCAST_TITLE=Joe_Pags_Show_Podcast
-Josh
I remember years ago (8 maybe?) where TW implemented a cap on bandwidth with the same justification now – a small percentage of the users were using a large percent of the bandwidth. The cap would make the service “fair” for everyone.
I haven’t called TW yet, but a couple questions are:
1. Was that not effective? Why?
2. Why wouldn’t you implement another BW cap and offer higher speeds for additional cost (kind of like what you offer now with RR Turbo)
I will switch if they implement this.
-Eric
[...] talker Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo is taking the opposite approach and getting his callers to talk up a storm on the subject. He hasn’t bought Time Warner’s excuses for fleecing his listeners and [...]
This is all about protecting their very lucrative Video on Demand TV service. By applying these caps it will sway customers from using up their allotted bandwidth on downloading movies/videos from places like netflix, hulu, and other competing video/movie places. Customers will be forced to rent video services from time warner in order to save on bandwidth.
“…This is all about protecting their very lucrative Video on Demand TV service. By applying these caps it will sway customers from using up their allotted bandwidth on downloading movies/videos from places like netflix, hulu, and other competing video/movie places. Customers will be forced to rent video services from time warner in order to save on bandwidth….”
Peter has absolutely hit the nail on the head. There are other complicated business reasons as well, but this will help them to prop up a sagging business for them.
(at our expense)
P.S. I also loved the posts above. I was a Compuserve user in 1981, I think and used it for years and years to get a leg up in business. I also had an early Mac and used aol for it at work and then I used them all at one time, Prodigy, Delphi, GEnie, etc. and of course a million BBS.
Content was amazing good for reading in those days. The Internet now seems to have made all the fools able to post poorly-written and incoherent cr_ap everywhere. At least then people online were generally a little smarter.
J.