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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Done and Voted!
Done and Voted. I also provided a paragraph or two about how Time Warner is attempting to eliminate their competitors for Digital Phone services as well as Entertainment delivery.
BTW, I contacted my local Town Supervisor and he seems on board with our cause. I also told him to use the resources of this website (Stopthecap.com).
John
Town of Parma resident
I think this will stifle innovation, and pave the way for website payola to the service provider. i.e. “Use website X for your search and it won’t count towards your monthly cap!”
I believe they don’t like Skype, Netflix as they provide competition for their cable and phone services.
I’d propose separating the infrastructure from the service as a possible regulatory block to this.
Done and Done!!
I still have this bad feeling in the back of my mind that TWC may actually, possibly, know exactly what they are doing with this. My reasoning is this. If Time Warner were to, instead of the caps, roll out 50/5 for a premium, most average customers would remain where they are. This would be for almost the same reasons, used to the service, can’t see a need to upgrade, internet works fine, etc. If that happened, their 50/5 would not be very cost effective with only a small percentage of users using the system.
However, by implementing a cap on normal service, it makes normal, slower internet more expensive. Consumers have become outraged, threatening to leave Time Warner, but really cannot because of the captive market problem. Meanwhile, sometime this summer, Time Warner announces that the $99 will be cap free. Most consumers, myself included, would probably flock to that in droves. That would in turn make the 50/5 plan very cost effective.
My point is this. Time Warner would not be wise in this economy to start more expensive services, unless there was a way to eliminate cheaper services without eliminating customers.
I think it’s more reasonable to expect them to tinker with the caps to raise them upwards as the weeks progress, claiming they are responding to customer requests, and at the point of implementation, hope that consumers think they got a “gift” of extra usage.
This fight is not about playing on their terms, throwing usage cap levels around and messing around with confusing tiers marketing experts even dismiss as nutty.
This is about opposing caps, period. There is nothing wrong, IMO, with creating premium levels of service with higher speeds at higher prices. But no tier should be capped. Light users are capped under this plan, and they aren’t even the “problem” as TW defines it. Besides, their slower speeds naturally limit their consumption anyway, and since the lightest users are likely occasional web browsers and e-mail folks, they probably wouldn’t know the difference about speed levels one way or the other. They WILL notice if the grandkids come over and get on the computer, or someone gains access to their wireless connection and runs their bill out of sight.
Admittedly I don’t know quite know how to quote a reply properly using WordPress …
– in any event, I just wanted to point out that your reasoning is spot on, Phil. And I oppose any form of capping on principle as well.
If “bandwidth abusers” are the REAL problem, why the need for the “Granny Cap”? Per usual, the answer is likely just: $$$ .
What average users understands what a gigabyte vs. a megabyte is anyway, and how could they possibly know how much data is being served to them via casual web surfing – what if they get served up a bunch of flash ads?
Raw network speed to me is a “smokescreen” / “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” situation to making you “comfortable” with the idea of capping / metering (or for those users who just don’t know better). Of course at some level, it matters little if you can download a large file (could be a video, but not necessarily) in 2 minutes vs. 4 minutes, if it just means you will arrive at whatever cap there is, that much sooner.
The point being: there is no reason, to my mind, to ever have to “feel good” about any form of capping. TWC wants you to start feeling warm and fuzzy about them. They are completely arbitrary, artificial restrictions placed on a completely ‘recyclable’ resource.
I understand where you are coming from Phil, and I am 100 percent against caps. But if Time Warner were to find a way to “force” every user, from light to heavy, to pay $90+ a month for internet, im sure they would jump for it. Thankfully though, we have Massa on our side to fight against this, and hopefully soon Time Warner will realize the customer is always right
Why should we pay for all the ads being forced to us? How do we incent Verizon to prioritize Fios in markets where Time Warner has a monopoly? I’d bet they’d get a lot of business.
I just did an online chat with Earthlink……..looks as though they will possibly be implementing caps as well, being that they are using the TW lines…. this SUCKS. TW, just because you have the monopoly in Rochester, don’t think people won’t look elsewhere! It just really sucks that I NEED internet access to work from home, yet there arent any options……
Do you have a screen capture? This would be the first time Earthlink admitted there would be caps because their employees were insisting otherwise prior to today.
If our enterprising readers can get to Earthlink and bring back some captures, this could mean a memo was sent.
Crap…….. I never even thought of my Vonage I have……. that will kill me right there with a cap…….. Bye bye vonage, bye bye RoadRunner!
A lot of non-technical folks with wireless routers are going to be quite surprised when they see their Internet bill because of their neighbors riding along on their access.
This might be a good business for me to start up…… haha
Never got a screen capture…….. dang! I know I did an online chat with them a couple weeks ago and no caps were said to be implemented… I thought I had my out from TW…. well, they just said that they were “still in discussions” with TW but being that the caps were goign to be on the TW lines that they use, they expected they would be implementing the caps as well.
I still say, if TW wants to be fair and cap our Internet, and charge us for how much we use……….. why don’t they do the SAME for the TV Channels.
I seriously only watch about 6 channels if that. Charge me for THOSE CHANNELS only…. not for the 1000′s that I don’t touch!
I just tried to chat with Earthlink again, and talked to a “Sue J.” According to her, no caps are planned. The last guy I just talked to probably got fired for dropping a hint of caps for them too!
Admittedly I don’t know quite know how to quote a reply properly using WordPress …
– in any event, I just wanted to point out that your reasoning is spot on, Phil. And I oppose any form of capping on principle as well.
If “bandwidth abusers” are the REAL problem, why the need for the “Granny Cap”? Per usual, the answer is likely just: $$$ .
What average users understands what a gigabyte vs. a megabyte is anyway, and how could they possibly know how much data is being served to them via casual web surfing – what if they get served up a bunch of flash ads?
Raw network speed to me is a “smokescreen” / “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” situation to making you “comfortable” with the idea of capping / metering (or for those users who just don’t know better). Of course at some level, it matters little if you can download a large file (could be a video, but not necessarily) in 2 minutes vs. 4 minutes, if it just means you will arrive at whatever cap there is, that much sooner.
The point being: there is no reason, to my mind, to ever have to “feel good” about any form of capping. TWC wants you to start feeling warm and fuzzy about them. They are completely arbitrary, artificial restrictions placed on a completely ‘recyclable’ resource.
Sorry, forgot to add great post! Can’t wait to see your next post!