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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IF you have not seen it yet, the new Frontier newspaper add is great. They used quotes from TW’s press release, made reference to a cap free internet and changed the Frontier phone number to 54NoCap.
is it online anywhere?
I could not find it anywhere.
Three-card Monte is Time Warner’s favorite game
Article on the TWC stuff on the NY Times Business Section, Its a very good article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20isp.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Interesting article. Thanks for the link.
2016: The future of the Cable/Television/Phone industry – A Consumer’s Dream
Feel free to make this into a headline: I don’t really know that it fits as a comment to anything existing.
The other day I noticed something peculiar on my DirecTV receiver. They had upgraded my receiver to 1080p resolution overnight (the same resolution used in Blu-Ray DVD’s.) I don’t have a Blu-Ray player, but I can assume the picture is incredible. I went to see what programming was available in 1080p so I could check it out, and I wasn’t surprised to see that right now, it was just a handful of movies. Makes sense, since I’m quite sure that no station currently broadcasts their content in 1080p. What truly surprised me was the selection. Yes Man with Jim Carrey was already available. The release to 1080p On Demand rental through DirecTV was the same day as the Blu-Ray DVD release. Instant in home delivery had caught up, in this instance, with the drive to the video store. Technology has continued to allow us to progress to a society where information doesn’t need to be purchased in a store, and then given back to the store the next day.
I had two options for watching the movie. I could go on my computer and order a 24-hour pass of Yes Man (quick movie review, Jim Carrey isn’t Ace Ventura anymore, but this movie was stupid and overall pretty funny and entertaining, his love interest in the movie who I think is the girl from Weeds is sneaky hot, overall I liked it even though I thought I wouldn’t.), or I could hook my receiver up to my router via Ethernet cable and download it. Obviously, it was much easier to use the remote to order on screen. So while I consider myself technologically progressive, eventually I can see many more people making a similar decision, and that’s sure to run up their Time Warner gas gauges.
By the time we’re getting around to electing our next president, the way we enjoy home entertainment could be revolutionized. Movies in 1080p could be just the first step. I’ve said it before; the compact disc is not the future. No matter how much storage capacity you give it, or how high you make the resolution that can be carried on it, the disc itself will still have 2 flaws that it can never surpass. It is a flimsy, easily damaged medium, making it a poor choice for long term data backup, and it is not easily writable. The future of removable media is SD. It’s already integrated into personal media, digital cameras, laptops, cell phones, video game consoles, and other places where content is created by the consumer support this medium. With the dawn of SDXC cards supporting storage up to 2TB, it’s hard to argue that these little cards are the next big thing.
Consider this simple comparison: Your old NES games from 1985 will still play just fine if you can find a console to play them on. However, your maltreated copy of NBA Live ’97 for PlayStation? Forget it. Not only is the disc scratched beyond recognition, but the old PS2 you were going to try to play it in doesn’t work anymore. The laser that reads the disc is out of alignment, and good luck getting that fixed for free. All I have to do to get the old NES working is shoot a little canned air in the hole and I’m good to go. I’ve upgraded from the mouth cannon I used as a child. The point to all this is that the cartridge medium does not scratch and is a much more plausible standard for technology going forward.
With the rise of these little storage cards comes the decline of the provider based DVR. A little known fact is that we as consumers have the right to purchase or even build our own descrambling box, separate from the one provided by our television provider. As long as we continue to pay our provider for access to the content, this is perfectly legal. Right now the best example of this is obtaining a TV Tuner card on a PC and using the Windows Media Center to turn your PC into a defacto DVR. Another example is TiVo. They provide descramblers that work for different platforms already. What hasn’t been done is a universal descrambler, with software that can work for any provider, with multiple sets of bios upgraded via the internet.
By 2016 someone will have built this. And not only will the access to cable and satellite be obtainable via these boxes, but the lineup will be as well. No more paying monthly fees to ‘rent’ a box from your cable or satellite provider. And possibly, no more paying monthly fees to view a bundle of channels from your cable or satellite provider, either. Content providers could provide subscription based access to their internet feeds of their stations directly to the consumer via the internet, and these new smart boxes would tune to these stations, authorize and stream the content right on our TVs. Our new boxes would be able to digitally record anything to come through the pipes, just as our DVR’s did, except these would be wired to handle SDXC storage cards, so our storage of this media would be infinite. And soon, these boxes would become so popular that their functionality would be built right into our televisions, delivered via wi-fi, simplifying our TV hookup so that only a power cable will get it up and running.
Sure, we’ll still be paying $14.95 a month for HBO, but will we still be paying $69/month for our basic tier channels? No way. Getting access to the Italian language channels will no longer mean you’ll have to pay for and subsidize the Spanish, French, Russian, Taiwanese, Swahili, and German speaking channels as well. Most of us now have packages that include hundreds of channels, but we only watch programming on about 25 of them, on average. Those channels could provide feeds via the internet at a higher rate than they are charging the cable companies, but could be cheaper altogether for those of us who want to ‘itemize’ our channel lineup. And better yet, we’ll be able to call our cable or satellite provider and tell them that we no longer need their TV package. We’re getting everything we want via the internet.
Plus by then perhaps we’d see the resurgence of the home phone. VoIP would replace traditional phone service, and we’d see the first video phones. With secured home WiFi being more reliable than ever, VoIP could stand for Video over IP; if we can already have webcam chats using some of our PC’s resources, imagine how much better the quality and reliability could be on a dedicated device. In fact, all of our data could be delivered to us via the internet in new and creative ways.
For too long in our society people have been making a killing breaking down what is essentially data and breaking it into small pieces, doling it out to us in small quantities over different mediums. Why should we need to drive to a video store to rent a movie? Why should we need to stop at a Barnes & Noble on the way home to pick up a book? Why should we kill millions of trees every year to read the newspaper, when we can have all this information at our fingertips digitally? The next time you’re purchasing something in a store, think to yourself… “Is this actually a product? Did I need to leave my house to get this? Could I have purchased this digitally at a better price?”
Of course, if we allow cable providers that also give us internet, or telephone providers that also give us TV and internet to dictate the terms to us, to develop policies like broadband usage caps and media blackout regulations, to protect their interests in current technology, we’ll never see the technology of the future. Because these companies have grown so large, they’ve taken a “this is the way we do things” attitude toward innovation. Sure, they’ve come up with some good ideas, but they find little ways to make them cost us exponentially more. They feel the need to attach a monthly fee to everything, and that’s just wrong. They charge monthly for DVR service. Essentially, a DVR is a VCR with a different storage medium. So why are we charged monthly to use it? We already pay a monthly fee to rent the equipment. It makes no sense, unless you’re a company that is comfortable with making a profit the same way year after year until the end of time.
It should come as no surprise, then, that they try to institute these caps. What these caps will effectively do is kill the vision I have for 2016. They’ll be able to slow innovation by making these new ideas too expensive to implement, thus keeping consumers limited to the same lousy options they have now. So while I have this grandiose dream for the future only a few short years away, more and more it feels like I’m about to wake up disappointed, because stalwarts like TWC just will not change.
Just think… if it weren’t for net neutrality, nobody would be able to access this Web site (unless they would wait for it to load at 1kb per minute).
I don’t believe net neutrality even exists as a law at this point. I may be wrong.
I believe you are correct, ‘net neutraility’ was introduced but I believe it was shot down by ‘special interest groups’, (read cable/phone companies.)
The group American Consumer Institute (ACI) helped shoot it down. They’re the ones promoting “usage tiers are good” now on behalf of the telcom industry.
Well, if not “net neutrality”, then the absence of “not net neutrality”. What I meant to get across is that if content providers had to pay bribes to TWC, sites like these would be inconvenient to access and a page load might take a minute or two.
http://billniemeyer.tv/images/cable-share-tv-hhs-2009-04.jpg
Cable TV subscriptions are falling like there’s no tomorrow!!! Check out the graph.
Shouldn’t TWC have release their Q1 report a few days ago? has anyone gotten a hold of it
Not untill the 29th.
http://finance.aol.com/earnings/time-warner-cable-inc/twc/nys
If cable subscribership is on the decline (and it is according to the above graph) that only makes it all the more likely that the Cable companies concerns over free HD video on the web is a factor of consideration in this teired pricing business. They probably see the trend of less cable subscription and the growing shift to the internet and are asking themselves how can we maintain and grow or profits with these new trends?
You must be a rocket scientist.
That’s uncalled for. I was merely pointing out that the graph supports the view that they are worried about lost subscribers to internet.
TWC pee in you Wheaties this morning?
Everyone knows exactly why TWC is doing this. You’re reiterating what everyone has been saying since the dawn of internet streaming of video. It was only a matter of time until someone did it.
Jason’s just upset at the prospect of having to watch porn at work. It’s just not gonna work out in his cubicle, with all those noisy people staring at his screen, you know?
I reported your lame attempt at sarcasm. It serves no purpose to forward our view on this issue.
Here’s an interesting article I saw posted on broadband reports.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163344/why_metered_broadband_would_work.html
Lets not forget the large drop in cable subscribers is also due in large part to the economy, and not necessarily related to the net. When someone loses their job, cable is often one of the first things to go.
I’m not surprised to see the company regrouping. The gall factor wafting off them is suggestive of somebody high up panicking over Netflix and Hulu, and realizing if they don’t try to implement caps soon they might not get the chance.
Frankly I like cable TV and I don’t watch a lot of shows online. It’s tedious to watch stuff chained to the computer. I have a nice TV, and darn it I’m gonna use it. While a Roku sounds vaguely interesting, I don’t want to switch to a rental model for TV. I just like to be able to turn it on and see my favorite shows, and record them if I plan to watch them later.
It’s obvious to a casual observer that cable companies are taking a hit because they’ve made digital TV too pricey for a lot of people, and their on-demand services are still in the first generation and don’t compete well with the content available online. If they could improve on-demand service by making more stuff available (particularly, anything you might have missed by less than 24 hours) and easier to access, and if they lowered the cost of digital cable services, they would see a boom in use and a boom in profits. Instead they raise the bills year after year and wonder why people balk at the prices. I realize negotiating over content is not simple, but the way cable companies handle content is still very much stuck in a 1980s model.
Bingo! You’re right in saying “realizing if they don’t try to implement caps soon they might not get the chance”. Right on the money.
The FTC is looking in to cracking down, so they figure they better jam the price gouging in within the next year, or they’re stuck. Hopefully the FTC starts treating them like a utility.
I don’t mind paying per GB; $0.25 per gigabyte is a fair price–not $1.00 over 60 plus $45 flat. Using the Comcast 250 GB cap as an example, at $0.25 a gig, the bill would be $62.50. That sounds fair. A $150 bill will never be swallowed down by the public. I estimated my usage–using Rokario’s FREE and nifty Bandwidth Monitor 2– at around 7 GB a day. I would have to pay the $150 for unlimited under TWC’s stupid plans for my usage. But I won’t. I’ll go to DSL first, and then dial-up. Test me.
I do mind paying per GB, just like I would mind if I had to pay for each mile I drove down the street, or each piece of poop I flushed down my toilet. I don’t mind paying for better bandwidth, but if they’re gonna offer me 10mbps they ought to let me take advantage of it.
This is exactly the attitude TWC wants to see from us, they want us to make concessions. They want us to say, well, caps aren’t so bad if they’re a little higher, or we can deal with the overage charges if you reduce them a little. The fact is, it will never ever be a fair pricing model to put a cap on or charge by consumption for an infinite resource such as the internet. If it is inevitable then it is a sad state of affairs in this country that businesses can run wild on consumers like this.
Again i guess its going to be time shortly to make a change to Frontier or Earthlink, i am going to cheer as I see customers from Time Warner leave in droves, and I hope WE ALL Stick to our guns and stick it to them hard. They are going to get whats coming to them. I Just need to find another provider for my TV and i will go back to frontier for my phone. So instead of keeping me for 2 services aside from internet they will get NONE of my business because they punish you for dumping one of 1 services in their package.
“Frankly I like cable TV and I don’t watch a lot of shows online. It’s tedious to watch stuff chained to the computer. I have a nice TV, and darn it I’m gonna use it.”
I feel the same way, but I also know that my next TV will accept input from a PC. And that trend is growing strong. I’ll likely build a simple PC that will allow me to interface my current over-the-air signal with streaming internet video. Internet based TV is the way of the future. On demand high def is here. The next step is internet networks. Imagine iABC or iNBC. Imagine the money HBO could have made sell the Soprano’s to viewers for a couple bucks per episode without the cable company getting it’s cut for delivery.
The thing is about Time Warner is they have the resources to make the next set top cable box. Make it Internet capable.
Make it stream Netflix like the XBox 360 for a small price (with the 360 you need to be a gold subscriber to use netflix), make the Hulu channel or the YouTube channel or whatever for a small fee.
They can do it, but they are stuck in their current business model and can’t seem to think outside the box.
No matter how much the TWC talking heads try to convince us otherwise, cable and broadband signals use the same TUBES and should be treated the same. Because they are the same. I just took a look at my router, and it just so happens to be using the cable jack on which I could receive a cable TV signal. (But I don’t… haven’t had cable for at least two years).
If you want to price on consumption, you better be willing to price cable TV the same way. Not everyone is happy about subsidizing BET, MTV, VH1, you know??? I only want to pay for FOX, FOX News, and The History Channel. I would pay $5 a month for this. Sound fair, TWC? No? Awwww… how come???
IMHO if I may. A Classic in the making. Everybody is broke. As a poster above pointed out if you’re now making $7 an hour a $150 plan is not in your future. I still think regulation is needed and some will disagree. Ok no problem this is a free speech website. I will never stab somebody in the back but at times I may ask a person what they based their claim on. It’s a big world and that person just may point me to a site that has a good view. We choose what we read and we choose how we judge it. There is common ground here and everybody has an equal voice to share.