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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95% of all statistics are made up on the spot!!!
Don’t feed the TWC monster!!! Cut the cord!
Some people are so f***ing dumb.
Heavy gamers will NOT be feeling the caps in any real way. Unless of course your plan to game on a system like OnLive, which streams video. Online gameplay exchanges very small packets, the amount of information transferred by a game played online for an entire month wouldn’t sum to more than a fraction of a gigabyte. Online games are just not very data intensive…
People need to stop trying to use this as a talking point, even the heaviest of gamers will simply not be affected, no one will have to cancel their xbox live account or game less… it’s just the truth of the matter…
Those who do need to be worried, people who watch/download video online, stream lots of music, use online storage solutions, use P2P networks (legally or illegally)
I am metering my usage playing an on line mmo. So far this April I have used 1.6gb of data and this includes e-mail, program downloads, browsing and game updates…no heavy gamers for an average mmo (EQ2)are not affected.
GJ
I installed SurplusMeter (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20884/surplusmeter)
on my Mac. It’s free.
In the last 12 hours (1/2 day) just with e-mail and this site active and of course the constant buzzing of the modem, I’ve consumed half of my daily projected allotment based on 40 gig/month.
How’s that stack up with your “fraction of a gig”?
That fits with what the Rochester TWC “Residential Account Specialist” told me yesterday in what was described as visiting the customers in her area to make sure everything is ok with their service. The Rochester spin, however, is that the cap would only impact the upper 14% who download 2 or 3 movies a day.
It was a pleasant conversation but all I received were assurances that the cap would not have impacted me using RR Lite — even though I may be actively connected for hours on end — and should I wish to increase the speed, the next level of service is only . . .
Based on my results above, folks on the lowest tier, 1 gig – correct me if I’m wrong – would be in overage daily.
I mean, you are wrong… there are a lot of people that will not transfer more than a Gigabyte in a month. They are also people who don’t really use much of the internet. A gigabyte in a month is about equivalent to 35MB/day. This number can easily be more than some people need.
On the other hand some users will blow through that in a matter of seconds…
It’s all based on what people do with the internet…
That TW Mouthpiece has really been practicing her body language performance.