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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Time Warner execs make so much money they can’t relate to the average family or small business owner. It must be nice living in a bubble
Not a bubble, but like the person from Duke Energy on 60 minutes last night they try real hard to live in a vacuum. Either way those execs need to leave their fantasy world, and come back to the real world.
What about At&t testing caps in the same city, we hear nothing about them.
Sorry if I sound like a broken record only cocerned about My ISP. But I wonder why AT&T doing the same thing in the same city doesn’t seem to be an issue.
I had AT&T DSL at my old house, and there was no cap. Ever.
At our new house, we have TWC’s internet. I can’t wait to get the bill this month for service. They can’t seem to keep NBC on the air, and I’ve been watching HEROES streaming online. Shouldn’t I be able to watch it without worry of $1 a GB? I mean, I pay for cable television, and you can’t keep the channels on.
Well, being a Beaumont area customer, I’m currently protesting by not giving Time Warner a single penny of my money. Unfortunately, for my specific location, this means reverting back to the stone age of dial up.
They like to sale this “pay for what you use” crap to people, but it only works in one direction. I suppose it’s the most sensible sounding PR garbage they could come up with to try and sale this metered usage scam to the masses.
So I guess that means if I sign up for their 30 gig plan but only use 10 gigs, I’ll see a discount on my cable bill for the 20 gigs I didn’t use? Yeah, right. Most new customers currently pay for what they use AND don’t use.
They like to whine about having to pay for upgrades, well where have our 44-54 dollars a month been going all of these years?
Maybe if they’d take some of that lobby money they’re spending trying to destroy competition and Net Neutrality, we wouldn’t be so far behind a lot of other first world countries right now.
Can we give any help to Beaumont? It’s the canary in the mine.