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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I would like to say thank you to this website. I live in Virginia, but can’t stand it when big business sticks it to the “little guy”. With this site, I can stay informed (in the unlikely event that this will happen to my town [we have Comcast Cable and Verizon FIOS here]) with everything that is happening. Keep up the good work and keep fighting the good fight.
I’m an NC resident.
Can we get a list of NC legislators and how they voted or whatever they did to these 2 bills? When the next election comes, I want to know who supported these things.
I’m sure that can be dug out from somewhere.. We can also thank those that sent this bill to the “study committee”. I hope it dies there.
Every vote in these committees was a voice vote, so no records exist of how a legislator voted. However, the bills’ sponsors are listed on the NCGA website.
Note that not all legislators who agreed to sponsor the bills necessarily maintained their support for the bills. On the other hand, some enthusiastically supported them. They are the ones where you should focus your efforts.
Good job people!!
I think this is what you might want. Sponsors of the House Bill
Sponsors
Primary: Harrell; Jones; Avila; Tillis;
Co: Bell; Cole; Crawford; Current; Dollar; Earle; Guice; Gulley; Hilton; Holliman; Johnson; Justus; Lucas; Neumann; Sager; Steen;
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2009&BillID=H1252
Sponsors of Senate Bill
Sponsors
Primary: David W. Hoyle;
Co: Debbie A. Clary;
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2009&BillID=S1004
Or at least started this whole thing. Might have to do some digging to find how people fell on a side.
Congrats to the NC folks. Glad to see you won these two battles. TWC stirred up the hornets nest and the cable industry might discover that their party is over before it’s all said and done.
If we all stay vigilant and active the industry will be forced to come around.
And I need to thank TWC for “educating me”.
If they hadn’t tried to roll-out the cap, I wouldn’t have been paying attention and heard about the anti-municpal broadband bill in our legislature.
My guess is that TWC will try to get revenge on us North Carolinians but the door remains open for municipal telecommunications service so I suppose it will be at their own peril.
By the way, who would you contact in your city government to push the idea of municipal service similar to Greenlight?
I sent a bunch of emails (28) out to the committee this morning. I received one reply.
I wrote about my email and the response on my blog: http://bit.ly/7EF3I
Thanks for the list of click-able email addresses! They were a big time saver.
stopthecap.com gets results
Phil, you are a force to be reckoned with!
Way to pull the community together!
Thanks,
Josh Beck
If you want to get your community interested in building its own community broadband system, let your Town Manager, Council or Mayor know. There is federal stimulus broadband money ($7 billion) dedicated just to this purpose. For more information you can contact SEATOA too at seatoa@ci.charlotte.nc.us
Good work, citizens of North Carolina! And yes I suppose that the TWC “education campaign” is partly to be thanked for getting people to pay attention to this website.
Municipal broadband is one way of many that the U.S. can promote wider access to broadband Internet and therefore stay competitive on the global stage.
Thank you Phil for hosting this blog – keep on keepin’ on (and keep up the vigilance)!