After a considerable amount of research, testing, and work, welcome to the new look of Stop the Cap!

Our old theme, Tarski, served us well for nearly a year.  However, it was obviously developed for lighter traffic websites where content didn’t get blown off the front page within 24-48 hours.  Since this issue exploded on April 1st as Time Warner Cable expanded its ludicrous Internet rationing plan, the fast pace here simply became untenable for our readers.  Most people don’t read beyond page two of a website, much less hunt around for articles written two or three weeks earlier.

This new theme allows our editors to keep important issues front and center so readers can obtain information that is still very relevant, but was written a short time ago.

You will also find an increasing number of articles that only display the first paragraph or two, followed by …Continue Reading.  This is to reduce page load time and let you scroll through articles more quickly.  Very important information is often contained “below the jump,” so I strongly encourage you to click on the “Continue Reading” option as often as possible.

Here are some highlights:

• The horizontal menu bar below our heading offers several categories and topics to explore.  Some have drop-down menus that let the reader drill down for specific content, others bring readers all of the articles published here on a particular subject.  Cities tracks issues and developments in each hot spot where capping and consumption tiering has broken out.  Events gives you a rundown of upcoming activities (or prior ones) Stop the Cap! is working on, from public protests to legislative hearings you can attend.  Issues is the meat and potatoes section of our site, identifying important stories in the news.  Multimedia brings you audio and video clips and events.  Providers explores what Internet Service Providers are up to.  On the right side of the bar are a variety of information pages that are under reconstruction and reorganization at the moment.  The Subscribe button lets you access our RSS feed.  We are also planning an e-mail digest/notification system because RSS seems to be falling out of favor.
• The four images beneath the horizontal bar are currently showing night skylines from four of the cities recently impacted by the Time Warner Cable “experiment.”  These images will be changing regularly to highlight important developments, issues, and projects that deserve special focus here.  If you hover your mouse over them, text content will appear, with a clickable link to additional information.  This is not yet functional.
• The left side column will be the home of most of our content, with 10 articles per page.  Right above those articles, a Breaking News box may display late-breaking stories or important Calls to Action deserving your special attention.  The box below each headline will contain a byline, date of publication (and soon time I hope), the categories that apply, and the number of reader comments, if any.
• The middle column currently contains: Recent Headlines, stories selected by our editors for their importance or reader interest, Recent Comments, which display the latest reader input we’ve received, and Popular Content, which consists of articles getting the most reader commentary.  The order of these will be adjusted shortly, with Recent Comments going on top.
• The right column features a Search This Site box, where you can type keywords to locate a specific article, Content Tags, which give you a sense of how frequently a topic is covered here, a Blogroll of links to related websites, and Your Account, for account registration and sign-in/out.  Registering for an account takes seconds and makes submitting comments a lot easier.

It is important to note there have been some visual changes in this theme.  Linked content that you can click on now appears like this here.  The fonts have been changed.  Article headlines are in a sans-serif font which usually will present as Arial.  Article text will now appear in a serif font, typically Georgia.  Quoted text within the body of an article should be easier to read than it was under our old theme.  Please let me know if you experience any problems seeing fonts, reading the text, or any similar anomalies.

Here are the known bugs and problems we are working on:

The theme here is new, and there are some known bugs and issues we are already aware of and are working to resolve.  As they are repaired, the will be stricken from the list.

• Embedded videos from Dailymotion are too big for the column space they are given, and barge into adjacent columns and content.  I will be working to resize these videos over the weekend to get them displayed properly.
• There are some minor formatting problems with thumbnail images and how they present here.  I’ve already avoided using them in places where their presence would be immediately apparent.
• The comment editor does not appear just below the comment you are replying to at this time. Remember, you can reply to the article -and- to individual comments left by others.  You can also edit your comments to correct any grammar problems you missed the first time.  Those with registered accounts here no longer have a time limit to edit their remarks, for your convenience.
• The site is designed to render properly on most browsers and screen sizes, but has problems with Internet Explorer v6.0 in particular.  Mobile browsing is not currently supported, but may be in the future.

What is planned for the future:

• E-mail notification of new comments left on the articles you participate in, as well as a subscription digest/alert to remind you new articles are available. [After commenting, you can now be notified of new replies!]
• Paypal link to allow readers to contribute to help defray server expenses and software costs.
• Various minor fixes and adjustments based on your input.

Please feel free to share your comments, impressions, and suggestions in the Comments section of this article.  I hope this theme change will prove helpful in the days ahead as we continue our fight.

Phillip M. Dampier
Editor, Stop the Cap!

We have begun the transition to our new theme and look.  Over the course of this evening, you will find the site appearing dramatically different.  Not everything will function as the transition occurs, because a lot of manual changes will need to be made to certain features.  In particular, options across the top horizontal bar will probably not be completely functional/look right until the end of the weekend.  Embedded videos will also present a problem until I manually complete re-sizing them to work within the new layout.

You may need to refresh the page and/or empty your browser cache if you find part so the site conflicting with other parts.

There are a few known bugs in the theme, and they are being worked on.  We’ll be tinkering with the site over the coming days to handle them, and anything else that might occur.

Thanks for your patience.

For your convenience, I have compiled a package of media on the 1st Quarter Results for Frontier Communications, including audio from this morning’s investor conference call, and copies of the reports for your review. You must remain on this page to stream audio clips.

A cue sheet is referenced below for the different audio actualities. The complete conference call is available for download as an MP3 file.

… Continue Reading

Frontier Communications reported its 1st quarter 2009 results this morning, demonstrating a growing proportion of its overall business is coming from data products and services.  Frontier is an independent telephone company serving rural and suburban communities across the United States, with its largest market being Rochester, New York.

CEO Maggie Wilderotter put a positive spin on an otherwise lackluster report, showing the company’s revenue had declined when compared with last year’s same quarter results.

“I am very pleased with Frontier Communication’s 2009 first quarter results bolstered by our “Rolling Thunder” promotional campaign,” said Maggie Wilderotter, Frontier Communications Chairman and CEO.

“Frontier surpassed 600,000 High-Speed Internet customers and as of today has surpassed 150,000 DISH Network video customers. Our first quarter High-Speed growth was the best since the first quarter of 2008 and our first quarter DISH video growth was equal to all video subscribers added during the entire year of 2008. We took market share from our cable competition and we improved our customer churn. Access line losses improved for the third consecutive quarter, Wilderotter reported.”

… Continue Reading

It looks like StoptheCap! gets to wrap up North Carolina Week today after four days of intense lobbying and fighting back against telecom lobbies and the clueless legislators duped into doing their bidding (or financially rewarded with a nice campaign contribution.)

We’ve learned several lessons from this battle, which we managed to win on both fronts, thanks to the help of everyone who got involved:

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Gov. Jim Hunt

INFORMATION HIGHWAYS ANNOUNCEMENT
Governor Jim Hunt

May 10, 1993

Today North Carolina takes a giant step forward into our future.

This Fall, North Carolina will link up the most advanced telecommunications network of its kind in the world — a network that will ensure that the state will be a leader in the 21st century.

The network will reach into every corner of our great state. It will connect our cities with our towns, our schoolhouses and our courthouses, our hospitals and clinics — our people all across the state.

Early in this century, North Carolina came to be known as the “Good Roads State.” We discovered a new technology — and started paving roads. Those roads began moving people and products in ways never before possible.

Today we reach out for a new technology — a new kind of highway. The North Carolina Information Highway.

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I was unable to attend this morning’s meeting of the Senate Commerce Committee, but just received a text message from Senator Don Vaughn, who represents me, indicating they sent SB 1004 to the “study committee.”

It has been a wild ride the last two days.  There was an estimated 150 people in the House Committee meeting yesterday.  Everyone from ordinary consumers like us, mayors of cities interested in our fight, to the pro-business/cable “Americans for Prosperity” who showed up wearing anti-communism buttons.

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It’s back again.  For at least the last decade, the trade press has speculated about whether Cablevision would survive as an independent cable operator in an increasingly concentrated industry, where the big players get bigger, and the smaller operators exit the cable business.

Charles Dolan, Cablevision CEO

The Dolan family, which has owned Cablevision since its founding on Long Island, is routinely said to be cash crunched, looking for a healthy cash bonanza on the way out the door, or dealing with internal family dramas which pit those advocating a sell off against those who wish to keep the business running.  When Cablevision launched its Voom HD satellite service, which turned out to be a disaster and money pit, the intensity of speculation achieved a fever pitch, and that was several years ago.  The Dolan family still runs Cablevision.

The New York Times sports page, of all places, is the latest home of pondering a sell off of Cablevision’s remaining cable systems to Time Warner Cable to raise cash for the Dolan family’s sports ventures, including ownership of the Rangers, Knicks, and Madison Square Garden.  It was all borne from a single line in the latest earnings report from Cablevision, which indicated the company intended to “explore the spinoff of its Madison Square Garden business.”

Cablevision's Service Area in Northeastern US

Cablevision’s bread-and-butter business is supplying cable television, broadband lines and Internet phone service to 3.1 million subscribers in the New York metropolitan area. The company, based in Bethpage, N.Y., has faced stiff competition from Verizon, which has spent heavily to build a fiber-optic network that competes with it and Time Warner Cable.

Industry analysts have speculated that Cablevision may eventually sell the entire company to Time Warner Cable, or sell its sports entertainment group to raise cash to compete in the cable business.

“Cablevision watchers [and we’d put ourselves in that category] have long pondered possible endgames, and the notion that the Dolans would retain ownership of MSG and the New York sports teams long after the rest of the assets had been divested has always been viewed as among the most likely outcomes,” Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research wrote in a report after Cablevision’s earnings release Thursday morning.

People have grown old pondering questions like this.  Cablevision is positioned to compete just fine with Verizon FiOS after completing an aggressive rollout of DOCSIS 3.  Cablevision does not compete with Time Warner Cable at all.  Industry boosters have traditionally cheered on consolidation efforts, so it’s no surprise even the smallest tidbit will restart the Spec-U-Plex all over again.  Should Cablevision decide to sell, Time Warner Cable would almost certainly be the buyer, because their largest cluster of systems are adjacent to existing Time Warner franchise areas.  But I wouldn’t be in a hurry to shove the Dolan family out the door.

The companion bill in the North Carolina Senate that would have effectively killed municipal networks across the state has gone the way of the House bill HB 1252 — into the black hole of the “study committee.”  While the issue may yet re-emerge after it “has been studied,” it’s dead for now.  Thank you to everyone in North Carolina who responded with an outpouring of calls and e-mails to elected officials in the Senate after big cable tried a sneak attack to ram this through this morning.

This is your third victory for consumer rights in less than a month.  We’re on a roll!

Sneaking in the backdoor - the Senate companion bill scheduled for tomorrow morning!

[12:40am ET Thursday Morning - Added More Contact Information, Expanded Article] I have just been informed big cable and their lobbying friends are going to try to pull a fast one on us in North Carolina.  Sometimes you successfully defeat them at the front door while they sneak in the back.  That is precisely what they are going to try tomorrow morning.

Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Manager for the city of Wilson, just informed us that Senate Bill 1004, the companion hit-piece on consumers to HB 1252, has been moved up for consideration in a Senate committee tomorrow morning bright and early.

In a sneak attack, the industry hopes to breeze through the approval process on the Senate side after failing in the North Carolina House of Representatives.  So unless you get on the phone right now and make those calls, today’s victory could become tomorrow’s defeat.  Allowing big cable and telco lobbies to get their foot jammed in the back door is a consumer catastrophe.

It’s clear the industry people have already camped out in several offices and have brought the pizza and coffee.  When Bowman called one of the chairperson’s offices to confirm the time, the administrative assistant literally handed the phone to a cable company employee to explain the bill! How nice of them.

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