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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Usage insurance?!?! I ‘LOL’d!!!
OMG, talking about ridiculous. I think, if I were a customer of theirs, it would be better if they just pulled a gun on me and robbed me instead. That way, I wouldn’t feel bad about being robbed.
this sounds like the same “insurance” the mob would charge you…..a.k.a extortion
Usage Caps must be a dream to any provider who has established them. This gives them ultimate control over creating and charging consumer for all kinds of pseudo “products/services”.
Looks like Bell’s getting after everyone complaining about their caps. Cutting the caps almost by 80% is a very bad move. So to home users, this was a critical hit. To Bell, it was an instant win.
Seriously, Canadians need to organize and boycott these ISP’s up there. Hurt them where it really hurts, their wallets!!
Am I reading this wrong or is this actually a better deal than that proposed by Time Warner as once you pay the $30 in overages you are unlimited and can freely download as much as you want. It actually sounds kind of fair only being 30 dollars more to download as much as you want, with those not needing to download as much as desired not needing to pay that fee. I wouldn’t actually mind the canadian system, sounds like they are getting good speeds and the overages are not that bad being a maximum of 30 and then the all you can eat buffet begins again. Time Warner should seriously consider this model as it would be fair to all users arguably, although the initial caps are a little low for what is being paid for the service.
Rogers asks for up to $25 in overlimit fees, Bell asks for $30 in overlimit fees. The reason I last heard for this was that Canadian federal law limits such fees, although I haven’t confirmed that. I am aware Canadian ISPs want to see such limits removed, so they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
Keep in mind, these providers also actively throttle your speeds for applications they don’t like, particularly peer to peer, which can drop to 250kbps speeds as they see fit.
South of the border, there are no limits for overlimit fees, which is why no ISP trying to charge them seems to have limits.
Just as with “usage insurance,” once one gets the establishment of overcharging schemes in place, whatever tempering of them they do at the outset to make them more palatable can always be removed later. So what costs $5 today may cost $50 tomorrow. Once you let them get away with charging them in the first place, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll jack the prices up.
It’s FAR better to avoid ever allowing ISPs to engage in ANY Internet Overcharging schemes in the first place, versus arguing on their terms over what is supposedly “fair.”
Remember, no ISP is on the verge of Chapter 11 here. The large national ones remain insanely profitable. They just want to take it to the next level of profit pillaging.
[...] online video around a model they own and control, or who simply want to throw a Money Party by inventing new ways to charge people more money for exactly the same service they get [...]
[...] to broadband, then throwing a penalty fee on your bill… unless you sign up and pay for their “insurance” plan to protect you from those [...]
[...] lower today’s 250GB limit? Perhaps, but there is no evidence of anything imminent. It has been done before in Canada and sold as a “money-saver,” offered with an “insurance policy” Bell had [...]
[...] some providers like Bell, the trick is to gradually reduce your usage allowance, exposing more and more customers to overlimit fees (the company even sells an insurance plan to [...]