Cable Montana is now Optimum West, Cablevision’s marketing name for the cable systems it acquired from Bresnan Communications.

Earlier today, customers in Billings, Laurel, Park City and Columbus were able to start using upgraded cable, phone, and broadband equipment on the updated cable system.  More than 2,200 Montanans were introduced to the Optimum name in a mailing sent to neighborhoods where service has been upgraded.  But all of the new equipment that comes with the service has created considerable confusion for long-standing Bresnan customers who have been using older Bresnan equipment for years.

The changes have been overwhelming for those used to Bresnan’s modest level of service for more than a decade.  Cablevision, best known for its Optimum service in suburban New York City, Connecticut, and New Jersey, has brought an enormous increase in programming, and improvements in broadband service, for many customers.

“All existing customers in Laurel, Park City and Columbus will be upgraded to Optimum TV by July 20, which will deliver many more channels, including access to more than 100 channels of free HD (high definition), thousands of titles of video on demand and other benefits like faster high-speed Internet and a better phone service with lower prices and more features than are available from any other provider,” says a Cablevision spokesperson.

When it works properly.

The Laurel Outlook reports some customers frustrated with the changeover have found themselves at local cable stores trying to sort out all the problems:

One Laurel customer installed his modem, but was not receiving service. A visit to the Laurel office did not provide answers to his satisfaction, so he drove to the Billings office on Monad Road, where he received two telephone numbers to call for tech support. He called one of the numbers, followed a menu, and was able to troubleshoot with a technician to get his Internet up and running.

A second customer installed her set-top box but was not receiving Optimum TV channels. She called the 1-800 number provided in the mailing packet, but technicians were unable to walk her through the necessary steps to receive service. Frustrated, she drove to the Laurel walk-in center on West First Street and made an appointment for a technician to come to her home. She discovered that not only must she program her television with the new Optimum channel numbers, she must also program the TV-top box with the correct numbers. After doing so, she was able to receive the new channels.

Many customers are likely going to need to reprogram their televisions more than once.  When the upgrades are complete, Cablevision says it plans to unify channel lineups across the area.

A Boston firm believes broadband is something best shared, and plans to put that notion to the test by bringing free access to wireless broadband to anyone in range of its equipment.

NetBlazr starts with gigabit fiber from Cogent Communications, and then delivers free or low-cost access to any customer that is willing to do two things:

1. Spend $299 for their basic installation kit, which includes a high speed router, three antennas, and some cabling;
2. Use the included equipment to receive service from NetBlazr and agree to share it with anyone in range of the wireless antennas included in the kit.

Reception of the wireless broadband signal, comparable to Business Class DSL, comes with no ongoing fees.  If you want dedicated, guaranteed speeds, NetBlazr will sell them to you at an added cost.  The more customers exchanging signals, the more robust and faster the network becomes, says NetBlazr CEO Jim Hanley.

Although the service is currently designed to operate for business customers in downtown Boston, Hanley sees the possibility of crowdsourcing a broadband platform eventually large enough to cover residential homes and businesses across the country, at almost no expense.

The venture is new, however, and the company’s FAQ warns businesses not to depend entirely on NetBlazr for dependable broadband just yet.

Because it’s still new, the quality and level of service is highly dependent on what kind of signal one can receive from the next nearest business that belongs to the cooperative.  If you are the only one for blocks around, the signal could be marginal to non-existent.

Such communal networks only work when they reach a critical mass of cooperative members to blanket areas with coverage.  At the moment, that means Boston’s Back Bay and downtown, where high-rise buildings help get the signals around densely populated neighborhoods.

NetBlazr’s marketing brochure touts the service can deliver symmetrical speeds up to 60Mbps for free, and is particularly suited to offices that need additional broadband resources, but don’t want to sign a pricey upgrade agreement with incumbent providers like Verizon.

NetBlazr’s competitors like the aforementioned phone company are reacting with a shrug of the shoulders so far.

Verizon spokesman Phil Santoro: “Competition is always healthy and the market for Internet service is already highly competitive.”

“We aren’t familiar with this company’s business proposition, but I can tell you that Comcast already offers secure and reliable high speed Internet,” spokesman Marc Goodman told the Boston Herald.

Earlier efforts to share Internet services in neighborhoods through Wi-Fi ran into trouble when Internet Service Providers found out.  Virtually all providers specifically prohibit customers from sharing their residential service with non-paying customers beyond the property line.  But since NetBlazr arranges for its own access, this stumbling block is overcome.

Company officials say they have enough connectivity to support the demand, although business users don’t traditionally pound networks with peer-to-peer file requests or lots of online video, so how NetBlazr will ultimately perform in a residential setting remains to be seen.

The company has impressed technology mavens at the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange.  NetBlazr won this year’s “Best Bootstrapped Start-up” award.  It was also a finalist for the $1 million MassChallenge competition held earlier this year.

Hanley’s ultimate goal is to provide cheap, commodity Internet access, and thinks within five years his idea will be a major game-changer for how broadband service is delivered in the United States.

netBlazr CEO Jim Hanley indicts America’s broadband duopoly and says direct action through new competition will solve the problem faster than public policy can.  Hanley also explains how his service works. (10 minutes)

Meigs County, Ohio

Connect Ohio, one of the many state chapters working with telecommunications industry-backed Connected Nation, has released its 2011 Technology Assessment about how the state is adopting broadband technology.

Despite celebrating improvements, large parts of rural Ohio still do not receive any kind of broadband service, especially from the state’s dominant provider AT&T, one of the companies that has traditionally backed Connected Nation.

The friendly relations these broadband groups maintain with their sponsors results in reports that strenuously avoid any direct criticism of providers for ignoring rural Ohio, particularly in the southeastern part of the state where broadband is especially difficult to obtain.

Connect Ohio’s findings, mostly provided by voluntary data from Internet Service Providers and respondents to various surveys, downplays rural Ohio’s broadband drought:

Statewide, 5% of Ohio residents report that broadband is not available where they live, 85% say with certainty that broadband is available, and 10% do not know whether broadband service is available.  By comparison, Connect Ohio’s provider-validated Broadband Service Inventory found that 1.7% of households do not have terrestrial fixed broadband service access.

The disparity in Connect Ohio’s numbers is especially apparent in rural Meigs County, located in southeastern Ohio.

“Geographically speaking, nearly two-thirds of Meigs County does not have easy access to affordable broadband,” Meigs County Economic Development Director Perry Varnadoe told The Daily Sentinel. “In terms of infrastructure, access to broadband is just as important as water and sewer service to businesses.”

Varnadoe thinks the few major providers that do offer service in the county are basically done expanding their service areas, and Varnadoe believes broadband adoption has reached a ceiling in Meigs County.

With much of the county bypassed for DSL or cable modem service, the only exception to this is fixed wireless service from New Era Broadband.  Unfortunately, it’s a costly alternative to traditional DSL.

New Era Broadband of Coolville is a Wireless ISP

New Era delivers up to 1.5Mbps service for $60 a month with a $200 installation fee and a two-year service agreement, and provides service in the vicinity of the community of Racine.

The company is still waiting on a $2.9 million grant to expand service to an additional 3,000 residents, mostly in the area of Five Points, which only has access to dial-up Internet.

Only about half the residents of Belmont, Jefferson, Monroe and Harrison counties have broadband connections at home, the study also found.  The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register placed most of the blame for that on residents not being particularly interested in the Internet, but service and cost are likely more important factors, as cable and DSL service is also spotty in those counties as well.  If there is a computer in the home, there is a demand for broadband service, especially in households where children find Internet access increasingly important to complete study work.

For most residents, it has become a waiting game to see who will deliver access, if anyone will.  In most of Ohio, customers look to the phone or cable company for access.  Rural Ohio lacks good cable broadband coverage, and DSL from the phone company first requires an interest in providing the service, and AT&T has not proven to be aggressive in rural communities in the state.

In fact, the phone company has been seeking approval to discontinue providing rural landline service at a time and date of its choosing.  If the landline goes, the chance for wired DSL goes with it.

Phillip "No Data Tsunami Over Here" Dampier

As the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission enters into the second week of hearings on Internet Overcharging, there have really only been a few minor surprises.

First, and most importantly, when voting consumers pay attention, regulators start asking questions and get aggressive.  This is the same commission that only a year ago gave the green light to wholesale usage-based billing (UBB) — a practice that would guarantee every ISP in Canada dropped flat rate Internet service.  After a half-million Canadians signed Openmedia.ca’s petition opposing UBB, the Harper government (and the opposition parties) got interested, and the Commission got an earful from Industry Minister Tony Clement, who was simply appalled at this kind of Internet pricing.

Second, this round of CRTC hearings has found Bell — UBB’s biggest proponent — largely unrepentant.  It still supports charging people for their usage, even as the company’s foundation for that premise — bandwidth congestion — erodes away.  Providers can claim anything they like, but they cannot invent facts.  By Friday, most of the commissioners realized what consumer advocates had been saying all along — there is no great bandwidth crisis in Canada.  No data tsunami. No exaflood in the zettabyte era.  Growth is exponential to be sure, and Canadians have a passionate affair with their Internet connectivity, but one that remains easily managed when providers make regular, affordable investments in upgrading their networks.

Bell’s week-long contention that congestion pricing was paramount to managing Canada’s bandwidth finally fell apart when CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein noted Bell’s trinity of regional entities managed Internet usage completely differently, even though the traffic passed through the exact same network:

• 1) Bell Aliant, which provides service in the Atlantic provinces, has no usage caps at all.
• 2) Bell Quebec provides service with a considerably more generous usage allowance than given to those customers in Ontario, even those just on the other side of the border.
• 3) Bell Ontario’s usage cap is downright stingy compared with Quebec, most likely because it competes in Ontario with an equally stingy provider — Rogers Cable.

With these facts in evidence, Bell was finally forced to concede it was “competition” not “congestion” that brought three different treatments of Internet usage.  So much for “network congestion.”

Bell’s competitors also hung the telecom giant out to dry when it was their turn to testify.  Each in turn would claim that congestion presented no problems for their respective networks.  Telus, Rogers and Shaw all denied they shared Bell’s usage problems.  That is not to say any of them were in favor of restoring flat-rate Internet access.

Instead, they argued, UBB represented a combination of “stimulating investment” in broadband networks (already insanely profitable for all-comers) and “peak usage pricing,” a hybridized argument about congestion during peak usage periods.  Since some wholesale broadband services are priced at peak capacity requirements, some argue UBB helps keep that peak usage manageable during prime time.

Unfortunately, the peak usage pricing argument undermines itself because Canadian providers enforce usage limits 24/7, not only during peak usage periods.  This means there is no incentive for users to offload their heaviest usage to times when the network experiences low demand.  Independent providers continue to argue “peak usage pricing” may be defensible in certain circumstances, but it’s not even a possibility under Bell’s proposed wholesale UBB scheme.

The record being constructed from Canada’s hearings have direct implications for Americans, as the basic business models for cable and phone providers are similar in both countries.  The death rattle of the “congestion” myth is good news for North American broadband users who have long rolled their eyes at hysterical arguments about data floods and capacity crises.

The CRTC still needs to hear from some additional speakers, and we are under no illusion they will completely reverse themselves on Internet Overcharging schemes, but this represents a clear-cut case that consumers need not simply sit back and take abusive pricing.  Consumer activism can make a real difference in the broadband policies of both the United States and Canada.  It takes a concerted effort, but once a critical mass of consumers is achieved, the ability for providers to simply do as they please becomes a virtual impossibility.

That’s good news for all of us.

CBC News covers the start of the CRTC hearings and what UBB pricing is doing to Canada’s Internet experience.  (2 minutes)

Last week, Stop the Cap! shared the story of Andre Vrignaud, a 39-year-old gaming consultant in Seattle who found his Comcast Internet service shut off for a year for twice exceeding the company’s arbitrary 250GB usage cap.  The story continues to draw media attention, including this TV news report from Seattle station KOMO-TV.  Cloud computing is implicated, but Vrignaud’s cure — paying more for additional usage, strikes us as the wrong answer.  Monetizing broadband usage is a provider’s dream come true.  The better solution would be to fight to remove the cap or at least ensure residential customers can upgrade to business service, if they choose, without the year-long “ban” in place.  (3 minutes)

Martin

While thousands of West Virginians continue to struggle without any broadband service, the state government is having trouble finding a way to spend up to $40 million in broadband stimulus money on institutional broadband projects that often already have cutting edge fiber networks.

State officials won $126 million in federal stimulus grant money last year, from which the state announced it would lay more than 2,400 miles of fiber optic cable to wire government offices, schools, and libraries.  Now, a vocal critic says a combination of government waste, preferential treatment for the state’s largest phone company — Frontier Communications, and bad planning could leave up to $40 million of the grant money on the table, unspent for better broadband.

Jim Martin, president of business broadband provider Citynet, says the state overestimated the number of public facilities that need broadband improvements.  Many of the facilities involved already have high speed service, and do not require additional infrastructure.  As the grant expires, Martin says he would not be surprised if the state only managed to fund the installation of 300 miles of fiber.

Martin believes funds should be redirected to bolstering the state’s “middle mile” network — fiber infrastructure that would serve as an open network backbone to ensure capacity exists to support growing broadband demands in the state.  Instead, Martin told the Charleston Gazette, the state has been spending money providing fiber broadband to small libraries with fewer than a dozen computers that are unlikely to have the resources to pay the monthly fees Frontier Communications will charge for the service.

“There’s no value to any of this to anyone but Frontier,” Martin said.

In fact, Martin believes many of the current projects funded by taxpayer dollars deliver enormous benefits to Frontier’s bottom line, but only incremental improvement to some institutional users.

Martin claims Frontier has, in some cases, only spent enough money to install fiber from the pole to the building. That assures Frontier of being the only provider that can deliver ongoing service to institutional users.  Martin has a dog in this fight — his company competes with Frontier for business service contracts.

West Virginia's current broadband map shows large areas of the state have access to no broadband at all. (Olive color = No broadband.) (Click to enlarge)

Before the grant expires in February 2013, the state is hurrying to bolster its list of would-be recipients.

Jimmy Gianato, the state’s homeland security chief, said his office recently identified 330 additional “replacement locations” — higher education facilities, schools, health departments and state-owned hospitals — that could be eligible for the project, according to the newspaper.

Not on the list are individual consumers and small businesses who currently do not have access to any broadband service.  One of the ongoing problems of broadband stimulus funding is that public funds are often available to bolster broadband for state and locally-owned institutions, such as government offices, health care facilities, schools and libraries, but no funding to improve infrastructure for individual broadband service for “last mile” users.  This can result in Cadillac-style installations for small schools and libraries who win superb quality networks they ultimately cannot afford to operate on an ongoing basis.  For most, that service would come from Frontier Communications.

Martin already accused the state of investing in more than 1,000 routers without being certain if they were needed or where they would be installed.  At $20,000 each, Martin called the routers “Lamborghinis” and suggested they were largely unnecessary.

A repair shortcut made by Time Warner Cable in Cleveland got some unwelcome media attention last week, when the company was caught repairing one customers’ cable and broadband service with a hastily-spliced replacement line strung across the ground from a neighbor’s house — a “repair” that left both Bainbridge customers with pixelated pictures and disrupted broadband service.

“We’ve called them 10 times, at least,” Dr. Roger Classen told consumer troubleshooters at WEWS-TV. “Nothing has happened, they say we need a new line.”

The Classen’s neighbors were surprised to find Time Warner Cable had spliced their cable line and ran at least 50 feet of cable across the ground to the neighbor’s house, leaving a tripping hazard and a hassle whenever either homeowner mows the lawn.

After one phone call from the Cleveland television station, two Time Warner Cable crews appeared almost immediately to properly bury the offending cable and restore service for both customers.  It’s another example of high profile media getting results for customers who cannot get satisfaction themselves.

WEWS-TV recommends that customers running into a brick wall with Time Warner Cable demand to speak to a supervisor, write down the names of everyone you speak with, visit a local cable office to raise your complaint, or file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

A Cleveland television station called out Time Warner Cable for some shoddy repair work that left bad service and a cable strung across the ground across two yards.  The station says these kinds of complaints are among the most common the newsroom receives from Cleveland-area customers.  (2 minutes)

With FairPoint Communications, customers often have to take the good with the bad.  The formerly bankrupt telephone company providing service in northern New England announced last week it had met its obligation to provide at least 90 percent of Vermont residents with a broadband option — typically 1-3Mbps DSL — and has trumpeted results showing 83 percent of Maine and 85 percent of New Hampshire is now served by FairPoint DSL, an improvement over former owner Verizon Communications, which routinely ignored rural areas in all three states.

But while winning the option to buy DSL service, thousands of customers found service lacking last week when a power cable in the Manchester Millyard area brought down both broadband and voicemail service across all three states.

In such circumstances, FairPoint’s backup generators are supposed to maintain service, but not in this case.

“I’m on dialup and went down for 10 (hours),” Wolfgang Milbrandt of Mason wrote in an e-mail to the Nashua Telegraph. “So why does FairPoint have so many eggs in the Manchester basket and is the backup power system that feeble?”

In Milford, Tom Schmidt lost his DSL broadband for about five hours last Monday, with it returning “around 6-ish.”

Company officials admitted they didn’t switch to the generator after the power failed, and customers noticed as voicemail and DSL service began to fail.  Service problems were ongoing even after power was restored after about 90 minutes, with some FairPoint customers reporting problems through the early part of last week.

FairPoint plans to press forward with DSL broadband expansion and has also prioritized build-out of its Ethernet-Over-Fiber service for cell phone towers, delivering fiber-fast connections to more than 800 tower sites to support 4G wireless broadband from major wireless carriers.

http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WGME Portland FairPoint customers lose service 7-11-11.flv
WGME-TV in Portland, Maine covers FairPoint’s substantial broadband outage last week. (1 minute)

Wayne King: Living high off Time Warner Cable's Hog

The vice-chairman of North Carolina’s Republican Party, Wayne King, Tuesday penned a guest editorial in the Fayetteville Observer telling readers recent legislation passed in the state legislature provides a level playing field for telecommunications companies and protects “scarce public dollars” from being spent to compete against private providers like Time Warner Cable.

This legislation will also greatly benefit North Carolina taxpayers. At a time when local governments are cutting education and law-enforcement funding, taxpayers simply do not need to be spending scarce public dollars on communications systems that directly compete with the private sector. It makes no fiscal sense to build public infrastructure right alongside lines that have already been built by private firms.

Let’s imagine the government wanted to get into some other generally private industry. Would taxpayers be willing to foot the bill for a publicly subsidized cafeteria right next to a favorite local restaurant? Keeping in mind that you’d have to pay for services at both facilities (public communications networks still charge subscribers), I think the answer would be no.

Too bad Mr. King prefers to dine at Time Warner Cable Café.  He’s evidently having trouble seeing over the cable company’s talking points-menu to recognize that while he rails against public broadband expansion and community-owned competition to providers like AT&T, CenturyLink, and Time Warner Cable, he completely forgot the state of North Carolina and the city of Charlotte are handing Time Warner $5 million in combined, “scare public dollars” to create just over 200 new jobs and promise not to lay anyone off in the city of Charlotte.  That’s $5 million this year, and doesn’t count the sums the cable company has won from taxpayers over the past several years.

Mr. King has absolutely nothing to say about that kind of corporate welfare — the kind that takes $5 million away from education and law enforcement and hands it to a provider that will be raising its prices on North Carolina consumers once again by the end of this year.  And why not?  Where will those consumers go for a better deal?  FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn called out the legislation for what it is: “a broadband barrier.”

While Mr. King remains firmly seated at Time Warner Cable’s table as it funnels money to his party’s legislators, it’s easy to stare out of their window and complain about a new café being built across the street.  If that happens, diners just might end up paying a lot less for their meal, and get a much better dining experience to boot.

The only folks with indigestion will be executives at the cable and phone companies, and people like Mr. King, who will probably have less campaign money to show for it.

Virgin Mobile, which last year excited a number of our readers with the introduction of its Broadband2Go unlimited mobile broadband plan, has continued to evolve the meaning of “unlimited,” to now mean just 2.5GB of usage per month before speeds are reduced to the very un-broadband level of 256kbps.

It’s just another in a series of limits Virgin Mobile has placed on its 3G “unlimited” pay-as-you-go service since last August.

Last summer, customers paid up to $100 to purchase the mobile broadband device used with the service, and promptly discovered a lot of people were doing the same thing, which promptly overloaded the network and drove speeds downward.  Within months, our readers reported Virgin had quietly implemented a “fair access policy” that began reducing customers’ speeds after as little as 200MB of use daily, usually to 256kbps or less.  By February 2011, Virgin announced a 5GB usage cap, after which speeds would be permanently throttled until customers either paid an additional $40 or waited out the end of their billing cycle.

Apparently, even 5GB of usage per month is considered too much, so now Virgin Mobile is slashing that in half to 2.5GB.  Despite the ongoing decreases, company officials insist whatever level they are, they are still generous.  The company said less than 3 percent of its customer base will be impacted by a 2.5GB limit on their supposedly “unlimited” plan.  Virgin Mobile, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sprint, gets around that pesky contradiction by calling their plan “unlimited access,” which means you can access it day or night at speeds that either might be fast, or heavily throttled.

What used to cost $40 a month for truly unlimited service today costs $50 for 2.5GB.

Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go "Before" Pricing from August, 2010

Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go "New and 'Improved'" Pricing

The days of "Sugar Mama" are long gone.

Virgin Mobile is also hiking rates for two budget handset plans that include data:

• 300 minutes, including unlimited texting and data up $10 to $35 a month
• 1,200 minutes, including unlimited texting and data up $5 to $45 a month

But competition does occasionally deliver some benefits to consumers as Virgin recognizes it is being killed by cheaper unlimited smartphone plans from MetroPCS and Cricket, so it has cut the price on its own unlimited calling, texting, and data smartphone plan by $5 to match its competitors’ $55 monthly price.

Virgin Mobile is in the process or repositioning itself away from being a prepaid budget-priced carrier towards a smartphone-oriented provider for customers who do not want to sign lengthy service contracts with Verizon, AT&T, or even parent company Sprint.

This certainly means the days of Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama are long gone. 

Thanks to Bones and several other Stop the Cap! readers for sharing this news with us.