Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
October 2, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
September 27, 2009
Tweet 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
Tweet 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 […]
September 23, 2009
Tweet 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, […]
September 22, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
September 21, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
September 11, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
September 7, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
September 1, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
August 31, 2009
Tweet 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 […]
August 27, 2009
Tweet 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, […]
Subscribe
Although “soft-launched” several weeks ago in many markets, Time Warner Cable has officially unveiled its holiday gift for 2012: a free 50% speed increase for Standard tier customers: 15/1Mbps service.
Kind of makes the 20/2 service not worth the extra money. Glad it’s only costing me $5 a month for the next year.
So this made me wonder how this would affect the extra plus turbo plan I have (I forget what it’s called, but I average around 20-28 down and 1 up). So I go on TWC website under internet, and totally unrelated to speed, but I see that apparently this month I’ve used 33GB bandwidth… today is 12/7! So I’ve used 33GB in one week, and their idea of average net usage is 5GB (their standard proposed cap)?!? Thanks for the speed boost (even though it doesn’t affect me) but I’m panicked now for when these inevitable bandwidth caps come… apparently I use over 100GB a month- why? I stream TV and movies from Netflix and websites, and I also use carbonite backup for my pc. Sorry, that doesn’t seem too abnormal to me.
Phil I’m curious about how much you use on average a month…?
I’m not Phil but our family averages ~800GB a month…
We stream for our older child to watch shows and were using about 200GB / mo.
I tested speeds on my main home PC (connected to the LAN) before and after resetting the modem and it was quite impressive. Just shy of 10 Mbps down before and between 14-30 Mbps down after – average seems to be low to mid 20′s. A very welcome change after feeling like their pricing is way too much – thanks to another post here I’m set on another 12 months of $35/mo.
The one thing I’m finding very odd with the speed upgrade is that now certain wireless devices (not all) are getting worse speeds than before the change. Three very capable Android phones and a Dell E6420 laptop can’t seem to break past 6 Mbps when I’m certain each of them were just shy of 10 Mbps beforehand. I know it’s not something to do with a router configuration since I consistently get about the same speeds from my Samsung Series 7 slate (wireless) as I do with the PC plugged into the LAN. The only commonalityy between those two devices is they both have Windows 8 (one consumer preview and the other RTM). I don’t see how that could be a factor. I’m a bit stumped and saddened that my speeds have DECREASED for some of our devices.