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, […]
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AT&T’s WiMAX Internet service in Alaska will be switched off Jan. 31, forcing rural Alaskan customers to find an alternative for inexpensive wireless service in areas where DSL or cable broadband is unavailable.
AT&T never really tried with the service in Alaska, and crippled it with high prices and bundling of their landline phone long distance in order to get a small discount.
The first issue was their WiMax towers had poor line of sight to many areas causing low signal strength for prospective or current customers. This caused most customers to either get no signal thus returning the units, or intermittent signals causing lots of packet loss and high latency.
The second issue was the bundling of AT&T long distance to get a modest discount so your price matched their advertised pricing. This made absolutely no sense in a market where most homes don’t have land lines as they have Smart Phones already with AT&T, ACS, or GCI (BTW a $120+/mo AT&T iPhone didn’t quality for the discount). Plus if anyone already had ACS or GCI with land line phone included for “free” or bundled you could add DSL or Cable Internet from either company with faster speeds for the same amount of money as AT&T’s 3Mbit WiMax.
If WiMax was done right with 5-15 Mbit speeds, unlimited use, and perfect full strength signals at a affordable prices from $30-100/mo it could have been a viable competitor. There was plenty of interest in Alaska, but AT&T just didn’t seem that interested in making it work or putting any real resources into it.
It’s one of those projects where you almost question if they wanted it to fail in order to promote their cellular broadband in rural areas agenda which have a much higher profit per customer with the 1Gb @ $15 overage fees.
What a shame. It makes me sad to hear when any presumably remote rural area loses it’s Internet access. Perhaps some folks can form a co-op and buy the Wimax equipment to keep it running. Alternately, the government could buy it as a backup communication system for emergencies, and a primary link for animal tracking and weather and observation stations. Locate those stations at folk’s homes and allow them Internet access for their participation *wink*.
[...] AT&T initially had plans to expand WiMax further, the evolution of LTE sidelined those plans. Stop The Cap directs our attention to the fact that AT&T’s now shutting down that service January 31, [...]
I found my notes on the AT&T pricing when I looked into it.
1 Mbit IF you had a lineline and switch to AT&T Long distance was $19.95/mo, otherwise it was $49.95/mo
2 Mbit was $40.95/mo with AT&T Long distance service, otherwise it was $59.95/mo without.
They had 3Mbit service available early on but seem to had discontinued it in the last year or two of offering the WiMax service.
ACS DSL in the area at the time was offered at 1 Mbit for $69/mo (including local phone service), and 3 Mbit for $89/mo. Note that you can now get 10 Mbit from ACS with unlimited usage now for $109/mo.
The Cable Company GCI was charging aproximately $140.00/mo for their broadband, plus basic cable, which they then later forced a $20+ bundle of local phone service which also added another $10-15 of taxes/fees and was metered like all their plans with only 40Gigs of data at the time.
To it’s credit the AT&T WiMax service was not metered, but I’m not aware if they did any packet shaping/limits per customers to manage bandwidth, but as I noted above their signal and coverage was horrible so very few people could make use of the service and even then it was too slow for most usage.