Cable ONE intentionally eavesdropped on what its customers did online in order to profit from targeted advertising. That is the allegation contained within a class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Alabama Northern District Court.
The suit alleges the cable operator installed network monitoring software from NebuAd, an advertising provider, which monitored and profiled customers for the purpose of delivering customized, targeted advertising.
Cable ONE is named as defendant in the suit because the company did not inform customers that such profiling was taking place, and never gave customers an opportunity to opt out, according to the complaint. NebuAd itself has not being named in the suit.
Customer Samuel Green claims NebuAd paid the cable company a “price per customer, per month” and placed tracking cookies on his computer to follow his online activities. He accused the company of violating his privacy. The lawsuit establishes a class action case opening the door for a settlement with every customer, potentially nationwide.
The suit asks for damages of $100 per day for the period Cable ONE utilized the tracking services of NebuAd. It also demands the company destroy all of the data the suit alleges was wrongfully obtained.
The case is being handled by Florence attorney Joey K. James.
Cable ONE, owned by the Net Neutrality-bashing Washington Post, has turned the art of broadband service into a science of confusion for its customers.
In addition to introducing a forthcoming new, faster tier of service, offering speeds at 12Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream, Cable ONE has been tinkering with their convoluted usage capping system, which combines a daily usage allowance with throttled speeds and exempt periods during traditionally lower usage hours.
See if you can understand their new usage limit chart, and even if you can, ask yourself if your parents will pick up what they are putting down:
(Click to enlarge)
Karl Bode at Broadband Reports thinks “Standard Speed” refers to Cable ONE’s throttle — reducing effective speeds by half, assuming you exceed your “threshold.” The limits shown are reset daily. Exceeding that limit many times during a month can technically get your service suspended, but we’ve not heard of anyone who either hasn’t been able to talk their way out of it with company officials or who haven’t been bothered by local system managers who are probably just as confounded by this crazy cap scheme as we are.
Cable ONE customers like the new speed offering, if and when it arrives in their respective communities, but hate the silly usage allowances and speed throttles that accompany them. As Stop the Cap! has always said, consumers are beating the doors down waiting to throw more dollars at broadband providers who offer them the higher speed service they desire.
Instead, some providers would rather create Internet Overcharging schemes to reduce demand and expenses, and profit the proceeds. If given a competitive choice, consumers will leave a cap-happy provider for someone else who actually listens to customers. Unfortunately, for too many Americans, the key words are “if given a competitive choice.”
A customer in Boise notes, “I can’t even watch a full movie from Netflix without getting my speed cut in half. I started the movie at 12pm and by 1pm my speed was cut in half. When I called Cable ONE and asked about my bandwidth, they wouldn’t even tell me if I crossed the threshold limit. They kept dancing around my question with ‘it may have been reduced.’ Wake up Cable ONE!”
Many Cable ONE customers are located in smaller cities and communities that currently have just one other option – DSL service from the local phone company. For many residents, that tops out at 1.5Mbps or 3Mbps downstream. But for some, it’s better than being usage capped by cable.
Perhaps Cable ONE would do good to watch their own advertisements, which promise: “It’s the way we always listen, to every word you say; loud and clear is how we hear, there’s just no other way.”
Stop the Cap! calls on Cable ONE to discard confusing, impenetrable usage allowances that few customers can find on their website and even fewer actually understand. Investing in your network with the proceeds of higher speed premium service tiers and making upgrades to DOCSIS 3 can provide additional bandwidth and profit opportunities while customers can sit back, “enjoy the fun with Cable ONE,” and relax with the broadband service they pay good money to receive. Cable ONE already provides customers with a way to self-regulate their usage, by selecting a speed tier that is comfortable for them and their anticipated Internet needs.
There is bad, and then there is REALLY, REALLY BAD.
CableOne punishes you if you exceed your daily usage allowance.
CableONE’s new residential broadband Internet Overcharging pricing achieves new lows among American broadband providers – low caps that is.
The company has boosted the speed of its residential broadband services, and lowered the allowance you receive each month to use it. The “Economy” package, if used to any degree for anything beyond e-mail and a smattering of web page viewing each month, will wreak havoc on any household budget. Providing just 1.5Mbps downloads and 150kbps uploads for $26 a month, your monthly usage allowance is just ONE gigabyte. Exceed that at your financial peril. The overlimit penalty is a whopping $10/GB, and that full $10 is billed whether you exceed your allowance by one byte or 999 megabytes. CableONE graciously limits their Money Party to a maximum $50 in overlimit penalties, putting your broadband service you thought you paid $26 for at the “reasonable” price of up to $76 a month.
But there is a way to steer clear of the overcharging, if you are a night owl. The company turns the “meter” off from 12 midnight until 12 noon the following day.
CableONE’s other residential plans now also have lower consumption allowances, designed to limit your day to day use of your broadband service. Instead of adopting a monthly maximum allowance, the company imposes daily limits that do not “roll over” from day to day. If you use your connection heavily one day, but not at all the next three, you could still find yourself over the limit.
Going over your limit between one and 14 days per month will result in an automatic downgrade in your broadband speed to the next lowest tier. Exceed it more than 15 days per month, and your account will be terminated.
The company has suggestions for customers who want to reduce their usage to stay compliant. Right on top: stop watching those online videos.
Suggestions for Reducing Bandwidth
CableONE’s service counts bytes used during the peak usage period which is defined as 12 noon to 12 midnight.
The following types of usage consume high amounts of bandwidth and should be avoided during peak usage period:
Movie downloads
Streaming Video
Picture downloads or uploads
Leaving your browser open on pages that “refresh” automatically
Some of the programs you have installed will try to update themselves periodically by downloading files. You can typically set your program to schedule updates during off-peak times. Windows software can be set to update overnight as well. Updates and large downloads done between midnight and 12 noon do not count against your allocation.
Subscribers, particularly in southern Mississippi, have had an increasingly difficult relationship with CableONE. In March, a subscriber announced a lawsuit against the cable operator for gouging customers on set top boxes, required for digital cable viewing. CableONE charges its customers $11 a month for a regular Motorola cable box and $23 for its HD-DVR box. In June, a suspicious white powder was found in the Biloxi CableONE office, that was later determined to be harmless.
An unintentionally amusing CableONE ad follows the jump below.
Tkpvictory3: Mine says zero… Oh yea that’s because it’s not available in at my residence!...
Tim: I can't even run the gov test. The test won't even show up. It keeps saying I need to install Java, which I have. I have Firefox 3.6 with Java 6.0.18....
Umabala: Thank you for sharing your response, and offering some solutions....
Daniel: Here's a plan: If Frontier doesn't think internet customers want fiber to the home, how about they simply lease the territorial rights to Monroe Count...
jr: In LA, consumers are sinners and corporations are saints...
BrionS: This is a somewhat misplaced sense of security. Frontier (or a landline in general) isn't necessarily any more reliable.
Consider the ways Frontie...
Bob in Illinois: Just a slight addition.
The listed llinois communities are all in the Springfield, IL area, since some of the info was from the Springfield State Jour...
Smith6612: This is why I still have landlines here as well, not just to make DSL cheaper. The telephone companies (Verizon and Frontier) haven't let me down in t...
Tkpvictory3: Atleast communities like Rochester have some form of broadband availiable... I live seven poles from the last Time Warner connection point and they wa...
PreventCAPS: The I <3 NY image needs to have a hole cut into it to represent communities like Rochester that will miss out on these services....
Uncle Ken: Earl: you are correct to. Single point is a bad idea...
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
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 [...]