DSL & Cable Modem Service

Ann Burr, chairman and general manager of the Rochester division of Frontier Corporation, wrote a Letter to the Editor in this morning’s Democrat & Chronicle, claiming the company’s usage caps and limits were “rumors” and untrue.

Broadband usage won’t be limited

The popularity of the Internet continues to grow. Today, the average residential customer on Frontier’s network uses 1.5 gigabytes of bandwidth each month. A smaller percentage of heavy users may consume as much as 1,000 times that amount. All customers, urban and rural, should have choices based on their individual use. Beginning next year, Frontier will provide customers with tools to measure their bandwidth usage. We believe customers should be in control and pay only for the bandwidth they need. If a customer needs capacity for streaming video or simple e-mails, customers will have a choice of plans.

There are rumors that Frontier plans to limit bandwidth usage. That is not true. We do not limit or control bandwidth consumption. We believe in providing the best Internet experience with a dedicated line to each customer. Frontier customers want reliability, choice, and most of all, value for all of their Internet needs, large and small. We strive to bring innovative solutions to our customers every day.

ANN BURR
ROCHESTER

The writer is chairman and general manager, Frontier Communications of Rochester.

Burr should fully be aware her company is not the victim of some Internet rumor and smear campaign.  As StoptheCap! has documented since this summer, Frontier’s public relations crisis is one of their own making, starting with the company’s unreasonable definition of reasonable use at just 5GB per month, comparable to most mobile telephone data plans.  The company’s own acceptable use policies gave them the right to terminate accounts that exceeded their definition of reasonable use, not to mention what other costs may eventually be imposed for those that exceed that definition.

We will be publishing an expanded rebuttal to this letter here shortly.  A much more limited response may be published in the Democrat & Chronicle.  Eager readers who don’t want to wait can simply click the Frontier category and review our entire collection of reports on Frontier’s debacle and see the ever-evolving positions of this company and decide for themselves whether Frontier is the victim, or their customers are.

Comcast Implements 250GB Usage Cap Effective October 1, 2008.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts likes his new high-tech toys, even if using them on his own cable system is now pointless.  At the January Consumer Electronics Show, Roberts demonstrated the next generation of broadband Comcast is poised to begin rolling out to consumers in the next several months.

Dubbed “wideband,” Roberts downloaded a High Definition copy of Batman Begins in less than four minutes.  Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade, which bonds multiple channels together to deliver broadband speeds up to 160 Megabits per second, will be able to bring Comcast customers the latest high bandwidth applications, particularly including very high quality video, in just a matter of minutes.

Designed to compete with Verizon’s FIOS fiber to the home network, Comcast’s “wideband” service will create a new paradigm for high quality video services entering the home.

Except for one thing.

A 250GB monthly usage cap.

Using Comcast’s wideband service, customers downloading movies could easily exceed the 250GB cap in less than five hours.

Even the cable industry’s trade publications like Multichannel News are now posing questions about how exactly Comcast can promote customers upgrading to wideband service when a cap of 250GB stops the fun in a matter of hours.  What MN didn’t add to the equation is the fact Verizon FIOS does not have a usage cap and has no current plans to implement one.

So exactly why would any consumer choose Comcast wideband, with a usage cap over Verizon FIOS, which leaves you alone and doesn’t threaten to terminate your service if you use more than the cable company deems appropriate?

Another issue MN touched on, but didn’t bother extending to the real issue - stifling competition:

Imagine if all your TV were delivered via the Internet. High-quality 1080i HD video at (conservatively) an average of 5 Mbps would chew up plenty of bandwidth: roughly 286 Gigabytes in a 30-day period, given that Americans watch an average of 127 hours and 15 minutes of TV per month, according to Nielsen. Cap busted!

Imagine indeed.  Imagine virtual “cable companies” delivering cable networks and broadcast TV over the Internet.  Pay your monthly bill for data from the cable company, but watch your video programming from another provider.  A 250GB cap puts an end to that business plan quite nicely, thank you.

Comcast CEO Demonstrates Wideband At Cable Show In May

By the way, a quick note to Frontier, which still thinks 5GB a month is just plenty. Pay attention to the file sizes in this video and then get back to us about why you think your customers will never come close to using 5GB a month in the coming year or two.

BREAKING NEWS: Frontier Communications has modified their position on the 5GB usage cap yet again.  Your pushback on this unjustified 5GB monthly usage cap has continued to make a real difference in getting company officials to listen to reason.

Frontier’s website has been changed again, now deleting the portions of their DSL sales pitch which used to reference “5GB” of included access per month.  Additional changes have been made to their terms and conditions pages.  Still present in Frontier’s Residential Acceptable Use Policy is the language which defines their usage cap at 5GB per month, although they don’t formally call it that.  Instead, they consider 5GB to be a “reasonable” amount of usage, and reserve the right to terminate accounts that exceed it.  However, some other language has been introduced as Frontier backs off from implementing their cap formally:

The Company has made no decision about potential charges for monthly usage in excess of 5GB.

Company officials have repeatedly said they will not penalize customers who exceed the 5GB “reasonable” level they define in their Acceptable Use Policy, which is to be commended.  But as Frontier Communications has been continually modifying their position on the cap issue in general, both in comments to reporters and on their website, customers have no guarantees what they insist today won’t be much different tomorrow.

StopTheCap! calls on Frontier to do the right thing and remove this entire “5GB” section of their Residential Acceptable Use Policy altogether.  It is this language upon which the entire 5GB usage cap debacle was built, and Frontier can show its good faith by eliminating it from their website if they truly want to put customers at ease.

We have also learned that Frontier has taken another piece of our advice: to launch a campaign to better educate and inform their customers about how bandwidth is utilized, and ways they can reduce their usage voluntarily.

StopTheCap! strongly believes that consumers are willing to review what they are doing with their Internet connections and will reduce usage voluntarily if they understood how certain applications can consume bandwidth even if they don’t seem to be running.  And it’s a win-win for customers who wonder why their Internet connection seems so slow without realizing someone in the house is running a torrent server 24/7, or has a computer infected with a virus that is churning out millions of spam e-mails without the owner even realizing it.

Treating your customers right means allowing them to take advantage of the myriad of new applications and features a broadband experience can provide, without a draconian limit on that usage.  And customers have a responsibility to better understand what they are running on their computers.

There are several additional developments about Frontier’s 5GB usage cap, and we’ll be publishing a roundup of the latest news, including your comments and what company representatives have been telling you, shortly.

This remains a developing story.

One of the usual excuses given to promote the need for usage caps on residential broadband accounts is the person on the network who has fired up their peer-to-peer sharing application (usually torrent software) and has left the thing running 24/7 for the entire month.  This person is inevitably held up as an example in the pro-cap community as someone who is “abusing the network” by downloading terabytes worth of data “that no person could reasonably use in a month.”

There have been some interesting reports on the impact of peer-to-peer applications on broadband in the last two weeks (”20% Drop in p2p on AT&T Backbone Other video, like YouTube and Hulu, twice as high” - DSL Prime, 8/1/2008).  Ask a torrent fan what they enjoy getting the most from using such applications and it usually turns out to be television shows.  With the advent of more… authorized methods of accessing favorite programs, including Hulu, Joost, iTunes, and the network websites themselves, people can get near instant gratification without waiting hours, if not days, for a coveted episode to finally arrive over some BitTorrent site.

Is there something missing from the usual equation offered by cap advocates that “excessive/abusive use” + “limited bandwidth” = a usage cap to “better manage network traffic?”

Also, is there a place in the discussion for bandwidth providers to better dialogue with their customers, educating them about the impact of running certain file sharing peer-to-peer software on a continuous basis, not only on network traffic, but also potentially slowing down the connection for everyone else in the house?  How many parents have only the most limited knowledge about the software their kids are running?  And if it’s the head of the household running the software, do they even know how much bandwidth such tools could consume if left running continuously.

Do you think people would respond to a voluntary request by providers to not run such software unattended for hour after hour, day after day?  Would a customer be more inclined to reduce usage knowing that a voluntary reduction could mean not having to place caps on every customer?  What are your feelings about such a proposal?  Would it be effective?  Or do you dismiss the peer to peer traffic argument entirely?

Part of the purpose of Stop the Cap! is to offer some potential new ideas with providers genuinely interested in traffic management and not simply imposing caps as a way to increase revenue.  Your comments and advocacy for or against this idea are welcome.  Just hit the Comments button under the article headline and share your views.  Providers do read Stop the Cap! and many are genuinely interested in reading your views.

[Editor's Note: As promised, Stop the Cap! now moves on to expanding coverage of the issue of broadband usage caps by North America's other broadband providers.  In the coming weeks, we'll be reviewing the plans, proposals, and implementation of caps by companies large and small.  We will also continue to report on how this potentially impacts on our national competitiveness, considerations of Net Neutrality issues, and addressing the digital divide by information-have's and have-nots.] 

Beaumont, Texas

Beaumont, on the eastern border of Texas with Louisiana, is one of America’s mid-sized cities of just over 100,000 people, best known for the Texas Wildcatters, a smattering of oil and gas companies, and the first advance by Time Warner, America’s second largest cable television company, into this year’s issue of bandwidth usage caps.

Company officials first announced the market test in January, impacting only new customers in Road Runner’s Golden Triangle Division with usage caps ranging from 5GB for the Lite Tier plan to 40GB for the Turbo Tier.  The charge for exceeding your plan’s cap is $1 per gigabyte.

Like other companies talking about usage caps, everyone likes to use their own internal definitions of what 1GB of usage represents.  Time Warner’s is:

1GB gets you about 70,000 e-mails, 34 hours of gaming or 1,344 hours of Web browsing; or, it’s the approximate equivalent of downloading 569 photos, 277 music files, 7 hours of low-resolution video (YouTube), 3 hours of standard definition streaming video or 45 minutes of high-definition streaming video.

Again, my own calculations bring some different numbers to the table, and, honestly, does anyone really worry about going over a usage cap from reading e-mail and web browsing alone?

Randomly grabbing 277 MP3 music files consumed 1.56GB of usage.  Downloading 569 photos assumes your collection consists of pictures averaging 1.75MB apiece.  I grabbed some digital photos I took to Walgreens for printing and looked at the files I uploaded to their server.  My pictures, at high resolution (but not extremely high) come closer to 8MB apiece.  One episode of Law & Order (around 42 minutes without the commercials and dropping the stream before the end credits rolled) consumed 360MB at standard definition rates.  As noted earlier, a movie delivered by Akamai can consume 6-9GB for just one 720p high definition film, nearly double that if you choose the 1080 version.

Taking each of these activities into consideration individually, usage caps of 20GB a month (or 40GB) don’t immediately sound alarming.  But people do not use their Internet connections for a single activity, and the more people you bring to the table, such as in a four person household, the easier it is to see just how quickly a family, especially with teenagers, will quickly exceed even these kinds of caps.

Beaumont residents are the first to participate in a Road Runner trial with usage capped.

There are users out there who use their connections for little more than basic e-mail and occasional web browsing, and Time Warner offering a plan at a discount for those users is not a problem, assuming they actually promote such plans to potential customers.  The greater issue comes from a service provider charges the same price (or more) for a plan that is now seriously limited by a cap.  And to date, there has been no proposal for retaining an “unlimited” tier in addition to offering a range of capped tiers for those who figure they will use considerably less.

Wireless telephone companies, which historically sold usage in plans with buckets of minutes, are now moving towards offering flat rate options - pay one price, talk all you like, while the broadband industry, which marketed “unlimited, always on” connections for a variety of content they include in their advertising are now headed in the other direction, limiting consumer choice and access.

Time Warner has been complaining about broadband growth as both a content distributor and as a bandwidth provider, which adds an interesting twist to the rationale companies have to implement caps.

Saul Hansell, a reporter and blogger for The NY Times, noted company officials are growing tired of basic cable networks making them pay license fees for content, and then seeing that content being given away on the web.

Speculation that bandwidth caps may also have to do with limiting the amount of streaming video that consumers watch have also been offered as a reason for providers adding caps to their Internet service.

Time Warner’s rationale for bandwidth capping was, according to the company itself, to control what they felt was excessive use of their network.

“This is not targeted at people who download movies from Apple,” Time Warner spokesman Alex Dudley told the NY Times. “This is aimed at people who use peer-to-peer networks and download terabytes.”

And again that brings up the question of how a 20-40GB cap is the most effective way to control a minority of users running a torrent client or server 24/7 and consuming terabytes over an entire month.  That is the equivalent of dropping a nuclear weapon on a pesty moth.  The weapon does get the moth, but it also impacts on a far larger circle of customers that don’t come close to consuming that level of data.  Every ISP has language in their contracts with customers that allow them to cut off the 24/7 torrent addict today.  Some, including Comcast, have enforced these kinds of provisions before without a usage cap.

To date, consumer reaction in Beaumont has been mixed.  Many are convinced the caps are unjustified, too low, or simply too expensive for what you get.  Others object to the excessive rate of $1 per gigabyte for overage fees.  Some don’t like the idea of having to measure everything they do online in fear of exceeding a usage cap.  There are also some that like the idea of paying for what they use, and are willing to consider different plans based on what they actually consume if it also means they get the speeds they were promised in advertising.

Dudley argues that the usage cap issue is not a foregone conclusion at Time Warner.  Dudley told GigaOm that TWC’s experiment in Texas was just that – a test. If consumers don’t want it, the company is going to back away from it. “I think this is a trial and we are going to learn from this trial,” he said.

Stop the Cap! wants the company to learn as well.  If you ask customers if they’d prefer paying the same amount they do today for unlimited access or capped access, there will be little surprise as to the outcome.

Now that we’ve reached the two week anniversary of Frontier’s inclusion of a 5GB clause in their Acceptable Use Policy first going up on their website, it’s probably useful to provide the latest information in a summary format.  Additionally, we’re now reaching a point where new information about Frontier’s consideration of the cap is slowing down as the company ponders where things go from here.  So here is the latest summary of where things stand:

1) Frontier has published on their website two references to usage information.  Their marketing indicates that 5GB of usage is provided as part of their DSL account.  The company has now also publicly stated that until they state otherwise, they are not going to charge overages or terminate accounts for exceeding that usage.  When we get news of a date if/when that changes, we’ll let you know.

2) Their marketing material online indicates customers with “price protection agreements” will not be subject to any usage caps for the duration of their contract.  Assuming that language is inserted into their actual contract for customers, that could be the one good thing to come out of this.  (Hint to Frontier’s marketing gurus - if you offer a cap-free plan in return for a service agreement, we’ll sing its praises and I’d personally recommend it.)

After all, the goal of this site is to advocate for a cap-free Internet experience, and we’ll praise any company offering one.

3) The company continues to take input from customers on the matter, and we encourage people to share their views with Frontier regarding usage caps in general.  I personally hope they will drop the entire idea altogether and ride the marketing potential their service would have should the cable industry adopt caps or limits.  If you are not comfortable with where things stand on this issue, you have the right to take your business elsewhere.

We’ll be continuing to follow this issue as developments warrant.  Frontier is not the only company out there contemplating capping their customers, so Stop the Cap! must also delve into what the cable industry is up to, and there is plenty to report there.