Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
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 […]
October 2, 2009
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 […]
September 27, 2009
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 Hong […]
September 23, 2009
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 […]
September 23, 2009
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 […]
September 22, 2009
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 […]
September 21, 2009
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 […]
September 11, 2009
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 […]
September 7, 2009
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 […]
September 1, 2009
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 Alberta […]
August 31, 2009
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 […]
August 27, 2009
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 […]
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Another home run story for WXII which gave viewers the fact Time Warner is doing very well financially with the existing service they provide. Too often, media outlets just accept the statements being made by company officials at face value and just repeat them. As we’ve come to learn with this story, that’s a very dangerous thing to do if you are interested in informing viewers about the truth.
Ugh… Why did they put an IE logo on that graphic? Internet Explorer != The Internet. In fact, it does a pretty bad job at displaying a lot of the Internet correctly.
I know this has nothing to do with the battle at hand, but it just goes to show how little the general public knows about the Internet.
Elliot – on Ubuntu/Firefox = no IE logos. Try it. I’m in Clemmons, outside Winston-Salem. The local village gets $210,000/year from TW but the village budget says “Cable franchise tax has been replaced with local video programming revenues that are now collected and re‐distributed by the State. Future revenue growth realized by this industry will benefit the State budget. However local governments revenue will remain at levels established at 2007 levels with no potential for future growth.” So does that mean local government has no say – and Time Warner has locked in their costs? Could be why they are… Read more »
It’s in the content of the video.
Who cares what browser icon they showed! Get your head in the game and talk about REAL problems dude. I liked that the reporter repeated the profits are up but costs are down argument, that is the one every person seems to understand the best no matter how tech savvy you are.
I know it’s completely unrelated; it was just something that irked me.
Trust me, I have my head in the game. 😉
I personally loved the reaction from the young woman when she heard about the new price. Once you frame the issue as it really is, not as how TW wants you to see it, it’s stunning.
I like the response from the girl with the sunglasses on. I also like how they added the part at the end about profits were up 11% while costs dropped 12%. The Mayor looked like she was ready to rumble. Good luck to you guys down there!
Whoa… my Internet connection is unusually slow right now. Is TWC purposely slowing down peoples’ connections to prove the Internet is running out? BTW, I’m in Greensboro.
Yes the video of that woman was great she never paused to think about what she was going to say just spoke what she thought.
Simon who knows what tricks TWC will use to further their cause.
This is the first time in a long while since my connection’s been so slow. It might just be a snafu or coincidence. I don’t know. My connection’s improved right now so I don’t know what to think.
Simon your only going to run at the speed of the big pipes. You may be getting ready for bed soon but the other half of the world is just waking up. It really is pointless to have 50 down and 5 up. You will not see those speeds once your out of TWC area the straw pipes as I call them. There are just not enough lines moving all that data to fit at the same time and it becomes more and more everyday. Just for grins do a tracert to a place like microsoft.com and watch just how… Read more »
Simon I did a tracert to Phils site and it never left TWC’s area 4 hops very quick and bam I was there. Being only a mile apart it figured that would be the case but lets say some part of TWC net was run over by a truck one strenght of the net is it will always find a path even if it has to run across the world to get there.