“I can walk outside of this building and touch FairPoint, and they were telling me back in February that they couldn’t find my building!”

It takes a special kind of incompetence to run a telephone company into the ground and allow customers to achieve a level of exasperation unparalleled in history.  Well beyond a month after the “transfer” from Verizon to FairPoint, the company was literally tearing up the fabric of New England business customers, unable to obtain telephone service despite weeks of trying, as WCAX discovered up in White River Junction, Vermont:

[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington Problems Continue for Some 3-15-09.flv[/flv]

Nearly a month without e-mail, Internet service interruptions, and six week waits before a repair or installation truck bothers to show up in your driveway.  Life under FairPoint this past spring was hardly a picnic.  Comcast ran a veritable festival of advertising telling customers there was an alternative, and where cable was available, they did a good business picking up customers fleeing FairPoint’s nightmarish service.

Up in Maine, business customers arriving for work started to discover their phone lines had been disconnected without warning, potentially costing them thousands in dollars of lost business when customers dialing their numbers heard “this number has been disconnected” in response.

How could this happen?  WCSH in Portland finds out:

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCSH Portland FairPoint Business Customers Angry 02-13-09.flv[/flv]

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Stop the Cap! reader Bob, who gave Frontier Communications another shot for his broadband needs, finally threw in the towel and went back to Time Warner Cable when he got his current bill.  B0b was happy enough with his DSL service, despite the nagging sense DSL is really losing the speed race, with an increasingly growing gap between the fastest speed Frontier can offer vs. Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service.  But the final straw came in this month’s bill.  It was messed up, and it turned out Frontier’s DSL was more expensive than Time Warner’s Road Runner, once taxes and fees were counted.

A Frontier Billing Mystery Sherlock Holmes Couldn't Solve

Welcome to my world.  I’m still dealing with billing nightmares prompted from my own test run of Frontier’s DSL “High Speed Internet Max” product, which wasn’t “High Speed” (maximum speed here was 3.1Mbps) and “Max” in giving me headaches because of the need to make repeated calls to the company to straighten out service and billing problems, which still aren’t fixed.

Frontier just sent its employees another one of those taunt-0-gram e-mails at Time Warner Cable’s expense, telling employees:

Time Warner continues to execute a seriously customer-unfriendly strategy for managing the pressure they feel from their customers’ usage of broadband services.

More proof that Time Warner is just focused on how to add PRICE INCREASES to their High-Speed services; Frontier’s focus has never wavered – we ADD VALUE for our customers.

I actually agree with most of that, and would be on board except for the Excedrin-size headache created by Frontier’s customer service in DeLand, Florida.  They’re confused about their own products and services and are prone to making lots of mistakes processing orders and requests.

Before taking shots at TWC, let’s get one’s own house in order first.

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For the first time, an entire first world nation is threatened with being dumped into a broadband backwater by abusive practices from commercial Internet providers across Canada.

Usage caps with draconian limits, expensive overlimit fees, slow speeds, traffic “shaping” and overpriced monthly subscription fees have caused Canadian broadband to deteriorate rapidly in world rankings.  As measured by price per megabyte — how much one pays for speed — Canada ranks 28th out of 30 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ahead of only Mexico and Poland.

Canada’s disastrous decline from one of the world’s leaders in broadband service to today’s bottom of the barrel status in certain categories can be blamed on one thing: the nation’s commercial Internet providers.  The OECD report gives declining marks nearly across the board for Canada’s broadband marketplace.

“This reflects poorly on Canada’s advancement in the information economy,” said University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist. “Canada remains woefully uncompetitive … We’re getting a poor deal.”

In fact, competition in Canada continues to decline, with dominant providers typically limited to the local telephone company and cable operator, who are engaged in a competition to leverage higher profits from broadband at the expense of network investment and increased penetration.  Canadians now pay more for less than most industrialized nations because operators have increased rates while imposing miserly usage caps, bandwidth throttling, and stopped the competitive speed and price wars that were a hallmark of broadband competition in Canada 5-10 years ago.

Most Canadians now face a monthly broadband bill averaging $45.65 U.S. per month before taxes/fees.  That’s more than $15 higher than the average fee paid by Americans.  Canadians also belong to the dubious club of just four nations where virtually all providers impose paltry usage caps averaging 60GB per month (Belgium, Australia and New Zealand are the others).

Canadians are still enthusiastic about obtaining broadband access — they’re just angry with the limited choices they have, the lack of solid penetration in many rural areas, and the despised usage caps.

Providers claim they are investing in improving service, but independent observers disagree.  Canada holds the distinction of being one of the few industrialized nations with almost no fiber deployment to residential homes.  When providers cap, throttle, and tier, they artificially control the traffic growth on their networks, taking pressure off the need to keep up with demand, despite high profits.

In the past year, many of these providers also began imposing draconian caps and limits on their wholesale accounts, forcing independent ISP’s to increase rates and impose usage caps at levels that make many independent providers uncompetitive.

The OECD report specifically calls out usage capped broadband, warning it may begin to negatively impact the Canadian economy and the nation’s competitiveness.

“This may become an economic disadvantage in countries with relatively low bit caps, particularly as more high-bandwidth applications appear,” the report said.

Many Canadians have been jealous about the expansion of online video and other applications south of the border, but presently denied to them.  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation warns they may have to wait forever, because usage caps may have permanently eliminated the prospects of online video on a mass scale throughout the country.

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OnLive’s Microconsole – About the size of a deck of playing cards

Back in March, an upstart company born from a high tech business incubator in Palo Alto announced it was nearly ready to challenge the conventional business model of the video game industry.  For years, game players invested in game consoles, complex pieces of hardware that rival many desktop computers, to play games distributed and sold as physical media. With the rise of digital platforms, enthusiasts can explore new gaming arenas, including the top 10 casino singapore options for an exhilarating online experience. Every few years, the multi-hundred dollar console would become essentially obsolete, and consumers would then have to spend hundreds more for the latest and greatest.  Switching allegiance to another brand meant repurchasing game titles to work on the new console. Those who are playing online games to win money may try this spaceman slot.

OnLive turns the traditional console model on its head.  By leveraging high speed broadband connections, the company claims it can move game play to a “cloud” model, where only an inexpensive micro-console is required to connect your broadband connection, game play controllers and accessories, and television together.  All of the raw processing power is done by OnLive’s servers.  As long as you have a robust broadband connection (at least 5Mbps preferred), game play is claimed to be fast and in “high definition quality.”  The company also claims to have licensed access to virtually all of the latest games, available the same day they become available in stores.

Customers are promised an end to console upgrades and costly investment in purchasing individual game titles.  OnLive’s business model provides the service for a monthly subscription fee, yet undetermined.  Play what you want, when you want. Bitcoin casinos are also becoming popular as players find them to be more transparent and trustworthy than their traditional online counterparts. Players can find the best crypto casinos at bitcoin lister.

But there is a fly in the ointment.  Moving to a cloud computing model, dependent on high speed broadband, changes the dynamics of how online gaming works.  Console models use comparatively small amounts of bandwidth.  Physical media provides the foundation for the game, and compressed “control data” moves back and forth to indicate player positioning and action.  OnLive does virtually everything from its servers, and sends it all down your online connection.  That means more bandwidth, more data moving back and forth, and under a broadband Cap ‘n Tier scheme, the possibility of more of your money moving out of your wallet.

OnLive claims it has sat down with most of the nation’s broadband providers to establish “good relations” with them.  OnLive’s usage model is designed to be “cable modem friendly,” relying much more on downloads and not a whole lot on uploads, putting reduced pressure on the cable modem pipeline.  The company was asked what kinds of deals they may have cut with cable providers, and company officials were vague.  Theoretically, OnLive could partner with bandwidth providers and given favorable priority for game play traffic between customers and OnLive’s servers.  But nothing like that appeared to be on the horizon at the GDC 2009 press conference (full video press conference), which highlighted the company’s product.

A follow-up question drilled down into the broadband capping issue OnLive may need to contemplate further:

[flv width=”608″ height=”336″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/OnLive Bandwidth Caps.flv[/flv]

While Comcast’s 250GB monthly usage cap may not pose a tremendous problem for OnLive for now, Time Warner Cable’s former experiment in Beaumont maxed out at 40GB per month, with $1/GB overlimit fees thereafter.  OnLive officials believe bandwidth caps impacting their business model “haven’t come up so far,” and they believe that if they have “good relations” with cable providers, some way will be found to deal with the matter.

Whether that proves to be true will be worth watching.  In the meantime, OnLive might do better standing with customers instead of providers and objecting to the usage cap limbo dance craze.  Because if a 40GB usage allowance is “a lot” for one company, so was the 5GB allowance some other companies claimed to be perfectly reasonable.  For OnLive, they certainly are not and there is nowhere to go in this dance except down.  Companies that rely on broadband to make their business models work will find customers second-guessing whether its worth it to buy a service, and get billed effectively twice for using it.

[Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader “Smith” for calling our attention to the story.]

Another day, and the problems just kept on coming.  Yesterday readers saw what happens when a small independent phone company is wholly unprepared for the task before it – to absorb three states’ worth of telephone and Internet customers into a company that used to serve just a few hundred thousand people.  Lost e-mail, Internet service down, multi-hour wait times on “live chat” support, and up to six weeks waiting for a service call.  With thousands of e-mail accounts apparently non-functional, the governor of New Hampshire had to personally intervene to get them to fix the problems.  Some desperate customers turned to the news media for help.  WMUR in Manchester found itself acting as an intermediary between FairPoint Communications and the customers who found it impossible to reach them directly for days on end:

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Thousands Of Accounts Lost In Transition 2-4-09.flv[/flv]

One woman spent two and half hours waiting in the queue for an online support chat… and then it kicked her off.  She’s livid, and so are many other New England customers flooding WMUR’s newsroom with e-mails and videos, which a station reporter took directly to the FairPoint CEO.

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