Stop the Cap! reader Brian thought he noticed a change in Time Warner Cable’s speedtest website for upstate New York residents — he thought the top speed on the gauge may have increased.  At the same time, a few readers on the Broadband Reports Road Runner forum wondered if a change in the Texas division’s speedtest gauge meant DOCSIS 3 upgrades were headed their way.

Perhaps, but Time Warner Cable’s speedtest gauges probably aren’t a guaranteed indicator of an imminent upgrade.  The one for western New York has shown a maximum speed of 120Mbps for months now, but there’s no evidence every city covered by it will soon have up to 100Mbps service.

A quick survey of Road Runner speedtest sites show a remarkable variation:

Verizon Communications has made its intentions clear — would-be broadband customers in its service area who are off the FiOS footprint can pound salt.  The Federal Communications Commission issues regular reports on broadband services and their adoption by consumers across the United States.  In the latest report, published this month, customers in Verizon’s current or former service areas who are not being served by Verizon FiOS are behind the broadband 8-ball, waiting for the arrival of DSL service from a company that has diverted most of its time, money, and attention on deploying its fiber-to-the-home service for the big city folks.

One might think the worst DSL availability in the country would be in rural states like Alaska, or territories like Guam, or income-challenged Mississippi.  No, the bottom of the barrel can be found in northern New England and the mid-Atlantic states — largely the current or former domain of Verizon:

Percentage of Residential End-User Premises with Access to High-Speed Services by State
(Connections over 200 kbps in at least one direction)

Source: FCC High-Speed Services for Internet Access: Table 19

Some might argue that DSL penetration ignores Verizon’s fiber upgrades, but does it?

Providers of High-Speed Connections by Fiber by State as of December 31, 2008
(Connections over 200 kbps in at least one direction)

Source: FCC High-Speed Services for Internet Access: Table 20

A survey of the rest of the country calls out Verizon’s inattentiveness to DSL expansion in its remaining service areas not covered by FiOS.

For example: Alabama, Idaho, Montana, and Oklahoma all enjoy 80 percent DSL availability.  Utah and Nevada achieved 90 percent coverage.  Even mountainous Wyoming, the least populous state in the country, provides 78 percent of its state’s customers with the choice of getting DSL service.  Yet New York manages only one point higher among its telephone companies, largely because of enormous service gaps upstate.

What happened?  By 2002 Verizon began to realize their future depended on moving beyond providing landline service.  The company began to divert most of its resources to a grand plan to deliver fiber connections to residences in larger markets in its service areas.  While great news for those who live there, those that don’t discovered they’ve been left behind by Verizon.  Northern New England got flushed by Verizon altogether — sold to the revenue-challenged FairPoint Communications who assumed control of Verizon’s problems and managed to make them worse.

The argument that rural broadband is “too expensive” doesn’t fly when looking at DSL availability in the expansive mountain west or rural desert regions.  Compact states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland are far easier to wire than North Dakota, New Mexico or even Texas with its large rural areas (87, 87, and 81 percent coverage, respectively).  Verizon simply doesn’t realize the kind of Return on Investment it seeks from FiOS customers — a dollar amount investors want to see.

Of course, that’s the argument Frontier Communications, and FairPoint behind it, made to regulators in sweeping promises to deliver better broadband service.  FairPoint missed its targets and declared bankruptcy.  Frontier is still in the “promises, promises” stage of its deal to take over millions of rural customers currently served by Verizon.

Broadband Reports this morning heard from a trusted source who says America’s largest cable operator is considering offering 250Mbps service to customers, perhaps as early as 2011.

While some cable operators (Time Warner Cable) have dragged their feet on DOCSIS 3 upgrades, Comcast has not — it is expected to have 100 percent of its cable systems upgraded this year.

DOCSIS 3 provides vastly increased speeds across a more robust network.  Older standards provided neighborhoods with a single 6 Mhz channel, with a 36Mbps downstream pipeline.  While that may be fine for a neighborhood browsing web pages and checking e-mail, it doesn’t take much too much high bandwidth activity to start slowing speeds down.  DOCSIS 3 “bonds” multiple channels together to create one fat pipeline.  Newer chipsets support eight combined 6Mhz channels, capable of providing that same neighborhood with 320Mbps of capacity.  Using schemes like PowerBoost, or with few others online, Comcast can deliver occasional bursts of speed at 250Mbps to customers without further upgrades, notes Dave Burstein of DSL Prime.

The bigger question is will customers pay the premium price for 250Mbps if Comcast maintains its 250GB usage limit on it?  Super speed tiers like this are useful to customers using high bandwidth applications.  It doesn’t make sense to upgrade to premium speeds if they’re accompanied by a usage governor.

When AT&T’s U-verse system arrived in Lawrence, Kansas residents rejoiced at the prospect of finally getting broadband service that didn’t come with Internet Overcharging schemes attached.  Sunflower Broadband, the local independent cable system, tied its fortunes to broadband usage allowances as low as three gigabytes per month.  Exceeding the allowance kicked in an overlimit fee for every extra gigabyte used.

As AT&T continues to make inroads in Lawrence with U-verse, which doesn’t have usage limits, customers noticed and began dropping Sunflower.  The cable system also noticed, and has increased plan allowances.

On the low end, the Bronze plan still charges $17.95 per month for 3Mbps/256kbps service with a three gigabyte allowance .  The Silver plan — $29.95 per month — received a speed and allowance upgrade.  Up from 7Mbps to 10Mbps, the monthly limit has now doubled to 50 GB per month.  Upload speeds remain an anemic 256kbps, however.  The biggest change comes for Gold plan users.  For $59.95 per month, the company offers 50/1Mbps service with a considerably more generous allowance — 250GB per month, up from 120GB.

Sunflower Broadband's Old Pricing/Service Plan (from January 2010)

Sunflower also sells a flat rate, unlimited plan called Palladium that doesn’t offer customers a set speed.  The company cut the price from $49.95 to $44.95 a month, perhaps in response to an underwhelmed customer base.  As we reported in January, Palladium speeds do not impress many Sunflower customers.  But some local residents report speeds are improving for those moved to Sunflower’s new DOCSIS 3 platform, an upgrade from Sunflower’s older system, where most of the speed complaints were noted.

The Lawrence Broadband Observer says AT&T and Sunflower are becoming close competitors in most respects, except upload speeds:

The one area where Sunflower still lags is upload speed, which even on the high-end plan is still limited to 1 megabit. This seems puzzling, and the 50 down to 1 up ratio of is greater then any other DOCSIS 3 cable company I was able to find, and makes it difficult to use services like photo and movie uploading, file sharing and online backup services. If Sunflower ever raises their upload speeds, they might just be able to lure this former customer back into the fold!

They could lure many more back if they dropped the hated usage limits and overlimit fees.  DOCSIS 3 provides substantially improved bandwidth, making such limits unnecessary.

Sunflower's New Broadband Plans & Pricing (February 2010)

TelstraClear serves New Zealand

Some broadband customers in New Zealand are treating their monthly usage allowances as usage targets, dedicated to ringing every last penny of value out of the Internet Overcharging schemes.  That means bandwidth usage increases just because customers don’t want to leave their remaining allowance on the table at the start of a new month.

PC World New Zealand notes “caps are essentially stupid” because your allowance resets at the end of every billing cycle:

If I’m away for a month and use zero bytes, it costs just the same as if I’d used my full 20GB. This wouldn’t be so galling if some allowance were made for under-utilising my capacity. It doesn’t have to be a 1:1 thing or roll over from month to month, but some concession would be nice. Perhaps a 1:2 ratio that must be used within the next billing period; in this case an allowance to go up to 30GB in the next month seems reasonable.

That would also get around the other irritating thing about data caps, the punitive charges if you go a single byte over your limit. In the case of TelstraClear it’s $2.95 per GB or part thereof.

TelstraClear - The Internet. Overcharged.

Readers shared their two cents:

I have a 40GB cap which I regularly go over. Telscum charge $20/Gb so it hurts like hell. I tried [switching] to TelstraClear but after three months all I had from them was a bill for services I didn’t receive.

We have 20Gb shared between the three of us and it is rare to go over but we do try like you to use it all up simply because we have paid for it. There is a company in NZ that allows you to roll it over it is Trust power Kinect. A friend uses them and roughly every three months he reckons he can save a month. You do need to have your power and phone with them though and for us it would actually work out more expensive but for others it might not. I do think caps suck though and wish they could be scrapped as I think we would actually use less bandwidth.

I think this part of the world and UK is an exception when it comes to data caps. In Europe data caps are very rare (except in UK which is not typical for Europe in any aspects). Being from Sweden I was a bit surprised moving to NZ and discovered data caps as well as very slow and expensive Internet. Sweden is similar to NZ (e.g. size, population) so it’s a fair comparison. You are being ripped off!