Dora Gonzales may have to explore other options for Internet service, thanks to Cable One.

Dora Gonzales sat down in front of her computer this week to check her e-mail, surf the web and play a little Tetris.

Instead of e-mail, the Albuquerque resident found a message telling her to call Cable One’s Internet security department, because her service was canceled.

“You downloaded a movie illegally and we’re shutting your service off,” came the explanation from Cable One, her local cable company.

Gonzales proclaimed her innocence, noting she doesn’t have the first clue how to download movies online.

After several minutes of conversation, Cable One figured out what was probably happening.  Gonzales not surprisingly didn’t secure the wireless network Cable One provided her with its cable modem broadband service.  Someone, possibly a neighbor, hopped on board her connection for some downloading mischief.  As a result, the illegal download was traced back not to the perpetrator, but to Gonzales — who takes the fall because it was her account.

Cable One manager told KOB-TV that Gonzales was ultimately responsible, even though the situation is not unique.

“What will happen is because they’re using your modem, it’s going to come back to you,” said Cable One manager David Gonzalez. “So the movie company or whoever is going to be trying to press charges will be looking at you because it came from your computer.”

Cable One wants to reduce the risk customers might face using the company’s wireless equipment, so effective immediately, it is requiring customers use passwords to access their wireless networks.

While a noble idea, Stop the Cap! reader Jon notes his Cable One gear only offers him the option of WEP security, a wireless security protocol that was broken back in 2005.

“Any neighbor savvy enough to run peer-to-peer traffic over the neighbor’s Wi-Fi is probably well-equipped to hack their way through WEP-based security in mere minutes,” he writes.  “Even worse, it becomes a lot harder for victims to claim innocence when they were running in a ‘secure mode’ that is anything but.”

A quick check with Cable One shows the cable company is equipping at least some of its customers with more security-conscious modems.  The company now advises customers to use WPA-PSK security, which its newer equipment supports.  Existing customers using older WEP-only modems should consider switching them out with Cable One for newer equipment.

Frontier Communications is another provider equipping some of its DSL customers with WEP-only modems.  We had one at Stop the Cap! headquarters when we tested their DSL service last year.

Consumers using wireless routers are advised to use the latest versions of WPA security, which offer better protection.  Be sure to use a password that is easy for you to remember but hard for others to guess.  Using a combination of letters and numbers and avoiding words or phrases is strongly recommended.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOB Albuquerque Providers Crack Down of Wireless Pirating 11-8-10.flv[/flv]

KOB-TV in Albuquerque reports Cable One is shutting off broadband service for customers not using wireless security.  (2 minutes)

Netflix accounts for 20 percent of all broadband activity in the United States during prime time evening hours.  As expected, “Internet experts” that are really little more than paid lobbyists for the broadband industry have started to feed the media scare stories about the great Internet traffic crisis soon to befall the Internet.

Just a few years ago, it was peer-to-peer traffic responsible for Internet “brownouts,” but now Netflix offers an even better, more convenient scapegoat — especially for the broadband providers that compete with it.

Fortune magazine provides a handy dandy needle to pop the balloon of BS from the broadband industry bully boys:

Just for fun, try to guess the year in which the following warnings about the Internet’s impending meltdown were issued:

No. 1: “Over the coming six to 12 months, computer users around the planet are likely to experience the Internet equivalent of the Great Blackout, or at least frequent brownouts, as our information infrastructure staggers and struggles under the heavy onslaught of new users and new demands.”

No. 2: “Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.”

No. 3: “Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?  American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up.”

The answers: 1997, 2007 and this week—and that’s just a small sampling from the past 20 years. Such predictions of the Internet’s breakdown are always premised on  the arrival of a scary new device or application that will send lots of digital bits over the Net.  Back in 1995, when Internet sage Bob Metcalfe tried to explain why he foresaw “the Internet’s catastrophic collapse,” he cited a wave of new “Internet appliances,” in particular the dangerous Sony Playstation, which for the first time had Internet access!

[…]What the chicken littles often miss are the clever ways in which Netflix movies and other content get delivered.  Like most major companies that move lots of Internet traffic, Netflix contracts with companies whose job it is to deliver lots of bits, fast and cheap.  Netflix relies mainly on industry giant Akamai, which runs 77,000 servers with big hard drives that it has placed in every nook and cranny of the Internet.  When a college student downloads “Dexter Season 1” from Netflix there’s a good chance the show is already stored on campus on an Akamai box.

“That video is growing rapidly and going to be huge is true,”  says Akamai co-founder Tom Leighton. “But there’s tons of capacity out at the edges of the network….plenty of capacity in the last mile to your house.”  That capacity, he says, combined with smart delivery of Netflix content from nearby servers, means the Internet can handle Netflix just fine.  If all that traffic had to travel closer to the center of the Internet then many larger peering points would be overwhelmed, Leighton adds. (There’s reason to trust Leighton’s numbers on both counts: he’s also a professor of applied mathematics at MIT.)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOCO Oklahoma City Netflix Crashing The Internet 11-4-10.flv[/flv]

Check out KOCO-TV Oklahoma City’s “Internet Panic” story, delivering the broadband industry’s talking points about Internet traffic jams in just 30 seconds.  (1 minute)

Virgin Media broadband customers in the United Kingdom who spend free time playing the highly addictive World of Warcraft (WoW) suffered some serious withdrawal episodes after game developers, who may know how to create games like 벳엔드, released a major software patch (v4.0.1).

Just after installation, customers noticed their game play started slowing to a crawl, resulting in game performance worthy of a Noob popping Xanax.  With online ‘street cred’ at risk on the multiplayer game environment, WoW players rushed to Virgin’s support forums inquiring about the sudden slow lane performance:

Ever since this patch I have experienced very high latency (around 2-4k ms) whilst being in combat in 25-man raids. This latency causes me to disconnect from the game after around 10 seconds of very lagged out combat. Outside of raids I seem to yo-yo up and down. I have been as low as 70ms and as high as 1kms.

I have tried everything I can think of game related. I have ensured all the correct ports are opened via port forwarding on my router.  I have tried running the game in its default state with all add-ons removed. I have done virus scans, disabled my firewall and I am running out of options. No one else in-game seems to have the same problems as I do. Admittedly, a couple of them are Virgin Media customers too and have no problems but I cannot think what else it could be.

Now stuck in the slow lane on Virgin Broadband

Virgin Media customers and staff initially seemed at a loss about what could cause just WoW traffic to become very un-WoW.  Virgin’s terms of service includes a virtual paddle to spank customers who “excessively utilize” their broadband connections, and the patch itself — amounting to at least 7GB with accompanying updates — was worthy enough to put some customers in the time-out corner.  But even as company support officials were asking impacted customers to do the problem-solving sleuthing for them, a growing number of customers suspected the provider’s “intelligent network traffic shaping” technology was the real culprit.

Traffic shaping is a term Americans are just getting acquainted with.  It’s essentially a virtual traffic cop that can identify different types of online traffic and assign different levels of priority for different applications.  The broadband industry claims traffic shaping is a net plus for broadband consumers because it forces traffic gorgers like peer to peer file sharing to the back of the line, making room for more predictable performance of Internet phone calls, video, and other time-critical Internet applications. Virgin even markets its broadband service as enhancing online game play by giving the highest possible priority to game-related traffic. Join betpro today for access to a wide range of sports betting options and exciting casino games!

But when traffic shaping goes bad, it can create a nightmare for broadband customers who find roadblocks that ruin their online experience.

Virgin initially denied it was responsible for traffic shaping WoW to the point of unusability. Eventually, Virgin admitted it -was- responsible for the game traffic throttles, but passed the blame to WoW’s game developers, Blizzard Entertainment.  At one point Virgin suggested the company might want to recall the latest patch, just to get the game to work again on Virgin’s broadband network.  When that didn’t fly, company officials eventually released a statement taking responsibility, but telling customers it will be weeks before their “traffic management supplier” can create a workaround:

Since the latest World of Warcraft update we have seen that the type of packets used by Blizzard to deliver the on-line gaming has changed significantly.  This means that Virgin Media’s National (ADSL) traffic management system is unable to recognise the packets as gaming traffic and assumes that they are peer to peer traffic.  Due to this the traffic management system does not place the packets within the gaming queue which has the highest priority and lowest latency within the VM network, instead they fall into the peer to peer class which gets a low level of priority within our network and by default a higher level of latency.

We are working to try and rectify this as soon as we can with our traffic management supplier however it will take us a few weeks to upgrade the traffic manage solution so that is can recognise the new traffic class and correctly classify it as gaming.  Unfortunately due to the nature of most traffic management solutions we can not manually move these packets into the gaming queue as the solution can not work out which ones to move.

We appreciate that some customers will have noticed a similar issue with the previous World of Warcraft update.  The reason behind this is because gaming companies are not prepared to share the updates with Virgin Media or traffic management suppliers prior to its release and so the first time we see the new packets is when people start to use the new updates.  We are trying to change this view point of the gaming companies however at present they are un-willing to work with us.

We apologise for the affect that this has on your gaming experience and we will update you when we have a confirmed fix date for this.

By that time, many WoW enthusiasts will have probably fled Virgin for another provider.

Our reader James, who alerted us to this story, notes it takes a special kind of nerve for a broadband provider running speed traps to blame software developers for the problem.

“So, wait — Virgin is blaming the game developers because their code runs on the assumption that all traffic is treated equally and because they don’t verify their updates with the ISP before pushing them out to consumers?” James incredulously asks.

Virgin could always discontinue their faulty un-intelligent network traffic shaping scheme until a solution can be found, but that hasn’t happened.  It could interfere with “preferred content partnerships” — clients who pay to avoid the speed traps and throttles and always get special treatment.

Paying customers?  They can wait two or three weeks.

A Blizzard representative said Virgin’s buck (or is it pound?)-passing was inexcusable because the game producer -has- made efforts to reach out to ISPs in the past:

“In our defense, most of our previous attempts to work with ISPs have been shut down by the ISP management. I’m going to avoid naming actual ISP names for obvious legal reasons. We’re not the ISP’s actual customer so they rarely care what we have to say.”

And that is a perfect real-world example of what happens when Net Neutrality is not the law of the land.  Providers claim their traffic management schemes benefit their customers, but in reality they are only responsive to the “preferred content partners” that pay them to be responsive.

If Americans want to enjoy a similar level of service from their Internet Service Providers, just oppose Net Neutrality, sit back and wait… and wait… and wait.

Fibrant ruins Time Warner Cable's Speed Party by delivering faster service at a lower price, without the cable company's rate increase notice sitting in Charlotte-area mailboxes.

Residents of Salisbury, N.C. are going to get some of the state’s fastest broadband speeds as the community-owned broadband provider prepares to introduce 200/200Mbps service, leaving Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service behind in the dust.

Time Warner Cable enjoyed a few moments in the spotlight last week announcing free speed upgrades for the Charlotte region, which includes Salisbury.  But Fibrant’s fiber to the home network is well-equipped to turn Time Warner’s temporary speed advantage on its head.

Last week, the cable operator promoted the introduction of its new maximum speed 50/5Mbps Road Runner Wideband service, which carries a monthly price of $99.95.

But Salisbury city officials were unimpressed, claiming Fibrant already offers 50/50Mbps service — they just haven’t advertised it.

Assistant City Manager Doug Paris said Fibrant’s top available speed is 10 times faster than the cable giant’s when uploading.

“We’re cheaper, and we’re faster,” Paris told the Salisbury Post.  Fibrant sells the 50Mbps service for $85 a month, about 15 dollars less than Time Warner Cable’s slower Wideband service.

City officials also weren’t surprised that Time Warner announced faster Internet speeds the day after Fibrant launched.

“We’ve seen this in every other city that has invested in fiber optics,” he said. “They are trying to match our speeds, but they can’t.”

The Salisbury Post needs a few cans for its message boards, filled with anonymous lunacy.

Time Warner Cable claimed its new speeds were not in response to Fibrant but were part of a service upgrade for the entire Charlotte area, a claim every cable company makes in response to new competition on their doorstep.

Fibrant’s upstream streams are dramatically better than those offered by Time Warner Cable, which uses an inferior network architecture not currently capable of delivering the same upstream and downstream speeds to consumers.  Cable broadband networks are constructed with the assumption most users will download far more than they upload, so the networks emphasize downstream speeds.  Time Warner Cable has dramatically increased those download speeds, but has been forced so far to limit uploads to just 5Mbps.

Fiber to the home networks like Fibrant do not suffer those limitations, and the city plans to exploit that in their marketing.

Fibrant has the capacity to provide up to 1 gigabit per second upload and download, Paris said. Forthcoming are plans offering 100/100 and 200/200Mbps service, with prices yet to be determined.

Fibrant continues to have a waiting list of several hundred area residents waiting for service, but you wouldn’t know it from the raucous anonymous postings on the Post’s website.  Virtually all of the anonymous comments about Fibrant have been negative and wildly uninformed, to the point of hilarity.  From a Korean War veteran talking about eating blueberries and living life in the Windstream DSL slow lane (and loving it) to comments proclaiming fiber optics as woefully slower than WiMax, the Internet trolls have managed to prove why an increasing number of newspapers have learned to adopt “real names-only” posting policies or have just turned the comment section off altogether.

For those fans of  Time Warner Cable, the price of that love is about to go up.

Time Warner is mailing notices to Charlotte area customers announcing broadband rate hikes for some customers this December.  Time Warner customers who bundle their services or are on price protection promotions will be exempted from the rate increases… for now.

AT&T's "Fair Deal" website claims the company is fighting for lower programming costs.

Programmers trying to play hardball over fees paid by cable, satellite, and phone company providers occasionally get the ball thrown back at them, which is precisely what happened Friday when Scripps-Howard found their popular networks thrown off of AT&T’s U-verse, even though the companies had agreed on financial terms.

At issue — AT&T wants to distribute programming it pays for over new mediums, ranging from video on demand, online viewing, and even wireless watching through smartphone applications.  If programmers want more money, AT&T argues, they’d better also be willing to deal on how that programming gets watched.

When Scripps’ officials demurred Friday morning, AT&T simply pulled the plug on Food TV, HGTV, the Cooking Channel, as well as lesser-watched Great American Country and DIY Networks.

Scripps’ officials hurried out a statement:

“Let me start by saying this impasse is not about money,” said John Lansing, president of Scripps Networks. “We reached an agreement in principle with AT&T U-verse on the distribution fees we would receive for these networks well in advance of last month’s contract deadline.”

“AT&T U-verse demanded unreasonably broad video rights for emerging media where business models have not even been established,” Lansing said. “Accepting their demands would have restrained our ability to deliver our content to our viewers in new and innovative ways.”

Food Network President Brooke Johnson threw a HissyFit, claiming AT&T yanked the channels while the two sides were still at the negotiating table.

As Friday wore on, both sides defended their respective positions.  Scripps’ saw AT&T’s actions as nothing short of a Pearl Harbor sneak attack.  AT&T claimed Scripps was pulling a flim-flam — trying to stick the phone company with an inferior deal that restricted how they can use the basic cable networks, all at prices higher than their cable competitors were paying.

But when Lansing claimed the dispute was not about money, reality was also yanked from the lineup.  When a cable company or programmer tells you it is not about the money, it is all about the money.

Scripps reactivated their "Keepmynetworks.com" website to fight another programming fee battle

Johnson told the Chicago Tribune AT&T was trying to negotiate for broad usage rights of their programming for services that don’t even exist yet.

“They are asking for broad, unlimited distribution on non-linear platforms that go well beyond emerging media technologies. It’s anticipatory and it’s without a business model,” Johnson said.

Such agreements could end up haunting Scripps if a new money-making distribution scheme evolves that AT&T can use -and- get to keep all of the profits.

Cable companies might also be unhappy if AT&T won concessions they themselves don’t have.

Re-purposing video content into on-demand or portable viewing could evolve into a multi-million dollar business, especially if consumers begin deserting cable TV packages that include dozens of unwatched channels.  Cable cord-cutters could end up watching Food TV shows online, and who benefits financially from that is ultimately the issue here.

A weekend without the networks on U-verse was apparently enough for both sides, who pounded out an agreement announced yesterday evening, restoring the networks.

It was all-smiles for both sides:

Brian Shay, senior vice president of AT&T U-verse, said, “It was important to us on behalf of our customers to come to a positive resolution as quickly as possible. We appreciate everyone’s willingness to make that happen, working diligently over the weekend, so the situation wasn’t prolonged, and we thank our customers for their support and patience while we reached a fair deal.”

From Scripps:

“AT&T U-verse customers, we have been overwhelmed by your loyalty and support of HGTV and our other networks – DIY, Food Network, Cooking Channel and GAC. Your voice has been heard and we are very close to getting our networks back on AT&T U-verse.  We hope to have more good news for you soon.”

Terms of the new agreement were not disclosed, but you can be certain it includes a higher price tag for the bouquet of Scripps’ networks that will eventually appear on future AT&T U-verse bills.  But at least the cable networks avoided the fate of the Hallmark Channel, kicked off U-verse Sept. 1st and is still off as of today.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WDAF Kansas City Cable Customers Lose Channels 11-8-10.flv[/flv]

WDAF-TV in Kansas City covers the weekend loss of Food TV and other cable networks on AT&T U-verse over another programming fee dispute.  (2 minutes)