Bright House Networks Thursday switched on a huge network of free Wi-Fi hotspots for its broadband customers across central Florida.  Concentrated on coastal beach communities in eastern Florida and in the cities of Orlando, Tampa, and St. Petersburg, the new Wi-Fi service can be found on beaches and parks, inside malls and shopping destinations, downtown business districts, and medical facilities across their Florida service area.

Bright House Networks Wi-Fi Coverage Map

Existing Bright House broadband customers can log in and use the service for free:

• Most wireless devices will display available networks. If the device doesn’t show networks, open the network options and select My BrightHouse or Bright House Networks.
• Open the Internet browser of your choice.
• When the WiFi HotZones page opens, click ‘log in’ under Bright House Road Runner Customer.
• Log in using Road Runner email and password or My Services credentials.
• Agree to the terms of use and connect to the WiFi network.

Non-customers can purchase access with a credit card in increments of as little as three hours.  Stop the Cap! readers in central Florida report speed test results of around 5/1Mbps from many of the Wi-Fi locations, which is much better than many other publicly available Wi-Fi networks.

Bright House says it has launched the Wi-Fi service to help customers hang on to their usage-limited mobile broadband allowances.

“We’re trying to save our customers money, time and energy,” Bright House spokesman Donald Forbes said.  “Plus, Wi-Fi is so much faster and such a better connection.”

Cable provider-delivered Wi-Fi is often used by the industry as a customer retention tool and goodwill gesture.  It typically uses the company’s pre-existing broadband infrastructure, which keeps costs low.

Bright House is soliciting customer feedback about possible new locations for future Wi-Fi hotspots.  The company plans to add at least 2,000 additional hotspots by the end of this year.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bright House launches major Wi-Fi initiative 1-12-12.flv[/flv]

Bright House produced this informational video introducing its Wi-Fi service.  (2 minutes)

Phillip Dampier

Sometimes you have to wonder if some people have no shame.  Former Sen. Chris Dodd, who now collects a fat paycheck as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has his fur in quite the ruffle this morning, upset to learn thousands of websites have voluntarily gone offline in a one day protest against proposed copyright legislation bought and paid for by the industry he now represents.

“Some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging,” Dodd said in a statement.

Corporate pawns?  The irony of Dodd’s use of the revolving door between his public office and the special interests he used to oversee (and now earns a living from), was lost on him.  So was the fact the MPAA and its recording industry cohort the RIAA have spent the past several years alienating consumers extorting settlements out of those presumed guilty, under threat of being sued for much more.  With years of overreach and customer alienation under their belts, pardon America if they suspect Hollywood’s latest anti-piracy plan is more of the same.

Dodd served the people of Connecticut when the music and movie industry began a series of crackdowns on content theft that did more harm than good.  This is the industry that fought the right of consumers to record TV shows on home VCR’s for later viewing, wanted to tax blank media, raised prices on CD’s and DVD’s to the point it fueled piracy, for years refused to license legal online content in ways that would have undercut piracy, imposed “digital rights management” technology that effectively curtailed fair use of content consumers purchased for themselves, and sued customers it suspected of stealing — innocent or otherwise.

Dodd

But Chris Dodd doesn’t work for the American people any longer.  He works for giant corporate studios and now represents their interests.

Dodd is especially upset because the Stop SOTA protests may actually be effective at shutting down the railroading of the so-called “Stop Online Piracy Act” through Congress.

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information… A so-called ‘blackout’ is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals,” said Dodd.

The industry has spent millions trying to position their legislation as a solution to shady offshore counterfeiters and content thieves, but the bill’s most significant provisions hit much closer to home.

The proposed legislation would allow the Department of Justice and content owners to seek court orders against any site accused of “enabling or facilitating” piracy.  Since America’s long arm of justice can reach only between the states of Hawaii and Maine, this most important provision of the proposed bill would do little to curtail those “foreign criminals.”

SOPA also demands that search engines censor themselves to remove anything Hollywood suspects of infringing copyright from search listings.  As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented for years on its Chilling Effects project website, such powers have already been used within the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to wipe out listings that just reference copyrighted works, occasionally even by third parties that have no real standing to file the complaint.  At least websites responding affirmatively to DMCA complaints are protected from unknowingly violating copyright law.  Under SOPA, those protections are bypassed, potentially making even innocent infringement liable for civil action and search engine blocking.

Much of the enforcement, likely encouraged by companies Dodd now represents, will be done at the behest of Hollywood studios and other deep pocketed content producers.  Ultimately, most of the impact will be felt by consumers suspected of “infringing,” many who effectively lack the financial resources to prove their innocence.

Any web publisher would need to think twice about publishing anything online, if only because the financial risks of defending oneself against alleged copyright infringement would be onerous.

Since most of the criminal element Dodd claims to be concerned with is in it for the money, the most obvious solution is simple: remove the financial incentive.  A victim of copyright infringement need only seek a court order that bars financial transactions between theft-oriented websites and the online payment processors that supply the money.  Barring credit card companies, online payment services like PayPal, and other payment services from accepting money for copyright infringement puts the criminals out of business fast.  Existing provisions in the DMCA already force search engines to remove infringing content.

The alternative is turning the Internet over to the Hollywood copyright police, who along with the movie industry have demonstrated a long history of broad brush enforcement that cares little about the presumed innocence of the accused.

Years ago, phone companies could not simply raise rates willy-nilly.  They had to justify rate increases before an oversight body, usually on the state level.  But after spending millions to lobby state lawmakers to deregulate the phone business, AT&T is set to recoup their investment with a dramatic 25 percent rate increase for landline phone service in the state of California.

Some residential customers have kept basic landline service as a last resort, switching to “measured service,” where customers pay a small charge for every call they make or receive a calling allowance that covers several calls a day.  Measured service can deliver substantial savings over traditional flat rate service.  But now AT&T is targeting these “budget customers” for some stunning rate hikes.

Starting March 1st, AT&T is raising rates by nearly 25% for measured service — from $12.37 to $15.37 a month — a $3 increase.  After your calling allowance is exhausted, each additional local call will cost three cents per minute.

Customers with flat rate service will also pay AT&T $1.05 more — $21 a month (before taxes, fees, and surcharges) for basic flat rate, unlimited local calling.

Best of all (for AT&T), the company does not have to explain or justify the rate increase.  That attitude was evident when reading the Los Angeles Times‘ account of the rate hike, complete with an arrogant, shoulder-shrugging AT&T spokesman:

Lane Kasselman, an AT&T spokesman, said fees for measured and flat-rate calling plans are going up because, well, because.

“Goods and services go up,” he told me. “That’s how our economy works.”

The increase is expected to hit seniors and low income consumers the hardest — they are the biggest constituency of the 10 percent of AT&T customers who choose measured-rate, budget service.  They are also the least likely to have cut the cord on their traditional landline service in favor of a cell phone or competing Voice Over IP provider.

AT&T hints that the rate increase is partly to push customers into multi-service bundles that include phone, Internet, and television service.  By hiking the price of individual services, the bundled price suddenly seems to deliver the best “savings” for customers.

Critics call that price pumping — artificially raising the price of a-la-carte services to create phantom savings for the company’s higher-revenue bundled service packages.

A San Francisco advocacy group calls it something else.

“It’s extortion, pure and simple,” said Regina Costa, telecom research director for the Utility Reform Network, or TURN, a consumer group. “There’s no proof that these price increases are justified.”

Thanks to California’s deregulation of the landline phone business, no proof is required.

Draft legislation to make life difficult for community broadband in South Carolina has resurfaced this week in the state Senate Judiciary Committee.  The legislation, H. 3508, would hamstring communities from setting up fiber networks that are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of new investments from digital economy businesses like Amazon.com in the nearby state of Tennessee.

Lobbyists from AT&T are aggressively pushing the measure, and no doubt Time Warner Cable will also deliver its support.

The protectionist legislation, which delivers all of the benefits to status quo providers like AT&T inside the Palmetto State, guarantees local officials cannot pitch advanced, community-owned fiber networks to companies like Amazon, Google, and other billion-dollar businesses that are expanding across the southern United States.

The implications are so dire, the South Carolina Association of Counties and the Municipal Association of South Carolina vociferously opposed the legislation last year.  On the ground in rural Orangeburg County, administrator Bill Clark understands first hand the implications of broadband scarcity.  He was shocked to discover the bill considers any connection that achieves the woeful speed of 190kbps would qualify as “broadband,” no doubt to allow AT&T to claim its 3G wireless broadband service already “well serves” the state of South Carolina.  If AT&T can demonstrate it delivers at least 190kbps service in South Carolina, even if capped to just a few gigabytes of usage per month, the company can claim South Carolina does not have a broadband problem.

Stop the Cap! readers inside South Carolina regularly complain about the state’s lousy broadband on the ground.  Our regular reader Fred in Laurens is stuck between a broadband rock and a hard place, navigating poor service from Frontier Communications, AT&T, and bottom-rated Charter Cable.  He can’t wait for a community provider to set up in South Carolina.

Unfortunately for Fred and other South Carolina residents, special interests in the telecommunications industry have gone out of their way petitioning state government to set up obstacles to community broadband while providers do little or nothing to upgrade broadband in the rural corners of the state.

Back to push more special interest legislation to keep community-owned broadband from taking hold.

Now AT&T is back to push for even stronger restrictions, and as Chris Mitchell from Community Broadband Networks wrote during last year’s tangle, this legislation will effectively make any local government ownership of telecommunications facilities impossible:

The bill is blatantly protectionist for AT&T interests, throwing South Carolina’s communities under the bus. But as usual, these decisions about a “level playing field” are made by legislators solely “educated” by big telco lobbyists and who are dependent on companies like AT&T for campaign funds. Even if AT&T’s campaign cash were not involved, their lobbyists talk to these legislators every day whereas local communities and advocates for broadband subscribers simply cannot match that influence.

We see the same unlevel playing field, tilted toward massive companies like AT&T, in legislatures as we do locally when communities compete against big incumbents with their own networks. Despite having almost all the advantages, they use their tremendous power and create even more by pushing laws to effectively strip communities of the sole tool they possess to ensure the digital economy does not pass them by.

South Carolina’s access to broadband is quite poor — 8th worst in the nation in access to the the kinds of connections that allow one to take advantage of the full Internet according to a recent FCC report [pdf].

Some of the provisions on display are remarkably transparent for AT&T’s own interests:

No reasonable provider will invest in expensive broadband infrastructure in an unserved area if it must stop providing communications services within 12 months of a Commission finding that a private provider has begun to offer at least 190 kilobits per second to more than 10 percent of the households in the area.

Public sector entities will be subjected to “the same local, state, and federal regulatory, statutory, and other legal requirements to which nongovernment‑owned communications service providers” are held. This is similar language we see in North Carolina and other states, betraying the total lack of ignorance on telecommunications policy among legislators and their staff.

Requiring public communications providers to comply with all applicable local, state, and federal requirements would be appropriate, but requiring them to meet the same requirements that non-government entities must meet would be tremendously time-consuming, burdensome, and costly for public entities. It would also lead to endless disputes over which requirements public entities should comply with and how they should do so. For example, incumbent local exchange carriers, competitive local exchange carriers, Internet service providers, cable companies, private non-profit entities, and other communications providers are all subject to different requirements.

Requiring public communications providers to comply with all requirements that apply to private communications providers will not achieve a “level playing field” unless private providers are simultaneously required to comply with all open records, procurement, civil service, and other requirements that apply to public entities.

Call to Action: Contact these members of the South Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee right away and let them know you oppose H.3508:

(click names of individual members to obtain direct contact information)

Points to Share:

• While South Carolina ponders another bill tying the hands behind the backs of our community leaders, Tennessee’s community fiber network in Chattanooga just helped that state score thousands of new jobs for an Amazon.com distribution center.  Amazon is investing hundreds of millions in the state and local economy, creating new high quality jobs.  They chose Chattanooga because it had the digital infrastructure at a price that made that community too attractive to ignore.  Meanwhile, AT&T and other companies do not offer this level of service without a huge upfront commitment and lengthy delay to provision facilities.  That’s time for companies to look to states like Tennessee instead, where they can get the right service at the right price in days, not months.
• South Carolina delivers the country’s 9th worst broadband.  What high tech company will consider coming to our state when broadband service is so lacking?  Since private providers have had ample opportunity to deliver service themselves, and failed to do so, why can’t local communities decide what is best for themselves, free from special interest interference from big companies like AT&T.
• Why is AT&T setting the broadband bar so low in South Carolina when other states are enjoying fiber to the home service at lightning fast speeds?  The bar is set so low at 190kbps, it leaves South Carolina in the dust.  Our schools, public safety networks, health care facilities, and economy deserve better and could get a major economic boost from construction of networks similar to that in Chattanooga.  If it doesn’t make sense, communities won’t build it. If it does, why are we letting AT&T effectively make the final decision?
• Public broadband does not have to risk taxpayer dollars.  Successful fiber networks are being built in communities across the country at no risk to taxpayers.
• South Carolina must compete in the high tech economy.  We cannot do that with low speed wireless networks and DSL.  H. 3508 is corporate protectionism at its worst and will leave South Carolina without the flexibility to compete with states like Tennessee for future private sector investment.  What is more important — protecting AT&T’s incumbent copper wire facilities or attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from private companies like Google and Amazon?

We have received several inquiries about where Stop the Cap! stands on the “Stop Online Piracy Act” — legislation currently in Congress designed to combat online piracy.  We’ve remained silent on this legislation for only one reason: we just haven’t have the time to cover it.  But I wanted to take a moment to answer the ongoing inquiries from readers about where we stand on this legislation.

In short, we oppose it.

As with virtually all legislation bought and paid for by large corporate interests, this attempt to thwart online piracy is yet another example of special interest overreach with a bountiful basket of unintentional consequences corporate lobbyists are not paid to consider when pushing the agenda of giant media and entertainment conglomerates.

As of yesterday, the Obama Administration seems to have recognized the growing opposition to the legislation from just about everyone apart from the corporate interests spending millions to promote and lobby it.  Some media reports seem to indicate SOPA is on the verge of being shelved, at least temporarily.  But you can be certain that like all monied legislation, it will be back.

Instead of a lengthy explanation about SOPA, we’d prefer to point you to some excellent pieces explaining why the proposed bill is a really, really bad idea.  Free Press has an organized campaign to stop the legislation in its current form, one that you should consider supporting, even if the bill is now languishing in Washington.  Also check out the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s web form to contact your legislators to oppose SOPA.

Stop the Cap! will participate in the Stop SOPA censorship campaign scheduled for tomorrow.  Visitors will first land on an information page explaining why this site “has been blocked.”  But that page includes a link to continue your journey back here, where regular coverage will continue.

Be sure to watch these two videos:

[flv width=”596″ height=”356″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/MSNBC Chris Hayes SOPA and Antipiracy Debated 1-15-12.flv[/flv]

Chris Hayes’ courageous in-depth debate about SOPA appeared on MSNBC, a network owned by Comcast-NBC, which ardently supports the legislation to the point of distributing pro-SOPA coffee mugs to employees. (18 minutes)

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/SOPA Marvin Ammori.flv[/flv]

Marvin Ammori’s assessment of the legislation appeared on Al-Jazeera English, one of the few news networks willing to discuss the proposed legislation on-air.  (4 minutes)