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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This is definitely a threat to competition, the playing field isn’t fair and the players are just dividing up the territories and services amongst themselves. Both AT&T Verizon knows that 4g service is the future as long as they pay politicians to keep the FCC’s hands off it, keep it unregulated, and charge through the nose with per-Gig fee’s and any other metered or tacked on charges they can think of. If that means giving up their landline broadband, even their fiber, so be-it.. the upside on their unregulated market vs a regulated one is so much greater for the… Read more »
C- Beneficial collaboration. 3 new MVNO’s enter the market that previously weren’t there and whom had no intention of launching their own networks before now. FiOS rollout is over. Verizon is actively selling arms of it. They’re done in that space. As an entire corporate entity (VZ Communications + VZ Wireless), their focus is very clearly on enterprise services with their hardline services (corporate) and wireless for retail. MVNO’s are often cheaper than the parent network, the caveat being you supply the device… easy to do with it being Verizon. So how isn’t this good? There’s going to be more… Read more »
The problem with MVNO’s is the wholesale pricing and access rules set by their suppliers. They are both carefully calculated to ensure no reseller can challenge the parent provider. The prepaid space is where most MVNO’s seem to survive, but notice they are no real competitive threat to the companies that supply the service, and a lot of MVNOs not affiliated with Sprint, TMO, Verizon or AT&T are finding the market increasingly unprofitable. The real problem here frankly is Wall Street which absolutely loathes capital spending. If Verizon stood their ground more strongly over FiOS deployment, a lot more service… Read more »
The other thing I hate with the MVNO’s is because they’re bound with their agreements to AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc.. while they may announce a great innovative service plans with low pricing, or unlimited data.. at any point when it gets popular their provider simply changes terms on them requiring them to raise pricing, or drop unlimited and go with a metered per Gb at the same or higher price than the provider. We;ve got several new Cellular companies announcing service now too that are piggybacking on Sprint and their WiMax network for cellular.. and I totally agree that’s a… Read more »
I wanted to toss my monitor out of the window every single time Cohen claimed that they’d offered the spectrum to every other carrier. That’s such bull. You don’t think there would be a feeding frenzy for that spectrum? He really expects us to believe that only Verizon, the carrier with the most spectrum, was the only one who was interested in it? This is AT&T/T-Mobile all over again! Do they think we’re stupid or something? Yeah, of course it’s very convenient that there’s no public proof of these “offers” to other carriers. They should not be able to sell… Read more »