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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See, I really wished he’d asked about the fact that if you only have phone service from Time Warner, you don’t have to pay the fee for the modem. So, they’re obviously lying about the reasoning. I’m really glad I left Time Warner a few months ago. I got fed up with having to constantly reset my modem and call their customer service when my internet would stop working. I’ve been with Cincinnati Bell and I haven’t had to reset my modem ONCE since then whereas with TWC, I was resetting it maybe twice a week.
I just sent in a contact form to Philip about how I caught a rep with the argument of the EMTA modem not having a charge, but getting him to admit that if I added Internet service then they would tack on the fee for using the same exact modem. When I called him out on it as that proving how it amounts to nothing more than an Internet rate hike, the rep immediatly went to script. I sent him out takes from my chat session with infomation to see if he’d publish it as a story here.
It is coming, Ben. I have been spending a lot of time this week with doctors dealing with a disc problem in my back, so I have been a bit behind.
Well, get well first and foremost! This site is great and you are doing a good job spreading information. My chat with the rep details a lot more than just catching them not knowing how to handle a direct questions, things like multiple transfer for a simple basic question, etc. The fact that my Signature Home service is suppose to provide top shelf, knowledgeable support. So, it is indeed a relevant story. It’s more than just trying to “catch” them which happened more by accident, it’s the utter lack of any actual support.
“When I called him out on it as that proving how it amounts to nothing more than an Internet rate hike, the rep immediatly went to script. I sent him out takes from my chat session with infomation to see if he’d publish it as a story here.”
Well done Ben, please remember that chat and phone agents are only doing their jobs. They had no say in policy, they just have talking points and “scripts”.
Trying to “catch” them is a waste of every ones time and certainly not a story.
Today I go the ‘dreaded letter’ HOWEVER there is a interesting bit of news on this one… So they are charging me 3.95 for a modem lease. YET… in the paragraph right bellow it they are decreasing my bill by 3.95. SO at this point is now a wash… The exact wording ‘Effective on the same date, based upon your current service level and monthly rate, your Standard Internet Service price will be reduced by $3.95 per month.’ So in effect at this point it becomes that I can lower my bill by 3.95 per month if I buy my… Read more »
I receive my November bill yesterday, no modem fee. I have not received any other communication either regarding such a fee. My account is still flagged as “free modem”. Maybe it goes into affect for the first bill ‘generated’ after 11/1? Maybe it doesn’t matter based on the comment above.
Paul
The “notification” for Rochester is through the newspaper. The article appeared yesterday: https://www.democratandchronicle.com/errors/404/?from=new-cookie
Interesting looks like it is regional… For example mine (North Carolina) is up and down at the same time so a wash. But that one is up only. Will have to see on the next bill what they did…