Comcast Tinkers With New 600GB Cap for Super Premium Broadband Customers

Phillip Dampier September 18, 2012 Broadband Speed, Comcast/Xfinity, Data Caps Comments Off on Comcast Tinkers With New 600GB Cap for Super Premium Broadband Customers

Unfortunately, your usage allowance does not reach Xfinity.

Comcast has introduced more generous usage allowances for some of their premium broadband customers who pay for lightning fast speeds and do not appreciate a one-size-fits-all usage cap.

Broadband Reports has reliable information the rollout of more generous caps, starting in Tucson on Oct. 1, will eventually make their way to other Comcast cities. The newly available caps vary according to the broadband tier chosen by customers:

  • Economy: 300 GB
  • Economy Plus: 300 GB
  • Internet Essentials: 300 GB
  • Performance Starter: 300 GB
  • Performance: 300 GB
  • Blast: 350 GB
  • Extreme 50: 450 GB
  • Extreme 105: 600 GB

Well, that answers that.

Karl Bode says he is unsure what the cap will be (or if there is one) on Comcast’s newest 305Mbps speed tier, not yet available in Tucson. Comcast’s usage caps only apply to residential service. Customers who refuse to tolerate limits have often switched to one of Comcast’s business broadband tiers, which come uncapped.

Customers who exceed their allowance will pay a price AT&T seems to have successfully introduced as the de facto overlimit fee for American broadband consumers: $10 for each 50GB increment over the limit.

Customers will receive an in-browser notice when they reach their limit. Comcast has a ‘three strikes and you’re out $10‘-policy — giving customers three free “courtesy passes” if they happen to exceed their allowance and do not want to pay an overlimit fee. After that, the fee will be automatically billed.

While some Time Warner Cable customers are drooling at Comcast’s regularly increasing speeds (TWC’s top speed is currently 50/5Mbps), a significant number say not having a usage cap is worth the trade-off.

“Comcast can keep their higher speeds you can’t really use with their usage caps,” shares Stop the Cap! reader Will Pryzinski. “I’m more than happy with 50Mbps from Time Warner so long as the usage limit ripoff stays far away.”

AT&T Faces Net Neutrality Complaint from Public Interest Groups Over FaceTime Blocking

Free Press’ campaign against AT&T’s Net Neutrality violation (click image for further information)

When AT&T customers take delivery of their new iPhone 5 or install Apple’s latest iOS 6 software update, the popular video conferencing app FaceTime will become available to the company’s mobile broadband customers for the first time, if they agree to switch their service to one of AT&T’s new, often more-costly “Mobile Share” plans.

Until now, FaceTime has been limited to Wi-Fi use only, but objections from wireless carriers and some technical limitations kept the popular app from working over 3G or 4G wireless networks.

AT&T’s decision to block the FaceTime app unless a customer changes their current mobile plan has sparked a notification from three public interest groups that they intend to file a formal Net Neutrality complaint against AT&T.

“AT&T’s decision to block FaceTime unless a customer pays for voice and text minutes she doesn’t need is a clear violation of the FCC’s Open Internet rules,” said Free Press policy director Matt Wood. “It’s particularly outrageous that AT&T is requiring this for iPad users, given that this device isn’t even capable of making voice calls. AT&T’s actions are incredibly harmful to all of its customers, including the deaf, immigrant families and others with relatives overseas, who depend on mobile video apps to communicate with friends and family.”

Free Press is joined in the forthcoming complaint by Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

“AT&T’s decision to block mobile FaceTime on many data plans is a direct contradiction of the Commission’s Open Internet rules for mobile providers,” said Sarah Morris, policy counsel for the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. “For those rules to actually protect consumers and allow them to choose the services they use, the Commission must act quickly in reviewing complaints before it.”

AT&T earlier responded claiming they still allow the app to work over Wi-Fi (yours or theirs), so it cannot be a Net Neutrality violation. The company has spent an increasing amount of energy trying to convince regulators that wireless networks, including Wi-Fi, are largely equivalent. So long as a customer can access an app on one of them, there is no violation according to AT&T.

The company also claimed that since FaceTime comes pre-installed on phones, it is exempted from Net Neutrality regulations.

Whether the FCC will believe arguments that access over Wi-Fi is suitable enough to escape scrutiny for blocking an app on AT&T’s own 3G and 4G networks is open to debate.

The Obama Administration’s FCC has taken a lukewarm approach on Net Neutrality, adopting a compromise that is being attacked in court by MetroPCS and Verizon Wireless and considered insufficient protection by most consumer groups.

Capt. Jean-Luc Picard Defeated the Borg, But Time Warner Cable Takes His Will to Live

Phillip Dampier September 18, 2012 Consumer News 2 Comments

Even Sir Patrick Stewart, famed Star Trek: The Next Generation starship captain, can’t “make it so” when it comes to Time Warner Cable in New York City.

Stewart, who just moved to the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, ran into a level 10 force field trying to get his cable service established.

He did what so many other consumers do when they run into a brick wall of customer service bureaucracy. He took it to Twitter:

The man who helped defeat the Borg couldn’t survive Time Warner Cable’s dreadfully poor customer service meted out to customers in the Big Apple (it scores a less than impressive 1.5 stars on Yelp), despite the eventual intervention from one of the company’s social media representatives employed to put out Twitter and Facebook fires. Unfortunately, it was too late:

Stewart is not alone. LeVar “Geordi La Forge” Burton has been there too (along with many of the 1,100+ others who retweeted Stewart’s dilemma):

 

 

House Republicans Order Hearing on FCC’s Actions Regarding Bankrupt LightSquared

Phillip Dampier September 18, 2012 Competition, LightSquared, Public Policy & Gov't, Wireless Broadband Comments Off on House Republicans Order Hearing on FCC’s Actions Regarding Bankrupt LightSquared

House Energy & Commerce Committee

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing Friday to review the Federal Communications Commission’s actions regarding the now-bankrupt wireless firm LightSquared, which proposed a nationwide 4G network later found to create major interference problems for GPS users.

At issue are the circumstances surrounding the conditional waiver the company received from the FCC to move forward with its network in 2011. Some Republicans are questioning whether the FCC rushed the approval process without independently assessing whether LightSquared would interfere with GPS services located on nearby frequencies.

The hearing, requested by the Republican majority, will explore whether the FCC skipped its own procedures and ignored policy to hurry approval.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has raised questions about the FCC and LightSquared owner Philip Falcone, who has donated nearly $100,000 to the Democratic Party.

“Without transparency, and with media coverage of political connections in this case, there’s no way to know whether the agency is trying to help friends in need or really looking out for the public’s interest,” Grassley said last September after unsuccessfully trying to get the FCC to pass along documents regarding the venture.

The Center for Public Integrity found numerous political connections between LightSquared and the Democratic Party:

  • Several major Democratic campaign contributors and longtime Obama supporters have held investments in the company and its affiliates during its tangled decade of existence. They include Obama’s good friend and political donor Donald Gips, his former White House personnel chief, who now serves as U.S. ambassador to South Africa. Records show that Gips maintained an interest, worth as much as $500,000, as the FCC was weighing LightSquared’s request.
  • Obama himself was an early investor and came to the presidency a firm believer in expanding broadband. He remains close to other early investors, like Gips and investment manager George W. Haywood, inviting some to luxe social events at the White House and more intimate gatherings like a night of poker and beer.
  • Obama installed one of his biggest fundraisers, Julius Genachowski, a campaign “bundler” and broadband cheerleader, as chairman of the FCC, whose staff granted LightSquared a special waiver to operate.
  • LightSquared’s current majority owner, hedge fund manager Philip Falcone, made large donations to the Democratic Party while his broadband request was pending before the FCC. He and LightSquared executives met with White House officials. Neither Falcone nor the White House would comment on what was discussed.
  • LightSquared employs lobbying firms that wield formidable Democratic firepower: Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania and onetime chair of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the firm of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt.
  • Jeffrey J. Carlisle, the company’s vice president for regulatory affairs, served with Genachowski and Gips on Obama’s transition team.

With nearly $3 billion sunk into the venture by hedge fund owner Falcone and his backers at Harbinger Capital, fierce lobbying pressure was applied to win the conditional FCC waiver, granted by the FCC before it reviewed comprehensive reports affirming interference problems.

When independent tests showed LightSquared’s service would overwhelm sensitive GPS receivers and render the location-tracking service nearly useless, last February the agency withdrew its permission for LightSquared to operate, beginning a death spiral for the 4G venture, which filed for bankruptcy in May.

Upside Down World: FCC Says CableCos Buying PhoneCos “Increases Competition”

Phillip Dampier September 17, 2012 Competition, Consumer News, Public Policy & Gov't 1 Comment

The Federal Communications Commission today approved a request from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the chief cable industry lobbying group, that will allow cable operators to acquire competing phone companies under certain circumstances, which the Commission says will increase competition.

“Acquisitions of competitive [phone companies] by cable operators often will strengthen facilities-based competition for telecommunications services, which will in turn provide customers with better service and functionality and lower prices,” the Commission ruled.

The FCC theorizes that when a community is served by two (or more) telephone companies, there will be no degradation in competition if the local cable operator acquires one of them. The Commission suspects most cable operators seek out competing phone companies that target business customers for commercial telephone service. The FCC believes that such acquisitions will enhance the cable company’s competing phone service. That, in turn, will theoretically force the dominant phone company to lower its prices to compete with a strengthened cable competitor.

But officials from Montgomery County, Maryland thought some of the FCC’s logic was short-sighted, noting cable companies have been substantially boosting investments in commercial services on their own, without buying the competition. Montgomery County officials worry the unintended consequence of fewer players in the market could be higher prices for residential customers:

“With this level of growth in commercial services revenues by cable companies, any new cable-[telco] merger might reduce competition by merging two competitors rather than “injecting” competition in a local marketplace as the [NCTA] claims,” the county’s legal team wrote. “And the impact on the local residential marketplace of any cable-[telco] merger can only serve to lessen competition for residential customers as the cable companies already are dominant wireline providers in their local residential markets. Thus, a declaratory order will not necessarily promote competitive market conditions at all, and could in fact facilitate a substantial decrease in competition.”

 

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