Susan Crawford points us to this fun fact: While the cable industry wants to raise your prices to cover increased costs, one of the things they forgot to mention is more than $8,900,000 (so far this year) of your money was shipped straight to Washington to hand out to lawmakers. In the last quarter alone, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association has spent more than $4.5 million lobbying Washington on everything from repealing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to the Internet Freedom Act. If consumers are for it, the NCTA is against it. The ironic part of it is they put your money to work against your interests.

Imagine what you could do with $8.9 million — bringing broadband to the unserved, making service better for those who already have it, and keeping your broadband bill in check. Just sayin’.

The Federal Communications Commission’s July report on America’s broadband speeds shows virtually every major national provider, with the exception of Frontier Communications, made significant improvements in delivering the broadband service and speeds they advertise to customers.

Utilizing thousands of volunteer testers agreeing to host a router that performs automated speed tests and other sampling measurements (full disclosure: your editor is a volunteer participant), the FCC speed measurement program is one of the most comprehensive independent broadband assessments in the country.

Hourly Sustained Download Speeds as a Percentage of Advertised, by Provider—April 2012 Test Data

The FCC found Cablevision’s improvements last year paid off handsomely for the company, which now effectively ties with Verizon Communication’s FiOS fiber-to-the-home service for delivering promised speeds during peak usage times. The cable operator was embarrassed in 2011 when the FCC found Cablevision broadband customers’ speeds plummeted during Internet use prime time. Those problems have since been corrected with infrastructure upgrades — particularly important for a cable operator that features near-ubiquitous competition from Verizon’s fiber network.

“This report demonstrates our commitment to delivering more than 100 percent of the speeds we advertise to our broadband customers – over the entire day and during peak hours – in addition to free access to the nation’s largest Wi-Fi network and other valuable product features and enhancements,” said Amalia O’Sullivan, Cablevision’s vice president of broadband operations.

Verizon also blew its own horn in a press statement released this afternoon.

“Verizon’s FiOS service continues to demonstrate its mastery of broadband speed, reliability and consistency for consumers as represented in today’s FCC-SamKnows residential broadband report,” said Mike Ritter, chief marketing officer for Verizon’s consumer and mass market business unit. “The FCC’s findings reaffirm the results from the 2011 report, which found that FiOS provides blazing-fast and sustained upstream and downstream speeds even during peak usage periods. This year’s results also show once again that FiOS Internet customers are receiving speeds that meet or exceed those we advertise, adding even more value to the customer experience.”

Average Peak Period Sustained Download and Upload Speeds as a Percentage of Advertised, by Provider—April 2012 Test Data

Cable operators’ investments in DOCSIS 3 technology also allowed their broadband networks to perform well even as broadband usage continues to grow. Comcast delivered 103% of promised speeds during peak usage, Time Warner Cable – 96%, and Cox – 95%.

Just one nationwide provider lost ground in the last year — Frontier Communications, whose DSL service has grown more congested than ever, with insufficient investment in network upgrades apparent by the company’s dead-last results.

Frontier managed 81% of promised speeds in 2011, partly thanks to its inherited fiber to the home network. This year, it managed only 79%.

Frontier performed adequately for customers choosing its lowest 1Mbps speed tier. It also performed well in areas where its fiber network can sustain much faster speeds. The biggest problems show up for Frontier’s DSL customers buying service at speeds of 3-10Mbps. At peak times, network congestion brings those speeds down.

On average, the FCC found fiber to the home service delivers the best broadband performance, followed by cable broadband, and then telephone company DSL. Five ISPs now routinely deliver nearly one hundred percent or greater of the speed advertised to the consumer even during time periods when bandwidth demand is at its peak. In the August 2011 Report, only two ISPs met this level of performance. In 2011, the average ISP delivered 87 percent of advertised download speed during peak usage periods; in 2012, that jumped to 96 percent. In other words, consumers today are experiencing performance more closely aligned with what is advertised than they experienced one year ago.

The FCC report also found that outlier performers in the 2011 study, with the exception of Frontier, worked hard to make their differences in performance disappear. Last year, the standard deviation from promised broadband speeds was 14.4 percent. This year it is 12.2 percent.

Peak Period Sustained Download Performance, by Provider—April 2012 Test Data

The FCC also found consumers are gravitating towards higher-priced, higher-speed broadband service. Last year’s average broadband speed tier was 11.1Mbps. This year it is 14.3Mbps, almost 30% higher. Along with faster speeds comes more usage. Customers paying for more speed expect to use their broadband connections more, and the FCC found they do.

Overall, the FCC was encouraged to see broadband speed tiers on the increase, some to 100Mbps or higher.

Highlights from the report:

• Actual versus advertised speeds. The August 2011 Report showed that the ISPs included in the Report were, on average, delivering 87 percent of advertised speeds during the peak consumer usage hours of weekdays from 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm local time. The July 2012 Report finds that ISP performance has improved overall, with ISPs delivering on average 96 percent of advertised speeds during peak intervals, and with five ISPs routinely meeting or exceeding advertised rates.
• Sustained download speeds as a percentage of advertised speeds. The average actual sustained download speed during the peak period was calculated as a percentage of the ISP’s advertised speed. This calculation was done for each speed tier offered by each ISP.
  • Results by technology:
    • On average, during peak periods DSL-based services delivered download speeds that were 84 percent of advertised speeds, cable-based services delivered 99 percent of advertised speeds, and fiber-to-the-home services delivered 117 percent of advertised speeds. This compared with 2011 results showing performance levels of 82 percent for DSL, 93 percent for cable, and 114 percent for fiber. All technologies improved in 2012.
    • Peak period speeds decreased from 24-hour average speeds by 0.8 percent for fiber-to-the-home services, 3.4 percent for DSL-based services and 4.1 percent for cable-based services. This compared with 0.4 percent for fiber services, 5.5 percent for DSL services and 7.3 percent for cable services in 2011.
  • Results by ISP:
    • Average peak period download speeds varied from a high of 120 percent of advertised speed to a low of 77 percent of advertised speed. This is a dramatic improvement from last year where these numbers ranged from a high of 114 percent to a low of 54 percent.
    • In 2011, on average, ISPs had a 6 percent decrease in delivered versus advertised download speed between their 24 hour average and their peak period average. In 2012, average performance improved, and there was only a 3 percent decrease in performance between 24 hour and peak averages.
• Sustained upload speeds as a percentage of advertised speeds. With the exception of one provider, upload speeds during peak periods were 95 percent or better of advertised speeds. On average, across all ISPs, upload speed was 107 percent of advertised speed. While this represents improvement over the 103 percent measured for 2011, upload speeds have not been a limiting factor in performance and most ISPs last year met or exceeded their advertised upload speeds. Upload speeds showed little evidence of congestion with little variance between 24 hour averages and peak period averages.
  • Results by technology: On average, fiber-to-the-home services delivered 106 percent, DSL-based services delivered 103 percent, and cable-based services delivered 110 percent of advertised upload speeds. These compare with figures from 2011 of 112 percent for fiber, 95 percent for DSL, and 108 percent for cable.
  • Results by ISP: Average upload speeds among ISPs ranged from a low of 91 percent of advertised speed to a high of 122 percent of advertised speed. In 2011, this range was from a low of 85 percent to a high of 125 percent.
• Latency. Latency is the time it takes for a packet of data to travel from one designated point to another in a network, commonly expressed in terms of milliseconds (ms). Latency can be a major controlling factor in overall performance of Internet services. In our tests, latency is defined as the round-trip time from the consumer’s home to the closest server used for speed measurement within the provider’s network. We were not surprised to find latency largely unchanged from last year, as it primarily depends upon factors intrinsic to a specific architecture and is largely outside the scope of improvement if networks are appropriately engineered. In 2012, across all technologies, latency averaged 31 milliseconds (ms), as opposed to 33 ms measured in 2011.
  • During peak periods, latency increased across all technologies by 6.5 percent, which represents a modest drop in performance. In 2011 this figure was 8.7 percent.
    • Results by technology:
      • Latency was lowest in fiber-to-the-home services, and this finding was true across all fiber-to-the-home speed tiers.
      • Fiber-to-the-home services provided 18 ms round-trip latency on average, while cable-based services averaged 26 ms, and DSL-based services averaged 43 ms. This compares to 2011 figures of 17 ms for fiber, 28 ms for cable and 44 ms for DSL.
    • Results by ISP: The highest average round-trip latency for an individual service tier among ISPs was 70.2 ms, while the lowest average latency within a single service tier was 12.6 ms. This compares to last year’s maximum latency of 74.8 ms and minimum of 14.5 ms.
• Effect of burst speed techniques. Some cable-based services offer burst speed techniques, marketed under names such as “PowerBoost,” which temporarily allocate more bandwidth to a consumer’s service. The effect of burst speed techniques is temporary—it usually lasts less than 15 to 20 seconds—and may be reduced by other broadband activities occurring within the consumer household. Burst speed is not equivalent to sustained speed. Sustained speed is a measure of long-term performance. Activities such as large file transfers, video streaming, and video chat require the transfer of large amounts of information over long periods of time. Sustained speed is a better measure of how well such activities may be supported. However, other activities such as web browsing or gaming often require the transfer of moderate amounts of information in a short interval of time. For example, a transfer of a web page typically begins with a consumer clicking on the page reference and ceases when the page is fully downloaded. Such services may benefit from burst speed techniques, which for a period of seconds will increase the transfer speed. The actual effect of burst speed depends on a number of factors explained more fully below.
  • Burst speed techniques increased short-term download performance by as much as 112 percent during peak periods for some speed tiers. The benefits of burst techniques are most evident at intermediate speeds of around 8 to 15 Mbps and appear to tail off at much higher speeds. This compares to 2011 results with maximum performance increases of approximately 50 percent at rates of 6 to 7 Mbps with tail offs in performance beyond this.
• Web Browsing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and Streaming Video.
  • Web browsing. In specific tests designed to mimic basic web browsing—accessing a series of web pages, but not streaming video or using video chat sites or applications—the total time needed to load a page decreased with higher speeds, but only up to about 10 Mbps. Latency and other factors limited response time starting around speed tiers of 10 Mbps and higher. For these high speed tiers, consumers are unlikely to experience much if any improvement in basic web browsing from increased speed–i.e., moving from a 10 Mbps broadband offering to a 25 Mbps offering. This is comparable to results obtained in 2011 and suggests intrinsic factors (e.g. effects of latency, protocol limitations) limit overall performance at higher speeds. It should be noted that this is from the perspective of a single user with a browser and that higher speeds may provide significant advantages in a multi-user household or where a consumer is using a specific application that may be able to benefit from a higher speed tier.
  • VoIP. VoIP services, which can be used with a data rate as low as 100 kilobits per second (kbps) but require relatively low latency, were adequately supported by all of the service tiers discussed in this Report. However, VoIP quality may suffer during times when household bandwidth is shared by other services. The VoIP measurements utilized for this Report were not designed to detect such effects.
  • Streaming Video. 2012 test results suggest that video streaming will work across all technologies tested, though the quality of the video that can be streamed will depend upon the speed tier. For example, standard definition video is currently commonly transmitted at speeds from 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps. High quality video can demand faster speeds, with full HD (1080p) demanding 5 Mbps or more for a single stream. Consumers should understand the requirements of the streaming video they want to use and ensure that their chosen broadband service tier will meet those requirements, including when multiple members of a household simultaneously want to watch streaming video on separate devices. For the future, video content delivery companies are researching ultra high definition video services (e.g. 4K technology which has a resolution of 12 Megapixels per frame versus present day 1080p High Definition television with a 2 Megapixel resolution), which would require higher transmission speeds.

Year by Year Comparison of Sustained Actual Download Speed as a Percentage of Advertised Speed (2011/2012)

If you are a Cablevision customer in New Jersey, your cable company wants you to use a set top box on all of your televisions, and eventually pay $6.95 a month for each of them.

Cablevision is beginning a conversion of its cable lineup to digital in a transition that is expected to last until October. After that, customers will need to use a box or CableCARD for each of their televisions hooked to cable.

The change is upsetting customers who do not want the hassle and expense of a converter box, especially those using third party equipment to record and watch favorite shows.

Cablevision does not yet offer a cheaper alternative – a digital transport adapter (DTA), which can turn digital signals into analog ones and allow customers rudimentary access to certain digital services on older sets. Instead, the company will offer customers several extra traditional set top boxes or CableCARDs for between one and two years before charging the usual monthly rental fee.

The cable operator says the majority of its customers already watch with a set top box as the company has gradually reduced its lineup of analog signals. Cablevision customers in New York and Connecticut have already made the transition to the digital lineup.

But some customers are upset enough about the change that they are threatening to switch to Verizon FiOS, although that service also requires customers to use set top boxes.

Comcast subscribers in other parts of the state have also been experiencing a transition to all-digital lineups.

Cable operators are moving video services to digital to make room for additional offerings, including more HD channels, faster Internet speeds, and new product lines like home security and automation. Many inside the industry also predict it is part of a greater transition towards an IP-based delivery system that will provide one large digital pipe through which television, phone, broadband and other services will all travel together.

Cablevision Digital Conversion Details:

• Those currently paying for set top box(es) will continue to do so. But customers can request additional boxes or CableCARDs for every remaining television in the home and receive them free for one year;
• Those who have no digital set top boxes in their homes now can receive a free box or CableCARD for every set for two years. In all instances, after the free promotion ends, customers will pay $6.95/mo for each device;
• Newer televisions equipped with a QAM tuner can watch Cablevision’s broadcast basic tier, consisting primarily of local over the air stations, without any extra equipment. Basic cable networks and premium channels will require a box or CableCARD;
• Broadband customers can use Cablevision’s app for iOS or a personal computer to watch the company’s cable lineup within the home;
• DTA boxes will be available from Cablevision within a year;
• Equipment installation is free. Do-it-yourself customers can have the necessary equipment mailed to them for free or can pick equipment up at any Optimum Store location.

Suddenly Bought

Well-compensated management at Suddenlink are teaming up with private equity firm BC Partners and the Canada Pension Plan’s CPP Investment Board to buy out Suddenlink Communications in a deal for the $6.6 billion company.

The transaction will leave Suddenlink’s founder and current CEO Jerry Kent in charge and part-owner of the company. Some other members of top management are also participating in the buyout deal.

Suddenlink is currently owned by investment bank Goldman Sachs through its private equity arm, Quadrangle Group LLC and Oaktree Capital Management LP.

The buyers will assume $4 billion of Suddenlink’s outstanding debt and BC Partners and CPP Investment Board are taking on $500 million of additional debt to fund the purchase.

Kent

Kent says the deal is designed to infuse additional capital into Suddenlink’s operations, which primarily serve smaller communities in Texas, West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas. Suddenlink launched in 2003 with the acquisition of discarded cable systems originally owned by Cox and Charter Communications. Today the company serves 1.4 million residential customers, making it the seventh largest cable operator in the country.

With Kent remaining in charge, few changes are expected. In 2011, Suddenlink adopted an Internet Overcharging scheme including usage caps and overlimit fees that it is gradually rolling out to all of its customers.

Investors see revenue growth opportunities from Suddenlink, particularly as it further monetizes broadband.

“This represents a unique opportunity to acquire a leading cable operator that has consistently generated industry-leading results,” said André Bourbonnais, who heads private investments for CPPIB.

Kent had been reportedly shopping the cable system around to private-equity firms over the past several months, on the condition he got to remain in charge and early investors could cash out.

Montreal-based Cogeco Cable has announced it is acquiring Atlantic Broadband, a cable operator serving small communities in Pennsylvania, Florida, Maryland, Delaware and South Carolina for $1.36 billion, raising investor fears the company is once again on a spending spree.

Cogeco’s tarnished record of cable acquisitions was highlighted last year when it was forced to write off almost $250 million in losses racked up by its Portuguese acquistion Cabovisao. The company finally sold the money-losing operation at a loss in February.

Cogeco stock plummeted more than 17 percent on today’s news, and investors are concerned Cogeco’s entry into the U.S. market is competitively risky.

Atlantic Broadband’s cable systems were acquired from Charter Communications in 2003. Charter was consolidating its operations into larger markets, and the systems along the eastern seaboard were deemed too small to create the kind of large, regional clusters cable operators prefer today. Atlantic only serves around 252,000 customers nationwide, almost all in smaller communities and cities. That mirrors the way Cogeco operates in Ontario and Quebec — primarily in smaller cities bypassed by larger operators Rogers Cable and Vidéotron.

Cogeco CEO Louis Audet believes growth opportunities in Canada are limited at best. He defended the acquisition as an entry point in the United States, signaling Cogeco was going to continue shopping for other small U.S. cable operators.

Cogeco is paying about $5,400 per subscriber, according to Bloomberg News. That compares with $4,418 Time Warner Cable paid per subscriber for Insight Communications, and $5,486 for each Knology customer acquired by WideOpenWest LLC.

Cogeco acquired Atlantic Broadband from private-equity firms Abry Partners and Oak Hill Capital Partners.