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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Signing up for Comcast’s 2Gbps fiber to the home service will not come cheap.
Later this year, the service is also expected to reach further west:
Bahahahaha! Good luck with that.
Central Illinois continues to get dissed by Comcast! I understand why Comcast would start with the Chicago area in Illinois.
BUT, don’t understand why Comcast is so in love with smaller cities in Indiana and Michigan, but don’t give a hoot about similar smaller metros in Central Illinois!
My guess is the hardware in the area is probably more up to date. Your cable company may have been acquired from someone else a decade or so ago and Comcast has been relying on what it got.
You have Comcast, we have Frontier. It’s the same story.
I acknowledge that you could be right. But, Insight/Comcast had a 50/50 partnership in these Indiana/Central Illinois areas for a few years. Insight ran it, while Comcast seemed to be more of a silent partner. Eventually, they agreed to split systems between themselves. Comcast got Indiana/Central Illinois and Insight got Ohio, southern Indiana, Kentucky.My point is that Comcast would/should have known the details of these acquired systems.
Both some of the Indiana(Bloomington, Anderson, and Lafayette/Kokomo) and Northern(non Chicago)/Central Illinois Comcast properties(Rockford/Dixon, Quincy/Macomb, Springfield, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington-Normal) were acquired by Comcast from Insight at the same time, back in 2007/2008.
I could understand maybe $100-$120/Month with a $500 installation fee but this is just price gouging at it’s finest. This just shows their level of greed.
I call it the “go away” price. I first thought this pricing would be attractive to business customers, but then I see it is residential-only. The $1,000 fee is a built in disincentive that allows them to issue reams of press releases touting their speeds without having a high demand from customers requiring them to spend money to actually extend the fiber to them. In other words, more fiber to the press releases.
I’d assume they want you to buy the fiber, run it from the curb to your house and then pay them their “fees” to get started and the monthly price is probably promo anyways so it would be very interesting to see what it will be after the first year. And by going with their “up to” phrasing on most of these providers you may not even get the quoted speeds.
This looks to me like what I have predicted all along. They are pricing their fast and no cap service at a level where they are getting the same amount of money from those who cancel their cable as they would had they stayed with cable and a lower tier internet service (with caps). I’ve said the same thing about menu selection of channels. If it were to ever come about, the cable companies will find a way to price the individual channels so that the price of any chosen 20 or 30 stations equals that of the full cable… Read more »