Discovery Communications, occasionally left out of online video alternative bundles targeting cord-cutters, is preparing to retaliate with a $3-4 web-delivered bundle of channels featuring Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC and other affiliated networks and possibly Scripps Networks’ bouquet of channels including HGTV, Food Network, and the Cooking Channel.

Discovery is one of two bidders (Viacom is the other) vying to take charge of Scripps Networks Interactive, one of the few remaining independent network owners not affiliated with a cable company or Hollywood studio.

Bloomberg News reports Discovery wants the networks to bolster its forthcoming inexpensive online video bundle, which will sell for $3-4 a month. While Discovery has advocated selling a sports-free package of networks in partnership with Viacom and AMC for under-$20 since April, those negotiations appear to be stalled, so Discovery is reportedly moving forward on its own.

Discovery Networks¹

If Discovery successfully snares Scripps, it will own five of the top 20 U.S. cable networks. That is likely to be important in future negotiations with cable and satellite providers at contract renewal time. Discovery, like most cable network owners, pitches cable companies bundles of networks sold at wholesale prices, whether a cable operator wants all the channels in that bundle or not. Discovery plans to avoid alienating cable and satellite providers by using them to market the bundle direct-to-consumers. A prospective customer would call their local cable or satellite provider to order the bundle of web-streamed networks, not Discovery. Cable operators would likely also handle billing and customer service issues.

Scripps Interactive Networks¹

This type of sales partnership is not unprecedented. Before the era of DirecTV and Dish Networks, home satellite dishowners using C band TVRO satellite dishes as large as 12 feet across often ordered satellite-delivered programming from cable companies, particularly those owned by John Malone’s Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) and sold through its home satellite programming division Netlink. Customers would be billed directly by the nearest TCI cable system on an ongoing basis, which irritated a lot of dishowners in the 1990s who sought satellite reception as an alternative to dealing with the cable company.

The practice did not come without problems. Many local TCI systems were baffled when their customer audits revealed they had customers in cities 100+ miles outside of their immediate service area. Many were accidentally disconnected after their subscriptions were purged from TCI’s systems in error. By 2005, TCI was five years out of the cable business and had sold Netlink to Echostar, which owns Dish Networks. That same year TVRO owners were informed they could no longer subscribe to a number of networks for their giant backyard dishes and were converted to Dish Network small dish service instead.

¹-Information sourced by Wikipedia and Stop the Cap!

Unclear and unenforced Net Neutrality rules in India give a cautionary tale to U.S. internet users who could soon find Net Neutrality guarantees replaced in the U.S. with industry-written rules filled with loopholes or no Net Neutrality protections at all.

As India considers stronger enforcement of Net Neutrality protection, broadband providers have been merrily violating current Net Neutrality guidelines with fast lanes, sometimes advertised openly. Many of those ISPs are depending on obfuscation and grey areas to effectively give their preferred partners a leg up on the competition while claiming they are not giving them preferential treatment.

Medianama notes Ortel advertises two different internet speeds for its customers – one for regular internet traffic and the other for preferred partner websites cached by Ortel inside its network. The result is that preferred websites load 10-40 times faster than regular internet traffic.

Ortel’s vice president of broadband business, Jiji John, said Ortel is not violating Net Neutrality.

“Cache concept is totally based on the Internet user’s browsing. ISP does not control the contents and it has nothing to do with Net Neutrality,” John said in a statement.

Critics contend ISPs like Ortel may not control the contents of websites, but they do control which websites are cached and which are not.

Alliance Broadband, a West Bengal-based Internet provider, goes a step further and advertises higher speeds for Hotstar — a legal streaming platform, Google and popular movie, TV and software torrents, which arrive at speeds of 3-12Mbps faster than the rest of the internet. Alliance takes this further by establishing a reserved lane for each service, meaning regardless of what else one does with their internet connection, Hotstar content will arrive at 8Mbps, torrents at 12Mbps and the rest of the internet at 5Mbps concurrently. This means customers can get up to 25Mbps when combining traffic from the three sources, even if they are only subscribed to a much slower tier.

Alliance Broadband’s rate card. Could your ISP be next?

Which services are deemed “preferred” is up to the ISP. While Alliance may favor Google, Wishnet in West Bengal offers up preferential speeds for YouTube videos.

The ISPs claim these faster speeds are a result of “peering” those websites on its own internal network, reducing traffic slowdowns and delays. In some cases, the ISPs store the most popular content on its own servers, where it can be delivered to customers more rapidly. This alone does not violate Net Neutrality, but when an ISP reserves bandwidth for a preferred partner’s website or application, that can come at the expense of those websites that do not have this arrangement. Some ISPs have sought to devote extra bandwidth to those reserved lanes so it does not appear to impact on other traffic, but it still gives preferential treatment to some over others.

Remarkably, Indian ISPs frequently give preferential treatment to peer-to-peer services that routinely flout copyright laws while leaving legal streaming services other than Hotstar on the slow lane, encouraging copyright theft.

American ISPs have already volunteered not to block of directly impede the traffic of websites, but this may not go far enough to prevent the kinds of clever preferential runarounds ISPs can engineer where Net Neutrality is already in place, but isn’t well defined or enforced.

Antenna tower operator Crown Castle International has announced it will buy privately held Lightower Fiber Networks for about $7.1 billion in cash to acquire the company’s extensive fiber assets across the northeastern United States that will be used to connect small cell 5G networks.

The acquisition will allow Crown Castle to market an extensive fiber backhaul network in large cities like New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, as well as smaller cities particularly in upstate New York, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and northern New England. Crown Castle, which already owns many of the cell towers where AT&T and Verizon place their equipment, will now be able to market fiber backhaul connectivity for AT&T and Verizon’s forthcoming 5G networks.

LIghtower’s fiber footprint.

Lightower’s fiber network was originally focused on major markets like Boston, New York City, the District of Columbia, and Chicago. Its partner, Fibertech — acquired by Lightower in 2015, focused on 30 mid-sized cities from Indiana to the west to Maine in the east. The network’s customers are large companies and independent ISPs. In Rochester, where Lightower maintains a Network Operations Center, Greenlight Networks relies on a fiber backhaul network originally built by Fibertech to connect its fiber-to-the-home broadband service. That fiber is likely to soon be shared with AT&T, Verizon, and potentially T-Mobile and Sprint to power any 5G buildouts in the region.

“Lightower’s dense fiber footprint is well-located in top metro markets in the northeast and is well-positioned to facilitate small cell deployments by our customers,” said Crown Castle CEO Jay Brown in a statement. “Following the transaction, we will have approximately 60,000 route miles of fiber with a presence in all of the top 10 and 23 of the top 25 metro markets.”

This acquisition marks Crown Castle’s first major diversion outside of its core market — leasing out the cell towers it owns or acquires.

(Image by Brad Jonas originally for Pando.com)

A shadowy group claiming to advocate for sensible online privacy is urging California’s legislature to ditch the California Broadband Internet Privacy Act (AB 375), introduced by Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park), claiming it will curb innovation, reduce competition, and hurt consumers.

“First, the proposal attacks a nonexistent problem,” complained Jon Leibowitz, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell and co-chair of the 21st Century Privacy Coalition. “Internet service providers have committed that they will seek permission from consumers before using sensitive personal information, such as health and financial data. Customers will have to affirmatively opt in before any such transaction could take place. So no one’s personal data is being sold.”

“Second, even if a problem exists, there are legal tools to combat it. In short, there is no legislative privacy gap,” he said. “The Federal Communications Commission has statutory authority to bring cases against internet service providers that fail to protect consumer privacy. In addition, the California attorney general can bring cases under the state Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits ‘unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business acts or practices.’”

Leibowitz seemed unusually concerned with how phone and cable companies would fare if the proposed bill becomes law.

Leibowitz

“The California proposal ignores the principle, almost universally accepted, that privacy should not be about who collects data, but rather what data is collected and how it is used,” Leibowitz said. “It would treat Internet service providers, a small subset of the Internet ecosystem, differently from every other company that collects consumer information online.”

Leibowitz told readers of The Sacremento Bee he hoped the legislature would “give this proposal the burial it deserves.”

The interest in state online privacy bills has grown because of the Republican-dominated FCC and Congress that tossed out federal internet privacy rules earlier this year. Consumers concerned about how their personal information and browsing habits are collected and sold are now largely dependent on whatever state laws exist to protect personal privacy and give consumers the right of informed consent for online information gathering and marketing.

While Leibowitz advocates for burying California’s effort to re-establish internet privacy, he has also attempted to bury his exceptionally close ties to the cable and phone companies that are responsible for almost all of his group’s funding.

The 21st Century Privacy Coalition, also co-chaired by former Republican congresswoman Mary Bono, is funded by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable/Charter Communications, DirecTV, and their respective industry trade associations. The checkbooks are wide open, because the coalition has already spent nearly $2 million on lobbying, according to disclosure records. Most of that money has gone to hiring lobbyists from Mayer Brown and Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli, and Berzok.

The group launched in 2013 and primarily concerned itself with federal online privacy issues, but since the Trump Administration came into office, there is little work to be done on the federal level, so their new mission appears to be hassling state legislatures who are unwilling to do the industry’s bidding.

Leibowitz is also a traveler through D.C.’s revolving door, serving as former Democratic chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Today he collects accolades and more from the cable and phone companies.

Altice’s Suddenlink Communications has announced gigabit service for its customers in Batesville and El Dorado, Ark., Maryville, Mo., and Conroe, Tex.

“Today’s announcement is the next step in Altice USA’s Operation GigaSpeed initiative to provide gigabit broadband service to our Suddenlink customers,” said Hakim Boubazine, co-president and chief operating officer of Altice USA, in a statement.

Altice will continue to use DOCSIS 3.0 technology for most of its Suddenlink customers instead of adopting DOCSIS 3.1 in the near future. Because Suddenlink systems are all-digital, Altice is using a significant amount of its available cable bandwidth for broadband services. Customers who don’t want to pay for 1,000Mbps can also choose from 100 and 200Mbps plans, up from 75 and 100Mbps respectively.

These communities bring the number of GigaSpeed enabled cities in Suddenlink territory to 45. Here are the others, below the break:

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