The three candidates running for President of the Republic of China are: James Soong from the People First Party (PFP) (L), Eric Chu from the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party (Center), and Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) (R).

Taiwan’s three presidential candidates, appearing in a nationwide debate on Sunday, promised to deliver improved High Speed Internet in the Republic of China, with some candidates committing to give broadband away for free to low and middle-income families.

Taiwan is making broadband expansion and improvement a top national priority, as the country races towards delivering gigabit wired broadband and 5G wireless service. The government wants to boost the country’s broadband ranking, now 33rd in the world.

Bringing speeds up while reducing broadband bills is the goal of Eric Chu, the candidate from the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party. During his terms as leader of New Taipei and Taoyuan County, Chu presided over a major expansion of Internet penetration rates. Chu believes the next step is to make broadband service free of charge for low/middle-income residents and deliver nationwide free Wi-Fi to every centimeter of Taiwan.

Internet providers would still profit from selling faster access to customers willing to pay for it, but Chu’s policies continue a theme that broadband access is a basic human right, a position increasingly popular in the country. Voters appeared skeptical of Chu’s claims, however, because the KMT has garnered a reputation of being in bed with big business during its last two terms in office. But that has not stopped Chu from criticizing telecom executives for not doing more to invest and eventually offer next generation 5G wireless service in Taiwan.

James Soong, from the People First Party — considered to have a close (but frequently tense) alliance with the KMT  — predictably agreed with Chu, but also wants Taiwan to do more to protect Internet privacy and online safety. Soong wants to completely scrap the country’s legacy copper wire telecommunications infrastructure and replace it with fiber optics, delivering fiber service to every home and business in Taiwan. With a fiber upgrade, Soong is convinced Taiwan will achieve his goal of top-10 broadband status.

Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said when private companies don’t deliver, it is government’s responsibility to address the digital divide, by making high quality service affordable and fast. Taiwan’s telecom companies are paying close attention to the DPP candidate because polls make her the favorite to become the next president of Taiwan, after the election on Jan. 16.

“The use of broadband Internet service should be part of the people’s basic human rights,” she said. “It is also important to narrow the digital divide to improve educational opportunities for children in remote areas and develop children’s digital capabilities.”

With broadband being treated as a high priority issue in the presidential race, Taiwan’s largest broadband provider, Chunghwa Telecom – 中華電信, has announced the first commercial deployments of G.fast technology – the newest generation of DSL – across Taiwan.

Israeli chipmaker Sckipio demonstrated G.Fast technology at CES 2016 in Las Vegas this week, claiming it is faster than traditional DSL and cable broadband. In a limited demonstration, the company demonstrated download speeds achieving 750Mbps over traditional copper wire networks, about 50 times faster than average broadband speeds. Sckipio promised G.Fast technology will debut in the United States later this year.

If residents in rural Kentucky want Time Warner Cable to offer broadband service, they better be prepared to pay for it.

As Time Warner customers consider the company’s latest rate increases, which now include a $10 modem rental fee and an increasingly common $4.99 “Wi-Fi Fee” if you don’t use your own wireless router, there are other customers signing contracts for residential Internet service from Time Warner at prices as high as $410 a month.

Jack Prindle lives in the Big Bone community near Union, Ky., — close enough to Cincinnati to be a suburb, but rural enough to be bypassed for broadband. Two dozen of his neighbors live along a nine-tenths of a mile stretch of Big Bone Church Road, which isn’t exactly a priority for Time Warner Cable. The families have spent a decade trying to entice anyone to offer broadband Internet access. Insight Communications (Time Warner’s predecessor) and Cincinnati Bell have never shown much interest. Time Warner Cable, however, has been engaged in a type of cat and mouse game, offering service at ever-escalating prices only to change its mind at the last minute.

“Within the last year, I have signed contracts with Time Warner for Internet service starting at $300 a month, with a three-year contract, only to have them come back and raise it to $350 for five years, and then $410 a month with a commitment of five years,” Prindle wrote in the Community Recorder. “Then only to be told a month later they were not going to provide Internet. Others of the 24 have similar bizarre stories concerning Time Warner and Cincinnati Bell.”

“Prindle’s story is an example of what is wrong with rural broadband in the United States,” writes Cynthia Rawley, who shared the story with Stop the Cap! “Unchecked cable and phone companies get federal dollars and the benefit of a fake broadband map that has no relationship to reality, leaving many to believe there is no rural broadband problem to solve. But there is.”

Union, Ky.

Rawley points out the FCC’s official National Broadband Map shows the two dozen homes around Prindle are all provided 5-50Mbps broadband service by both Time Warner Cable and Cincinnati Bell, despite the fact neither offers any broadband service to anyone in the vicinity.

“Boone County Judge-executive Gary Moore wrote to inform the FCC of this error and failed to get a response,” Prindle noted. What bothers him even more is his tax dollars have paid to subsidize rural Internet service he cannot get at any price.

“Some basic research reveals that Time Warner has received millions of taxpayer dollars to provide broadband Internet in rural areas,” Prindle notes. “The commonwealth of Kentucky has given over $100 million to Internet providers alone to provide broadband Internet in rural areas alone. Opensecrets.org reports that Time Warner spent $4,950,000 in lobbying efforts of federal, state, and local governments in 2015. With this amount of money changing hands, the conspiracy theorists among us see a 20/20 episode coming.”

Prindle better have his rabbit ears ready to watch, because at the rate providers are not expanding rural broadband, he will have a long wait before being able to watch that 20/20 episode online.

Dear Readers,

It was another great year at Stop the Cap! and we are very grateful for our growing readership and your involvement in the fight against data caps and for better broadband.

Phillip Dampier

Since 2008, Stop the Cap! has exposed the lies about the need to limit your unlimited broadband. We tirelessly check what company executives tell their investors and Wall Street and what they tell consumers and the press about the successes and challenges providing broadband Internet access. The chasm between the two is wide. While companies like Comcast have spent years telling shifting stories that usage caps are not usage caps at all, that limits are needed to ensure fair access to broadband by all of its customers, and that usage-based billing is only designed to force heavy users to subsidize the investments Comcast makes in faster broadband, company officials tell Wall Street a much simpler (and honest) story: usage caps are about monetizing broadband usage to boost profits.

There has never been anything fair about “fair usage policies” for wired broadband. Rationing Internet usage at a time when fiber optic lines are being installed at a rate not seen since the dot.com boom and the arrival of the next generation standard for delivering broadband over cable television lines simply does not make sense. But it makes a lot of dollars.

Customers continue to make it quite clear to all who choose to listen: usage caps and the industry’s version of usage-based billing are both unacceptable.

Tens of thousands of complaints about usage caps arrived at the FCC in 2015, while the agency continued to drag its feet on a much-needed review of their impact on competition. “Cord cutting” is no longer just a theory. While providers openly engage in wound licking over video subscriber losses, they also quietly appreciate the fact they own the broadband pipes that their new online competitors depend on. Worried that Hulu, Netflix, and Sling TV are stealing your customers? With a crafty usage cap, customers learn soon enough the money “saved” cutting the cord will instead be spent covering overlimit fees incurred using broadband to watch television. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Comcast is by far the biggest menace we will fight in 2016. Their multi-year “experiment” in Internet rationing continues to spread like a virus into new markets, mostly in the deregulatory/hands-off states in the southern and western U.S. The “free market” paradise that was supposed to bring robust competition has too often brought higher bills and usage limits instead. To observers, Comcast’s decision to cap its customers in Chattanooga, Tenn., seems crazy. Comcast faces robust competition from EPB Fiber Optics and AT&T. EPB doesn’t cap its customers and AT&T U-verse wouldn’t dare. But Comcast has decided to cap anyway.

In 2015, consumers continued to despise Comcast (while also throwing Time Warner Cable under the bus for lousy service and high prices), despite CEO Brian Roberts’ reflexive promise he was solidly committed to improving Comcast’s image with customers. Capping customers’ usage while creating a $30-35 “insurance plan” to protect customers from Comcast’s overlimit fees would seem counter-intuitive, or at least ironic, to improving customer relations. Yet Roberts continues to tell investors with a straight face customer reaction to caps remains “neutral to slightly positive.” (Perhaps at the online equivalent of Mistress Raisin’s S&M Club, but likely nowhere else).

In addition to fighting usage caps, Stop the Cap! also taught consumers how to fight for a better deal. We attracted over two million visitors to Stop the Cap! in 2015, many looking to cut their cable and phone bills. We showed them how. These articles were among the most visited for 2015:

#5: How to Get a Better Deal for Verizon FiOS; $79.99 Triple-Play Offer With $300 Rebate Card (14 comments, originally published in December, 2013)

#4: How to Get Verizon Wireless’ 4G $30 Unlimited Use Hotspot Feature Added to Your Account (47 comments, originally published in July, 2011 and no longer timely)

#3: Source: FCC Will Get Serious About Data Caps if Comcast Moves to Impose Them Nationwide (149 comments, first appearing in May, 2015)

#2: Updated! How to Score a Better Deal From Time Warner Cable and Save Over $700 a Year: 2015 Edition (150 comments and first updated in March, 2015 and again over the summer)

#1: How to Score a Better Deal With AT&T U-verse; $28/Mo for 18Mbps, $33/Mo for 24Mbps (112 comments and originally published in December 2013)

Our audience is global. Most of our readers are located in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but we recorded visitors from 209 countries in 2015.

The interconnection wars between cable and phone companies and online video providers like Netflix also helped bring readers to Stop the Cap! In fact, our busiest day in 2015 came on June 23rd when 14,362 unique visitors arrived to read our story: AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable Implicated In Content Delivery Network Slowdowns.

In 2015, Stop the Cap! published 452 news stories. Since 2008, we’ve archived 4,494 original articles here.

How do people hear about us? The top five referring websites in 2015:

Once people hear about us, many become regular readers and participants. We recognize our top-five participants who frequent the comment section found at the bottom of every Stop the Cap! article:

#5: Limboaz, with 23 comments in 2015

#4: AC, with 27 comments

#3: BobinIllinois, with 27 comments

#2: Paul Houle, with 28 comments

#1: Joe V, with a whopping 67 comments in 2015.

Welcome to 2016. The fight continues.

We appreciate your financial support and you will find a donate button on the right that allows you to make contributions with a credit card or bank account. Stop the Cap! does not accept industry money and is fully funded with contributions from readers like you. Your donations allow us to subscribe to news-gathering and research services, pay costs to support this website, fund software upgrades, and help cover expenses involving testimony before regulatory bodies. Providers may be getting rich, but we certainly are not, which is why making a regular contribution to Stop the Cap! will make a big difference in how far we can take this fight.

Thanks for your support!

P.S. – You can follow breaking stories from us on Twitter (@stopthecap) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/stopthecap/). You can follow my own views on broadband and other matters via my Twitter account (@phillipdampier). We intend to beef up our social media presence this year so stay tuned!

Sincerely,

Phillip Dampier – Your Editor

In a sign federal regulators are taking the behemoth merger of Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks seriously, the FCC today announced it was temporarily stopping the clock on the merger review required to approve or reject it.

“The commission has a strong interest in ensuring a full and complete record upon which to base its decision in this proceeding,” the FCC wrote in a statement. “Pausing the clock will ensure that commenters have sufficient time to review and comment on this new information, and will provide commission staff with the necessary time to review both the applicants’ materials and any responses.”

The delay is expected to last at least 15 days. The FCC considers such mergers under an informal 180-day “shot clock” that was designed to make certain mergers under review would receive prompt consideration by regulators. But the FCC treats the clock as a suggestion, not a mandate, and has often delayed contentious mergers, sometimes to a degree where the parties involved recognize the direction the review is headed, and withdraw their application.

Charter insists that is not the case here.

“We have recently submitted supplemental information to underscore the benefits of these transactions and it is expected that the FCC would want to give the public time to comment,” Charter said in a statement. “We are working well with the FCC on its review of our deal and continue to look forward to a timely approval.”

Comcast said the same thing when its merger application for Time Warner Cable stalled in federal and state regulators’ offices. Its merger application was eventually voluntarily withdrawn.

AT&T customers reaching out for customer service are likely to encounter dysfunctional call center employees that will lie, cheat, and scam customers just to meet their monthly targets, while three-quarters of the rest rely on high-powered antidepressants and anxiety medication just to get through the day.

Those shocking allegations come directly from a 17-year AT&T insider that has blown the whistle on “the catastrophe” that is AT&T’s customer service.

“For 10 years, The [Dallas Morning News‘] Watchdog has received a steady flow of complaints about AT&T,” writes consumer reporter Dave Lieber. “Hundreds upon hundreds. More than any other company by far.” (Dallas isn’t served by Comcast.)

Lieber writes that the newspaper’s embarrassing publicity about unresolved consumer complaints always gets the problems he writes about fixed, but the company never seems to correct the chronic problems that bring readers to the newspaper in droves as a last resort.

“I don’t know why this continues to happen, but a recent letter I received may help us understand,” Lieber explains.

Last fall, a career employee at an AT&T call center with 17 years of history with AT&T and its predecessor decided to blow the whistle. She signed the letter, but the newspaper felt it prudent to withhold her name from publication for obvious reasons.

The letter details several customer service practices that are now routine at AT&T call centers — practices that could interfere with a customer’s ability to argue for a better deal or cancel service. Recent belt-tightening by AT&T on promotional spending has left call center workers almost no chance to “delight” customers with a good experience saving their business. In fact, the employee alleges, those not on medication to manage the depression and anxiety that comes from dealing with angry and disappointed customers are capable of thriving at work only by checking their conscience at the door.

“Dear Watchdog, I’ve worked 17 years for AT&T. I have never, in all my years, imagined it would become the catastrophe it is now.

“As retention reps, we are told to not only retain existing customers after their promotions expire, but to also sell more to these people.

“In most cases, a customer’s bill will jump up $83 a month after the ‘intro’ pricing ends. We as reps are allotted at the beginning of week 5 ‘limited use’ promotions, giving folks the maximum of $40 off.

“By Monday afternoon, these are generally depleted as we take about 40 calls a day.

“This has created a culture of reps promising promos, but not adding them. Or telling the customer they are disconnecting the service, but just not doing it. Reps do not want to disconnect a customer, as this counts against the rep.

“You are right to request a user ID [of the rep]. However, it does not help, as every account is noted with the ID of the rep, and management does nothing to discourage the reps’ behavior (as the manager’s pay also is negatively affected by each disconnect their rep does).

“This goes all the way up to sales center manager, general manager and VP. None of the higher-ups care or do anything to stop it.

“They also turn a blind eye to ‘cramming’ by reps (mostly nonunion employees overseas) and erroneous misquotes.

“It’s very frustrating to be an ethical rep there anymore, as you are constantly under their scrutiny for not meeting numbers. The only way to meet these numbers is to be a liar and a sleaze. Three-quarters of my call center is on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medicine just to deal with the company. It shouldn’t be like that.

[…] “The problem with this is none of these general managers communicate. Each state is covered by different laws and regulations. You in Texas may call and get a rep in California. In California, I do not have to let you record the call. You also have the option not to be recorded.

“Now that we are national, you have GMs in charge of call centers in California, Missouri, Texas and Georgia. They don’t train you, don’t care about you, don’t care about the customer as long as they are getting commission off your work.

“They know nothing of government regulations, and frankly, do not care.

“I’ve been through so many GMs and vice presidents. However, this is by far the most inept. We should be helping our customers, not forcing products on them they do not want. … I really don’t think anyone in the government cares.”

“Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if this is an employee of our company,” AT&T’s response begins. “But the picture painted is not the experience we create, promote or endorse. We have some of the best call center employees in the industry. We set expectations and limit the offers they can use. But we also provide new agents with 12 weeks of intensive training — with a focus on keeping customers with integrity and with offers based on needs determined during the conversation.”

AT&T’s reaction to the letter missed the point, Lieber wrote, only addressing the identity of the author, not the specific complaints.

In practical terms, many of the allegations raised by the employee seem borne out in AT&T’s own customer support forum, where customers routinely complain about promotions promised but never delivered, billing errors, bills higher than originally quoted, and service never cancelled despite repeated customer requests.

In just the last few weeks, one customer was misled about a U-verse promotion that turned out to last only 90 days, after which the bill soared to $180 a month (with six months still remaining on a one-year contract). Another cancelled U-verse service on Nov. 16, but the service, and the bills… keep on coming. Another customer was promised a retention offer that AT&T reneged on, increasing his bill $80 a month.