Rogers Communications has announced usage cap and speed adjustments for many of its Internet service plans — changes that will bring increased allowances for some of the company’s most premium customers.

Rogers has modestly adjusted usage caps on its popular Extreme Internet Plan a year after slashing them, and brings dramatic increases for the company’s most expensive service tiers, even as it leaves usage caps unchanged for the bulk of their customers subscribed to the basic Express service plan:

A Rogers spokesman explained the changes.

The bar gets raised only for those who agree to spend more.

“With the rapid rise of online video, social media and online gaming, the way Canadians use the Internet is changing dramatically. We’re always reviewing our plans to ensure they meet your changing needs so starting later this month, our Hi-Speed Internet tiers are being upgraded with faster download speeds and higher data allowances for customers on Rogers DOCSIS 3.0, our best and fastest wireline network,” wrote RogersMarina on the company’s RedBoard blog.

Apparently the way Canadians use the Internet with Rogers’ most-popular Express plan hasn’t changed much, because Rogers leaves that cap unchanged at 60GB of usage per month.  Rogers previously reduced its usage cap for its Extreme level of service from 95 to 80GB, days after Netflix announced it was bringing its streamed video service to Canada.  Rogers’ latest increase amounts to just 5GB more usage than customers had during the spring of 2010.

The increased speeds that some usage tiers are gaining with the introduction of DOCSIS 3 technology come “at no additional cost” according to Rogers, but the company also mentions it charges higher prices — $1.50-$3 more per month — for the required DOCSIS 3 modem.

For customers certain to exceed their allowance, Rogers will sell you an insurance plan to protect your wallet from their $0.50-5.00/GB overlimit fees:

“Also starting later this month, you’ll be able to add a data assurance option if you’re currently using the Express and Extreme tiers. For an extra $20 per month, you’ll receive an extra 80 GB of data on top of your existing allowances. If you don’t need quite as much data, you can also get an additional 20 GB for an extra $5 per month.”

Most customers were not impressed.  Take Matt, for example:

“Speed increases are great but all they allow us to do is to get to our low data caps faster. These days with YouTube, Netflix, VOIP, and work VPN (heavy work from home user) $60 for 100 GB of data is pretty expensive, especially when a GB of data probably costs Rogers pennies per user. Competitors are starting to offer higher data caps for a similar price. In Toronto you can get a plan for same or slightly cheaper starting with 200GB.  In Vancouver you can get 50Mbps for $29 a month with a 400 GB data cap!”

Cambo notes the usage upgrades come easy for higher-priced tiers, but customers on the most popular Express tier have no increase in their usage allowance at all.

“You guys just don’t get it,” he writes on RedBoard.  “Speed isn’t the issue. Usage is. Why is it every tier gets a usage bump except the most popular Express? What is the point of bumping the speeds up and not significantly increasing usage, so we can get to the caps even faster I suppose. Sounds like a ploy to get people to spend more, to me.”

Andrew agreed:

“I also agree with this. I would rather get a larger usage bump than a speed bump — I don’t see a point in raising speeds when the data cap is still extremely restrictive. After all, I’d want to enjoy using the Internet, rather than monitoring my usage restrictions every day. If Rogers really listened to the customers, they’d know that most of us are more critical of their plans’ usage restrictions than their speeds.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ATT T Mobile Merger.flv[/flv]

Free Press has some fun at AT&T and T-Mobile’s expense with these four video ads opposing the merger.  Of course, the expense is all yours if the merger succeeds in further reducing wireless competition and allowing the all-new AT&T to raise prices even higher.  (3 minutes)

Murdoch

As Fox’s parent company News Corp. continues to reel in a wide-ranging criminal investigation involving phone hacking murder and terror victims in the United Kingdom, the scandal is now spreading into the United States with new revelations this week that CEO Rupert Murdoch, working with New York’s then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, used politically-motivated threats to force Time Warner Cable to add a newly-launched Fox News Channel to the cable dials of New Yorkers, raising their cable bills in the process.

The Daily Beast reports efforts by Murdoch to pay a substantial bounty to get the news/commentary channel on in Manhattan were not effective, so Murdoch turned to a political alliance with Giuliani, who received significant support from Murdoch’s NY Post in his earlier election bid, to force the issue with threats against the cable operator:

Let’s start in 1996, three years after Murdoch’s New York Post helped make Giuliani mayor with the narrowest win in modern city history. That year, Rupert and Ailes, who’d actually managed Rudy’s unsuccessful mayoral run in 1989, were launching Fox Cable News and they had one rather daunting problem: Time Warner controlled the prime NYC cable franchise, with 1.2 million viewers, including virtually all of Manhattan, where every advertiser who might buy a spot lived or worked. And Time Warner refused to give Fox a channel for its new venture. In those days, Time Warner only had space for 77 channels on the dial, and 30 applicants had lined up before Fox. Richard Aurelio, who ran the NYC cable system for Time Warner, recalls now that he assured Ailes that in a year or so, they would “get more capacity and put you on.” But, says Aurelio, now long retired at age 83, “Murdoch was furious.” A former deputy mayor under John Lindsay, Aurelio says he’d “never seen such a display of raw political power,” branding it “ferocious.”

Records revealed that after Murdoch and Giuliani talked directly about the matter on Oct. 1, their aides had 25 conversations and two meetings in the space of a few weeks. A deputy mayor instantly warned Time Warner about the possibility that their franchise, granted by the city every 15 years, might not be renewed and volunteered to fly anywhere in the country to meet with a Time Warner executive above Aurelio. When Time Warner wouldn’t budge, Giuliani came up with an extraordinary remedy. The city controlled five public-access channels, written into law as alternatives to commercial television, and the mayor decided to give one of them to Fox. In fact, presumably to make it look like this wasn’t something he would just do for Murdoch, he offered another to Mike Bloomberg’s then-fledgling TV network. The Bloomberg News channel actually had its debut one night before a federal judge could stop the deal, but soon the courts blocked this transparently extralegal adventure.

Giuliani

While Murdoch was initially willing to pay cable systems up to $11 per subscriber to launch Fox News on cable systems in the fall of 1996, most cable systems were effectively out of channel capacity at the time.  Fewer than ten million households had access to the new new network when it launched, despite the record launch bonus Murdoch was willing to pay.  Time Warner Cable had promised the network it would likely have channel space within two years as the company completed the rollout of its then-new “digital cable” service, which opened up hundreds of new slots for additional channels, but Murdoch was not willing to wait.

The Giuliani Administration owed a lot to Murdoch’s newspaper operations in the city, trumpeting his political campaigns.  One year before Fox News launched, Giuliani’s then-wife Donna Hanover was hired by WNYW-TV, Fox’s owned and operated local station in New York, despite the fact it was over a decade since her last job in television.  Fox tripled her salary just after Giuliani began threatening Time Warner Cable’s franchise to provide cable service in New York, unless and until the cable system made room for Fox News.

By 1997, Time Warner Cable added the network not only to its Manhattan cable system, but agreed to roll the channel out to most of its cable systems nationwide by 2001.

Murdoch’s early willingness to pay a bounty to get cable carriage has proved a worthwhile investment, considering Fox News has now become one of the most expensive networks in the cable package.  In December, Chase Carey, COO of News Corp., compared Fox News’ value with ESPN — America’s most expensive cable channel.  Carey has sought wide-ranging rate increases for Fox News in 2011, even after the network won earlier increases which made them by far the most expensive channel in the news and commentary category, running about a dollar per month per subscriber.  Those rate increases are passed down to every cable subscriber in the form of a higher monthly bill, whether one watches the channel or not.

In 2007, additional pressure was brought against cable operators to add Fox Business Channel, a perennially-low rated channel that was started to counter “the anti-business bias” of CNBC.  Despite now being available in nearly half of all American households, the spring Nielsen ratings show only about 57,000 people over the age of 2 watch the channel on any given day, even though every cable subscriber with the network on their lineup pays for it.

Rest in Peace, AT&T DSL

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson doesn’t think much of the company’s largest-reaching broadband product – DSL service, telling an audience at the the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners summer seminar in Los Angeles that AT&T developed DSL mostly to compete with Comcast, but “now that’s obsolete.”

That’s a remarkable admission for AT&T, which continues to provide the bulk of its Internet access to consumers over DSL on its copper-wire telephone network.  Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice, in attendance, promptly tweeted the news to her followers: “AT&T CEO — to chase comcast we built dsl, it is obsolete now”

The story from GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham only got stranger when an AT&T spokesperson tried to explain away Stephenson’s careless remarks:

Stephenson was answering a question from an audience member about how state regulators should think about new technology cycles when they are considering things like USF. He said that new technology used to be amortized over a 10-15 year period, but that has shrunk to about 5 years now. He said that DSL was introduced in the 1990s, it has been surpassed in speed by U-verse and Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0. He also gave the example of deploying 3G in 2006 … and now 5 years later we are rolling out 4G. His point was — new technology is being surpassed by the next generation much quicker than ever before. We have millions of customers using DSL and remain fully committed to the technology — even as we constantly look to bring innovation to the marketplace.

That innovation comes mostly from the company’s more advanced DSL platform U-verse, which is only slowly working its way across urban AT&T service areas.  Unfortunately, that service will not likely be forthcoming for AT&T’s rural landline customers, who will be left with “obsolete” DSL service, if available at all, indefinitely.

With an increasing amount of AT&T’s revenue coming from its wireless division, there is little incentive for AT&T to expand DSL service into areas where it is not already sold.  In fact, most of the company’s landline-oriented lobbying has been directed at allowing the company to abandon its “universal service” obligations to provide decent, basic telephone service in rural areas.  The company has already won that deregulation in several of the states it serves, but has given no indication if and/or when it plans to shut off its landline service.

Landline providers hope American consumers will lead the way, as an increasing number disconnect their home phone lines permanently.

More than half of adults between the ages of 25 and 29 reside in wireless-only homes, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

“The number of Americans who rely exclusively on mobile wireless for voice service has increased significantly in recent years,” the FCC said, citing a January-June 2010 National Health Interview Survey.

Unfortunately, rural Americans overwhelmingly receive broadband over that landline network in the form of basic DSL, usually at speeds of 1-3Mbps.  If that network is discontinued, their opportunity for broadband service goes with it.

Welcome to the unemployment network.

Cisco announced this week the imminent layoff of some 6,500 of its employees in a desperate bid to boost the company’s stock price and get back on the good side of Wall Street, angered by a series of acquisition blunders by the company’s management and a growing loss of confidence in the future of some of the company’s legacy broadband products.

The cuts at Cisco, which include 2,100 employees who took a voluntary early-retirement program, were announced July 18th, with tepid applause from many investors who don’t believe the company slashed nearly enough positions to get the company’s cash on hand up (although it currently amounts to nearly $30 billion, much of it stashed in overseas accounts).  They wanted at least 10,000 members of Cisco’s “human network” to be cashiered.

While thousands of employees pay the ultimate price for the company’s low stock price, the executives that steered Cisco’s enormous business networking ship onto the rocks are still firmly at the helm.  In fact, Cisco CEO John Chambers received compensation valued at $18.9 million in fiscal 2010, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. His total package is up 33% from 2009, when he received compensation valued at $14.2 million.  That’s quite a reward for what Wall Street perceives as utter failure.

Under Chambers’ watch, Cisco overspent top dollar for Pure Digital Technologies, the San Francisco company responsible for the Flip handheld video camera.  You know, the one now discontinued by Cisco less than two years after acquiring the company for $590 million (and up to $15 million in retention bonuses for key executives.)  In fact, Cisco may still be paying off a deal for a product consumers have now long-since forgotten.

Chambers (AP)

Currently, there is no indication Chambers will be significantly punished for the various blunders under his watch.  But his latest decision to jettison thousands of workers has thrown a high-pressure, well-funded lobbying campaign on behalf of large corporations trying to get a tax break repatriating billions stashed in overseas bank accounts, into chaos.

Cisco’s CEO was among the loudest supporters of the tax slash for corporate entities who have parked much of their free cash overseas to avoid Uncle Sam’s tax bite.  Chambers has publicly said he wants to bring $30 billion in company profits back to the States, but only if he can do so at a discount.  Ironically, Chambers promoted the tax holiday as a job creator, claiming Cisco would add as much as 10 percent to his workforce if the deal was approved.

That promise doesn’t mean much after this week’s employee clear-cutting by the networking company.

It’s certainly upsetting the lobbying apple cart in Washington, potentially ruining the Money Party for other super-sized corporations looking for a tax break handout.

Companies like Duke Energy said the $1.3 billion it wants to repatriate to the U.S. would create 15,000 to 20,000 jobs.  But many Democrats remain skeptical the promised jobs will ever materialize.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett from Texas notes we’ve been here before.  Back in 2004, HP got a tax break to bring back almost $15 billion with the promise the company would create jobs.  Instead, it slashed its workforce by 14,500 employees in a year.

“As a leading proponent of this corporate tax giveaway, Cisco is announcing massive layoffs instead of investing in American job creation with the billions it already has available,” Doggett said. “Once again, it is clear that large multinational corporations have no intention of using any repatriation tax windfall to create jobs.”

This left the WinAmerica Campaign, a corporate-funded group promoting the tax cut, scrambling to deliver an adjusted message to Congress.

Oops... we need a new message.

Doug Thornell, a spokesman for the group, told Bloomberg News the effort “isn’t about just one company.”

“It’s about the benefit to the broader economy,” he said. “It’s whether we continue a failed policy that lets a trillion dollars languish overseas when our economy desperately needs the help.”

With up to 6,500 former employees about to join unemployment lines, Cisco isn’t doing much to help, especially when those responsible are not held accountable for the mistakes that left the company in its ultimate predicament.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bloomberg Henderson Says Job Cuts Not Enough for Cisco’s Problems 7-18-11.mp4[/flv]

Bloomberg News talks to a Wall Street analyst who doesn’t think Cisco has cut nearly enough jobs to get the company worthwhile for investors again.  (5 minutes)