Cable One has announced it will invest $60 million in network upgrades across 42 cable systems in its mostly rural footprint to enhance reliability and deliver faster Internet service.

The cable operator, owned by the Washington Post, has been criticized for outdated infrastructure and poor service, particularly in Mississippi.

”We’re committed to delivering the best possible experience to our customers,” said Cable One CEO Tom Might. “We’re confident that this investment will ensure that our customers will receive superior service in the speed, reliability, and the overall performance of our services.”

The two-year upgrade project aims to replace amplifiers, split broadband customers who share a backbone connection into smaller groups, replace aging coaxial cable and improve the cable company’s fiber optic backbone.

The upgrade might allow the company to consider relaxing its draconian usage cap and speed throttle policies, which force customers to choose between an uncapped 5Mbps connection (with a speed throttle for those using more than 3GB per day) or a 50/2Mbps connection with caps as low as 50GB per month (overlimit fees: $0.50-1.00/each extra gigabyte.)

Cable One now offers two levels of Internet service: an uncapped 5Mbps plan for $50 a month and a 50/2Mbps plan for $50 a month with a 50-100GB monthly usage cap, depending on the package bundle. Usage is measured between 8am-12 midnight. Users on the uncapped 5Mbps plan are subject to speed throttling if they exceed 3GB of usage per day.

Sprint will focus its postpaid wireless business on profitability in 2013, with reductions in customer discounts and a tighter upgrade policy that will raise prices for some and slow down others seeking new subsidized smartphones.

CEO Dan Hesse today told Wall Street investors Sprint will be leveraging its upgraded LTE network to help hold the line on discounts and early upgrades, reminding customers Sprint’s Network Vision plan is delivering better service with faster speeds and fewer dropped or blocked calls.

Sprint released its 1st quarter 2013 earnings this morning, showing the company reduced its quarterly losses from $863 million in the same quarter last year to $643 million. The company spent $1.4 billion during the first quarter on network upgrades, primarily on forthcoming 4G LTE network roll-outs.

Steve Elfman, Sprint’s president of network operations reported the company activated more than 12,000 LTE-upgraded cell towers by the end of the quarter, slowed only by inclement weather. This year will see a massive increase in those numbers.

“We now have zoning complete on over 32,000 sites and leasing complete on over 31,000 sites. More than 25,000 sites already or have already begun construction,” Elfman reported. “Our weekly construction starts are now at a level to achieve our goals for the year. There are over 600 cities under construction and we have now launched 4G LTE in 88 cities with over 170 expected to launch in the months to come.”

Hesse

While Elfman oversees LTE upgrades, Sprint is also busy working towards decommissioning its Nextel network on June 30. Despite repeated warnings Nextel’s demise was close at hand, at least 1.4 million Nextel customers, nearly all business accounts, are still active on that network. Sprint is focusing most of its promotional budget again this quarter on convincing those customers to convert to Sprint service. But only 46 percent of Nextel customers took Sprint up on their repeated offers during the first quarter. Many others left for Verizon Wireless, switching off not only their Nextel commercial phones, but also those on Sprint’s network as well.

Sprint expects to hold on to a declining number of its Nextel customers as the second quarter progresses, until the network is switched off for good at the end of June.

That hurts, because Sprint has also been losing customers due to “pardon our dust” construction-related service interruptions as part of LTE 4G upgrades. Those disruptions are expected to accelerate  as more cities are prepared for LTE service.

Sprint’s Lifeline cell phone service for the poor, Assurance, also took major hits during the quarter after the FCC tightened eligibility requirements for the free/low-cost cell phone service. The company switched off 224,000 accounts in the last three months that either failed to re-certify eligibility or were never qualified in the first place. Sprint’s wholesale customers, which resell access on the Sprint network, are also busy deactivating unqualified Lifeline wireless lines, so Sprint expects a similar number of disconnects during the second quarter as those accounts are dropped from the network.

As Sprint turns its attention to profitability, revenue numbers at Sprint improved slightly. Sprint’s prepaid division added 568,000 net prepaid customers, and Virgin Mobile raised its minimum top up amount for 90 days of service to $20 (up from $15 with a credit card). As customers upgrade their Sprint postpaid phones, more customers are also encountering Sprint’s $10 “premium data” surcharge.

Customers will also discover a tightening of Sprint’s discounts and upgrade promotions. Among the efforts underway:

• curtailing or eliminating certain customer credits and discounts;
• tightening device upgrade policies to end early upgrades, although Sprint still retains its 20 month upgrade policy for now;
• holding the line on phone subsidies for increasingly expensive smartphones.

Sprint’s prepaid mobile division

Slowing phone upgrades is particularly important for Sprint’s bottom line.

“I think the policy shifting is important in the industry because subsidies just keep going up and I think from the economic model perspective of the carriers we just can’t afford to upgrade as often,” said Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. “We’re not seeing any evidence yet that customers are interested in upgrading less often if they see less difference or improvement year-over-year in terms of what’s going on with these devices. In fact the opposite might be true which means these policies are really quite important for the industry.”

Hesse admitted that the drive to increase profits could cost Sprint some of its postpaid business, and probably already has over the last three years. But Hesse noted many of those contract customers have migrated to the company’s prepaid service, which keeps revenue in-house. Hesse expects as long as popular phones are available on prepaid plans, price-sensitive customers will continue to migrate towards prepaid service.

“I think what you are seeing is maturing of the U.S. markets beginning,” Hesse noted. “The U.S. has always been or traditionally been almost exclusively postpaid and it’s beginning to look like other markets that have a higher prepaid mix in terms of the number or percentage of customers.”

The German Internet is functionally broken.

Deutsche Telekom, the largest telecommunications company in Germany, has announced it will introduce a brazen Internet Overcharging scheme for customers signing up for its broadband DSL service, including a throttle that reduces speeds to just 384kbps after as little as 75GB of monthly broadband usage.

For now, only new Telekom Deutschland customers signing up after May 1 will be affected by the usage limits. Customers will be offered the option of upgrading their Call & Surf package to get a larger usage allowance, although many parts of Germany are still reliant on DSL and its variants that cannot deliver the advertised speeds that go with the larger allowances:

• Up to 16Mbps: 75GB per month
• Up to 50Mbps: 200GB per month
• Up to 100Mbps: 300GB per month
• Up to 200Mbps: 400GB per month

“We want to offer customers the best network in the future and we will continue to invest billions to make that happen,” said Michael Hagspihl, marketing director of Telekom Deutschland. “However we cannot continue to sustain higher usage demand while lowering our prices. Customers with very high data volumes will have to pay more in the future.”

Company officials argue German broadband usage demands are accelerating at an ever-increasing rate, putting strain on the company’s network resources.

But critics question if usage demands are the root of the problem, why is DT exempting itself and its “preferred partners” from the data cap, including certain services that offer very high bandwidth video?

The Net Neutrality activist group Netzpolitik.org says DT is “massively violating Net Neutrality while the federal government looks away dreaming that the free market will solve the problem somehow.”

The group points out DT has admitted the speed throttle only applies to content providers who have not partnered up with the German telecom giant.

DT is exempting all of its own in-house content providers, the private television service Entertain, and telephone services (when provided by DT). For everyone else: the speed throttle gets closer the more customers use services like Apple iTunes or Amazon’s Lovefilm service. But DT says those companies can also get special treatment for the right price.

DT’s preferred partner cooperating agreements let “high quality content producers” pay for a managed services contract that guarantees exemption from the speed throttle and prioritization of their traffic on DT’s network, even if it means slowing down non-preferred partner content.

A parody future offer from DT.

“You cannot thumb your nose at Net Neutrality principles any better if you tried,” said Rene Pedersen, an Internet activist in Köln. “DT will have their emasculated two-tier Internet and all of Germany will have to suffer the consequences. Their own arguments do not even make sense. If there is a capacity crisis, how can they exempt some video providers that now consume the most network resources?”

“Until a few years ago, providers – just like the post – were just deliverers of packages,” said Netzpolitik’s Andre Masters. “This principle is called Net Neutrality – the equal treatment of data packets on the Internet, regardless of sender, recipient, or content. Now providers want to have a direct influence on the content sent, because they want to earn more money.”

Technology publisher Heise Online says the new usage restricting tariff has “triggered a veritable sh**storm” among net users who consider a 75GB usage limit untenable, particularly for families with multiple Internet users.

Heise is also critical of claims DT has made in the press that suggests German Internet users must either accept the usage caps or understand the company will have to spend at least €80 billion ($108 billion) to build a national fiber network to manage growing traffic.

In contrast, Goldman Sachs last year estimated the cost of wiring every home in the United States with Google Fiber would cost $140 billion, a number now considered inflated. Verizon FiOS managed to get costs down for its own fiber network to a level that suggests Google would only need around $90 billion — $10 billion more than DT claims it needs.

“DT is being disingenuous when they suggest it will cost €80 billion to solve their capacity problem. For that amount every household in Germany would get their own fiber cable with 200Mbps speeds or more,” Heise writes in their editorial. “To avoid slowing users down with a speed throttle, only a small fraction of this amount is needed to extend the Internet backbone and peering agreements between providers. For years network traffic has grown exponentially and DT has kept up with demand. So why does DT suddenly need to reshuffle the cards now?”

DT has also received criticism for how it has depicted its heavy users — mostly as content thieves and software pirates using file swapping networks to steal copyrighted works. But instead of dealing with copyright violations, DT wants a sweeping usage cap system that punishes every customer that wants to use their broadband connection.

“Customers are not insatiable Gierschlünde who want everything for free,” writes Heise. “They already pay a lot of money to Telekom: 12.5 million DSL customers roughly translates into around a half billion euros in sales per month.”

Back to the future.

The German news magazine Spiegel writes DT’s usage limits strangle the Internet for millions of Germans, especially for competing video providers:

When throttled, customers will need more than 23 hours to watch a DVD-quality movie. At Blu-ray resolution, it will take about two weeks to watch just one film.

[…] The implications of the end of Net Neutrality in Germany represents a form of economic censorship, and German politicians are standing by to watch it happen.

The federal government sees the Internet as a political bargaining chip and not as the social, cultural and economic tool it represents. The government acts in the interests of certain lobbyists, not Germany’s digital future. This allows German telecommunications companies to focus on their economic self-interests without government policies that demand investment in digital infrastructure.

A number of German Internet users are expected to switch to a cable provider, where available, to escape DT’s impending speed caps.

According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, many German cable companies also reserve the right to limit speeds for customers. But in practice, most don’t impose limits until traffic exceeds 60GB daily, and the speed cap is lifted the next day. A cable industry official says its cap currently impacts about 0.1 percent of customers, almost all who use peer-to-peer file swapping networks. Exempt from measurements that bring customers closer to a speed cap: web browsing, video streaming, and video-on-demand.

For now, Germany’s cable operators facing the same traffic growth DT speaks about find no need to impose further limits, stating their networks are handling the traffic with network upgrades as a normal course of business.

“It calls out DT’s claims as fraudulent, because cable Internet users visit the same websites and do the same things DT’s customers do and there only seems to be an ‘urgent’ problem in need of a speed throttle solution on BT’s network,” says Pedersen. “What needs to be throttled are the financial expectations of DT management and shareholders. The Internet is not their personal vault waiting to be plundered.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/What if Net Neutrality.mp4[/flv]

What if Net Neutrality did not exist?  [Subtitled] (1 minute)

Greenlight, the broadband provider owned and operated by the city of Wilson, N.C. today announced that it will begin offering gigabit Internet connectivity services to its customers by this July.

“In January, the Federal Communications Commission issued a challenge to communities to provide gigabit service by 2015, and we’re proud to answer that challenge now. We are excited to launch our gigabit service and allow our customers to be the first in the state to experience such high speed Internet access,” said Will Aycock, general manager of Greenlight. “Ultra-high speed Internet will help position Wilson for the future and will provide our businesses and residents with the tools they need to succeed.”

In January, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman issued the “Gigabit City Challenge” which challenged providers to offer gigabit service in at least one community in each state by 2015. Gigabit services are approximately 100 times faster than average high-speed Internet connections.

Greenlight was formed in 2008 to offer an independent, locally owned and operated option for television, telephone and Internet broadband connectivity for Wilson residents. Since then, Greenlight has grown to offer services to more than 6,000 residential customers and businesses and the Wilson County School System. In addition, Greenlight provides free wireless Internet access throughout the downtown Wilson area.

The community-owned broadband provider far out-delivers broadband performance from competitors Time Warner Cable and AT&T. Neither the cable or telephone company was willing to upgrade service in Wilson so the city decided to launch its own public network and manage its broadband future itself.

Unfortunately, many cities in the Tar Heel State cannot follow Wilson’s lead. The state’s dominant commercial cable and phone companies lobbied the Republican-controlled legislature for legislation that makes it nearly impossible for other public broadband providers to emerge.

The gigabit option will become available this summer on the community’s fiber to the home network.

If the Federal Communications Commission allows Charter Communications to deploy a new, enhanced encryption system for set-top boxes that will allow it to scramble any or all of its video channels, it will offer broadband service up to 100Mbps to at least 200,000 additional homes within two years and transition every Charter Cable system in the country to all-digital television service.

The proposed deal was addressed to the Commission in a brief letter from Charter Communications CEO Thomas Rutledge on Apr. 4.

Charter is trying to negotiate a two-year waiver to allow the company to deploy a cheaper and more robust downloadable set-top box security upgrade that initially does not support CableCARD technology. Charter’s proposal will leave its legacy conditional access platform in place to give CableCARD users a temporary reprieve until the next generation of CableCARD technology becomes available in retail outlets. Other customers will eventually have to get a set-top box for every television in the home once the company converts to an all-digital platform. QAM service will not be available if Charter encrypts its lineup.

Charter wants to move away from analog service to increase bandwidth for DOCSIS 3 broadband upgrades and providing more HD channels to customers.

The commitment to offer up to 100/5Mbps service may not tax Charter too much. Multichannel News reports Charter’s regulatory filings show the majority of Charter Cable systems can already offer 100Mbps service today.

Charter ended 2012 with DOCSIS 3.0 deployed to 94 percent of its homes passed, “allowing us to offer multiple tiers of Internet services with speeds up to 100 Mbits download to our residential customers.”  About 98 percent of Charter’s cable network supported 550 MHz or more of capacity at the end of 2012.

Rutledge is attempting to repeat the success he had at Cablevision convincing the FCC to waive costly set-top box upgrade requirements. Cablevision also received a waiver allowing it to encrypt its entire video lineup in the New York area, in part to combat signal theft.

The Consumer Electronics Association is opposed to the cable industry’s efforts to adopt their own closed standards for set top security, preferring AllVid, a proposed next generation version of the CableCARD that will work with all types of video services, not just cable television.