Blackberry Butter Spreader

As Blackberry owners enter their fourth day of a serious global service outage, a growing number are now wondering why they are still wasting their time with a phone that has been increasingly abandoned “for something better,” — namely smartphones running Apple’s iOS or Android-powered handsets that now have the largest share of the smartphone market.

Only Nokia is facing market share challenges greater than Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion, the maker of the formerly popular device.  After days of service disruptions, RIM may be getting a lot more acquainted with their town’s namesake than they’d like.

The trouble started Monday with a switch problem at the company’s offices in Slough, Great Britain.  Yes, the same Slough that is home to the workers of British television’s original rendition of “The Office.”

The switch failure soon began impacting customers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East — the remaining places where RIM still commands a respectable position in the handset market.  On Tuesday, problems spread across South America and India.  Yesterday, North Americans joined the growing crowd of users who found e-mail service and instant messaging spotty, when it worked at all.

Company officials suggest the spreading outages were caused by a cascading series of failures.  When the switch failed, backup systems proved inadequate, and the inevitable sea of “is your Blackberry working?” and “test… test… test” messages started piling up, arriving faster than RIM’s backup systems could handle.  The more frustrated users became trying to send and receive messages, the worse the problems got.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Blackberry Outage 10-13-11.flv[/flv]

The Blackberry outage caused a sensation in the United Kingdom, where the phone still maintains a significant market share.  British reporters and analysts had no time to throw softball questions at Blackberry officials.  Watch as Sky News and the BBC report the service failure as a veritable crisis for the company, followed by an increasingly uncomfortable managing director for Research in Motion’s UK operations who faced sharp questioning from a reporter intent on getting beyond the pre-written damage control statement.  In the United States, the declining market share for the Blackberry gave ABC News license to have some fun with the service outage, poking fun at the phone that is increasingly irrelevant to Americans.  (11 minutes)

RIM Founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis Apologizes

Blackberry users are dependent on RIM’s networking infrastructure because the company distributes messages through its own servers.  That can deliver more control to RIM’s network engineers, but also exposes the company to spectacular service failures when things go wrong.  And they have gone wrong repeatedly, as customers worldwide report regular sporadic service outages.

Wireless phone companies faced the wrath of angry customers, who initially blamed them for the service outages, but in fact the problems reside with RIM’s own network.

Loyal Blackberry customers have been forced, much to the amusement of other handset owners, into desperate measures.

“My God, I actually had to walk down the hall to my co-worker’s cubicle to ask him a question,” wrote one angry customer.  “Damn you, Blackberry!”

“So much for today’s lunch meeting,” shared another. “Nobody knew what to do or where to meet until someone suggested we call everyone on the phone.  The phone??? Are you kidding me?”

The New York Times shared other serious side effects of the outage:

By Wednesday morning, Wall Street was alight with e-mails from technology departments notifying employees of the problem. Bankers’ meetings fell through when attendees couldn’t look up the locations. Employees were reduced to leaving voice-mail messages.

Perhaps more concerning is the ultimate future of Research in Motion, which has seen better days.  Just three years ago, Blackberry enjoyed a 46 percent market share for mobile devices around the world, according to data from IDC, a research firm. This year, it’s 12 percent and dropping (and is already much lower in North America.)

The Blackberry toe spreader

Wall Street is furious, of course.

“[The outage] is symbolic of what’s going on at the company,” Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC partners who follows the telecom industry told the Times. “It’s a bloodbath.”

The same can be said for the company’s stock price, which one analyst compared to a train wreck in slow motion.

This morning, Research in Motion made the riskiest move of all — trotting out the historically idiosyncratic and impatient RIM Founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis to apologize.  He appeared more contrite than an earlier appearance with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones.  Lazaridis turned up to that earlier interview with his press handler and a lot of attitude.  He soon found himself being questioned by the reporter about the company’s user privacy policies in the Middle East.  After slamming the reporter for the question, Lazaridis ended the interview.

Today, the founder of the company still couldn’t answer the all-important, “when will service be fully restored?”  But as of late this morning, RIM’s co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie claimed all is well again with the Blackberry, but wouldn’t answer questions about whether customers were entitled to refunds for lost service.

That’s a question mobile carriers are starting to ask RIM as well, particularly as customers look for service credit for the outages cell companies were not responsible for causing.

“This is it. This is the boiling point. Someone has to go over to Waterloo and slap those in charge at RIM,” wrote Crackberry.com forum user BlackLion15.

With tomorrow’s release of Apple’s latest iPhone, RIM officials may prefer a good customer spanking over the alternative — customers throwing their Blackberries in the trash and switching to a new handset.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Lazaridis Before After.flv[/flv]

Before and After.  During better days for Research in Motion, RIM Founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis had no time for ‘impertinent’ questions from British reporters and called an early end to one interview.  Earlier today, he checked his attitude at the door to issue an apology to upset customers.  (3 minutes)

Bell’s Fibe customers in Ontario noticed something unusual in the company’s latest newspaper ads luring potential new signups for the company’s fiber-to-the-neighborhood service.

Subscribe to Bell Fibe™ Internet and get way more than the cable company for a lot less.

Get super-fast download speeds of up to 25 Mbps – more than double the 12 Mbps on cable.
Watch way more stuff online with 125 GB of usage – more than double the 60 GB on cable.
Plus, share pics and videos more than 12x faster than cable, with upload speeds of up to 7 Mbps.
All this for less than the regular rate you’re paying with cable’s 12 Mbps service.¹

See full offer details.¹²

Offer ends October 31, 2011. Available to residential customers in select areas of Rogers’ footprint in Ontario where technology permits. Modem rental required; one-time modem rental fee waived for new customers. Usage 125 GB/month; $1.00/additional GB. Subject to change without notice and not combinable with any other offers. Taxes extra. Other conditions apply.

¹Current as of Sept 29, 2011. Based on customer’s subscription to Rogers’ Express Internet package at the regular rate of $46.99/mo., prior to August 4, 2011.

²Available to new customers who subscribe to Fibe 25 Internet and at least one other select service in the Bundle; see bell.ca/bellbundle. Promotional $33.48 monthly price: $76.95 monthly price, less the $5 Bundle discount, less the monthly credit of $38.47 applicable for months 1-12. Total monthly price after 12 months is $71.95 in the Bundle.

75GB for existing customers, 125GB for new ones.

Setting aside the fact Bell’s package costs $71.95 a month after the first year, compared with Rogers’ regular everyday price of $46.99, existing customers were surprised to learn Bell’s usage cap for new customers (located in select areas of Rogers’ competing footprint in Ontario) was 125GB per month.  That stood out, because existing customers currently live with a monthly cap of just 75GB per month.

That means new Bell customers, who happen to also have the choice of being served by Rogers Cable, evidently have a considerably less “congested” network that allows a more generous 125GB usage cap over nearby neighborhoods not served by Rogers, where things must be “much worse” to justify the current usage limit of 75GB per month.

Customers call it another example of providers subjectively setting usage limits not according to technical need, but competitive reality.

“If having separate rates by province wasn’t enough, now we have different rates based on the neighborhood,” shared one Toronto Bell customer. “I will need to call them to adjust this.”

Bell’s website provides conflicting information to existing customers over exactly what their usage cap is.  Despite the advertised 125GB cap promoted online, many existing customers are still finding 75GB to be their monthly limit.  Customers are getting some satisfaction calling Bell and threatening to cancel service over the discrepancy.  Don’t bother with the regular customer service representatives — readers report they can do nothing for you.  Instead, tell Bell you are canceling service, get transferred to the Customer Retentions Department, and then tell them you will stay if you get the new customer promotion that comes with the 125GB usage cap.  If you ask, Bell will often configure your account with the promotion noted above, which comes with the automatically more generous usage cap.

Stop the Cap! has always believed usage caps have nothing to do with the network congestion and “fair use” excuses providers like Bell have repeatedly argued.  They exist because market forces allow them to, and when competitors arrive with more generous allowances (or none at all), incumbent providers suddenly find enough capacity to be more generous with their customers.  At least some of them.

Cable company-owned power backup batteries

For the last several years, telephone companies have faced millions in losses from stolen telephone cables often ripped right off of phone poles — sold to copper scrap yards, usually to fuel drug habits.  Now cable companies like Time Warner Cable are facing a theft problem of their own — stolen battery backup equipment.

In California and Texas, the problem has grown significant enough to cost the company nearly $1 million replacing lost equipment.  Time Warner is now offering up to $10,000 in some areas for information leading to the arrest of those responsible.

Thieves break into metal cabinets usually located on street corners, phone poles, or in backyards looking to harvest the power backup batteries inside.  Thieves resell the lead batteries at scrap yards, and often take the power backup controllers as well.  Most break-ins occur at night, and in many areas, the thieves dress up to resemble utility workers and drive panel vans or bucket trucks that passersby might mistake as utility-owned vehicles.

The batteries appear similar to a traditional car battery, but larger.  They weigh about 67 pounds each and typically sell for $17-20 apiece at scrap yards.  In some areas, repeated break-ins have caused the loss of dozens of batteries, and major headaches for customers who can find their phone and Internet service interrupted until technicians can replace the equipment.  In Beaumont, Tex., two men driving a bucket truck netted $3,000 worth of batteries in one evening.  They were caught by law enforcement officials who suspected them of breaking into numerous boxes attached to area telephone poles.

In January, two Huntington Beach, Calif. police officers stopped a suspicious vehicle and found 13 stolen batteries owned by the cable company removed from boxes in Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa. The vehicles’ occupants were arrested for a variety of charges including the possession of stolen property.  They have since been convicted of the crimes and sentenced to time in jail.

Grand Prairie, Tex. Det. Lyle Gensler told a Dallas TV station it’s not just the loss of service Time Warner is worried about, it’s the replacement cost of the stolen property that may trickle-down to customers.

“If Time Warner loses a battery, it’s going to cost them to replace it. If they lose money, they’re going to pass that onto the consumer,” said Gensler. “Over the last six months [Grand Prairie] has lost over $100,000 in property.”

Time Warner has been installing new theft prevention equipment on some utility cabinets in problem areas that deter unauthorized entry into the cabinets.

The cable company has already paid at least one tipster $10,000 for turning in cable equipment thieves.  Concerned citizens can report suspicious activity to their local law enforcement office or call Time Warner’s security tip line at 1-877-TWC-TIPS.

[flv width=”640″ height=”382″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KXAS Dallas Time Warner Offers 10000 Reward for Battery Thefts 10-11-11.flv[/flv]

KXAS in Dallas reports on a rash of battery thefts affecting Time Warner Cable and their subscribers in the Metroplex.  (1 minute)

Verizon has inserted a change in their privacy policy to allow the company to share the exact addresses of their customers with advertisers to target location-specific ads on websites browsed while using Verizon as your Internet Service Provider.  The new policy also applies to Verizon Wireless customers.

“…Verizon will soon participate in a program that will improve the ability of advertisers to reach our Verizon Online customers based on your physical address. The goal is to provide online ads that may be more relevant to you.

This program uses your address to determine whether you reside in a local area an advertiser is trying to reach.

This advertising program uses your physical address to help advertisers deliver ads to websites you visit while using Verizon Online. This program allows national brands and local businesses to tailor offers, coupons and incentives to your local area. Because the ads can be geographically directed, they may be more relevant to you.”

They know what you are doing online and where you live, and now they want to share.

In fact, they are even more relevant to Verizon’s bottom line, because the company can extract higher advertising charges for this level of targeting.  For example, eateries could purchase advertising directed only to specific homes they feel are most likely to patronize their establishments.  If a local department store wants to target only homes on streets statistically likely to deliver higher-income, big spending customers, Verizon could provide that service as well.  If advertisers want to reach seedy neighborhoods to pitch home security systems, Verizon can identify their customers in sketchy areas and direct ads accordingly.

Verizon also informs customers they are preparing to start tracking all of your visits to various websites, and they will sell that information to their advertisers as well.

If you are not interested in letting Verizon follow you wherever you go and allow them to share your home address with advertisers of all kinds, you can opt out:

Verizon broadband Internet access customers may opt-out of the geographically-based advertising program described above by following the instructions here. Verizon Wireless Internet customers may opt-out of the relevant mobile advertising program by following the instructions here or by calling us at 1-866-211-0874. If you opt out online, you will need your account user ID and password. Also, please note that you will receive ads whether you participate in these programs or not, but under these programs, ads may be more relevant to you.

Thanks to regular Stop the Cap! reader Corrine and Bill Pytlovany for alerting us.

Irony: Chesonis' 2007 book has this description on Amazon.com -- "When you put people first, you win. When you operate by the highest principles, you'll see the results in the bottom line. When you put a caring heart into how you operate, in your organization and your community, you build the only true foundation of long-term success."

Eight acres of rubble and a big hole in the ground.

That’s what residents of Rochester, N.Y., are calling the former site of Midtown Plaza, America’s first indoor shopping mall, torn down to make room for the new headquarters of PAETEC Corporation — headquarters that may never be built.

Now the city of Rochester has declared war on the proposed acquisition of PAETEC by Little Rock, Ark.,-based Windstream, suggesting the combined company may renege on its commitment to construct new headquarters in downtown Rochester after New York State and Rochester city taxpayers spent $60 million on an economic development package for the company.

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, the mayor’s office declared its official opposition to the merger proposal, citing the economic impact of wasted tax dollars and the deal’s impact on local jobs:

The Commission will note from the body of this correspondence that the City may be negatively affected if the transfer of PAETEC to Windstream takes place. The federal, state and local governments have worked to develop the site for the purpose of establishing a PAETEC headquarters in Downtown Rochester; tailoring a development package and investing millions to make this location shovel ready for development. New York State provided the Project’s most significant monetary investment, proceeding with the understanding that the Project would retain and grow employment in the Rochester region. It is in the public interest to examine, not just the financial and planning impact that this will have on the City, but to also study the effect this will have on employment, the communities surrounding the City and the lives of the individuals who may be affected.

[…] In anticipation of the PAETEC Project, New York State and the City invested $60 million to demolish the former improvements on the Midtown Site and create a shovel ready building site. To insure the success of the PAETEC Project, the City produced a development package (“Development Package”) which expedited and customized the demolition of the existing buildings at the Midtown Site to accommodate PAETEC’s construction schedule and provide a foundation for PAETEC’s corporate headquarters.

[…] The Development Package was intended to benefit a New York State employer and help that employer retain its current employees and hire additional employees to grow its business. Despite all the efforts of the City to facilitate and provide the positive economic environment for the PAETEC Project, Windstream has indicated that it intends to reduce PAETEC’s current 850-employee Monroe County workforce.

The two companies filed a joint response with the Commission essentially telling the city to stay out of the merger deal, and their concerns about PAETEC’s headquarters and how many jobs will ultimately be lost are not within the Commission’s power to review anyway.

PAETEC CEO Arunas Chesonis, who earlier put the highest praise for his company’s success on the employees who helped build it into what it is today, told a group of fellow business leaders a different story than he told readers of his 2007 book.

“For people who feel let down, we in Rochester should want to be let down like this 50 times a year,” Chesonis said. “Rochester will be a major operating center for the company. So along those lines, we have to figure out how many jobs will be in Rochester. We should be talking about the people that are going to lose their jobs. What are those people going to do next?”

Presumably collect unemployment, critics charge.  Among them is former Mayor William Johnson, who has criticized the city for bending over backwards for the ever-evolving plans for new PAETEC headquarters, which have been downsized repeatedly since they were originally announced.  Johnson thinks Windstream may have effectively put a knife in the back of taxpayers and the mayor’s office, and could ultimately exit the city of Rochester leaving countless local employees out of work.

Windstream seems resolute in its plans to cut what it calls “duplicative staffing positions.”  It reminded the FCC the agency “has routinely approved transactions in which—as will be the case in this transaction—increased efficiencies and economies of scale and scope are expected.”

That is code language for PAETEC employees: Update your resume.  You may need it.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WHEC WHAM Rochester PAETEC Windstream 10-11.flv[/flv]

Finger-pointing over a messy, uncompleted downtown construction project. PAETEC may be planning to renege on a $60 million taxpayer-financed economic development package after it announced plans to merge with Windstream.  Reports from WHEC and WHAM-TV.  (6 minutes)