Broadband Reports has obtained a leaked memo stating AT&T plans on eliminating its flat rate broadband plans for DSL and U-verse customers effective May 2nd.

On that date, AT&T will limit its DSL customers to 150GB per month and its U-verse customers to 250GB per month in what will be the largest Internet Overcharging operation in the nation.  Customers who violate the usage limits will face a three-strikes-you’re-overcharged penalty system.  After three violations of the usage limit, customers will pay an additional $10 for each block of 50GB they consume.  Although that represents just $0.20 per gigabyte, less than some others have imposed, it is not pro-rated.  Whether a customer uses one or fifty “extra” gigabytes, they will face the same $10 fee on their bill.

Customers will begin receiving notification of the change in the company’s terms of service March 18.

AT&T claims only 2 percent of their DSL customers will be exposed to the Internet Overcharging scheme.

“Using a notification structure similar to our new wireless data plans, we’ll proactively notify customers when they exceed 65%, 90% and 100% of the monthly usage allowance,” AT&T’s Seth Bloom told Broadband Reports. The company also says they’ll provide users with a number of different usage tools, including a usage monitor that tracks historical usage over time, and a number of different usage tools aimed at identifying and managing high bandwidth consumption services.

“Using a notification structure similar to our new wireless data plans, we’ll proactively notify customers when they exceed 65%, 90% and 100% of the monthly usage allowance,” AT&T tells us. The company also says they’ll provide users with a number of different usage tools, including a usage monitor that tracks historical usage over time, and a number of different usage tools aimed at identifying and managing high bandwidth consumption services.

However, AT&T’s accuracy in measuring broadband usage is open for debate.  The company is facing a class action lawsuit over its wireless usage billing.  According to the suit, AT&T consistently inflates usage measured on customer bills.  No third party verification or oversight of usage meters is mandated — customers simply have to trust AT&T.

AT&T ran trials in Beaumont, Tex., and Reno, Nev., from 2008 with a range of usage limits.  Customer reaction to the trials was hostile, and the test ended in early 2010.  In December, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told providers the agency was not opposed to usage limits and consumption billing schemes, leading some to predict the green light was given to companies willing to test whether customers will tolerate Internet Overcharging.

AT&T claimed this weekend its new pricing was going to benefit customers.  So long as customers keep paying their bills, AT&T will not “reduce the speeds, terminate service or limit available data like some others in the industry,” Bloom said.

But the usage limits come at the same time Americans are increasing their consumption of online video and other high bandwidth services.  Usage limits which may appear to be reasonable at first glance become punishing when they do not change over time and customers increasingly risk exceeding them.  Once established, several companies have repeatedly lowered them to further monetize broadband service usage.  AT&T has delivered some of the lowest usage limits in the wireless industry, so it has faced customer criticism in the past.

Customers tied to existing term contracts may likely avoid the usage caps temporarily.  Others will not stick around long enough to find out.

“I will be canceling my U-verse service on Monday and go back to Time Warner Cable,” writes Stop the Cap! reader Jeffrey.  “I will never do business with a provider that imposes overlimit fees on usage that literally costs them next to nothing to provide.  It’s like charging extra for every deep breath.”

Some of our other readers are headed back to Comcast, which has a 250GB usage cap, or exploring DSL provided over AT&T lines by third party companies, which likely will not impose usage limits, at least for now.

“Charging 20 cents per gigabyte isn’t too bad, but you just know AT&T will lower the caps or jack those rates up,” our reader Ian writes. “It is very important to send AT&T a message right now we are prepared to quit doing business with them over this issue, or else we will be nickle and dimed to death by them tomorrow.”

Our reader Jared asks whether new legislation has been introduced to curb unjustified Internet Overcharging.  In 2009, then Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill to ban Internet Overcharging unless companies could prove it was justified.  At the moment, there is no new legislation, but when providers attempt to overreach and impose pricing the vast majority of broadband customers oppose, that could change.

At the moment, Stop the Cap! recommends AT&T customers begin to explore alternative providers and prepare to terminate their service with AT&T unless they scrap their Internet Overcharging scheme.  AT&T earns billions in profits from their broadband division and spends millions on lobbying.  With this amount of largesse, AT&T does not need this pricing scheme to remain profitable.

Two years ago, when Time Warner proposed to limit consumption of consumer broadband accounts with an Internet Overcharging experiment, Stop the Cap! suggested they should instead upgrade their networks to meet the demands of their Internet-hungry customer base.

With thanks, they have taken our advice.  As DOCSIS 3 upgrades continue to roll across the cable company’s service areas, it is bringing immediate benefits to every Road Runner customer, and the company itself.

Several weeks ago, we shared the story of Time Warner customers in Webster, N.Y.  Time Warner had hopelessly oversold its broadband service in the growing town just northeast of Rochester.  Speeds plummeted to as low as 900kbps most evenings and weekends, and did not return to normal until most customers were back at their day jobs.

As a shared network, cable broadband delivers a limited amount of bandwidth into individual neighborhoods, shared by every customer.  When too many people pile on, speeds plummet.  When this happens, cable companies are supposed to either increase capacity, or more commonly divide a congested area into two or more parts, each served with their own broadband pipe.  In less densely populated towns, or where less net-savvy consumers tend to reside, capacity upgrades may come only once or twice over several years, and speeds are consistently fast day and night.  But where college students predominate, or where new housing developments deliver plenty of new upper-income homeowners more likely to leverage their broadband connections, the tell-tale evening and weekend slowdowns create problems.

A speedtest performed before the upgrade

“A good clue of overcongestion is when download speeds suffer, but upload speeds remain fairly consistent,” shares Prakash Patel, who consults with cable companies on HFC “cable” broadband deployment.  “Typically, if both speeds falter at different times of the day, that is usually a sign of a technical fault on one’s cable connection — not network congestion.”

For Stop the Cap! readers in Webster, the ongoing congestion made Road Runner virtually unusable during the evening and weekends, particularly for higher bandwidth applications like video or downloads.

Several of our readers filed complaints with the cable company and one took his case to the Better Business Bureau, who obtained a sympathetic response from Time Warner — but no immediate solution.  The Bureau accepted that explanation and “administratively closed” the complaint.

As we recommended, customers remained very vocal about the ongoing congestion problems in the town.  We’ve found the old adage, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” effective in moving upgrades higher up the list of priorities cable engineers deal with in maintaining their networks.

Original plans to deal with the problem were scheduled for late March, but Time Warner bumped the upgrade forward to this past weekend.  Instead of simply dividing up the town, Time Warner installed DOCSIS 3 technology, which greatly increases the size of the broadband pipeline available to customers.  The upgrade did the trick.

Our reader Tim shares the good news:

“I ran some speed tests Tuesday night and the improvement was very noticeable,” he writes.  “We were able to achieve speeds in the early evening that were previously only possible in the very early morning hours.”

Patel believes cable companies will continue to win a majority in the broadband marketplace using DOCSIS 3, which he considers an affordable and easy-to-deploy upgrade.

The results after the upgrade was completed.

“Not only is DOCSIS 3 relatively inexpensive, it provides plenty of new revenue opportunities for the companies that deploy it,” Patel says.  “It also fits well from an engineering standpoint, because it is an evolutionary update to a successful technology.”

Patel believes DOCSIS 3 and future versions of the cable broadband standard will allow operators to successfully compete, at least in download speeds, with virtually any provider.

“Cable companies can simply bond several channels together and accelerate download speeds,” Patel says.  “Upload speeds are proving to be a bigger issue, as most companies limit them to around 5Mbps.”

At least for now, customers in Webster are happy they are once again getting the service they paid to receive.  The upgrade solved the congestion issue for Time Warner, and the cable company plans to sell higher speed service to interested customers later this spring, earning new revenue to pay for the upgrades.

That’s a win-win everyone can appreciate — all done without an Internet Overcharging scheme.

Jenkins

The Wall Street Journal attempted to attach its own conventional wisdom in an opinion piece about cloud-based streaming that suggests Canada “is just ahead of the U.S. in introducing usage-based pricing [and] has bloggers and politicians accusing Bell Canada of unconscionable ‘profiteering’ from usage caps. The company, they rage, is reaping huge fees for additional units of bandwidth that cost Bell Canada virtually nothing to provide.”

The author, Holman Jenkins, is a regular on the ultra-business friendly editorial page of the Journal, and has been raging against Net Neutrality and for higher Internet pricing for several years now.

Jenkins’ latest argument, just like his earlier ones on this subject, falls apart almost immediately:

This critique, which is common, could not more comprehensively miss the point. Another car on the roadway poses no additional cost on the road builder; it imposes a cost on other road users. Likewise, network operators don’t use overage penalties to collect their marginal costs but to shape user behavior so a shared resource won’t be overtaxed.

Jenkins needs to spend less time supporting his friends at companies like AT&T and Bell and more time exploring road construction costs.  If you are going to try and make an analogy about traffic, at least get your premise straight.

Before debunking his usage-based billing meme, let’s talk about road construction for a moment.  In fact, the kind of traffic volume on a roadway has everything to do with what kind of road is constructed.  In the appropriately named “Idiots’ Guide to Highway Maintenance,” C.J.Summers explores different types of road surfaces for different kinds of traffic.  Light duty roads in rural areas can get results with oil and stone.  Medium duty side streets and avenues are frequently paved with asphalt, and heavy duty interstates routinely use concrete.  Traffic studies are performed routinely to assist engineers in choosing the right material to get the job done.

Digital information doesn’t wear down cables or airwaves.  If broadband traffic occupies 5 or 95 percent of a digital pipeline, it makes no difference to the pipeline.  Jenkins is right when he says Internet Overcharging schemes are all about shaping user behavior, but for the wrong reasons.

Jenkins thinks Netflix and other high bandwidth applications face usage-based pricing to allow providers to keep their broadband pipes from getting overcongested:

Netflix is one of the companies most threatened by usage-based pricing, and it has quickly geared up a lobbying team in Washington. In a recent letter to shareholders, CEO Reed Hastings downplayed the challenge to Netflix’s video-streaming business. In the long run, he’s probably right—the market will settle on flat-rate pricing once the video-intensive user has become the average user.

In the meantime, however, Netflix shareholders had better look out.

In fact, providers are reaping the rewards of their popular broadband services, but almost uniformly are less interested in investing in them to match capacity.  It is as if the AT&Ts of this world assumed broadband users would consume    T H I S    M U C H   and that’s it — time to collect profits.  When upgrade investments don’t even keep up as a percentage of revenue earned over past years, the inevitable result will be a custom-made excuse to impose usage limits and consumption billing to manage the “data tsunami.”

Canadian providers did not slap usage caps on broadband users because Netflix arrived — they lowered them. Telling users they cannot consume the same amount of bandwidth they used a month earlier has nothing to do with managing traffic, it’s about protecting their video businesses by discouraging consumers from even contemplating using the competition.  Jenkins works for a company that understands that perfectly well.  News Corp., has a major interest in Hulu as well as satellite television services in Europe and Oceania.

The rest of Jenkins’ piece is as smug as it is wrong.  In attacking Net Neutrality supporters as “crazies” trying to defend their “hobby horse,” Jenkins claims public interest groups are pouting about usage-based billing, too:

All along, what the net neut crazies have lacked in intellectual consistency they’ve made up in fealty to the business interests of companies that fear their services would become unattractive if users had one eye on a bandwidth meter. That’s why opposition to “Internet censorship” morphed into opposition to anything that might price or allocate broadband capacity rationally. But such a stance is rapidly becoming untenable, whether the beneficiary is Google, with its advertising-based business model, or Netflix, Apple, Amazon and others who hope to capitalize on the entertainment-streaming opportunity.

All are betting heavily on the cloud. All need to start dealing realistically with the question of how the necessary bandwidth will be paid for.

Part of Jenkins’ theory calls back on his usual Google bashing — he perceives the company as a parasite stealing the resources bandwidth providers paid for, while forgetting the success of their businesses ultimately depends on content producers (who indeed pay billions for their own bandwidth) making the service interesting enough for consumers to buy.

But there is nothing rational about Jenkins’ support for Internet Overcharging.  North Americans already pay some of the highest prices in the world for the slowest service.  While providers attempt to lick the last drop of profits out of increasingly outdated networks (hello DSL!), their future strategy is less about expanding those networks and more about constraining the use of them.

Jenkins is ignorant of the fact several of Net Neutrality’s strongest proponents, Public Knowledge being a classic example, have not historically opposed usage-based pricing, much to my personal consternation.  As we’ve argued (and I submit proved), Net Neutrality and Internet Overcharging go hand in hand for revenue hungry providers.  If they cannot discriminate, throttle, or block traffic they consider to be costly to their networks, they can simply cap demand on the customer side with usage limits or confiscatory pricing designed to discourage use.  That is precisely what Canadians are fighting against.

It’s all made possible by a broken free market.  Instead of hearty competition, most North Americans endure a duopoly — a phone company and a cable company.  Both, particularly in Canada, have vested interests in video entertainment, television and cable networks, and other entertainment properties.  As long as these interests exist, companies will always resist challenges to their core business models, such as cable TV cord cutting.  It’s as simple as that.

The “realistic” way bandwidth will be paid for escapes Jenkins because his quest for condescension takes precedence over actual facts.  Content producers already pay enormous sums to bandwidth providers like Akamai, Amazon, and other cloud-based distribution centers.  Consumers pay handsomely for their broadband connections, part of which covers the costs of delivering that content to their homes and businesses.  AT&T and other providers don’t deserve to get paid twice for the same content.  Indeed, they should be investing some of their enormous profits in building a new generation of fiber-based broadband pipelines to keep their customers happy.  Because no matter how much data you cram down a glass fiber, the ‘data friction’ will never cause those cables to go down in flames, unlike Jenkins’ lapsed-from-reality arguments.

Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt just can’t get his mind off overcharging customers for their broadband service.

Despite increasing broadband rates twice in the past two years, Britt is still convinced slapping usage limits and so-called “usage-based billing” is inevitable for the nation’s second largest cable operator.

“I think you will naturally see evolve a world where people who use very little broadband expect to pay less and people who use a whole lot, may complain, but in their hearts know they are going to pay more than somebody who reads email once a week,” Britt told investors at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media & Telecom Conference in Palm Beach, Fla. “I think there will always be an unlimited tier, but I think you’ll see the element of consumption introduced over time.”

Time Warner Cable attempted to impose an Internet Overcharging experiment in the communities of Rochester, N.Y.,  Greensboro, N.C., Austin, San Antonio, and Beaumont, Tex., in April 2009.  Customer backlash over a tripling in price of unlimited broadband service — to $150 a month, forced those plans to be shelved.

But Britt has continued to make positive statements about the practice of raising rates on broadband customers ever since, claiming a small percentage of heavy users were increasing costs.

But Time Warner’s own financial reports tell a different story.  While the company increasingly depends on broadband profits to impress investors in its quarterly reports, the costs (and investment in) broadband has been declining for several years.  Broadband is Time Warner’s single best performing product, and the company has raised rates from $39 a month to as much as $58 — a $19 monthly increase, over the past few years in many communities.  The highest prices are reserved for customers who only take broadband from the cable company and ignore their cable TV and phone services.

Britt also expressed increasing concern over cable TV cord-cutting, the practice of dropping cable television service, to investors as the company continues to lose more subscribers than it gains.

“We need to really to focus on that with a renewed intensity,” Britt said . “It is not acceptable to me to continue to slowly lose video customers every year. That has been going on for too long. We’re going to put renewed energy against that both in the product space and in marketing, to see if we can slow that down.”

To that end, Britt has hired a pricing expert to develop different prices for different types of customers.  The disparity in pricing is already widely apparent.  With some promotional customer retention offers now providing the company’s triple play package of Internet, phone and television service (with DVR) for as low as $79 a month, that is less than half the regular price of up to $163.85/mo charged to customers in states like California, without DVR service.

A bare bones basic package of a handful of national cable networks combined with local stations is selling for as low as $29.99 in northeast Ohio in a last ditch effort to hang on to economically challenged TV-only customers.

Although more than 30 million Americans have experienced getting bill shocked with a cell phone bill loaded with overlimit fees and penalties, a wireless industry group says 19 out of 20 of these customers are economically better off getting those high bills, and any plan to notify customers in advance when their usage limits are reached would “harm innovation, limit consumer choice, and impair the potential for competitive differentiation.”

These incredible conclusions come in a filing from the Wireless Communications Association International, an industry group funded by AT&T, Sprint, Clearwire, and Time Warner Cable.

The WCAI just released a new white paper claiming Americans facing Internet Overcharging from usage-capped wireless data plans are actually saving money when carriers impose overlimit fees.  Their reasoning for this new math?  You might overpay for a usage plan that delivers a higher usage allowance than you need.

"And to think they actually believed us when we said Internet Overcharging saved people money!"

The wireless industry is heavily lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to stop the agency from imposing new rules to deal with the bill shock problem.  The FCC favors an advance warning system, which would force providers to notify customers by e-mail or text message when they near their usage allowance.  Letting customers know when they are about to pay enormous penalty usage rates before they are reflected on a future bill could save Americans millions annually.

The WCAI-funded study says consumers don’t need the agency’s help, going as far as to claim the majority of Americans are already well aware they are exceeding their plan limits, and are better off paying short-term penalties.

“The FCC is weighing new regulations that it says will eliminate so-called ‘bill shock,’ but this analysis makes plain that consumers don’t need regulators’ help,” WCAI President Fred Campbell said. “If you give them the right information, they know how to pick the best deal.”

But critics charge providers fighting this provision want to hide the most basic information of all — when consumers are on the verge of running up huge bills.

“The FCC’s effort on bill shock is long overdue in a wireless environment where today’s heavy user is tomorrow’s average user, and where the wireless Web is more and more important to commerce and to society,” Free Press Policy Counsel M. Chris Riley said. “It is vital that consumers are empowered with the information and the tools needed to make decisions about their own wireless usage so they can avoid outrageous charges.”

The WCAI white paper suggests that if providers are forced to issue advance warnings, companies may have to raise rates to compensate.  The paper’s author suggests consumers would find that worse than just paying the bills with overlimit fees:

The Nielsen Study indicates that many consumers incurring overages do so willfully and repeatedly. Their behavior suggests it is unlikely that usage notifications or usage controls would change their behavior because they are either indifferent to the overage charges or have determined that the occasional overage charge is more economical for them than choosing a more expensive plan. Notwithstanding that these overage-incurring consumers may not want or need additional notifications or controls, the adoption of the FCC‘s regulatory proposals would impose on all consumers the financial burden of ―protecting this one small group.

The WCAI dismisses the huge number of complaints that arrive at the FCC each year over this issue as simply “opinions” from consumers, not nearly as credible as their own analysis of actual customer bills.

The paper even argues with the definition of ” bill shock,” suggesting that the nearly 7 percent of wireless customers who blow past their voice allowances only face an average penalty of around $18.  That is “surprising or inconvenient; but it is unlikely to be shocking.”

Bill Shock

The WCAI study admits the dollar amounts for data-usage bill shock can be considerably higher, sometimes $100 or more.  The charges occur more frequently, too — impacting nearly 18 percent of customers.  But the group dismisses it as a rare occurrence anyway and that carriers will issue credits for astronomical surprise bills.  Besides, the paper concludes, when it was written most consumers were enrolled in increasingly-rare “unlimited use” plans.  Since the raw data was collected largely before AT&T abandoned its flat rate data pricing in 2010, statistics regarding bill shock for AT&T’s new limited use plans were not available.  The white paper inaccurately dismisses that major rate change, claiming it “had no impact on the data analyzed.”  That leaves readers believing the rate changes made no difference.

But the group’s logic completely derails when it concludes there are “consumer benefits to overages.”  Namely, providers “simplified” rate plans to reduce choice which was causing “customer confusion.”  The paper concludes “there is substantial evidence that consumers make deliberate choices to incur overages rather than upgrading to a more expensive monthly rate plan, and that they overwhelmingly benefit from such choices.”

The white paper ignores several important factors:

1. The diminishing number of unlimited access plans which give consumers a way to avoid overlimit fees, especially for data;
2. Carriers themselves arbitrarily set the arbitrary rules for the playing field – calling plan allowances, data allowances, limits, overlimit fees and penalties, and roaming rates;
3. The study ignores the record number of consumers complaining about surprising bills and the true economic impact providing simple text message or e-mailed notifications would have, and doesn’t give any reason why a consumer can’t simply shut off services once limits are reached, to prevent excess charges.

The white paper notes that 736,000 Americans annually are getting surprisingly high bills.  Assuming they are an average of $20 higher than anticipated, that represents nearly $15 million dollars in extra revenue for carriers — ample reason to hire dollar-a-holler groups to produce nonsensical reports that conclude a system to notify consumers they are about to be one of those 736,000 customers is actually bad for them and their wallets.

The FCC’s Consumer Task Force recommends these strategies to avoid bill shock:

•    Understand your calling pattern for making voice calls, and ask your carrier for a plan that would be best for your kind of use.
•    If you are an infrequent phone user, consider a pre-paid plan. Because you “pre-pay” for all your minutes, these plans make it impossible to go over your set limit.
•    Understand what your roaming charges are and where you will incur them.
•    Understand your options for data and text plans.
•    If you are going to use your mobile phone outside the U.S. for voice, email, and other services, make certain to find out beforehand what charges may apply. (Visit Wireless World Travel for more information about using a wireless phone in other countries.)
•    Ask how your carrier can help you avoid bill shock – with phone or text alerts, by letting you monitor your account online, or by giving you other information.
•    If you have tried to resolve a billing issue with your carrier and can not reach an acceptable resolution, complain to the FCC. You can call our Consumer Center, toll-free, at 1-888-CALL FCC (1-888-225-5322), or file a complaint here.

To learn more, read the FCC’s White Paper on Bill Shock.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/FCC Bill Shock.flv[/flv]

The Federal Communications Commission discusses the problem of “bill shock.”  (1 minute)