Time Warner Cable is finally getting around to announcing its DOCSIS 3 “wideband” broadband upgrades in the Triad region of North Carolina.  Already available in Charlotte, Time Warner will offer 30/5Mbps service for $10 more than its Turbo service, and 50/5Mbps will also be available for $99.95 a month.

Customers in High Point will be the first to get access to the service in the spring, while other Triad cities will get the service later this year, according to a news release from the cable company.

The Triad region was part of Time Warner Cable’s 2009 Internet Overcharging experiment, which would have tripled pricing for unlimited broadband service to $150.  An outcry from residents forced the company to shelve its plans.

Triad residents are not impressed by Time Warner’s foot-dragging ever since.

Stop the Cap! reader Gene in Greensboro hasn’t forgotten the cable company promised speed upgrades in 2009 as part of its usage cap experiment.

“Other cities in North Carolina that were not on the list for their ripoff pricing got the upgrades while Greensboro drags at the same speeds we’ve had for several years now,” Gene says. “I think this announcement has more to do with the imminent arrival of AT&T’s U-verse in some areas of the Triad.”

AT&T is slowly expanding its U-verse footprint in central North Carolina.

The state is currently embroiled in a political debate over Time Warner-sponsored legislation that would largely eliminate community-owned broadband competition across North Carolina.

“I would trade Time Warner and AT&T for Wilson’s GreenLight fiber in a second,” Gene says. “Both AT&T and Time Warner are playing a snail’s game of incremental upgrades in this state that makes us also-ran when compared to New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.”

Time Warner Cable Broadband Pricing, North Carolina

Road Runner® Broadband (10 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload)
Standalone	$57.95/mo
With Broadcast/Basic Cable and/or Digital Home Phone	$52.95/mo
With Digital TV	$47.95/mo
Road Runner® Broadband Turbo (15 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload) Requires subscription to Road Runner® Broadband	Additional $9.95/mo to Broadband rate
Road Runner® Broadband Extreme – Charlotte (30 Mbps download, 5 Mbps upload) Requires subscription to Road Runner® Broadband Includes Wireless Home Networking	Additional $20.00/mo to Standard Broadband rate
Wideband Internet (50 Mbps download, 5 Mbps upload) Includes Wireless Home Networking	$99.95/mo
Road Runner® Basic (1.5 Mbps download, 256 kpbs upload)	$40.95/mo
Road Runner® Lite (768 kbps download, 128 kbps upload)	$30.95/mo
WiFi Home Network (up to 4 computers)	$9.95/mo

 

Canadians may soon get a license to steal, if songwriters have their way.

For $10 a month, Internet users will be able to beg, borrow, or openly steal as much music as they want, from anywhere they want, without legal reprisals.

The apparent “cry uncle” tactic against piracy comes from the Songwriters Association of Canada.

Eddie Schwartz, president of the group, says the monthly fee would be automatically tacked onto every Internet access account, raising more than $800 million annually.  Consumers who don’t want to pay the music sharing tax can “opt out,” if they notify the Association and agree not to engage in any online music sharing activity.

“The surest and swiftest way to dramatically reduce infringement is to give consumers an authorized way to music-file share. Once such an authorized system is in place, consumers who refuse to pay a reasonable license fee will clearly be choosing to infringe and can be dealt with accordingly,” reads Schwartz’s proposal.

Proceeds raised from the monthly tax will be diverted to songwriters, but not record companies — a matter the latter has taken notice of, claiming they have not been involved in the discussions.

This is not the first time the group has proposed a “music license fee.”  In 2007, the group tried to amend the Canadian Copyright Act to force service providers themselves to pay a tax on behalf of their file sharing customers.  The effort never made it out of Parliament.

This time, the group is talking directly with several unnamed Internet Service Providers about implementing the fee without seeking advance approval from the government.

Schwartz argues his proposal will monetize file sharing and eliminate enforcement headaches, because the group would only target individual infringers that refuse to pay the monthly license fee.  Schwartz says the majority of Canadians would support it.  He quoted recent studies that claim as many as 80 percent of all file-sharers would consent to a monthly fee if it eliminated their risk of prosecution.

But the government may take a dimmer view.  Many provinces forbid automatically billing consumers for services without their direct consent.  The so-called “negative billing” proposed by Schwartz would require a consumer to specifically opt out of the monthly charges.

Consumers are also likely to question higher charges for Internet service at a time when regulators are still reviewing usage-based billing schemes.  Considering the fees only cover songwriters, more than a few consumers are likely to wonder when Hollywood studios, television networks, software publishers, and record companies will come for their piece of the action — all have suffered to a similar degree from the underground trade of their products.

[Thanks to our reader Alex for sharing this news tip.]

Suddenlink, one of America’s smaller cable operators, has been undergoing a transformation as it tries to meet expectations of today’s cable subscribers and match whatever phone company competition comes their way.  While some of the upgrades are customer-friendly, others pose ominous signs for the future — particularly with respect to Internet Overcharging broadband customers.

Let’s explore:

The Good — New Broadband Speeds, New DVR, New Investments

In parts of Suddenlink’s service area, particularly in Texas, the company is moving most of its cable service to a digital platform.  This transition is designed to open up additional space for more HD channels, keep up with broadband demands, and open the door for additional on-demand programming.

In Nacogdoches, Suddenlink announced it was adopting an all-digital TV lineup.  Starting this week, the company is offering subscribers free digital adapters — also known as “DigitaLinks,” to enable continued viewing on analog television sets that do not have a set top box or digital tuning capability.  Every subscriber purchasing more than the broadcast basic package (that only includes local stations and a handful of cable networks) will either need a digital tuner-ready television, a set top box, or a DigitaLink device to continue watching.

What is good about this transition is that Suddenlink is not charging customers a monthly fee for the adapters, either now or in the future.  That contrasts with other cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable that have handed customers a set top box or a digital adapter they will begin charging for after a year or two.

Suddenlink expects to invest nearly $120 million this year in Texas, and by the end of the year will have invested nearly a half-billion dollars in the state since 2006.

Texas is extremely important to Suddenlink.  The third largest cable company in Texas serves about 450,000 households and approximately 27,000 business customers in Amarillo, Lubbock, Abilene, Bryan-College Station, Midland, San Angelo, Georgetown, Tyler, Victoria, Conroe, Kingwood and Nacogdoches.

The company has also lit new fiber connections to handle data communications, primarily for business customers, and is upgrading its broadband service to fully support DOCSIS 3, which will deliver faster speeds and less congested service.

Customers in the state are also among the first to get access to a new and improved DVR box built on a TiVo software platform.  Suddenlink’s “Premiere DVR” service ($17/mo) is now available in Midland, Floydada, Plainview, Amarillo, Canyon, and Tulia.

The Bad — “Suddenlink Residential Internet Service is for Entertainment” Purposes Only

Do you take your broadband service seriously, or is it simply another entertainment option in your home?  If you answered the latter, this story may not be so surprising.

In Humboldt County, Calif., broadband users started noticing their favorite web pages stopped updating on a regular basis.  At one point, a blogger in McKinleyville noticed he couldn’t manage to post comments on his own website.  But things got much worse when several web pages started reaching customers with other users’ names (and occasionally e-mail addresses) already filled in on login screens and comment forms.

It seems Suddenlink started to cache web content in the far northern coastal county of California, meaning the first customer to visit a particular website triggered Suddenlink’s local servers to store a copy of the page, so that future customers headed to the same website received the locally-stored copy, not the actual live page.

But the caching software went haywire.

Web visitors began to receive mobile versions of web sites even though they were using home computers at the time.  Some were asked if they wanted to download a copy of a web page instead of viewing it.  And many others discovered websites were customized for earlier visitors.

While the caching problem was irritating, the privacy breaches Suddenlink enabled were disturbing, as was the initial total lack of response from Suddenlink officials when the problem first started in late January.

The Journal finally reached a representative who provided this explanation:

Suddenlink Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications Pete Abel knew that a cache system had recently been installed in Humboldt County, but was unaware of the particular problems reported by users. After speaking with the Journal and other Suddenlink employees, though, he released a statement explaining what appeared to have happened.

According to the release, the cache system was installed in Humboldt County on Thursday, Jan. 27 — the very day that users began experiencing problems — and was intended as an interim solution to relatively low Internet speeds in Humboldt County. The system, it said, was able to cache only unsecure websites — those which, unlike almost all reputable banking or commerce systems — do not encrypt communications. But the company eventually discovered the problems that its customers had been reporting and, having fruitlessly worked with its vendor to find a solution, turned the system off on Monday.

“The good news is that secure Web site pages will not have been cached,” Abel said in a follow-up call to the Journal. “And I have been assured 100 ways from Sunday that never would have happened.”

Andrew Jones, who runs a blog with his Suddenlink broadband account, tried to opt out of the web caching and received an interesting response, in writing, from a Suddenlink representative.  He was told he could not opt out of cached web pages with a residential account because, “the residential service is for entertainment only.”

Jones was told he would have to upgrade to a business account to escape the cache.

“If a small local radio station intermittently went off air for multiple days, the radio host would be apologizing and explaining the situation,” Jones wrote the Journal. “If a large utility company experienced sporadic power outages, people could hear a recording on a toll-free number to learn the cause and about ongoing repairs. What does an Internet provider do when web access becomes spotty and begins serving customers old copies of web pages? The company gets back to you in a couple days and suggests you pay more if you don’t like its recently degraded services.”

The Ugly — Suddenlink’s New Usage Meter Suggests 43GB is An Appropriate Amount of Usage for Standard Internet, 87GB is Plenty for Their $60 Premium Package

Although Suddenlink has not formally adopted an Internet Overcharging scheme of usage caps or metered billing, the company is sending automated e-mail messages to customers who exceed what they call “typical monthly usage for customers in your package.”  The e-mail tells customers they may be infected with a virus or someone else could be using your connection without your permission.  Boo!  For the uninitiated, this kind of message can bring fear that their computer has been invaded, either with malicious malware or the neighbor next door.

Customers have also received letters in the mail from the company telling them to check out their new “usage meter.”  Several have been sharing how much they’ve racked up in usage during the month on Broadband Reports.  One customer managed 243GB while another looking at the company’s super premium 107/5Mbps package managed a whopping 786GB.

Although the wording of the message has strenuously avoided telling customers they are wrong for this amount of usage, the implication is clear to many: they are counting your gigabytes and identifying the outliers.  One customer called it Suddenlink’s “You’re actually using your connection, and we really wish you wouldn’t”-message.

“No one with an ounce of sense would pay for a 20/3Mbps connection and only use 78 GB in a month. Let’s hope they’re just making cute suggestions, not easing us into a cap, because that just won’t fly,” wrote one West Virginia customer.

Another in Georgetown, Texas did the math and made it clear 43GB better not turn out to be a cap because it means customers can barely use the service they are paying for.

“It’s way too low. I got 10Mbps [service] because of price/value and not because I use less than 43GB,” he writes. “[Even] if I downloaded at 1.25MB/s for 30 days straight (1.25 * 2592000 seconds) I could [still] grab 3.164TB.”

Meanwhile, some controversy over the quality of Suddenlink’s service during the upgrade process had some residents in Cushing, Okla., up in arms at a recent city meeting.  Lorene Clyde complained Suddenlink’s “new and improved” service is worse than ever.

“I’m tired of paying for a service I’m not getting,” Clyde said.  “And the Suddenlink commercials – they are like rubbing salt in a wound.”

KUSH-AM reporters were on hand to cover the event, noting Clyde was not the only one complaining.  The radio station noted that “the buzz around town echoes her sentiments – from the ‘mildly irritated’ to the ‘downright mad’ – citizens have been complaining.  Not only have they been complaining to Suddenlink – as difficult as that may be (the call center is in Tyler, Texas) – but to city leaders.”

What Clyde and others may not have realized is that Suddenlink officials were in attendance and were able to apologize for the problems, but a growing consensus among consumers and city leaders is that a broad-based refund for the poor service was warranted.

Commissioner Joe Manning said while he appreciated the promise to figure out the problem, it wasn’t good enough to just apologize and promise – that subscribers’ bills should be adjusted to reflect the poor service.

Commissioners Carey Seigle and Tommy Johnson agreed with Manning.  Seigle pointed out it would be “good P.R.” to give some sort of rebate across the board to subscribers while Johnson complained that the original “upgrade” was only going to take a few weeks and now 8 months later – things are not better, but worse, noted the radio station.

Suddenlink officials on hand said they did not have that kind of authority, but continued to promise things are going to get better.  “I pledge to you,” one said, “We will find it [the problem] and fix it.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KJTV Lubbock Borrowing Wi-Fi 2-7-11.flv[/flv]

KJTV-TV in Lubbock, Texas talked with Suddenlink about the growing trend of neighbors “borrowing” neighbors’ unsecured Wi-Fi networks.  Other than the accidental recommendation that consumers should “invest in Internet spyware” to keep your computer safe, the report does a fair job of shining a light on a practice that could have financial consequences if the provider implements an Internet Overcharging scheme.  (2 minutes)

A couple from Merritt, B.C. has received bills from Bell for more than $5,000 in data usage, even after the skyrocketing bills made the family so frightened of their phone, they turned it off.

This is the story of Daniel and Kate Methot, who purchased a smartphone from Bell in October of last year.  When the first bill arrived, it contained more than $1,000 in data charges.

“My wife looked at me and I thought ‘Oh boy, what did I do that I didn’t know that I had done? I am in trouble’,” Daniel told CBC News.

When Internet Overcharging of this magnitude occurs, most people first blame themselves, assuming they did something wrong.  The Methot family figured they downloaded a malfunctioning or data hungry app or left something running on the phone.

“We never thought we would be billed for something we weren’t using. That was sort of a new concept for us,” Daniel said, but the family still sought guidance from Bell on how the charges could get that high.

“They really couldn’t give us an answer,” Kate said.

The family deleted everything they could find on their new Samsung Galaxy phone in hopes of stopping the surprise charges.

But when the December bill arrived, the couple was horrified to discover their new bill was more than $3,500 — almost entirely for data usage that literally cost Bell pennies to provide.  In fact, the phone company managed to bill the couple for 30 hours of usage during one 24-hour day, a clear warning sign there was a severe billing problem at work here.

But when it comes to protesting charges with Bell, the Methots discovered customers are guilty until proved innocent.

“I felt like I was being treated like a criminal — like we were trying to essentially steal from them,” Daniel said. “When you call in to argue a bill, that’s what they do. They tell you to pay — and don’t ask questions.”

Kate got a stern lecture from Bell telling her to quit watching videos on her phone all day long.

Of course, the couple denied doing any such thing.  In fact, by the time January arrived, both Daniel and Kate became afraid of even going near their phone, much less using it.  The couple routinely shuts the phone off when they are not actually using it for calls, but still the data charges kept coming — more than $5,200 to date.

CBC News asked Bell several times for a response to the Methot’s complaint. While refusing an in-depth interview on the topic, Bell told CBC News it cannot yet explain what is happening with the account.

That hardly inspires confidence for the Methot family.  Despite Bell being unable to explain the charges, they continue to insist on being paid for at least some of them.

The couple even hired a lawyer for $400 to send a letter to Bell demanding better answers or the couple would not continue to pay the unexplained charges.

In that case, Bell would simply turn their account over to collections, and potentially ruin their credit rating.

Bell’s theories about the stratospheric bills include:

• They are running up the bill themselves and now trying to run away from the charges they incurred;
• They are using the phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot feature, inadvertently allowing the entire neighborhood to share their connection;
• They are watching Netflix all day and into the night;
• They ran across the border into the United States and are incurring roaming charges;
• They are tethering their computer to the phone and that consumes massive amounts of data.

The one explanation Bell hasn’t imagined is that their billing system is completely fouled up and their usage meter cannot be trusted.  One might imagine Bell could actually determine where the phone is being used, to dismiss the roaming theory.  Plus Daniel reports he is incurring data charges even when the phone is completely powered off.

Finally, Bell admitted they were responsible, credited the account for more than $3,000 of the charges, and the Methot family thought their long nightmare was over.

Only it isn’t.

Days later, though, they received a bill with $1,204 in new charges.

“It was just a temporary relief and then the stress is back again,” Kate said.

“At that point I wasn’t interested in being a Bell customer anymore,” Daniel added.

On top of that, Bell has reneged on their apology, now claiming they were not responsible for the faulty charges after all.  The Methot family can pay their $1,200 phone bill with cash, check, money order or credit card.  And if they plan to leave, they better be ready to cough up the early termination fee as well — another several hundred dollars.

Isolated incident?  Don’t bet on it.

“These customers are not alone,” Howard Maker, the head of the federal Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services told CBC News. “Unfortunately, Canadian telecom consumers do suffer from many billing errors from their providers.”

Maker said his office received more than 1,900 complaints about wireless providers last year, and 40 per cent of them were about overcharging.

With Bell insisting customers can trust their usage meter — the one that generates $5,000 in data charges for one family alone — Canadians should prepare themselves for the bills that will follow. With no oversight agency able to monitor the accuracy of the meter, Bell customers will just have to take their word for it.

[flv width=”640″ height=”388″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC News Couple’s huge bills unexplained by Bell 3-1-11.flv[/flv]

CBC News talks with the Methot family about their Internet Overcharging experience.  (5 minutes)

Shaw Communications held the first in a series of nearly three dozen upcoming “town hall meetings” on the issue of usage-based billing, starting with a gathering in Vancouver last evening.

Readers of Broadband Reports are reflecting on Shaw’s management of the meeting, particularly the lack of adversarial tone they anticipated going in. Several in attendance report company executives strenuously avoided arguments with customers and steered well clear of pro-UBB propaganda, which makes considerable sense when gauging the audience, which was likely almost entirely opposed to Internet Overcharging.

“They said they made a lot of mistakes concerning UBB,” one Broadband Reports reader shared. “It was almost a mea culpa.”

Company officials also admitted their usage caps will expose an increasing number of customer to overlimit fees if they go unadjusted — they respect the fact everyone will be defined as a “heavy user” under today’s usage limits in a few years.

“It was probably a bit of PR damage-control, and in that regard they did a good job,” the reader shared.

Another reader in attendance suspect the company misjudged the resulting backlash over UBB.

“It really felt like Shaw got blindsided by the righteous anger over UBB, and they’re truly surprised at how poorly they’ve judged the zeitgeist of their customers,” a reader wrote.

The cozy business relationship of Canadian telecommunications companies, who have maintained comfortable, barely-competitive markets for years might also be an issue of concern, writes one reader.

“They seem to be scared of the idea the cozy business-as-usual approach they’ve been taking [could go] away with the possibility of foreign ownership rules being relaxed or various other game-changing rulings being made. They sure sounded like they’re interested in making concessions [for] customer satisfaction, if only to stave off increased competition from outside Canada.”

Our Take

Stop the Cap! views such public meetings with some suspicion, if only because we have attended a few like these in the past and seen them used as intelligence-gathering operations for a marketing department charged with implementing the pricing schemes on customers.

While Shaw still seems to be holding onto the notion it can bring back a more palatable UBB scheme at the end of its “listening tour,” you can be certain other Canadian Internet providers are engaged in research and focus group testing with a less engaged audience, trying to find “fairness scenarios” that work in the court of public opinion.

As Shaw opens its next meeting in Calgary (and beyond), the best response people can give in these meetings is a clear, unified, and absolute message:

NO UBB.

NOT NOW.

NOT EVER.

UPGRADE YOUR NETWORKS!

As soon as you enter into discussions about what represents a “fair amount” of usage, you have lost the argument.  Debating the numbers is their game, not yours.  Is 100GB enough, 250GB? 500? 1000?

What about tomorrow?

What is “reasonable” mean anyway?

“Reasonable” should not be how much Internet you are able to consume at Shaw’s everyday high prices.

Instead, Shaw’s absolutely massive profits demand that upgrades be maintained to accommodate users of their product. Shaw has plenty on hand to manage growth with upgraded facilities from Vancouver to the prairies and still have plenty of money left over.  Their revenue from broadband is soaring.  The costs to deliver it are dropping.

When you go to these meetings, explain politely, persuasively, and persistently that you are not prepared to accept the return of any UBB system, period. That inconvenient truth may be difficult for them to accept, but tell them you have every confidence a company as innovative as Shaw can find a way to keep customers and shareholders happy, and you’ll work with them to that end if they deliver the flat rate broadband experience that your neighbors to the south get.

If the USA and other countries around the world can manage it, so can Canada.