Walt Mossberg, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, delivered some stinging remarks about how large telecom and media companies deliver broadband services and programming to North Americans.
“We really suck at broadband,” Mossberg complained during opening remarks at Beet.TV’s first executive summit held at the Embassy of Finland in Washington. “We have terrible, terrible broadband.”
“The typical consumer either has been lured into broadband by a DSL service that in Finland would not count as broadband — 768kbps is not broadband,” Mossberg said. “If [the government] adopted a regulation not allowing Verizon to call that crap broadband, it would help.”
Mossberg added that cable modem service in the US and Canada is so slow, it is the object of pity and pathos in countries like Japan and Korea, and we’re overcharged for it.
[flv width=”480″ height=”388″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizon Should Stop Calling DSL Broadband 2-17-11.flv[/flv]
Mossberg’s comments come as part of a discussion about the online video revolution, which he says is being hampered by copyright controls, outdated advertising models, and broadband providers delivering sub-standard service. (8 minutes)
A small wireless ISP owner who regularly complains about Net Neutrality and an industry friendly group that opposes broadband oversight were the handpicked guests at a hearing held today to investigate Net Neutrality. Only one witness, Gigi Sohn from Public Knowledge was there to defend the important consumer net protection principle.
The hearing, held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on IP, Competition and the Internet was among the first held in the new Republican-controlled Congress, which overwhelmingly opposes Net Neutrality. It opened an opportunity for Net Neutrality-opponents to attack the watered down rules, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission last December.
Laurence “Brett” Glass, owner of Lariat, a wireless ISP in Laramie, Wyoming, is a familiar name to those who follow comment sections of public interest websites and newspapers. Glass regularly attacks the concept of Net Neutrality and favors Internet Overcharging schemes, if only to protect revenues on his bandwidth-limited wireless ISP.
Glass told Congress adoption of even the FCC’s watered down regulations will put his company’s future at risk because they could be interpreted to allow “servers” on his network. Andrew Schwartzman, a net-neutrality proponent and senior vice president at the Media Access Project, says the restriction could technically violate rules, but only if it was argued as a prohibition of attaching server hardware/equipment.
“He is describing a practice which would violate Michael Powell’s 4 principles from 2005 (I think) since it allows end users to attach any device,” Schwartzman said in an e-mail to The Hill.
Of course, the watered down Net Neutrality regulations exempt wireless networks, and Glass’ argument ignores the long-recognized concept of the Acceptable Use Policy, which prohibits network activities that can create problems for the network itself or other customers. The FCC moving in to crush Lariat over such a scenario is hard to imagine in any case.
Larry Downes, another witness, represents the Big Telecom-friendly TechFreedom, which loathes industry regulations that could impact big players like AT&T and Verizon.
Downes argued the Net Neutrality rules were slipped in during the Lame Duck Session to avoid Republican scrutiny on Capitol Hill and are completely unnecessary. Downes argues:
There is no need for new regulation because there were never any serious violations (ignoring the Comcast incident that interfered with network traffic and the subsequent adventures (by others) this year on the wireless side where content access is being repackaged and sold by third parties based on access and usage).
Enforcement mechanisms are complex and expensive: It costs too much to investigate, so why bother?
Exceptions reveal a profound misunderstanding of “the Open Internet”: Downes argues today’s well-accepted concept of speed equality and agnostic network management are simply popular with consumers and irrelevant to the technical workings of the Internet itself.
The FCC lacked authority to issue the rules—and likely knew it: By not invoking appropriate authority, the FCC’s new Net Neutrality policies may fail to pass court scrutiny.
Downes favors a different kind of net freedom — one for corporations to treat the online ecosystem as they please and let the free market sort it out. If you are served by two providers who believe in Internet Overcharging schemes and speed throttles, so be it. If you’re lucky enough to be served by a provider that supports today’s online experience, lucky you.
The FCC evidently was not invited to testify about their own policy. Instead, Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn argued for Net Neutrality, but even she complains the FCC’s current provisions of that policy don’t go far enough. Public Knowledge is planning a pushback against Republican-led efforts to repeal Net Neutrality in a campaign launching later this week — The Internet Strikes Back.
(Click the image on the left to enroll in the campaign and participate in the effort to stand up for Net Neutrality this Thursday.)
Public Knowledge:
You – the Internet – are going to make it clear that ISPs cannot be gatekeepers and do not get to choose which websites work and which websites do not work. You – the Internet – will tell all of Congress to join the 105 Representatives who have already come out clearly in support of a free and open Internet.
Canada’s House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry Science and Technology has taken an in-depth look at Internet Overcharging in an ongoing series of hearings to explore Bell’s petition to charge usage-based billing. The request, earlier approved by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), would end flat rate, unlimited usage plans across the country, and mandate Bell’s proscribed usage cap regime on every ISP in Canada.
Remarkably, even Canada’s Conservative Party, which laid the deregulatory framework that allowed Canada’s barely-competitive market to stick it to consumers and small businesses, refuses to defend the overcharging schemes.
So far, the three hearings deliver everything Stop the Cap! has warned about since we began this fight in the summer of 2008:
Proof that usage caps, and consumption-based billing have nothing to do with cost recovery or fairness. They are, at their root, economically engineered to discourage use of the Internet and protect revenue from the provider’s other businesses, especially video.
There is no evidence of a data tsunami, exaflood, or whatever other term providers and their financially-connected allies in the equipment business cook up to warn about an explosion of data usage mandating control measures. Data usage is increasing at a slower rate than the development of new equipment and fiber pipelines to manage it.
Nobody ever saves a thing with Internet Overcharging schemes. While Bell and other providers make up scary stories about “heavy users” picking “innocent” users’ pockets, it’s the providers themselves making all the money. In fact, bytes of data have no intrinsic value. The pipelines that deliver data at varying speeds do, which is why providers are well-compensated for use of them. Levying additional charges for data consumption is nothing more than extra profit — a broadband usage tax. Providers make plenty selling users increasingly profitable connections based on speed. They do not need to be paid twice.
For all the talk about the need to invest in network expansion, Bell has reduced infrastructure spending on its core broadband networks the last three years’ running. They are spending more on deploying Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), a service the company swears has nothing to do with the Internet or their broadband service (despite the fact it travels down the exact same pipeline).
Caps and usage billing never bring about innovation, except from providers looking for new ways to charge their customers more for less service.
I strongly encourage readers to spend an evening watching and listening to these hearings. At least download the audio and let Canada’s broadband story penetrate. You will laugh, cringe, and sometimes want to throw things at your multimedia player.
In the end, the hearings illustrate the points we’ve raised here repeatedly over the past three years, and it only strengthens our resolve to battle these Internet pricing ripoffs wherever they appear. If you are a Canadian citizen,write your MP and demand an end to “usage-based billing” and make it clear this issue is paramount for your vote at the next election. Don’t debate the numbers or waste time “compromising” on how much you want to be ripped off. There is no middle ground for usage-based pricing. It should be rejected at every turn, everywhere, with no compromises. After all, aren’t you paying enough for your Internet connection already?
The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology
Meeting # 54 – Usage-based Billing Practices
February 3, 2011
This video is encoded in the Windows Media format which presents some technical challenges. Full screen or 200% zoom-viewing mode is recommended.
[For Windows users, right click the video and select ‘Zoom->Full Screen’ or ‘Zoom->200%’.]
This hearing was televised and had the most media attention. Testimony from the CRTC was decidedly defensive, and almost entirely in support of usage-based billing and Bell’s petition. The Commission found no friends in this hearing.
Appearing from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission: Konrad W. von Finckenstein, Chairman; Len Katz, Vice-Chairman, Telecommunications; Lynne Fancy, Acting Executive Director, Telecommunications. (1 hour, 29 minutes)
The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology
Meeting # 55 – Usage-based Billing Practices
February 8, 2011
The second in a series of hearings exploring Usage-based billing included witnesses from independent Internet Service Providers who could face extinction if they are forced to pay higher prices for wholesale broadband access.
Appearing: Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of TekSavvy Solutions Inc., Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus Telecommunications Canada, and Jean-François Mezei, a Montreal-based telecommunications consultant who most recently petitioned the CRTC to repeal its decision. (120 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.
The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology
Meeting # 56 – Usage-based Billing Practices
February 10, 2011
The third in a series of hearings exploring Usage-based billing included witnesses from Bell Canada, which originally proposed the idea, and additional testimony from independent Internet Service Providers and their trade association, and consumer advocates who oppose the pricing scheme.
Appearing: OpenMedia.ca: Steve Anderson, Founder and National Coordinator. Bell Canada: Jonathan Daniels, Vice-President, Law and Regulatory Affairs; Mirko Bibic, Senior Vice-President, Regulatory and Government Affairs. Shaw Communications Inc.: Jean Brazeau, Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs; Ken Stein, Senior Vice-President, Corporate and Regulatory Affairs. Canadian Association of Internet Providers: Monica Song, Counsel, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP. MTS Allstream Inc.: Teresa Griffin-Muir, Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs. Union des consommateurs: Anthony Hémond, Lawyer, Analyst, policy and regulations in telecommunications, broadcasting, information highway and privacy. Canadian Network Operators Consortium Inc.: Bill Sandiford, President; Christian S. Tacit, Barrister and Solicitor, Counsel. (128 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.
CanadianDownload fills the marketplace niche of delivering websites that are now too big to download under Canada’s Internet Overcharging schemes.
America, the home of the free and the brave… and the unlimited use Internet service plan, is coming to Canada’s rescue.
Want to watch the latest CRTC hearing about broadband or download a Linux distribution, but don’t want to blow through your puny usage allowance? Let a new website do the downloading for you.
American-based CanadianDownload.com is part mission of mercy, part online embarrassment for Canadian officials who have allowed the country’s broadband to lapse into a highly expensive, slow, and irritating mess.
Justin Bowman and his business partner Matthew Neder Laden are behind the website, which fielded 130,000 visits on its first day of operation. The two run a security camera outfit that has nothing to do with Canadian broadband, but considering their headquarters are in the mountains of North Carolina, one of the hotbed states for Internet Overcharging experiments south of the Canadian border, they strongly sympathize with the plight of ordinary citizens paying too much, for too little service. And because many of their customers want to remotely access the cameras they sell, their business could ultimately be impacted by paltry usage limits, too.
“The initial idea was just a protest of the ludicrous bandwidth caps that [Canadian ISPs] have placed on their customers,” Bowman told the Financial Post. “But the other part of it was just to provide a service.”
“We had no idea it would actually catch on and that people would actually give a rat’s ass about [the site], but they did,” he said.
Considering most Canadian cable and phone company Internet service plans are limited to 60 or fewer “rat asses” per month (and dropping), their surprise might be unwarranted.
Visitors are invited to enter the URL of the website they want shipped north, and the service will mail the discs at no charge using the cheapest possible shipping method, which you learn more from ArdentX.
Bowman and Laden
The two have spent countless hours burning DVD’s for consumers across Canada since the site launched earlier this month. But there are limits. Nearly 90 percent of the requests are “not serious,” according to Bowman. Requests for “Google” as well as racy online content can’t be fulfilled, and the service is careful to avoid running afoul of copyright law.
“I don’t want to mess with that, having the FBI on my ass because I’m shipping bootleg items across international lines, I’m just not going to do that,” Bowman said. “Basically we’re keeping it to open source software, a lot of those data files are pretty massive.”
All in all, CanadianDownload.com exists to make a point — that broadband service in Canada can never be a success story with Internet Overcharging schemes hanging over its head. Just as a carrier pigeon in South Africa proved it could deliver faster service than the overpriced broadband incumbent, an American website has called out the current Canadian broadband nightmare of high prices and usage caps. The scariest part of the story is that mailing DVD’s with web content could eventually become financially viable.
At least the United States Postal Service and Canada Post, who will reap the revenue delivering all those discs, hope so.
“We’ll [continue] for as long as we can,” Bowman told the Post. “So long as we can still make rent and feed ourselves… yeah we’ll keep on mailing you guys stuff.”
From CanadianDownload’s blog:
The metered bandwidth decision was and always has been about Netflix, iTunes, torrents, and other threats to dying media business models. From CRTC to Comcast, here in the states, the international business community must fight back against the monopolies who (for the most part) ran their cables on the back of public subsidies and now want to dictate how these pipes are used. We broke up big-Bell, it’s time to do the same here.
Here at SCW, we have been very concerned with bandwidth caps. We’ve been called [innovative] for our work with CanadianDownload.com, but we aren’t; we just hearkened back to old school business models. Bandwidth caps reduce innovation; they don’t increase it. Also for all the talk of “smarter way to ship data,” we have to state that we want this business model to fail. Although there is a need for this type of service in places like South Africa, Australia, and many other parts of the world, more innovation will be possible with an open and accessible Internet than with the “innovation” associated with bottling it up and shipping it.
The actions by ISP monopolies puts all online business at risk – and not just services like Netflix, imgur, and iTunes. In a world of metered bandwidth, low bandwidth versions of sites will have to be created — which squashes rather than creates innovation. Furthermore, this puts any site that serves online advertising at risk. If you bandwith is metered, who could blame someone for using tools such as ad-block-plus to take more control of your bandwidth allowance. This translates to a direct reduction in revenue for sites that support themselves via advertisement. The saddest part of this is that even the portal sites for ISPs, (where you can see your bandwidth usage), show ads.
EchoStar Corporation, which makes equipment and provides satellites for Dish Network, today announced it has agreed to buy Hughes Communications, Inc., for about $1.32 billion.
The deal means Dish, the second-largest U.S. satellite television provider, could be one step closer to providing a national data service to its customers. Hughes operates a “broadband” satellite network, which almost entirely serves rural areas.
Much maligned by its customers, who consider the service’s high prices, low speeds and even lower usage caps “fraudband,” Hughes’ satellite service has been up for sale for some time.
The purchase “brings together the two premier providers of satellite communications services and delivers substantial value to our shareholders,” Pradman Kaul, chief executive officer of Hughes said in the statement.
Satellite television companies have increasingly been at a disadvantage because they cannot sell a true “triple-play” package of television, Internet, and phone service to customers who commonly bundle the three services together. Instead, Dish and its larger competitor DirecTV have been relying on partnerships with telephone companies who provide phone and Internet service with a satellite television package.
The current generation of satellite broadband services are not well-rated by their customers. Capacity shortages force providers to place strict limits on usage, which makes the service largely useless for high bandwidth applications — especially video.
Watch HughesNet’s advertisement promising “blazing fast” speeds in contrast to an actual speed test completed by one of their customers, at a non-peak-usage time. (2 minutes)
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to […]
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to […]
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of Hong […]
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be […]
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw […]
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] proposal – to codify and enforce some […]
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario […]
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment […]
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by […]
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good Alberta […]
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling […]
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking […]