Shaw sets the bar lower.

Shaw Cable, western Canada’s largest cable company, has quietly lowered usage caps on virtually all of their broadband plans, while “forgetting” to change the date on their Terms of Service:

• Lite was 13GB, now increased to 15GB ($2/GB overages)
• High Speed was 75GB, now decreased to 60GB ($2/GB overages)
• Xtreme was 125GB, now decreased to 100GB ($1/GB overages)
• Warp was 250GB, now decreased to 175GB ($1/GB overages)
• Nitro was 500GB, now decreased to 350GB ($1/GB overages)

Shaw’s terms of service page documents changes implemented by the cable company and includes the revision date, changed whenever the terms change.  Not this time.  Blogger “Thewunderbar” documented Shaw left the revision date on the document unchanged, suggesting the cable company hadn’t made any adjustments to their service since July, 2010.  After publishing his piece, Shaw quietly updated their website to reflect the correct date.

Cable and phone companies in Canada have established a unique, unchecked duopoly.  They are systematically increasing prices while decreasing the amount of service provided to Canadian consumers.  Shaw’s decrease in usage limits comes with no corresponding price cut for Internet service.

At a time when Netflix streaming is attempting to make inroads into Canadian homes, broadband providers who also have interests in pay television (cable, phone or satellite) are working overtime to make sure no consumer believes they can safely cancel their cable-TV service and watch everything online.

Over the past four years, Canadian ISPs have embarked on a wide range of Internet Overcharging schemes:

• The elimination of flat rate, unlimited broadband service;
• The introduction of low usage allowances designed to trip up an increasing number of consumers leading to,
• The introduction of stinging overlimit fees for customers exceeding usage limits, at prices marked up from 500-5000 percent above wholesale;
• The introduction of speed throttles which artificially slow your broadband experience to speeds sometimes just above dial-up;
• The ongoing limbo dance of usage caps that decrease in size over time, exposing more consumers to overlimit fees, making them think twice about everything they do online.

Nobody has successfully monetized the broadband experience like Canadian ISPs have.  Even as their costs to deliver the service continue to rocket downwards, companies keep on increasing prices, exposing Canadian consumers to unwarranted bill shock from unjustified overlimit fees.  What does it cost Shaw per gigabyte?  An estimated 1-3 cents.  What do they charge you?  Up to $2.

It’s nothing short of a rip-off, and Stop the Cap! urges Canadian consumers to contact their member of Parliament and demand immediate action to ban these innovation-killing, job-retarding, unjustified overcharging schemes.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WOWK Charleston Frontier vs CityNet Pt 1 12-11-10.mp4[/flv]

DecisionMakers: Frontier vs. Citynet, Part One  (10 minutes)

Bray Cary

Bray Cary, who runs a Sunday news-talk-interview show on his network of West Virginia-based television stations, turned his attention back to the mediocre broadband picture across the state.  Once again, the “free market can do no wrong”-host showered attention and praise on Frontier Communications for their promises to improve West Virginia’s bottom-of-the-barrel rankings in broadband adoption, availability, and speed.  Only this time, one of his guests took him to school on why Frontier Communications is not the state’s broadband savior.

In this round, Cary invited Frontier’s senior vice president Dana Waldo and Citynet president and CEO Jim Martin to discuss where the state’s broadband is today and where it is going tomorrow.

The community of French Creek can't get Frontier broadband even after promising the company dozens of new broadband customers.

Cary wears his opinions on his sleeve, and he’s no fan of the Obama Administration’s broadband stimulus program, believing private companies will deliver West Virginia from its broadband doldrums. That’s wishful thinking Cary can afford as he browses the web from well-wired cities like Charleston.  But if you live in a community like French Creek in Upshur County, that talk isn’t going to get you broadband from Frontier or anyone else.  Stop the Cap! has heard from residents in the community who have delivered petitions from dozens of residents ready and willing to sign up for -any- broadband service, but Frontier hasn’t responded.

Martin opines that as long as stimulus money is available, using it to get the best bang for the buck could improve service for residents from the Panhandle to the Virginia border, instead of simply improving Frontier’s bottom line.

Cary did seem concerned that Frontier was ill-equipped to deliver service to all residents, regardless of cost.

Martin argues Frontier’s broadband network will do nothing to stimulate competition and bring better service.  Martin wants funds redirected into a robust middle-mile statewide backbone, preferably fiber-based, that is open to all-comers at reasonable wholesale pricing.  Citynet has been aggressively complaining about broadband stimulus grants in the state which seem to benefit a handful of companies and projects that don’t actually result in service to individual residents.

The reality is, Cary’s “free market” approach will not deliver service to tens of thousands of West Virginians who will never get wired because of “return on investment” requirements for service in the mountainous state.  Martin’s middle-mile mentality won’t bring access to the last mile, critical for wiring individual homes, either.  But one thing Martin does see that Frontier doesn’t — fiber is the future.

There is a third way to get service without waiting from Frontier’s 1-3Mbps service with an Internet Overcharging scheme or Martin’s middle-mile network that goes past your home but never stops there — petition your local government to empower itself and build a community-owned network that answers to residents, not to Frontier’s dividend-obsessed shareholders.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WOWK Charleston Frontier vs CityNet Pt 2 12-11-10.mp4[/flv]

DecisionMakers: Frontier vs. Citynet, Part Two  (9 minutes)

Since federal courts ruled that corporations are people, shouldn’t that mean those corporations also deserve the same privacy rights you and I enjoy?

AT&T intends to find out at the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of FCC v. AT&T Inc., an effort to win privacy rights for itself and keep potentially embarrassing documents out of the hands of third parties.

At least one court — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which includes the very-business-friendly state of Delaware, agreed with AT&T.  It ruled that since a corporation is also defined as a  “person,” it deserved enhanced protections available to ordinary citizens.

In AT&T’s world, that includes adjectives — all things personal, as in “personal privacy.”

The implications of such an interpretation are stunning, and judicial activism on this scale would deliver a golden platter of new rights to corporate interests that would wipe away oversight and more than a century of accepted business law.

AT&T could use its new powers to deny requests for documents and other materials, on the principle it would violate its privacy and potentially “embarrass” the company.  AT&T as an entity could get the right to remain silent and enjoy double jeopardy protections from repeated investigations.

It would be like watching a Law & Order episode with a corporate logo propped up at the defense table.

Overreach much, AT&T?

Many members of the U.S. Supreme Court apparently thought so during last week’s arguments, judging from the astonished reactions to AT&T lawyer Geoffrey Klineberg’s reasoning.

“Anything that would embarrass the corporation is – is a privacy interest?” Justice Antonin Scalia asked. “You talk about personal characteristics. That doesn’t mean the characteristics of General Motors. You talk about personal qualities. It doesn’t mean the qualities of General Motors. [The ‘personal privacy’ of a corporation] is a very strange phrase to me.”

Chief Justice John Roberts was also skeptical of AT&T “adjective”-shopping, noting several examples of adjectives with different meanings from their root nouns: “craft and crafty; squirrel and squirrely; pastor and pastoral.”

AT&T is no stranger to the federal court system, pouring millions of dollars into a range of legal actions that suggest the company takes its “Rethink Possible” slogan to literal extremes in some business-friendly legal venues.  [Stop the Cap! covered an earlier California case where AT&T argued consumers do not have the right to file class action lawsuits against the company.]

At Issue: Earlier AT&T Wrongdoing

In 2004, SBC Communications (which now owns AT&T) overcharged the government to provide technology services to several Connecticut schools, under the government’s E-Rate program (funded by telephone ratepayers).  After earlier abuses in the program were exposed and the federal government was threatening to expand investigations, SBC turned themselves in and handed over documents demanded by the Federal Communications Commission.  In return for its cooperation, AT&T got to admit no wrongdoing, but did pay a half-million dollar fine.

That didn’t sit well with CompTel, a Washington-based phone company trade association.  In 2005, Mary Albert, the group’s assistant general counsel e-mailed a request for copies of the documents collected by the FCC in the case.

“I made the request because I was very surprised to see the FCC enter into a consent decree in a case like this,” Albert said. “There has been a serious problem with E-Rate fraud over the years. I don’t mean to accuse AT&T of fraud, but there were clearly [enough] problems with its billing [to the program] that it reimbursed the government.”

Klineberg

Under federal law, documents collected by the government have to be made public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), so long as those documents do not violate national security or expose certain personal, private information (typically home addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, etc.)  Companies also have long-standing, existing exemptions protecting confidential trade secrets and other proprietary business information.

Albert expected to receive documents with “blacked-out” information protecting AT&T’s trade secrets, but instead she ended up with nothing.

AT&T argues the release of -any- of the documents would embarrass the company and violate its personal privacy.  It demanded, and got the FCC to withhold release of the documents and the dispute has been working its way through the court system.

The FCC argues corporations can’t sue over invasion of privacy.  Why?  Because they are an entity, not a person.

How does someone violate the privacy of a corporate entity that doesn’t live, breathe, or even blush?

Legal observers say the case isn’t really about protecting AT&T from potential embarrassment — it’s about curtailing the government’s right to request and receive documents from companies as part of its oversight process and to investigate potential wrongdoing.

On cue, Lawrence J. Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies (which receives substantial funding from AT&T), argues AT&T’s arguments have merit because if corporations are not protected under FOIA’s law-enforcement exemption, they will be less forthcoming to the government.

In other words, if you don’t give AT&T what it wants, it will bury, shred or hide important documents when regulators come looking.

"If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it."

Knology, which bought out Sunflower Broadband last year, has elected to carry forward the old owner’s Internet Overcharging schemes, charging broadband customers penalty rates for exceeding their usage allowances.

The company’s explanation for their overpriced bandwidth comes with a tall tale about their competitors they simply made up out of thin air:

Data transfer allotments allow Knology to offer higher speed service with lower prices. Unlimited, open usage plans offered by other providers typically employ network controls to slow down the high usage customers.

That’s news to us, and to their nearest competitor AT&T.  They deny speed throttling any of their U-verse or DSL customers.

While the company’s download speeds are impressive — up to 50Mbps — their upload speeds are not, topping out at a paltry 1Mbps.

Knology's pricing is nearly identical to its predecessor Sunflower Broadband, except for the $5 rate hike for its most popular Silver plan.

Knology claims they expand usage allowances based not on network capacity, but by the percentage of customers they gouge with overlimit fees:

Data transfer allotments: Each level of internet above includes the amount of data transfer indicated measured in Gigabytes (GB). The data transfer allotments are increased regularly, based on usage patterns, to ensure the number of customers who go over their allotments remains under 10%. Additional GB of data transferred beyond the allotment is billed at $1.00 per GB if not purchased at a discount before the end of the billing period. The percentage of Knology customers charged for extra data transfer beyond their allotment was 6.1% in April 2009.

Paul Bunyon, Knology's new director of marketing

Bemusingly, customers with time machines who can travel into the future and determine they will exceed their allowance for the month can pre-purchase an increase in their usage allowance at a discount.

No time machine?  Then you either pay the standard overlimit rate, watch your usage like a hawk, or potentially over-buy excess usage that expires at the end of the month.

Customers tell Stop the Cap! the company’s single, unlimited use package is “the same piece of garbage it always was,” writes Larry who lives in Lawrence.  He had high hopes Knology would do the right thing and abandon Sunflower’s overcharging schemes.

“Apparently not, and after a month with their unlimited service, I have scheduled my U-verse installation with AT&T,” Larry writes. “Even on Knology’s limited packages, they don’t provide the speeds they promise.”

Larry also says the higher speed tiers Knology offers deliver diminishing returns.

“If their uplink is congested, or the web sites you visit are busy, it won’t matter if you have 10Mbps or 50Mbps — the speed is effectively the same,” he says. “Besides, upload speed is more important these days and 1Mbps is just plain lousy in 2011.”

“Bye, bye SunKnology.”

Sunflower's Old Broadband Plans & Pricing (February 2010)

Verizon's iPhone Herd Mentality: Pay, pay more, and pay again.

We’re still trying to wrap our heads around this “deal” spotted in the Verizon iPhone FAQ by Gadgetell (underlining ours):

I just purchased a new smartphone during the holiday season, but if I knew that iPhone 4 was going to be available soon I would have waited. What are my options now?

Current Verizon customers who purchased and activated new smartphones, feature phones or certified pre-owned phones between 11/26/2010, and 01/10/2011, are eligible to receive up to a $200 Visa debit card when they purchase an iPhone 4 at full retail price by 02/28/2011 and return their existing phone. Note: This offer is only available on consumer accounts with five lines or less, who are purchasing iPhone 4 through Verizon Wireless retail stores, telesales, or through verizonwireless.com.

So, if you have recently bought a new Android or Blackberry phone during the holiday season, you can turn it in and essentially get your money back.  But Verizon isn’t giving you $200 — it is paying only as much as you spent on the phone to be returned, up to $200.

Verizon says that earns you the right to go and get in line to pay full retail price for a new iPhone in February.  No discounts or subsidies for you!  The 16GB iPhone runs $649.99 and the 32GB iPhone costs $749.99.

We’re basking in the savings.  Gosh, thanks Verizon!

Not only are customers giving up Verizon’s “new handset subsidy” — often worth hundreds of dollars, they also lose their New Every Two discount and other savings from promotions like Verizon’s Smartphones Talk Free $9.99 monthly discount for 24 months.

For those who simply must have the iPhone, Verizon will make you pay dearly for not waiting.

Having owned the iPod Touch (essentially the iPhone without the phone) and Motorola’s Droid X, I can testify the price penalty Verizon wants you to pay for the iPhone isn’t worth the asking price.  Move on, there is nothing to see here.  This is even more true considering the next generation of the iPhone will likely be introduced in just four months.  What will you do then, and how much do you think Verizon will extract from you all over again to get that phone?

There is no doubt Apple’s iPhone is a fine phone, but there are cheaper ways to get one, ranging from opening a new line on your Verizon account and passing your old phone down to a family member, to finding one on eBay, subsidized in part by selling your existing phone.