Stop the Cap! reader Michael writes to alert us he found AT&T’s U-verse online Account Overview now includes a section called “Usage & Recent Activity” that includes a placeholder for a future usage meter.

“I canceled my U-verse TV and bumped my Internet speed up to 12Mbps last weekend, and I remember checking to see if my account updated sometime around the middle of last week.  The old website was still in use then.  Today was the first time I got redirected to the new site, which includes this new placeholder for a usage meter,” writes Michael.

Stop the Cap! reader Michael sent us a screen shot of his AT&T U-verse account, showing this placeholder for a future usage meter. (Click to view the full screen shot)

While customers like Michael are currently being told their “internet plan provides you with unlimited usage — there are no usage details to display,” the potential for usage meters can set the stage for future Internet Overcharging schemes down the road.

AT&T alienated many of its customers in Beaumont, Texas and Reno, Nevada when an extended usage cap trial was underway.  Complaints were filed against AT&T with the Better Business Bureau over dubious marketing practices that sold customers on unlimited broadband, only to dispatch letters to newly signed customers telling them it wasn’t unlimited… after signing up for service.

Stop the Cap! learned the Beaumont/Reno experiment was coming to a close this April.

Internet Overcharging schemes are vastly unpopular with consumers.  A 2008 study found an overwhelming majority of customers (81 percent) opposed to usage limits or usage-based billing, with 51 percent willing to take their business to another provider if implemented.

In Beaumont and Reno, customers threatened to cancel service when they learned of the experimental overcharging scheme being tested.  Some managed to get exempted from the trial.

Customers routinely reject the notion that a company already earning billions in broadband profits today needs to set the stage for even higher pricing and profits tomorrow.

AT&T has spent millions lobbying for the introduction of their U-verse system on favorable franchise terms with the promise it would deliver more competition and lower prices for millions of Americans.

For customers like Michael, usage meters are the first step towards breaking that promise.  When followed with formal usage limits or usage-based billing, higher broadband bills are a sure thing.

AT&T customers should contact AT&T and put them on notice — any effort to impose usage limits or usage-based billing will result in immediate cancellation of your AT&T account.

Stop the Cap! will continue to closely monitor AT&T and we’ll recommend further action should conditions warrant.

Update 3:00pm EDT 3/23 — AT&T tells Broadband Reports that whatever users are seeing, it’s some kind of website glitch, and that the company has no plans to implement a usage meter. “We did do some upgrades to our account management portal this weekend, but we haven’t been able to recreate this screen,” according to AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom.

While that’s good news for AT&T customers, we are unsure exactly how such a glitch could occur with such depth, including wording that specific Internet plans providing unlimited usage.  Further, specifying “U-verse Internet Usage” on the tab above it seems surprisingly specific for a “glitch.”

Barring any new evidence, we’ll take AT&T’s word for it, but readers should continue to report any further “glitches” they might encounter.  If possible, include the URL with any screen shots, which we’ll happily provide to the company in any effort to recreate the page.

American Salt Company's salt pile in Hampton Corners, just south of Rochester, N.Y.

Faithful Stop the Cap! reader Lance dropped us a note this afternoon alerting us that Syracuse is the latest Time Warner Cable city getting the benefits of increased speed from Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3 Wideband upgrade.

While those in the Salt City can now sign up for 50Mbps broadband service, Time Warner Cable tells residents of the Flower City to go pound salt — there are no upgrades for you!

Why?

Thank Frontier Communications anemic (read that barely-existent) competition against Time Warner Cable in Rochester.  While the rest of upstate New York is being wired for fiber-to-the-home service from Verizon, Frontier Communications is relying on decade-old DSL service… indefinitely.  For residents like myself, that topped out at a whopping 3.1Mbps. That fails the FCC’s newly-proposed minimum speed to even be considered “broadband.”

Buffalo has been Wideband ready since early this month, and New York City launched service last year.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle must have noticed nearby cities were getting speed increases, but Rochester was not, so they contacted Time Warner Cable to find out why:

While those DOCSIS 3.0 products — called Wideband and Road Runner Extreme — are being made available in Buffalo and Syracuse, the company “has just begun its national launch of this product across its entire footprint, but with no additional locations determined at this time,” said spokesman Jeff Unaitis.

The company, however, does plan to roll out a wireless broadband product for the Rochester market before the end of 2010, he said.

(*) - As long as you don't live in Rochester, N.Y.

That’s the nice way of saying Rochester isn’t getting the speed increases because there is no competitive reason to provide it.  With Rochester left off the upgrade list, and no real incentive to run to Frontier (which can’t beat Road Runner’s existing speeds), this community falls behind the rest of the state in broadband speed.

To think last April Time Warner Cable was promising dramatically upgraded service, if the community agreed to accept their Internet Overcharging usage-based billing scheme.  Apparently no other upstate city was required to commit to ripoff pricing, and speed upgrades came anyway.  The fact Rochester is bypassed this year proves our contention their pricing experiment came to Rochester only because they faced no real competitive threat from Frontier then, and they still do not today.

As for the wireless product coming to Rochester, that will come courtesy of rebranded Clearwire service, which has had very mixed reviews.  Time Warner Cable and Comcast are both major investors in Clearwire, and are using their service to provide a wireless add-on.  It won’t come cheap, however, if North Carolina’s pricing also applies here:

• Road Runner Mobile 4G National Elite gives unlimited access to both Time Warner Cable’s 4G Mobile Network and a national 3G network (Sprint, presumably), for use when traveling.
  o $79.95 per month for Road Runner Standard or Turbo customers.
• Road Runner Mobile 4G Elite gives customers unlimited access to the Time Warner Cable 4G Mobile Network.
  o $49.95 per month for Road Runner Standard or Turbo customers.
• Road Runner Mobile 4G Choice gives light users 2GB of service on the Time Warner Cable 4G network each month.
  o Available for $39.95 per month to customers of at least one other Time Warner Cable service.  Additional $5 off if you have a  bundled service package.

As for Wideband pricing, Syracuse residents should expect to pay:

• 30/5Mbps: $25 more than standard Road Runner service;
• 50/5Mbps: $99 per month, but ask about promotional pricing, which may be available.

In Syracuse, Road Runner speed now matches Verizon FiOS on the downstream side, although Verizon can deliver better upload speed at 20Mbps.  Formerly, Road Runner maxed out at 15Mbps in central New York.

About 30 percent of the central New York division of Time Warner Cable is now Wideband-ready, including the entire city of Syracuse.  By October, the company expects to have the faster service available in 70 percent of the central New York area.

For those around in the 1980s, Verizon Wireless’ latest 3G ad slam against AT&T should have brought back some memories.

Someone at Verizon probably spent some time reviewing advertising collections of the 1970s and 1980s and ran across Big Red, the cinnamon-flavored gum with the long-lasting flavor.  First appearing back in 1976, the gum really took off in the early 1980s when the William Wrigley Jr. Company commissioned a catchy jingle for its advertising campaigns.  It stuck, and most still remember it to this day.

Verizon, which bathes its corporate image in red, made the connection, and managed to recreate most of the imagery of several Big Red commercials, mostly from the early 1980s, albeit with updated lyrics.  They certainly got the classic corporate 1980s Reagan-era jingle sound down pat.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizon Big Red.flv[/flv]

For those too young to remember Big Red gum, I’ve brought one of the original advertisements together with Verizon’s reproduction so you can appreciate the scope of their recreation.  Verizon actually borrowed from several Big Red ads, but you’ll get the point.  Too bad it’s the gum priced at 25 cents and not the 3G.  With the gum, you could have any many sticks as you wanted — no chewing limits either. (1 minute)

Strauss

This week Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski appointed Karen Peltz Strauss Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau Deputy Chief.

Strauss is supposed to focus on disability issues, among other things, and will help the Commission to implement the components of the National Broadband Plan that address access for people with disabilities, including leading the effort to develop a proposed Accessibility and Innovation Forum.

“The FCC has a vital role to play in empowering and protecting all consumers and ensuring they have access to world-class communications networks and technologies” said Chairman Genachowski. “I look forward to drawing on Karen’s extensive experience with telecommunications access issues to realize those goals.”

A news release from the FCC includes a brief review of her 25 years’ experience working on telecommunications access for people with disabilities.

But the agency forgot to mention Strauss also serves on the board of directors of an industry front group — the Alliance for Public Technology.  APT claims it represents the best interests of consumers, but considering who is writing the checks, that’s highly doubtful.

APT’s website suggests the group “makes policy decisions based on the potential benefit to consumers. The Board members themselves as well as APT’s member organizations serve the education, health care, social service and economic development needs of senior citizens, people with disabilities, minorities, children, low income families, rural communities, and all consumers.”

That’s true, if you, as a consumer, are for big telecom mergers like AT&T and BellSouth, which APT supported, oppose Net Neutrality, which APT feels should not be imposed on providers, liked the idea of Cingular being absorbed into AT&T’s empire of wireless, which APT also supported, and so on.

In fact, this group even praised Verizon’s willingness to invest in West Virginia:

Verizon has demonstrated a commitment to increased investment in advanced telecommunications capabilities. According to the company, Verizon invested almost $560 million in its Maryland network and $150 million in West Virginia in 2001 (2002 figures not available). Verizon added more than 31,000 miles of fiber optic cable in Maryland and 20,500 miles of fiber optic cable in West Virginia. Over 2.5 million access lines in Maryland now have access to DSL. Authorization to provide in-region long distance service in Virginia will facilitate Verizon’s capacity to build on economies of scale and scope in order to provide a high standard of service and accelerated deployment of advanced technologies to the consumers of Maryland, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.

The only thing Verizon wants to accelerate in West Virginia is their exit.

Laughably, one of the reasons APT supports AT&T so much (besides the big checks the company writes to fund their operation) is:

With BellSouth’s entry into the Florida and Tennessee long-distance markets, AT&T began to offer 30 minutes of free long distances to its customers and inserted “thank you” messages into the time between a customer dials a number and the connection occurs. These actions demonstrate tangible benefits for consumers because of an increased number of competitors in the long distance market.

I know that makes me feel warm all over.  Who should I call first?

Wading through APT’s public policy positions unearths absolutely no surprises.  They exist to advocate for the interests of the companies that fund their operations, and that includes all the bully boys:

• AT&T
• CTIA
• Embarq
• Qwest
• United States Telecom Association
• Verizon

Despite this, APT writes with a straight face, “These companies give donations based on a shared vision for the ubiquitous deployment of high-speed telecommunications technology, but have no say in the governance of the association.”

Sure they don’t.  But then again, those checks would stop coming if APT began actually representing the consumers they claim to care so much about.

It’s disappointing the FCC would want someone so closely aligned with the interests of large telecommunications companies working to implement a National Broadband Plan that is supposed to represent the public interest.

It’s just another example of the Inside the Beltway Tickle Party, where lobbyists and “dollar a holler” experts flow between government jobs, privately-funded think tanks, and the private sector.  Consumers are only too aware that their best interests are not represented by employees whose loyalties change depending on what hat they wear to the office.

In addition to our ongoing concerns about Internet Overcharging schemes like usage allowances and caps, Stop the Cap! is a strong advocate for Net Neutrality protection.  As part of yesterday’s unveiling of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spent 30 minutes answering questions from CitizenTube participants about broadband policy.

Among the 18 questions asked was one from yours truly, taking on broadband industry lobbyists who make evidence-free claims that Net Neutrality will somehow kill investment in broadband expansion.

Pointedly, I pressed Chairman Genachowski about whether we had to sacrifice the Internet’s openness in order to bring broadband service to the presently unserved.  We sure don’t think so.

Based on the answer, which appears about 24 minutes into the video, he doesn’t think so either.

The false argument providers make to scare legislators is little more than hollow rhetoric, especially when you accept their claim they are not engaged in the kinds of activities today that Net Neutrality would ban tomorrow.  How exactly does prohibiting what providers claim they are not doing anyway harm investment?

Answer: it doesn’t.

What it harms are further efforts to monetize broadband from every angle in an effort to further fatten already engorged profits.

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