The sun is shining again here in western New York and it’s 52 degrees.  I’m still terribly offended by those videos from the folks in Austin in short sleeved shirts and leaf-filled trees out the window.  Our spring has only just begun!

If you’ve been wondering why the number of articles has dwindled in the last two days, it’s because of the growing number of media interviews I have been doing.  Reporters from across the country are taking an active interest in this story, recognizing that what Time Warner (among others) may try in a few cities will spread like wildfire across the rest of the country if they deem their experiments “successful.”  It is gratifying to know that so many consumers have joined forces to push back against this ridiculous rationing of Internet access at top dollar pricing.

We officially broke through the barrier of 20,000 unique visitors this afternoon.  That number only counts those who have arrived since April 1st.  The top three states being New York (13,043), Texas (3,126), and North Carolina (1,592) for obvious reasons.  More than 4,000 new people found this site yesterday alone.

I am pleased that more than 400 of you have already e-mailed news tips, story links, ideas, and/or have volunteered to help in this group effort.  If you have not seen your story idea or link appear here yet, it’s only because I haven’t gotten around to it yet.  Please don’t stop sending that information.

I have also been working on bringing more writers into our team.  It is my intention to find small groups willing to spearhead our efforts in each of the affected cities.  It appears Austin has gotten ready to step up and be the first, outside of me keeping tabs on what’s happening here in Rochester.  These local efforts are extremely important because each of you in your respective communities know what needs to be done, and it’s going to be easier for some of you to get that information up here fast than wait for me to get to it.  We are always looking for more people.

To get involved, just find the link below on the left to register for an account and send me a note on the Contact form asking for access to the editor.  I will e-mail you back instructions and guidelines, and then get started.

Over the weekend, I am going to create new tags for each of the affected cities, making it easier for people to find out about upcoming events and projects in each area.

I believe keeping us working together as a team is going to be more effective than scattering efforts across multiple sites.  StoptheCap! is about you and the power we have together to force back anti-consumer behavior.  The time has come to say, “we’ve had enough.”

If you are able to attend any of the upcoming events, and you are permitted to record the event, you can then upload your video to DailyMotion, YouTube or any of the other sites that permit us to embed your videos and we will get it up here for everyone to watch.

If you’ve arrived here because of an article in a local newspaper or TV newscast, welcome.  I know you probably have a lot of questions.  Many of them are probably already answered in one of the earlier articles we have here.  This site has the latest content first, and then works its way back in time from there.  You can access the pages that interest you from the Select Category box in the upper left of your screen.  Just click it and a box will open with various topics.  Select one that interests you and all articles pertaining to that topic will appear.  Most categories will have several pages of articles to review.  At the very bottom of the page, you can find a search box to find anything specific.  Also be sure to see the links running horizontally along the top banner.  You may want to explore Alternatives and Take Action regularly, as those sections will be updated often.

Many readers comment on the articles here.  Right beneath the headline, you will see “Comments.”  You can click that and read and reply to any of the reader comments found there.

I have more content on the way, so check back often!

This Week in Tech covers the Road Runner usage caps issue

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s report about the amazing inconsistency of responses coming from Time Warner customer service employees to our readers, here comes another one.  This Week in Tech [thanks to Steve Rea from Sound Bytes for pointing the way] covered the usage cap story this past weekend, and if you are new to this site and don’t understand what all the fuss is about, this is around eight minutes you need to hear to understand what is going on.  It covers the broadband industry model, the inconsistent messages the broadband industry is sending to consumers, and what one of the fundamental goals of broadband capping seeks to achieve: a reduction in risk to their primary video programming delivery business.  The more you watch online, the less you’ll think you need those bloated cable TV packages with all those channels you never watch.  A cap that makes watching video online an expensive proposition means you’ll think twice before watching another Hulu or Netflix movie on your computer.

I’d also like to share some of the behind-the-scenes contemplating I have been doing on this issue based on the evolving message coming from Time Warner on this issue.  I think the increasing reliance on their use of the words “experiment” and “test,” and the supposed willingness to “rethink” the level of the caps may be part of an effort to lay the groundwork for some sort of damage control announcement that the company is going to “double” or “triple” the caps in their upcoming “experiment.”  In thinking about how this industry has worked over the past two decades I have been keeping an eye on them, it would not be outside the realm of possibility for them to try and proclaim a “victory for consumers” by simply increasing the caps, but still imposing them anyway.

When you hear this podcast talking about Time Warner employees referring to some “internal memo” or “email” on this subject (and we’re always happy to receive our copy here at StoptheCap! should someone anonymously drop one our way), it would hardly be surprising if something akin to this wasn’t under consideration.

But I want to make everyone clear that a cap, of any kind, is honestly not a victory for anyone. It’s a Band-Aid.  And even assuming they tripled the proposed caps, where the maximum 40GB becomes 120GB, that still puts them below other competitors in this race to the bottom, and your bill is still going up, and now you have to watch a gas gauge every time you sit down in front of the computer.  And using their own claim that average subscribers are increasing their usage by 50% a year, we’ll be right back here on this issue soon enough as people start getting larger and larger cable bills for “going over.”

The only real victory here is a complete revocation of the “cap experiment.”  No caps.  If Time Warner wants to rake in additional revenue, why not consider creating new super-tiers that are priced higher, but also offer heavy users faster speeds, particularly for uploads.  There are plenty of heavy users of the net who already pony up an additional $10 a month for Road Runner Turbo, if only for increased upload speed.  I am among them.  In many markets, like Rochester, there is room to grow on the top end without imposing caps on anyone, and still collect additional money from subscribers who choose a better level of service.  Punitively punishing every customer from the very light to the very heavy user is nothing less than market abuse and an effort to extract even more dollars out of your customers.  The costs to upgrade their facilities to provide a level of service capable of easily growing with broadband demand is not nearly as expensive as they would lead you to believe.  We’ll get into the weeds on that issue shortly.

And it’s not just consumers saying caps are bad.  Other cable companies and those in the financial sector who track Time Warner are saying it too:

Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield, in a note to investors Wednesday, said asking consumers to keep checking their consumption “sounds tedious.”

“Let’s start with a simple premise: moving from an all-you can eat ‘buffet line’ for bandwidth usage via broadband to an a la carte system of paying for every gigabyte you eat is subscriber-unfriendly and will be confusing to the average broadband user,” he wrote, referencing the opposition by Massa and the Greensboro city council.

“In an increasingly competitive world, the age-old saying of ‘keep it simple stupid’ should not be overlooked,” Greenfield continued. “If competition exists, we suspect a provider offering broadband without caps or a simplified strategy toward broadband will gain meaningful market share, assuming TWC continues to move forward with its bandwidth-cap strategy.”

At last week’s Cable Show ’09, Jim Blackley, Cablevision Systems senior vice president of corporate engineering and technology, said on a panel discussion that bandwidth-usage caps are not in the MSO’s plans.

“We don’t want customers to think about byte caps so that’s not on our horizon,” he said. “We literally don’t want consumers to think about how they’re consuming high-speed services. It’s a pretty powerful drug and we want people to use more and more of it.”

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p style=”text-align: left;”>Press the play button to listen (you must remain on this web page to hear the entire segment):

There is snow outside. Not enough to shovel, but still… how much more of this do we have to take?

In more bad news, you’ll find an article here from this morning suggesting that Earthlink is also going to be capped. How do we know? Because Time Warner’s corporate public affairs guy tells us so! So much for that Federal Trade Commission settlement back in 2000 that opened Time Warner’s network to competitors. Earthlink still has not called or written us back to give their side, even though we’ve left a bunch of messages at their corporate headquarters. It’s nice to know that Time Warner evidently gets to decide on Earthlink’s business plans. We’re going to have to wait awhile longer on this to find out exactly what is true here.

By popular request, the Alternative Providers list is now linked at the top of the page. At the moment, it’s a reprint of the article from last week on alternatives for Rochester area residents. I am still working on the other cities so hang in there.

Customers "want this": Broadband Reports covers Time Warner's propaganda campaign

Karl Bode at Broadband Reports has another great article up quoting from Time Warner Cable COO Landel Hobbs who came out the other day to praise the revolutionary thinking of Time Warner’s new ration-your-Internet plan.  It’s part of the grand propaganda effort underway at Time Warner to convince serfs customers that this is exactly the change they were hoping for.  Because when I think of people who are in touch with my needs and are just like me and my neighbors, I think of executives in the upper floors at Time Warner headquarters.  Yeah.

Beware cable companies bearing gifts.  How lucky we all are to benefit from this amazing plan!

There’s another great article this afternoon on the grand myth Time Warner’s corporate types are selling that people are clamoring to have their Internet accounts rationed away written by Karl Bode over at Broadband Reports.  Check it out.

We have our first contributing writer here this morning as well. A lot of you are asking me what more you can do to help. We need a lot of things. Writers to help post articles here, people who like to share news tidbits they’ve uncovered, and lots of data gatherers. I need to prioritize the fight back section work, and it’s slow going for me, especially for the other cities. If you want to help collect data on alternative providers and what their pricing, packages, and contact information is, that would be very useful, especially if you have experience using their services and can share insight on what people can expect.

Another area is figuring out who the movers and shakers are in other cities on this issue so we make sure we are linking to them and publishing their information.

If you are so talented, we could also use people to capture video clips from any future news coverage on this issue, and then upload them to Dailymotion or YouTube so we can embed them here. In fact, any video or other multimedia on this question containing original or new information is very welcomed.

If you are artistic or creative, we could use your help in creating things like protest banner ads, editorial cartoons, and I even have some ideas for some video web ads which could potentially get some free exposure in the media, but although I have that radio voice thing going, I’m inept in the artistic talent and video software department.

Basically, anything you think is missing here, want to have here, and especially that you can help make possible here I want to know about.

Please consider registering for an account and using the contact form to request more information about writing articles here and join the team!  It’s very easy to do, because I managed to figure it out.  If I can, you can too.

Lunch time…  I wonder if anything else is happening in the world;  I’ve lost touch since April 1st for some reason.

Imagine the following…

You are sitting down to watch your favorite show (if you have good taste perhaps it’s something like Battlestar Galactica or Fringe). Thirty minutes in at the mid-way point of the show a message box pops up on the screen, saying:

“Your monthly allocation of 150 hours of television viewing has almost expired. Additional blocks of 10 hours are available for the low price of $1 / 10 hours which will be reflected on your next bill.”

There are two buttons you can push at the bottom, one to turn off your TV and the other to accept the additional charges and continue watching your show.

For most people the above example would be absurd to the point of idiocy. Any provider trying to enforce such a policy would be laughed out of town and their competitors would be literally falling over themselves to sell you “unlimited TV viewing” at a similar price point.

Now, change your television usage in the above example to your Internet bandwidth usage and you have what is beginning to take shape in today’s broadband Internet market.

Several companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are either actively trialling so-called “metered broadband” in test markets or have rolled it out to all of their customers already. So what can you do about it if you are “lucky” enough to be in one of these test markets or instead use an ISP who has already enacted bandwidth caps on their users? Simple – tell them to take a hike.

Accepting smaller caps now in the hope that they will lead to higher caps later is something that the companies want you to do. By doing so you have already bought into their thinking that “caps = good” or, at the very least, “caps = bad”. The only way to ensure that this is a not a victory of degrees is to simply switch to another provider in your area, one that does not have any bandwidth caps. And when you call your original provider to cancel your service, make sure that you tell them that the bandwidth caps on their Internet service are the specific reason you are canceling.

Once enough people start doing this they will begin to get the message. At that point they will have a choice – they can either continue with their policy and have customers leave to go to other providers – OR they can draw a line in the sand, abandon the idea that they need to nickel and dime people and fall back into the good graces of the individuals who pay their wages, their customers.

The years 2008 and 2009 have seen many advances in the area of high-bandwidth HD content. Hulu offers literally hundreds of hours of television available online for free, most of it accessible with HD streams. YouTube is now also beginning to promote HD video on its site, and they are certainly not the only two providers doing this. HD high-bandwidth content is becoming more and more prevalent, but there’s no use in the content being out there if you cannot access it without incurring additional charges from your ISP. And as for digital distribution of software, games and applications purchasable on services like Stardock and Steam, they become much less attractive when you figure out that the $20 game is going to end up costing you closer to $30 by the time you have factored in your overage bandwidth charges for downloading your content.

The future will rest upon your shoulders. If you look the other way and think to yourself, “This isn’t so bad, I will never be close to the caps so it won’t affect me” and then a couple of years down the line find yourself paying overages to your cable or DSL provider then you can have no complaints. Instead, write now to your local municipal councilperson, your state representative or state senator and tell them why caps are a bad idea. Tell your friends and family, and have them tell their friends and their family, and so on.

Remember…

Only you can prevent forest fires, and only you can reject metered broadband.

Just say no!

[Editor’s Note: Ironheart is our first contributing author here on StoptheCap! This project is a joint effort, and we welcome those who would like to contribute their own articles for the site.  Please consider registering for an account and using the contact form to request more information about writing articles here and join the team!]

I wanted to take a moment and give everyone some updates on what’s been happening behind the scenes here at StoptheCap! as the rain continues to fall and a winter storm watch is up for snow here in what was supposed to be spring.  It’s sunny and well into the 50s in Texas, and 76 in Greensboro, and we hate you for it.

First, after an incredibly exhausting week of writing, writing some more, and then writing even more than that, I’ve been working on developing some of the important resources you’ll need to take action.  You will find a new link at the top of the page for that, and that section will be expanded greatly to include links to various resources, contact information for all of the important players, petitions, social groups, politicians and company officials.  It’s a labor intensive project, so there will be fewer new articles posted here until that section is expanded.  Some of the other links along the top of the page will also be modified and expanded.

Along the left side of your screen, you will find the most recent comments posted, some of the articles that have left the front page but are still important, a new links section which I’ve just started, and towards the bottom, under Meta, a link to sign up for your own account here so you can leave comments without having to retype your name and e-mail address over and over.  You can also change your avatar and become more personable in the comments section.  Another update now lets you reply to individual comments and have them display just below the original.

Second, a hat tip to Kate Perry at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle who is continuing to provide more depth on the Time Warner cap issue than any other newspaper reporter in all of the affected communities.  A major story in the Sunday edition gave additional perspective on this issue from some of the national players.  A follow-up piece coming shortly will cover additional local reaction.  When I saw the first report on this cap issue, which was a pretty basic piece reflecting Time Warner’s position and little more, I had feared we were in for shallow coverage of this important story.  I am happy to withdraw that concern and thank the D&C and Ms. Perry for their reporting!

Third, thanks to SoundBytes, the long-running computer users group of the airwaves (Sunday 12-1pm ET on WHAM-AM 1180 Rochester), listeners had a place to vent about the cap issue and also learn about StoptheCap! The program can be streamed online anywhere, and when the archive show is posted, we’ll have a link to it here.  Meanwhile go and vote in their poll.  Fifty-three percent of respondents thus far say they will cancel Road Runner if they impose usage caps.

I have been doing a number of press interviews since Friday on this story.  What has become apparent is that no newspaper, much less a television newscast, has the time to explore a lot of the underlying issues regarding usage caps.  And it’s very easy to get far out into the weeds on a story like this.  Most media outlets have to keep it simple because of space/time constraints.  Thankfully, we don’t have those limitations here.  I will continue to devote a lot of time and attention to helping you understand this issue as fully as possible, because knowledge is power and it will help you fight back.  I will do that through industry news items, talking points, and background stories.  It’s clear I have a lot of work to do based on Letters to the Editor like this.

Fourth, our story on Frontier was picked up by Broadband Reports, which also does excellent coverage on the usage cap question and other broadband-related stories.  It’s a must-read for anyone intensely interested in broadband issues.  Bookmark it.

Fifth (whew), I’m not the only one who has not received a call back from Earthlink’s Corporate Communications department.  We are still trying to confirm through official corporate channels whether Earthlink will remain cap-free come fall.  Right now the answer is “there are no caps.”  But our question is, “will there be caps if/when Time Warner imposes them on Road Runner, which uses one of the same delivery platforms that Earthlink uses.”  We’re still waiting on an answer.

Finally, I’ve received some e-mail from interested volunteers and I will be in touch shortly.  But we need more, especially from Texas and North Carolina.  Please use the contact form (link at the top of the page) to contact me.  I need people on the ground in these areas who can point to news articles, TV news coverage, alternative providers, pricing, etc.

I’ll be back later with more coverage.