Upcoming wireless spectrum auctions are critically important for some of Canada’s newest players in the cell phone marketplace.  Most are working hard to make sure they have plenty to spend to secure new frequencies for advanced wireless services that will help them remain competitive with larger players.

Globalive Holdings, the parent company of Wind Mobile, has convinced backers to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, so long as all of the money is spent on acquiring wireless spectrum.

Wind’s nearly 400,000 customers will appreciate the additional room for growth, and new customers may keep Wind in mind for advanced 4G networks most Canadian providers intend to build and expand into the new spectrum they acquire at an auction next year.

Much of the funding, estimated to approach nearly a half-billion dollars, is coming from Wind’s parent entities, Egypt-based Orascom Telecom and the European conglomerate VimpelCom that acquired Orascom earlier this year.  Because the Canadian government is expected to set-aside some of the valued 700MHz spectrum exclusively for bidding among new entrants in the market, Wind could walk away a big winner, particularly if other similar-sized competitors Mobilicity and Vidéotron Ltee./Quebecor have trouble raising enough money to remain competitive in the bidding.

As far as Canada’s largest cell companies are concerned, set-asides are unnecessary and they prefer a winner-take-all auction.  Rogers, in particular, has been lobbying hard to convince Canadian officials it needs access to the 700MHz spectrum up for auction to roll out service in rural communities and upgrade networks in larger cities.

Those who feel Canada’s cell phone marketplace is already too concentrated have little sympathy for Rogers’ point of view, and expect an auction free-for-all will mean the largest incumbent players will walk away with everything they can bid on.

Among smaller players, assuming the set-asides are in place, analysts expect Wind will probably secure the most spectrum, but Vidéotron is expected to stay competitive and walk away with at least some frequencies for use in its home province of Quebec.  Big losses among the smaller players could fuel calls for additional mergers and acquisitions among those carriers deemed to have been left behind.

The Canadian government is expected to be the biggest winner of all, netting a potential $3-4 billion from the spectrum sale.

A Winston-Salem man with a judgment from a North Carolina court in hand shocked AT&T store employees on Summit Square Boulevard Tuesday when he walked in with a Forsyth County Sheriff’s deputy to serve AT&T a court order that allowed the Sheriff’s Office to seize the store’s assets and sell them to satisfy his $2,000 judgment.

George Kontos says AT&T has been stonewalling his family for more than three months after winning a lawsuit against AT&T for Internet Overcharging.  The company had been stalling Kontos with paperwork requests, but a visit by a sheriff’s deputy prepared to begin selling off the store’s property to pay Kontos managed to finally get AT&T to act.

“AT&T is making arrangements to pay the sum owed to the Kontos family and will deliver the payment to the appropriate entity,” an AT&T spokesperson said in a statement.

Kontos had little trouble arguing his case in small claims court.

(Courtesy: WFMY News)

“When I went into AT&T to look at the plan, I wanted to make sure I had a comparable data plan with what I had been using and the rep pulled up the account and obviously even as an AT&T employee it must have been outstanding for him because his first reaction was, ‘wow you’re paying too much,'” Kontos told WFMY News.

With an AT&T employee on his side, Kontos thought AT&T would do the right thing and credit his account for 24 months of overcharging.  AT&T agreed to partial credits for the last five months.  Kontos said he would see the company in court.

In July, a county small claims court judge quickly found for Kontos and handed him a judgment and Kontos has been waiting by his mailbox for AT&T’s check ever since.

Kontos calls the matter a real David vs. Goliath story, and openly wonders how many other customers in the Triad are being overcharged by AT&T.

“Demand that they review your account for the last two years minimum,” he told the station. “Find out what you’ve been paying. Find out what other rate plans exist. Find out what you could have been paying and if you’ve got money that’s owed to you, get it back.”

If AT&T won’t provide an owed refund willingly, and you live in North Carolina, you can use this form — the same one used by the Kontos family — to sue AT&T yourself.

[flv width=”640″ height=”447″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WFMY Greensboro Customer George Kontos Took ATT Mobility To Court And Won 10-7-11.flv[/flv]

WFMY in Greensboro shares the story of the Kontos family, who discovered they were overcharged for a data plan for more than two years.  When the company refused to issue an appropriate credit, Kontos took the company to court and won.  (2 minutes)

Frontier Communications customers may be owed refunds for their Internet service because, a new lawsuit alleges, the company deceptively billed customers fees the company is not entitled to receive.

Four Frontier customers — three in Minnesota and one in New York — are suing the company for add-on charges the company claims are required by the government, but in fact are pocketed by the phone company.

The lawsuit claims Frontier is guilty of fraud, breach of contract, deceptive practices, false advertising and violations of the Federal Communications Act and the Internet Tax Freedom Act.

The plaintiffs claim broadband customers are being billed for certain state and federal taxes, 911 surcharges, and Universal Service Fund fees, even though they don’t apply to broadband service.

“It is merely a junk fee that Frontier imposes on customers,” the lawsuit says.  “The fee bears no relationship to any governmentally-imposed fee or regulation, and is nothing other than an effort by Frontier to increase prices above the advertised price.”

Adding fuel to the fire, Frontier recently imposed a new “HSI Surcharge” on broadband customers, and as Stop the Cap! reported earlier, some company representatives have claimed that fee is government mandated as well.

In fact, federal law bans most taxes on Internet service under the Internet Tax Freedom Act.  Since broadband customers cannot dial 911 from a DSL modem, 911 surcharges should not apply either.  USF fees only apply to voice telephone service.  Frontier, the suit alleges, levies all of these fees on the broadband portion of customer bills.

Frontier has more than 7 million customers nationwide, although the company does not disclose how many of them purchase broadband service.  If the lawsuit achieves class action status, Frontier could be required to return the ill-gotten gains to customers if a judge agrees they were wrongly collected.  That could cost the company millions in retroactive refunds.

Crumpton

NAACP national board member and former Missouri Public Service Commission member Harold Crumpton believes that combining AT&T and T-Mobile will create 100,000 new jobs, despite the fact both companies have promoted “cost savings” from eliminating redundant services and winning “increased efficiencies.”

That’s code language for layoffs, and it has been that way with every telecommunications merger in the last decade.  But Crumpton prefers to deny reality in a guest opinion piece published today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Most mergers result in — and pay for themselves with — job losses and higher prices. Not this one.

If, to use the government antitrust lingo, there is a “relevant product market” for this merger, it would be “jobs” because jobs are the No. 1 product of the broadband factory. The AT&T and T-Mobile merger is structured as an engine of job creation — yielding 100,000 new jobs by delivering on President Obama’s call for a national high-speed broadband network. That’s far more jobs than would be lost because of AT&T and T-Mobile overlaps.

Ironically, AT&T announced the repatriation of 5,000 call center jobs and pledged not to terminate call center employees because of the merger. Two hours later, without warning to AT&T, the Justice Department filed its suit. Suffice to say that President Obama, our greatest champion of job creation, was not well-served that morning.

How will AT&T produce all these new jobs? By creating the first national next-generation high-speed (4G) mobile network. The merger is what will make the network possible, and it will do that by aggregating and redeploying spectrum T-Mobile can’t use for 4G. In this way, the network would reach 55 million more Americans than 4G currently reaches.

AT&T couldn’t have argued the case better.  Oh wait.  They have, in the company’s advocacy package mailed to the NAACP and dozens of other groups who receive the company’s financial support.  Those talking points inevitably end up in the guest editorials penned by Crumpton and others.

While the bloom is clearly off the rose of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, thanks in part to consumer groups and the U.S. Department of Justice who filed a lawsuit to stop it, AT&T is still flailing about trying to find some way to get the deal done, if only to avoid the outrageous break-up fee self-imposed by the telecommunications giant if the deal falls apart.  AT&T’s promise to bring an end to the obnoxious practice of offshoring their customer support call centers — if the merger gets approved — has been compared with blackmail by some customers who have spent an hour or more negotiating with heavily accented customer support agents that companies like Discover Card routinely mock.

AT&T promises customers a solution to the "Peggy Problem" if their merger with T-Mobile gets approved.

It clearly wasn’t enough to move critics of the deal to reconsider — AT&T could voluntarily hire American workers who speak the language of their customers for the benefit of those customers with or without a merger with the fourth largest wireless carrier in the country.

Crumpton argues President Obama was not well served by the Justice Department.  Consumer groups argue T-Mobile and AT&T’s customers will not be well-served if this merger ever happens.

As Stop the Cap! has repeatedly argued, both AT&T and T-Mobile will construct 4G mobile broadband networks in all of the places where the economics to deploy those networks makes sense.  No more, no less, no matter if AT&T and T-Mobile are two companies or one.

Crumpton might as well have argued the merger would deliver 4G service to Sprint customers as well.  It’s the same disconnected logic.

Crumpton thinks AT&T’s high-priced, heavily-capped 4G network will somehow solve the pervasive problem of the digital divide — the millions of poor Americans who can’t afford AT&T’s prices.  Incredibly, Crumpton’s answer is to allow one of the most price-aggressive, innovative carriers in the country favored by many budget-conscious consumers to be snapped up by the lowest rated, if not most-hated wireless company in the country.

It just doesn’t make sense.  But it does make dollars… for the NAACP, which receives boatloads of corporate money from AT&T.  It’s no surprise the pretzel-twisted logic that drives merger advocates like Mr. Crumpton comes fact-free.  The money makes up for all that.

“The NAACP stands ready to work with the public and private sectors to ensure that every American has an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from this awesome ‘broadband revolution,'” Crumpton writes.

We can only hope that is true.  The NAACP can get started by admitting publicly it receives substantial support from AT&T and it will either agree to remain neutral in corporate advocacy issues to avoid conflicts of interest, or return AT&T’s money.  After all, it sounds like they need it to build the digital divide-erasing 4G network Crumpton is purportedly so concerned about.

Fiber optic cable spool

For the most populated provinces in Canada, questions about when fiber-to-the-home service will become a reality are easy to answer:  Never, indefinitely.

Some of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers have their minds made up — fiber isn’t for consumers, it’s for their backbone and business networks.  For citizens of Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, and Vancouver coping with bandwidth shortages, providers have a much better answer: pay more, use less Internet.

Fiber broadband projects in Canada are hard to find, because providers refuse to invest in broadband upgrades to deliver the kinds of speeds and capacity Canadians increasingly demand.  Instead, companies like Bell, Shaw, and Rogers continue to hand out pithy upload speeds, throttled downloads, and often stingy usage caps.  Much of the country still relies on basic DSL service from Bell or Telus, and the most-promoted broadband expansion project in the country — Bell’s Fibe, is phoney baloney because it relies on existing copper telephone wires to deliver the last mile of service to customers.

Much like in the United States, the move to replace outdated copper phone lines and coaxial cable in favor of near-limitless capacity fiber remains stalled in most areas.  The reasons are simple: lack of competition to drive providers to invest in upgrades and the unwillingness to spend $1000 per home to install fiber when a 100GB usage cap and slower speeds will suffice.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports that while 30-50 percent of homes in South Korea and Japan have fiber broadband, only 18 percent of Americans and less than 2 percent of Canadians have access to the networks that routinely deliver 100Mbps affordable broadband without rationed broadband usage plans.

In fact, the biggest fiber projects underway in Canada are being built in unexpected places that run contrary to the conventional wisdom that suggest fiber installs only make sense in large, population-dense, urban areas.

Manitoba’s MTS plans to spend $125-million over the next five years to launch its fiber to the home service, FiON.  By the end of 2015, MTS expects to deploy fiber to about 120,000 homes in close to 20 Manitoba communities.  In Saskatchewan, SaskTel is investing $199 million in its network in 2011 and approximately $670 million in a seven-year Next Generation Broadband Access Program (2011 – 2017). This program will deploy Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) and upgrade the broadband network in the nine largest urban centers in the province – Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Estevan, Swift Current, Yorkton, North Battleford and Prince Albert.

“Saskatchewan continues to be a growing and dynamic place,” Minister responsible for SaskTel Bill Boyd said. “The deployment of FTTP will create the bandwidth capacity to allow SaskTel to deploy exciting new next generation technologies to better serve the people of Saskatchewan.”

But the largest fiber project of all will serve the unlikely provinces of Atlantic Canada, among the most economically challenged in the country.  Bell Aliant is targeting its FibreOP fiber to the home network to over 600,000 homes by the end of next year.  On that network, Bell Aliant plans to sell speeds up to 170/30Mbps to start.

In comparison, residents in larger provinces are making due with 3-10Mbps DSL service from Bell or Telus, or expensive usage-limited, speed-throttled cable broadband service from companies like Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron.

Bell Canada is trying to convince its customers it has the fiber optic network they want.  Its Fibe Internet service sure sounds like fiber, but the product fails truth-in-advertising because it isn’t an all-fiber-network at all. It’s similar to AT&T’s U-verse — relying on fiber to the neighborhood, using existing copper phone wires to finish the job.  Technically, that isn’t much different from today’s cable systems, which also use fiber to reach into individual neighborhoods.  Traditional coaxial cable handles the signal for the rest of the journey into subscriber homes.

A half-fiber network can do better than none at all.  In Ontario, Bell sells Fibe Internet packages at speeds up to 25Mbps, but even those speeds cannot compare to what true fiber networks can deliver.

Globe & Mail readers seemed to understand today’s broadband realities in the barely competitive broadband market. One reader’s take:

“The problem in Canada (and elsewhere) preventing wide scale deployment of FTTH isn’t the technology, nor the cost. It’s a lack of political vision and will, coupled with incumbent service providers doing whatever they can to hold on to a dysfunctional model that serves their interests at the expense of consumers.”

Another:

“The problem with incumbents is they only think in 2-3 year terms. If they can’t make their money back in that period of time, they’re not interested. Thinking 20, heck even 10 years ahead is not in their vocabulary.”