From the “Don’t Give Them Any Ideas” Department…

The Chinese government has banned electro-shock therapy on Internet addicts in China, after reports reached the Ministry of Health in Beijing that an unqualified psychiatrist in Linyi, Shandong Province, administered electric currents to nearly 3,000 teenagers in an attempt to rid them of their heavy Internet using habits.

With nearly 300 million Internet users, China now leads the world in sheer numbers of people getting online, much to the consternation of the Chinese government, who has run an “anti-excessive use” campaign for more than a year.  In addition to China’s youth accessing the “wrong” kinds of websites, exposing them to “dangerous” sites containing criticism of the Chinese government, officials in Beijing also claim that heavy online usage damages youth studies and family life.

Reuters reported at least 200 Internet overuse “treatment centers” have sprung up in China recently to treat heavy downloaders.

The developer of the “electric impact therapy” is Doctor Yang Yongxin, also known as “Uncle Yang,” who runs a boot camp called the Internet Addiction Treatment Center at Linyi Mental Hospital, the China Youth Daily said.

Patients are given psychotropic drugs as well as electro-shocks, at a cost of 5,500 yuan (805 USD) a month.

Strictly trained in military ways and accompanied by their parents, the young patients are prohibited from outside contact.

Most of them were sent to the hospital by force, the China Youth Daily added.

Last November, residents in Morgan County, West Virginia became so exasperated with Verizon’s unwillingness to provide high speed DSL service in this rural region of the state, residents took to the streets holding signs proclaiming “Verizon neglects rural West Virginia” and “Honk for Broadband Internet.” A website called Abandoned By Verizon was launched to highlight the problem.

The problem? Verizon is spending its time, attention, and money on rewiring America’s larger cities with advanced fiber optic networks while selling off their rural customers to independent telephone companies.

Last year, Jennifer Carpenter-Peak and her husband Bob organized a public protest after being strung along by Verizon for more than three years for DSL broadband service. Each time they inquired about availability, they were told it was coming sometime later. Last fall, they were told to wait until sometime this year.

Of course, if the Peak family and their neighbors wanted service any quicker, they could always pony up the $10,000-100,000 the company wanted to wire their neighborhood, or opt for a slow T-1 commercial service line for around $500 a month.

Bob Peak told The Morgan Messenger it has been impossible to e-mail his photos and graphic designs from home. He takes his laptop and drives to town or to Cacapon State Park to send files.

“It’s become increasingly difficult to do business because all of my clients and vendors expect it,” Peak said of high-speed internet.

The Carpenter-Peak family also relied on some map data produced by Connected Nation’s ‘Connect West Virginia’ which broad-brushed Morgan County in April 2008 with lots of broadband service in the western and northern parts of the county. Of course, such service is not consistently available in all of the areas ‘Connect West Virginia’ claims, which is another reason why groups like this, well-connected with telecommunications industry players, should not be drawing maps for anyone.

One didn’t need a map to find area residents who agreed with the Peak family’s predicament:

Jim Hoyt said Frontier Communications had made a big effort to provide DSL to its telephone customers in the western end of the county. He wondered why the U.S. 522 Business Park didn’t have DSL.

Angela Petry said a lot of people are working from home and have a need for high-speed internet. It will keep dollars in the county, she said.

Bibi Hahn said one family in their subdivision would spend more time here if they had DSL.

“We need it. We need leadership to get it. We need commissioners and the governor demanding it,” Hahn said.

Getting high-speed broadband internet access throughout the county is the highest priority, said County Administrator Bill Clark.

Broadband was the top issue at the county’s Economic Development Authority summit and is of great importance locally, Clark said.

Clark has been working with all county providers to try and make headway, but it’s just not happening as fast as everyone would like it to, he said.

“It takes infrastructure,” Clark said.

Verizon has expanded its internet presence in the county and Frontier has DSL in some fairly isolated places, he said.

It will take people like last week’s protestors as well as petitions and surveys to get high-speed internet to more county areas, he said.

A new telecommunications committee is also trying to get a handle on the problem, Clark said.

What the Peak family probably didn’t realize is that Verizon was hard at work on a plan of a different kind:  to throw the state of West Virginia, and the Peak family themselves, under the proverbial bus by selling off their operations and getting out of the Mountain State. That’s because Verizon doesn’t consider West Virginia worth the effort to rewire with the advanced fiber network it deploys in other larger states, so why spend millions of dollars when they can let the company that buys those assets deal with it?

On July 2nd, Verizon announced it was going to offer DSL service to another 1,800 lines in Morgan County, expecting to reach parts of the following areas: Route 522, near the Morgan County Business Park; Route 9 East in the River Road and Clone Run Road areas; the Johnsons Mill Road area that includes parts of Highland Ridge, Duckwall, Spriggs and Rupenthal roads; Great Cacapon, including the Maidstone and Cacapon River Meadows communities; Spruce Pine Hollow area, including Chestnut Grove and Spruce Pine Hollow communities, plus parts of Burnt Mill, Potter, Michael’s Chapel and Victory Lane roads; the River Road area, including Sleepy Creek Farms community and parts of Rover, Householder, Crone Lane and Poole roads; parts of Pious Ridge, Culp and River roads; Mountain Run Road area, including New Hope Acres and Deer Run Woods communities, and parts of Mountain Run, Shades Lane, Swaim Lane and Duckwall roads; Winchester Grade Road in the area of Sleepy Creek Forest community and parts of Virginia Line, Highland Ridge, Posey Hollow and Barnes Lane roads; and Spohrs Cross Road area, including areas along Route 9 and parts of Spohrs and Potomac roads.

Verizon’s entry-level DSL service offers speeds of up to 1 Mbps (megabits per second) downstream and 384 Kbps (kilobits per second) upstream. Consumers who want faster speed can order Verizon’s offering of up to 3 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps upstream.  No guarantee for customers actually achieving those speeds is provided, however.  Providing service at speeds better than that will be up to the new owner of West Virginia’s telecommunications future.

That company will be Frontier Communications, if a deal can be approved by state regulators.

Frontier Communications is aggressive about deploying DSL broadband service to its mostly-rural customers. That’s because broadband is one of the company’s growth areas. Frontier wired telephone line customers are declining as customers switch to competitors or rely on their mobile phone for telephone service. But broadband service is a bright spot for Frontier, as it’s often the only player in town beyond incredibly cumbersome and expensive satellite broadband services in rural areas.

Will Frontier bring DSL to the Peak family and their neighbors if the deal is approved? Almost certainly, eventually. For West Virginia, the question of what kind of broadband service Frontier will provide is an entirely different, but equally important question.

Frontier continues to rely on increasingly dated ADSL standard service across most of its service areas. It’s a technology more than a decade old, with plenty of limitations and little room for growth. Frontier should be willing to provide at least ADSL 2+ service in less populated areas, and either VDSL service or fiber-to-the-home in more populated town and city centers. Both DSL “standards” are improvements over the original, and can often provide substantially faster speeds and room for growth well into the future. It also creates the potential for equity of access for rural and more urban consumers, or at least something approximating it.

In rural areas, standard DSL speeds often don’t exceed 1.5Mbps, and are sometimes even slower. Installation costs can be substantial, along with the monthly subscriber fees, taxes and surcharges, and modem rental costs. The further away one lives from the telephone company central office, the slower and less reliable the service becomes. Some customers living more than 18,000 feet from a central office will not be able to obtain the service at any speed.

Additionally, Frontier Communications continues to define an acceptable amount of residential broadband usage at a paltry 5GB per month. Although the company has not enforced that limitation to date, nothing precludes them from cutting customers off who exceed that minuscule amount of usage, or charge them overlimit penalties and fees for exceeding it down the road. That puts Frontier in a league shared only by wireless data providers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, and Sprint. No other wired provider of note “limits” consumers to that tiny amount of usage. We continue to call on Frontier to delete the entire reference to “5GB” of usage from their Acceptable Use Policy, particularly if the company truly intends not to enforce it.

Should rural residents find themselves with Frontier as their only broadband service provider, the kind of broadband service they will endure, without revolutionary upgrades, could be essentially suspended in time while the rest of the nation marches forward with ever-increasing speeds and potentially lower pricing as a result of competition. It’s a phenomenon known as establishing a “broadband backwater,” where consumers are trapped with sub-standard service with onerous limits, slow speeds, and high pricing with little or no competition.

Although companies like Verizon have the financial resources to rewire even the smallest states with advanced broadband networks, even if they are currently unwilling to do so, smaller providers could find themselves in a reverse position – wanting to deploy advanced networks but lacking the financial capacity to do so.

The unnerving part about all of this is the Obama Administration is set to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to improve and enhance broadband networks, particularly in rural areas across states like West Virginia. Telecommunications companies nationwide are hiring consultants and grant specialists to tailor-write grant applications to receive public funds to build out their broadband networks. It would be a terrific shame if public money went to providers building networks based on yesterday’s technology, with paltry usage limits and high pricing for consumers, with some or most of those costs to construct the networks paid by taxpayers like you and I. That’s having your broadband cake and eating it too.

No telephone company should ever be given public money to construct broadband networks that cannot meet the need for increased speeds and consistent levels of service for every customer, today and in the future, regardless of whether they live in the largest city or a small mountain town in West Virginia. No sales transaction transferring assets from one phone company to another should be granted unless the needs of consumers are given first priority, not the afterthought they were given with some prior deals (FairPoint, Hawaiian Telecom, etc.) No public money should ever be handed over to a broadband provider that wants to establish Internet Overcharging schemes like paltry limits and tiers either, especially in non-competitive areas where consumers have just one choice.

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This article was published originally on ConsumerTel, our new pro-consumer website protecting the interests of telephone company subscribers.

CRTC Review of the Internet Traffic Management Practices of Internet Service Providers

July 6 — July 14, 2009
Conference Centre – Outaouais Room
140, Promenade du Portage
Gatineau, Province du Québec
Canada

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The CRTC hearings are being held to establish guidelines on practices that internet service providers use to manage traffic and congestion on their networks.  Among the issues under consideration: reducing the speeds of certain Internet applications such as peer-to-peer traffic, establishing usage allowances and/or limits on usage, and whether such practices potentially favor existing providers by protecting their other businesses from competition.

Hearing Transcripts

The official written transcripts of the CRTC hearing proceedings, primarily in English, released by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission.

July 6, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

July 7, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

July 8, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

July 9, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

July 10, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

July 13, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

July 14, 2009 — CRTC Web Document

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Hearing Audio

Unfortunately, audio from the session of July 6 is not available at this time.  Please consult the official written transcripts provided above. Also, hearings in Canada often feature speakers that switch fluidly between English and French when delivering testimony or answering questions. The vast majority of the hearing was conducted in English. On July 13th, there was some extended testimony delivered in French. Some Bell employees flipped back and forth between English and French during their testimony as well. Therefore, for those who are not bilingual, we have included a special audio file recorded from the simultaneous English translation feed on that day.

July 7, 2009

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Two – Morning & Afternoon Session — Gatineau, PQ – July 7, 2009 (207 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

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July 8, 2009

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Three – Morning Session (Part 1) — Gatineau, PQ – July 8, 2009 (57 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Three – Morning Session (Part 2) — Gatineau, PQ – July 8, 2009 (42 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Three – Afternoon Session (Part 3) — Gatineau, PQ – July 8, 2009 (25 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Three – Afternoon Session (Part 4) — Gatineau, PQ – July 8, 2009 (78 minutes)
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July 9, 2009

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Morning Session (Part 1) — Gatineau, PQ – July 9, 2009 (68 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Morning Session (Part 2) — Gatineau, PQ – July 9, 2009 (56 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Afternoon Session (Part 3) — Gatineau, PQ – July 9, 2009 (37 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Afternoon Session (Part 4) — Gatineau, PQ – July 9, 2009 (48 minutes)
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July 10, 2009

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Morning Session (Part 1) — Gatineau, PQ – July 10, 2009 (73 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Morning Session (Part 2) — Gatineau, PQ – July 10, 2009 (41 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Four – Afternoon Session (Part 3) — Gatineau, PQ – July 10, 2009 (29 minutes)
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July 13, 2009

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Five – English Translation Feed — Gatineau, PQ – July 13, 2009 (281 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Five – Morning Session (Part 1) — Gatineau, PQ – July 13, 2009 (33 minutes)
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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Five – Morning Session (Part 2) — Gatineau, PQ – July 13, 2009 (91 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Five – Afternoon Session (Part 3) — Gatineau, PQ – July 13, 2009 (66 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Five – Afternoon Session (Part 4) — Gatineau, PQ – July 13, 2009 (67 minutes)
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July 14, 2009

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p style=”text-align: center;”>CRTC Hearing: Day Six – Morning & Afternoon Session — Gatineau, PQ – July 14, 2009 (159 minutes)
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Recordings courtesy of: “Bonkers”

I got word on the heels of tomorrow’s Public Utilities Committee meeting that S1004 has been gutted and changed in the Senate!  So again we can scream Victory!

The low-down on what exactly happened goes something like this:

The North Carolina Senate has a very odd procedural rule that allows it to gut a bill and replace it with a completely different bill.  They can do this as long as the bill number and title remain the same.  In S1004’s case they kept the name and title and are changing the text of the bill to allow Progress Energy to change some of its coal fired plants to natural gas.

Be aware that HB1252 is still the bill we have been fighting and I am tracking it continuously.  We are half way there on defeating big cable’s sleeper hold on competition.  As long as we all keep the fight up, we won’t be saying goodnight to Irene any time soon!

The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission is investigating Canadian ISP practices all week in a series of public hearings.

All week long, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada’s telecommunications regulator, is investigating Canadian ISPs who are throttling back speeds on certain Internet applications and engaging in “usage based pricing” of their wholesale accounts.

The hearings, which will run until Monday, will help the CRTC create regulations for how service providers manage their Internet traffic and address provider claims of network congestion.

A wide array of interests are represented at this week’s hearings (courtesy CBC):

1. ISPs that use internet traffic management for P2P file transfers

• Specifically: Bell Aliant, Cogeco, Rogers, Shaw, Barrett Xplor.
• What they are expected to say: Practices such as throttling are necessary to ensure fairness among internet users and prevent a few bandwidth hogs from slowing down the internet for everyone. Barrett Xplor use traffic management for satellite services, arguing that satellites are expensive and hard to upgrade.

2. ISPs that use other methods to deal with congestion

• Specifically: Telus, MTS Allstream, Primus, Quebecor on behalf of Videotron
• What they are expected to say: Methods such as usage-based pricing and network upgrades work well to deal with congestion, but each ISP should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding how they deal with congestion. Primus argues in its written submission that internet wholesalers such as Bell should not be allowed to impose their traffic management practices on the customers of other ISPs that buy wholesale network access from them.

3. Small ISPs, including those that may be throttled by their wholesalers

• Specifically: Coalition of Internet Service Providers Inc., Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Execulink, Cybersurf.
• What they are expected to say: Many of these companies buy internet access wholesale from companies such as Bell, create packages and resell it to their own retail customers. They argue that allowing wholesalers to apply traffic management to customers of other ISPs is anti-competitive.

4. The entertainment industry

• Specifically: Independent Film and Television Alliance, Canadian Film and Television Production Association, Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists.
• What they are expected to say: The internet is an important platform for distributing music, film and TV. ISPs should not act as gatekeepers for those.

5. Other businesses and organizations that rely on the internet to deliver services

• Specifically: Zip.ca, Jason Roks, Vaxination informatique, Norm Friesen, Canada research chair in e-learning practices at Thompson Rivers University, Open Internet Coalition
• What they are expected to say: Traffic management practices that discriminate against certain types of data could reduce investment in broadband networks and consumer choice, inhibit innovation and freedom of expression and be abused to engage in anti-competitive practices.

6. Consumer and public interest advocacy groups

• Specifically: Public Interest Advocacy Centre, Union des consommateurs, National Union of Public and General Employees, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic on behalf of Campaign for Democratic Media, Council of Canadians with Disabilities and ARCH Disability Law Centre
• What they are expected to say: Their position is similar to that of businesses and organizations that rely on the internet, but they are also concerned that technologies such as deep packet inspection could invade consumers’ privacy.

Several interest groups are willing to advocate for certain bandwidth management techniques over others, much to the consternation of some consumers following the hearings.  Jacob Glick, Canada policy counsel for Google, for example, told CRTC commissioners he supported usage based pricing if it meant throttled broadband would end.  In his written and spoken comments before the CRTC, he indicated that throttled broadband was the worst choice for ISPs:

They have the potential to hurt innovation and other techniques are preferable, including:

• Boosting network capacity.
• Using different pricing models.
• Using techniques that target the amount of bandwidth use rather than the type of application using the bandwidth; for example, slowing a user’s connection after reaching a certain limit.

Glick argued that such techniques helped Comcast reduce network congestion after it was ordered by regulators to stop throttling its customers.  Comcast has a 250GB monthly consumption allowance.

John Lawford, counsel for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, which claims to represent three Canadian consumers groups, also advocated usage based pricing telling the Commission it was an acceptable alternative to dealing with network congestion issues.

But Timothy Denton, national commissioner for the CRTC, inquired about whether usage based pricing would inhibit the development of innovative, but bandwidth intensive, services like online video.  Marvin Ammori, general counsel for Free Press argued that it very well could.  Ammori pointed out there are anti-competitive issues to consider because many online innovations, particularly video, may compete with Internet providers’ own services.

Canadian consumers following the hearings on several technology websites were hostile to both usage based pricing and Net Neutrality violations.

John from St. Catherines wrote Stop the Cap!:

“I don’t know who these groups claim to represent but they sure as hell don’t represent me or any of the other consumers I know.  It sounds like some of these so-called pro-consumer groups are being funded by commercial services that will be harmed more by bandwidth throttles than with these overcharging scams.  Rogers does it all – they throttle, they cap, they charge penalties, and they raised their prices anyway!  Glick is part of Google which has their own agenda which isn’t consumers, and Lawford is full of crap.  He and his friends are like the passengers on the Titanic clawing their way to the front of the ship as it goes down. He’s not smart enough to realize all he’s accomplishing is going down with the ship a few minutes after the rest of us. He’s still going to drown, along with all of the consumers these people claim to represent.”

Canada’s largest online movie rental firm was particularly concerned about usage pricing models.

Rob Hall, Chairman of Zip.ca, Canada's leading online movie rental firm, told the Commission his business could go down if providers continue throttling traffic and limiting usage.

Rob Hall, chairman of  Zip.ca and CEO of its parent company told the Commission its plans to provide direct delivery of movies and other programming directly to consumers online, without waiting for a DVD to arrive in the mail, could be jeopardized by speed throttles and usage limits.  Hall said that cable and telephone video providers get to deliver their own programming to viewers over the same wires as their Internet service, but without any limitations.  Hall said that represents evidence that providers are giving priority to their own network traffic over others.

“The same rules must apply to both,” Hall said.

Hall was also concerned about ISPs spying on customers and potentially taking advantage of the data they collect:

Some ISPs are throttling peer-to-peer file transfers using programs such as BitTorrent, which “might be an ideal platform” to deliver Zip.ca’s movies, as it uses the network efficiently.

Deep packet inspection, a technique used for traffic control, will be abused to access marketing information about users that his company has collected.

If rules change suddenly, and there is no way to resolve the problem quickly, his company could be put out of business.

Independent ISPs are also concerned about the implications of throttled service.  They purchase Internet access from large providers like Bell (Canada) and then resell that connectivity to their customers.  Recently, Bell started imposing usage based billing on their wholesale accounts and throttled their speeds, forcing providers to raise prices and limit access.

The proposition, according to several providers, is that they are supposed to compete with Bell and large cable operators with a service that is identical or worse than what those providers offer, with the same limitations on usage and service, at a price that reduces or eliminates potential savings and benefits for their customers.  They believe many providers will be driven out of business because of the anti-competitive marketplace.

Many appearing at the hearing were skeptical about the effectiveness of bandwidth throttling, particularly of peer to peer applications.  Many such networks are rapidly moving to hiding traffic to avoid the network throttle.  Jean François Mezei, who runs the consulting company Vaxination Informatique, told the Commission that those heavy users of such applications will switch to a less efficient protocol to hide their traffic, which would only increase congestion further.

Toronto-based technology consultant Jason Roks said the real problem is false advertising by providers who are overselling their networks to subscribers.  Roks said advertised speeds in provider promotions rarely meet expectations, companies do not disclose the actual speeds of throttled services, and consumers are not given access to that information.  Roks told the Commission bandwidth providers are using throttles and other control measures to avoid investing in expanding their networks.

“If they can’t afford to upgrade their networks to support that many customers at advertised speeds, they should let customers go,” he argued.

More reactions from Canadian consumers below the fold.

… Continue Reading