Signing up for Comcast’s 2Gbps fiber to the home service will not come cheap.

The cable company this morning announced pricing for its 2,000/2,000Mbps residential-only broadband tier: $299.95/mo with $1,000 in installation fees on the first bill.

If you can afford that, you may not mind Comcast’s other installation and contract requirements:

• The first bill will require a payment of about $1,159 — $500 for installation, $500 for activation plus $159 if you qualify for a limited time service promotional discount;
• Only a select number of residential Comcast customers will qualify for the service — those living within 1/3rd of a mile of Comcast’s existing fiber network in a limited number of cities;
• Customers must opt for professional installation and it may take six to eight weeks to complete;
• A two-year term contract is also required, with a stiff early termination fee;
• Equipment, taxes and fees and other applicable charges extra;
• This tier is exempt from usage caps/usage-based billing, but actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed.

Later this year, the service is also expected to reach further west:

• Colorado: Denver, Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont and Colorado Springs
• Minnesota: Minneapolis/St. Paul
• Oregon: Portland
• Texas: Houston
• Utah: Salt Lake City
• Washington: Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, and Everett

U-verse cabinets often make the evening news when they are plunked down in your front yard, as this report from North Carolina shows.

A drunk driver that managed to take out one of AT&T’s “lawn refrigerators” powering its U-verse service in San Jose was the start of a four-week nightmare for a family driven from their home by a loud, polluting emergency generator left running by the phone company 24 hours a day. Falsely blamed for an accident? Here’s what to do.

AT&T responded to the accident scene after half the neighborhood lost service. Technicians installed a replacement green lawn box and fired up an emergency generator to restore service until Pacific Gas & Electric could arrive to hook up regular power to the AT&T box. If you’re looking for a versatile solution for emergencies, outdoor adventures, or job sites, portable generators are compact and mobile, making them perfect for a temporary, self-contained power source.

And then nothing happened… for weeks.

Emily White’s home on New Jersey Ave was treated to nearly a month of continuous generator noise and fumes that made staying in the house impossible.

“We could smell the exhaust in our house and the noise was just endless and loud,” White told KGO-TV. “It vibrated the windows, we couldn’t use our backyard, we went away on the weekends just to get away from it.”

The family ended up canceling their Father’s Day barbecue and left for an area hotel, regularly calling AT&T to try to get them to deal with the generator but had no response. But it turned out they may have called the wrong company to complain.

Nearly a month after the accident, PG&E trucks arrived to finally restore power to AT&T’s equipment. They also assumed full responsibility for the delay.

“We could have and should have done better by this customer. We want to do a deeper dive into why the work took so long,” PG&E spokesperson Nicole Liebelt said.

The electric company is also picking up the cost of the family’s hotel stay.

KGO-TV reports PG&E may have been the guilty party for leaving an AT&T emergency generator up and running for nearly a month. (2:11)

A plan to place a 15GB monthly usage cap on Eastlink broadband service in rural Nova Scotia has led to calls to ban data caps, with a NDP Member of the Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia leading the charge.

NDP MLA Sterling Belliveau is calling on the Liberal government to prohibit Eastlink from placing Internet data caps on rural broadband.

“This newly announced cap really sends us back to the 1990s when it comes to technology,” Belliveau said in a news release Tuesday. “The province paid $20 million to bring this service to rural communities, and as such, the Minister of Business needs to tell Eastlink this can’t stand.”

Belliveau’s office is being flooded with complaints from residents and business owners upset about Eastlink’s data cap, which includes a $2/GB overlimit fee, up to a maximum of $20.

“Only rural customers get penalized for using the Internet,” complained Angel Flanagan on Twitter. “We can’t have Netflix or YouTube. Eastlink, stop this cap and upgrade your services and give us better Internet. We don’t need to use it less.”

“I am so angry about the Internet capping,” said Emma Davis. “Eastlink you are out of your goddamn minds. Rural Nova Scotia is entering the Dark Ages.”

Eastlink’s Rural Connect package is a wireless service, delivering speeds up to 1.5Mbps at a cost of $46.95 a month. The service is provided where wired providers are generally not available, including Annapolis, Hants, Digby, Yarmouth, Queens, Lunenburg, Shelburne and Kings counties. Eastlink says its new usage cap was designed to accommodate “intended usage like surfing the web, reading/sending emails, social media, e-commerce, accessing government services, etc. — and NOT video streaming, for which the service was not intended.”

Belliveau

Eastlink’s continued dependence on a low capacity wireless network platform has conflicted with the changing needs of Internet users, who increasingly use high bandwidth applications like streaming video that can quickly clog wireless ISP traffic.

When the service was designed, the popular video streaming service “Netflix was shipping DVDs by mail,” says Eastlink spokesperson Jill Laing.

The cap was implemented to “address Internet traffic, which we believe will help provide equal access to the service and deliver a better overall rural Internet experience for customers,” Laing wrote.

Eastlink says the average customer uses about 12GB of traffic, excluding video streaming. Setting a usage cap at 15GB should not be a problem for customers who stay off Netflix, argues the ISP.

“Those who are using the service as it was intended to be used should not be impacted by monthly usage,” she wrote.

The fact Eastlink labeled some traffic legitimate while video streaming was discouraged did not go over well with customers.

“Who made them Internet Gods when our provincial tax dollars helped finance their Internet project,” asks Al Fournier. “The very fact they would suggest a 15GB cap with a straight face in 2015 should be ringing alarm bells in Ottawa about the rural broadband crisis in Canada.”

Fournier suspects Eastlink has not invested enough to keep up with a growing Internet because the service originally advertised itself as a way to listen to online music and watch video. But he also wonders if the data cap is an attempt to force the government to fund additional upgrades to get Eastlink to back down.

“This is why wireless ISPs suck for 21st century Internet,” Fournier argues. “They are incapable of keeping up with growing traffic and bandwidth needs and need to be retired in favor of fiber.”

But at least one wireless provider in Nova Scotia does not understand why Eastlink is making a fuss over data caps.

Cape Breton’s Seaside Wireless Communications offers Internet access in Antigonish, Cape Breton, Colchester, Cumberland, Guysborough, Inverness, Pictou, Richmond and Victoria counties, along with rural parts of Halifax County, and has no data caps.

“It is not even on our radar,” said Loran Tweedie, CEO of Seaside Wireless. “This is a differential we are proud of.”

Some Nova Scotians are also questioning why their Internet service is being capped while rural Eastlink customers in Newfoundland, Labrador and Ontario can continue to use the Internet cap-free, at least for now. Others are suspicious about the future of Eastlink’s maximum cap on overlimit fees, currently $20. Canadian providers have a history of raising the maximum cap, subjecting customers to greater fees.

“It’s hard to speak to what will happen over time. We’ll certainly evaluate where we’re at later in the fall,” said Laing.

Liberal provincial Business Minister Mark Furey said he was aware of Eastlink’s rural broadband data cap but only promised to monitor the situation for now.

Starting next month, Eastlink’s rural Internet packages will be capped at 15 gigabytes of usage per month. CBC Radio Nova Scotia’s “Information Morning” program speaks with Eastlink and Port Royal resident Gary Ewer about the impact the usage cap will have. (10:15)

You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Time Warner Cable owes Araceli King $229,500 after bombarding her with 153 robo-collection calls intended for somebody else.

A Manhattan judge on Tuesday in a summary judgment awarded triple damages amounting to $1,500 per call for Time Warner’s “willful violations” of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which forbids companies from placing unwanted calls.

King, of Irving, Tex., began receiving automated “interactive voice response (IVR)” collection calls from Time Warner on her mobile phone intended for Luiz Perez, the former owner of her phone number. In less than one year, the cable company called King more than 150 times looking for Perez, even after King told the company the phone number they were using was not correct. King sued Time Warner after the company wouldn’t stop the calls.

Even after the lawsuit reached the cable operator, it called 74 more times.

“Defendant harassed plaintiff with robo-calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its IVR system,” wrote U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein. “Treble damages are unquestionably appropriate to reflect the seriousness of TWC’s willful violations.”

Hellerstein

Time Warner Cable has fought to have the case dismissed, claiming King cannot bring a claim under the TCPA because Time Warner was not placing automated telemarketing calls and had authorization from King to keep calling. The company also argued it did not realize it was calling the wrong number and only 70 of the calls were actually answered.

“Each of these arguments fails,” ruled an unimpressed Judge Hellerstein, who educated Time Warner that under the TCPA, “TWC violated the statute each time it placed a call using its [automated dialer] without consent, regardless of whether the call was answered by a person, a machine, or not at all.”

He told the cable company a “responsible business” would have tried harder to find Perez’s correct number. Instead, Time Warner never bothered to update its records, even after King spent seven minutes on the phone with a Time Warner representative who promised to correct the problem.

The judge called the 74 additional phone calls placed by Time Warner even after King sued the company a “particularly egregious violation of the TCPA” and demonstrated TWC “did not take this lawsuit seriously.”

King’s attorney said Time Warner made life miserable for the Texas woman, a point the judge seemed to agree with.

“We’re thrilled that Ms. King got the justice she deserves,” said King’s lawyer Sergei Lemberg. “And we’re proud every time we can hold big businesses accountable when they trample consumer rights.”

A Dutch telecommunications regulator is warning mergers and acquisitions rarely turn out well for competition or consumers, and admits mistakes were made when regulators allowed John Malone to create an effective cable monopoly in Holland.

Chris Fonteijn, board chairman of the Netherland’s Authority for Consumers and Market (ACM) told fellow regulators at a conference in London that two wired broadband providers are not enough to foster real competition, because the competitors are likely to collude on pricing and have a built-in incentive to limit costly upgrades.

Fonteijn

“Two telecom companies [in an area] is not sufficient to ensure that consumers get the best deals on price and quality,” Fonteijn said. “Two dominant operators can lead to coordination between the main players and less investment and innovation, disadvantaging consumers.”

Fonteijn confessed ACM may have made a mistake allowing John Malone’s UPC — a European cable conglomerate — to acquire its larger competitor Ziggo, establishing an effective monopoly in cable broadband in most parts of Holland. The merger has left most Dutch broadband users with two choices for broadband: telephone company KPN or  cable company Ziggo.

After the merger, Fonteijn believes the two companies reduced investment and innovation. Dutch regulators required KPN to open its network to wholesale customers who resell services over the telephone network. But UPC/Ziggo escaped any wholesale access requirement, further limiting potential competition. Fonteijn said ACM was revisiting that discrepancy and may force Ziggo to open up its cable system.

At the very least, Fonteijn suggests multiple wired operators competing with at least three nationwide mobile carriers to protect competition and innovation.