Ooredoo in Arabic means “I Want.”

More than 80 percent of homes in Qatar now receive fiber optic broadband at speeds up to 100Mbps and the country is on track to becoming one of the best-connected nations in the world.

According to the Fiber to the Home Council, Qatar is the world leader for fastest deployment of fiber-based Internet access, as the country moves away from copper-based ADSL broadband at record speed.

Ooredoo, formerly known as Qatar Telecom (Qtel), has been constructing the fiber network to help the country develop its knowledge-based economy and offer an infrastructure platform for high-tech business to launch new online products and services. The Emirate has the world’s fastest-growing economy, forecast to have grown by 6.5% in 2013. It also has the world’s highest GDP per capita at $106,000.

With that economic success, the government is accelerating its ambitious reform program designed to move Qatar away from dependence on its gas and oil economy into the digital age. In 2008, the government launched Qatar National Vision 2030, which includes major infrastructure projects including fiber broadband, new roads, railways, airports, bridges, hospitals, libraries and museums.

Fiber broadband is not cheap in Qatar, but neither is the cost of living there, something compensated for in the average Qatari salary. A 100Mbps account costs $178.50 a month, although adding television and telephone service only adds $13.75 a month to the bill.

More than two dozen NorthwesTel customers in Canada’s north are contemplating a class-action lawsuit against their Internet provider after being charged hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in overlimit charges for phantom traffic nobody can seem to identify.

Kyle Jennex of Whitehorse has always checked his usage, particularly because NorthwesTel charges very high prices for access and has a low usage cap. Running over a plan limit can prove costly at $5 per gigabyte. In November, Jennex discovered NorthwesTel’s usage meter was registering between 5-7GB of mysterious upload traffic every night even after the computer was physically disconnected from his Internet connection.

Despite complaining to NorthwesTel, the company billed him for nearly $1000 in overlimit fees, claiming he exceeded his allowance by nearly 200GB.

“I depend on the Internet for our lifestyle,” Jennex told Yukon News. “We like our music and our movies and our TV, so I download a lot of stuff. I also believe that if I’m paying for 150 gigabytes, I’m going to use that up. So because of that I monitor our usage carefully so I can spread it out throughout the month and to make sure we don’t go over.”

NorthwesTel has never suspected their meter of being responsible for the phantom usage measurements. To Curtis Shaw, NorthwesTel’s vice president of marketing, excess usage is entirely the customer’s responsibility. The company told Jennex his high usage was likely caused by torrent/peer-to-peer network traffic or a neighbor who had hacked into his password-protected Wi-Fi network. But neither explanation can account for usage that continued to rack up with nothing connected to his Internet modem.

Shaw recommends NorthwesTel customers shut down their computers when not in use, particularly overnight, to avoid excess charges. He also advises customers to change their passwords, regularly check usage, and install and update anti-virus software on their computers.

Bill Shock

Shaw also says users can sign up for e-mail that notifies customers when they approach their limit, “really to protect people from receiving a surprise bill.” He adds the company does monitor customer usage and has called customers in the past when their accounts show an unusual amount of activity.

But NorthwesTel didn’t bother to call a customer in Whitehorse who reports he was billed an extra $990 for the extra 198GB of usage he claims he never used. Nor did the company call the woman in the Northwest Territories bill shocked with $3,000 in overlimit fees in a single month.

The company says there have been repeated cases of neighbors “sharing” Wi-Fi connections which can quickly run up usage. But Jennex, who says he well understands the danger of unprotected Wi-Fi, believes he has taken the necessary precautions and has been overbilled anyway.

“The way they’re talking, it’s like every second neighbor is hacking into your wireless,” Jennex said. “I have passwords that are completely random that would take some pretty sophisticated equipment to hack into. We even tried disconnecting all our devices from the router and it still kept happening. The only way I could get them to stop was to physically unplug my modem.”

The company cannot or will not trace Jennex’s mysterious web traffic to identify the source, confident their meter is accurate. Besides, the company says, customers often underestimate the amount of traffic they consume using file sharing programs or watching video online. The company claims it worked hard on its usage meter and it received industry approval for its high degree of accuracy. But providers need not submit their meters for independent verification or subject them to periodic audits to verify meter accuracy.

NorthwesTel does not have a good record on meter accuracy. In 2010 the company was forced to admit it had overbilled hundreds of customers over a “meter glitch” when usage monitors were not reset. As a result, customers found enormous overlimit fees attached to their bills. In one example, a customer was charged a $2,500 overlimit fee on top of his usual bill of $88.

A glitch may indeed be part of the problem as one Yukon customer successfully confronted NorthwesTel for erroneous overlimit fees for consumption of data that was impossible to accrue at the speed of his Internet connection.

Angry customers complain that with so little competition, NorthwesTel has every incentive to play fast and loose with its meter, either because customers will cut their usage, upgrade to a higher cost tier with a bigger allowance, or pay the overlimit fees.

Customers who believe they were unjustly billed overlimit fees should take their case first to the Office of the President. Failing that, they should appeal to the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services, an independent agency that has a good track record of winning relief.

Some customers fear the expensive overlimit fees so much, they are following NorthwesTel’s advice and keeping their computers switched off when not being used, but that isn’t a good enough answer for Jennex, who plans to continue the fight.

“There’s no need to rip us off because we live so far North,” he told CBC North.

Maine’s broadband speeds are among the worst in the country. (Graphic: Portland Press Herald)

If talking about broadband was the same as getting broadband, Maine would be saturated with High Speed Internet service. Despite years of blue ribbon task forces, studies, grants, and lawsuits, the state of broadband in Maine has never been worse, ranked 49th among 50 states for quality of service and availability. The only state below Maine is Montana.

Maine’s woeful broadband is the result of passive providers including Time Warner Cable and FairPoint Communications that find little incentive to expand service into Maine’s considerable rural back country. Even if they did offer service, Maine’s aging population hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for spending hours online, assuming they understood how to navigate the Internet in the first place.

So how do you convince Maine’s broadband providers to deliver more and better service? Throw money at them in the form of tax breaks and subsidies, suggests David Maxwell, program director of the ConnectME Authority. He believes that if providers are incentivized to wire the unwired by agreeing to cover some of the costs, they will do it.

But as the Portland Press Herald reports, eight rounds of ConnectME grant funding to providers that averaged $1 million each has not made much of an improvement in the state’s broadband standing.

Maine residents in cities and large towns can usually find broadband service from either Time Warner Cable or FairPoint Communications, which purchased the deteriorating copper wire network abandoned by Verizon Communications as it exited the landline business in northern New England. Cable broadband customers can buy speeds up to 50Mbps, but Time Warner’s presence in Maine is not widespread. The majority of customers still buy access from FairPoint, and DSL speeds in Maine are slow.

Gizmodo reports the majority of Maine counties serviced by FairPoint currently receive a maximum speed of 7.3-10.9Mbps, primarily over DSL. That is 40-60 percent slower than the national average. In nearby Boston, speeds average 21.8-25.5Mbps.

FairPoint has been reticent about upgrading its landline infrastructure, particularly in rural counties. Maxwell told the newspaper FairPoint and other providers can’t justify an investment in broadband with no possibility of a quick return. But the phone company has also been accused of reneging on commitments already made to improve Internet access.

The Maine Public Advocate’s Office sued FairPoint to speed up and broaden its efforts to expand broadband to at least 87 percent of customers no later than April.

Wayne Jortner, senior counsel, told the Portland newspaper FairPoint vigorously defended against the lawsuit, but ultimately lost.

“In fact, the litigation did cause us to go all the way to the Maine Supreme Court, and we won there again,” Jortner said. “Now they’re on track to pretty much do what they said they would do.”

After years of inaction, northern Canada will finally see improved telecommunications services that the rest of us have taken for granted for at least a decade.

Under a plan developed by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), NorthwesTel (a Bell Canada subsidiary) will spend $233 million by 2017 to improve Internet service and bring other telecommunications services into the 21st century.

At present, many communities still lack phone features like caller ID, call waiting, and three-way calling. Dial up access remains common and landline based broadband from DSL remains spotty. Larger communities like Whitehorse can obtain broadband at speeds up to 100Mbps, however.

The eastern Arctic regions, including Nunavut, rely primarily on satellite broadband while those in the western Arctic can access a mix of DSL and Wireless ISP services in more populated areas and settlements. Cell phone service is available in some areas, but reception doesn’t hold up once customers roam outside of town. Mobile broadband upgrades are anticipated to make 4G home broadband a possibility, although it is likely to be expensive and usage-capped.

NorthwesTel’s operating area

Telecom analyst Iain Grant told the Canadian Press NorthwesTel’s plans to upgrade it services are long overdue. Grant is a proponent of fiber broadband access over satellite and reminded the CRTC a Canadian company called Arctic Fibre is working on a fiber optic route across the Canadian Arctic that will connect China to Europe.

The CRTC has been unimpressed with the Bell Canada subsidiary’s performance, noting the quality of service is well behind the rest of Canada. The Commission has placed a four-year price cap on services and has broken up NorthwesTel’s near-monopoly on service by ordering it sell landline, Internet, and other voice services separately, which opens the door for new competitors to emerge. New entrants could either develop their own networks or resell service purchased wholesale from the phone company.

The CRTC heard numerous complaints from northern residents during hearings held in the region earlier this year. Common complaints included inadequate access to broadband, expensive and outdated telephone service, and no competition in parts of the region. Residents also complained about poor cell service.

One competitor that has specialized in cellular service in northern Canada, Ice Wireless, announced it is spending more than $12 million to upgrade its network in Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, introducing mobile data service for the first time.

NorthwesTel serves the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and northern parts of British Columbia and Alberta.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC North CRTC issues decision on Northwestel plan 12-18-13.flv[/flv]

CBC North reports northern Canada is well overdue for telecom service upgrades, and Canadian regulators are no longer waiting around for competitors to show up. (1:45)

Time Warner Cable lost another 215,000 video subscribers during the fourth quarter of 2013, leaving the company with 825,000 fewer subscribers than it had one year ago.

Customers are dropping service with the cable company because of rate increases, programming disputes, competition with AT&T and Verizon, and cord cutting.

Despite the video losses, Time Warner attracted 55,000 new broadband customers, many defecting from DSL, and 15,000 new landline customers signing up for phone service as part of a larger bundle.

Time Warner Cable’s poor results are fueling speculation that takeover offers promising increased shareholder value are potentially days away. Dr. John Malone’s Liberty Media and Charter Communications are expected to formally offer $62 billion for Time Warner as early as this week.

Malone has spent the last six weeks lining up Wall Street banks to help finance the transaction with loans that would leave a larger Charter Cable with substantial debt.