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Comcast has been showing off changes to the company’s set top boxes, which have been effectively “dumbed-down” by removing internal processing power for box-based program guides and other content functions and moving it to the cloud.  Comcast’s newest generation of boxes offer a slimmed-down “browser” experience which relies on stored content at the cable company office, delivered over the cable to the set top box. 

In Denver, Xfinity representatives demonstrated the new products to groups of media and local radio personalities.  Among the most visible improvements is the program guide, which is starting to come closer to Netflix and farther away from the TV Guide Channel of years-past.  Among the features includes box art from movie titles, online reviews, social networking tie-ins, and instant recommendations for other similar programming to watch, either concurrently or in the future.  Subscribers can program shows for recording, alert friends to upcoming shows, and even submit their own review for other subscribers to see.

It’s a significant improvement over older technology, like that still used by Time Warner Cable and other cable operators, which requires extensive delays before incremental improvements are made, and operates on expensive set top terminals.  Video courtesy of: The Daily Local.  (2 minutes)

Apple is set to announce a new iPhone or two early this afternoon, but some in the tech media notice the frenetic excitement of the newest Apple sensation has been tempered, in part because many of the new software and cloud storage features will run into usage caps for some, speed throttles for everyone else.

The imminent arrival of anticipated models iPhone 4S, expected to sell at AT&T and Verizon and iPhone 5, which is rumored to be sold exclusively by Sprint during a short sales window, remains a big deal for all three carriers.  Verizon is reportedly allowing its call center employees to take unlimited overtime in preparation for the anticipated rush of questions and orders.  Sprint, which has 33 million customers on two-year contracts, has made a commitment to sell at least 30.5 million Apple iPhones over four years, if reports by the Wall Street Journal turn out to be accurate.  That’s a lot of phones.

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9 to 5 Mac shows off a mock image of what the newest iPhone 5 will probably look like. Pay close attention to the rounded edges and bezel.

Reports from the Wall Street Journal, WDAF-TV in Sprint’s home base of Kansas City, and Bloomberg News discuss the implications of Sprint’s deal with Apple.  (11 minutes)

That’s also an enormous gamble for Sprint, which is guaranteed no real profits from the venture until the year 2014.  If the company does win temporary exclusivity of an iPhone model that includes support for Sprint’s 4G network, WiMax, it will also bring the company an enormous number of new customers.

Among the most important new features of the phone is iOS 5, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.  It comes loaded with new ways to burn through the stingy usage caps AT&T and Verizon Wireless are now providing their customers:

1. Over the air upgrades/activations: Apple’s notoriously huge software updates can be delivered to your wireless device without syncing it on a personal computer.  That means downloading software updates that can easily exceed the 200MB “light usage” plans some carriers sell budget-conscious customers;
2. Notification Center: Puts messages from e-mail, texts, and apps in a more convenient place to access and respond, increasing usage;
3. NewsStand: Leverages newspaper and magazine content in a single app, downloading content pushed to your phone, increasing usage;
4. Safari Sync: The Safari web browser will now sync with other instances of the browser on other devices to keep your reading list updated;
5. iMessage: Send texts, photos, and bandwidth-hogging video to friends and family, potentially driving up usage considerably;

But nothing is expected to spike wireless data usage like Apple’s new iCloud and iTunes Match, both of which manage and sync multimedia content and app purchases between devices “over the cloud.”  Unfortunately, repeated journeys of this type will burn through your usage allowance, and those with significant-sized libraries of photos, music, or videos are at serious risk of blasting past their usage cap.  Even customers who use more than 4-5GB on “unlimited data plans” sold by AT&T and Verizon will face the scourge of the speed throttle, which will reduce your zippy new phone to speeds that resemble dial-up.

AT&T and Verizon Apple iPhone customers are at the highest risk of facing the speed throttle, because Apple is not expected to support either company’s 4G data network.  Verizon only exempts 4G customers from the speed throttle when they use the 4G network.

The one company well-positioned to capitalize on these realities happens to be Sprint, which is keeping its truly unlimited data plan.  If Apple comes through with 4G support for Sprint, customers could not only say goodbye to AT&T and Verizon’s slower 3G speeds, they would also be able to rest easy knowing they won’t experience bill shock or a month in the dial-up speed penalty corner if deemed to be using “too much” service.

Customers of the two biggest carriers need to get familiar with switching to Wi-Fi as often as possible, and avoid using data-intensive features on usage-limited plans.  For Verizon and AT&T, it’s the best of all worlds — another two year contract for a usage-limited data plan that guarantees increased revenue and reduced costs.  For you, it’s an improved phone you can never use to its full potential.

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The Wall Street Journal reports there isn’t as much buzz over this year’s newest iPhone.  Bloomberg talks about the software changes in the new phone, and WWLP-TV in Springfield notes Verizon’s unions are calling on Americans to boycott the new phone until Verizon workers get a fair contract.  (8 minutes)

Update 2:00pm ET:  The Wall Street Journal reports the Sprint iPhone will not support their 4G network: According to people familiar with the company’s plans, the hotly anticipated device won’t operate on long-term evolution or WiMAX fourth-generation networks. Those wireless networks promise speedier downloading to mobile devices of episodes of television programs, as well as cute baby photos. The people said the device will work on 3G networks, which are broadly in use today and are the standard for the current iPhone 4. AT&T says its HSPA+ network has 4G-like speeds.

Update 4:00pm ET: The announcement event finally concludes with news the iPhone 5 is vaporware for now.  Sprint will end up with the same Apple 4S phone AT&T and Verizon will sell on their respective networks. The San Jose Mercury News was not thrilled with the event:

At a rollout that lacked some of the thrills and surprises of past product releases — and disappointed some in attendance who expected a completely made-over iPhone 5 — Siri stood out as the sexiest new feature on an iPhone that, contrary to speculation, isn’t any thinner or different looking on the outside than its predecessor, the iPhone 4.

“This phone is better than the iPhone 4 in many ways, even though it looks the same,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst with Current Analysis on hand for the unveiling before several hundred reporters, bloggers, analysts and other guests. “Sales will be wildly successful, but Apple fanboys’ expectations probably were not met today.”

The new phone, which will be available Oct. 15 after pre-orders begin Oct. 7, will cost $199 for a 16-gigabyte version, $299 for 32GB and $399 for 64 GB. It had been center-stage in the tech blogosphere for months, as pundits weighed in with what they saw as the most obvious bells and whistles Apple would unleash on their growing fan base. Tuesday, some were surprised by how wrong that had been.

The phone that everyone thought would be thinner than the iPhone 4, pretty much resembled its older sibling. But as analysts had suspected, the new phone is much faster, thanks for the new A5 chip inside it, and it has plenty of consumer-pleasing attributes, most of them inside the case.

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Time Warner Cable is spending subscriber dollars in Wisconsin on free lawn signs with the company logo showing support for the Milwaukee Brewers.  It’s not the first time the cable company has distributed free signs to sports fans.  In January, the Wisconsin division of the cable company handed out signs celebrating the Green Bay Packers.  The cable company said local cable store employees found lines of interested takers ready and waiting before they even opened.  Green Bay locations ran out of signs within hours, but if past precedent means anything, Time Warner will print up more for a second round.  (1 minute)

While most rural telephone companies are selling customers 1-3Mbps copper-delivered DSL service, Alcatel Lucent has announced the commercial availability of VDSL 2 Vectoring, a new way of delivering up to 100Mbps over the copper wire telephone network most rural North Americans still depend on for telecommunications service.

VDSL2 combines a fiber-copper hybrid network similar to Bell’s Fibe or AT&T’s U-verse, with interference-cancelling technology called “vectoring” to deliver speeds much closer to the 100Mbps theoretical limit of current DSL technology.

“Alcatel-Lucent’s plan to make VDSL2 vectoring commercially available is very timely,” said Rob Gallagher, Principal Analyst, Head of Broadband & TV Research, Informa.  “VDSL2 Vectoring promises to bring speeds of 100Mbps and beyond to advanced copper/fiber hybrid networks and make super fast broadband speeds available to many more people, much faster than many in the industry had thought possible.”

A new way to boost copper speeds even faster.

Different flavors of DSL are currently in use around North America and beyond.  The most basic form, ADSL, also happens to be the most commonplace among phone companies offering basic broadband service.  For customers up to 12,000 feet away from a phone company central office, DSL delivers speeds usually at 1Mbps or faster.  Customers enjoying the fastest speeds must live much closer to the phone company facilities.  The further away you live, the slower your broadband speed.  In rural areas, consumers can live further away than the maximum distance of the central office, which means no DSL service for those subscribers.

A combination of signal loss and interference, called “crosstalk,” from adjacent copper wire pairs are both the enemies of DSL broadband, because they can drastically reduce speeds.

Telephone companies can address this problem by building new satellite central offices located halfway between customers and their primary facilities.  These offices, usually connected by fiber, can successfully reduce the amount of copper wire between the customer and the company, boosting speeds.  Many phone companies also deploy DSL extensions called D-SLAMs, which can be attached to a phone pole or enclosed in a metal box by the roadside.  A fiber cable connects the D-SLAM back to the phone company, while existing copper phone wires go back to individual subscribers.

More modern forms of DSL: ADSL2, ADSL2+, and VDSL, share some of those concepts.  The key is cutting as much copper wire out of the network as possible, replacing it with fiber optic cable which does not suffer signal loss or interference in the same way.

Many European and Pacific broadband networks rely on ADSL2/2+, which can usually deliver reliable speeds in the 20Mbps range.  VDSL networks offer even more bandwidth, and are the basis of U-verse and Fibe, which split up broadband, phone service, and television on the same cable.  When customers demand even faster speeds, phone companies can “bond” several individual DSL connections together to deliver faster speeds.  Some traditional ADSL providers do that today for their customers, especially in areas where low speeds prevail.

An argument the phone company will love.

Alcatel Lucent says VDSL2 with Vectoring is the next best thing to fiber to the home, because it is cheaper to deploy with fewer headaches from local authorities when streets and yards are dug up for fiber cable replacements.  It also meets the growing speed needs of average consumers.  Alcatel Lucent predicts the minimum speed North Americans will need to support the next generation of online video is 50Mbps, more than 10 times the speed phone companies like Verizon, AT&T, Frontier, and CenturyLink provide over their traditional DSL networks, especially in rural and suburban areas.

Vectoring can deliver results for phone companies with aging copper wire infrastructure, more prone to crosstalk and other signal anomalies.  Alcatel Lucent compares vectoring with noise-cancellation headphones.  By sampling the current noise conditions on copper cable networks, vectoring can suppress the impact of the interference, boosting speeds and delivering more reliable results.

With technologies like VDSL2 with Vectoring promising speeds far faster than what rural North Americans currently enjoy, the Federal Communications Commission may want to re-evaluate its national minimum speed standard for broadband — 3-4Mbps — found in its National Broadband Plan.  Alcatel Lucent promises they can do much better.

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Alcatel Lucent produced this video to promote its new VDSL2 with Vectoring technology.  The video targets cost-conscious phone companies who are being pressured to deliver faster service, but don’t want to spend the money on a fiber to the home network.  (6 minutes)

1.5Mbps "broadband" is not the cure-all Comcast claims it to be.

When multi-billion dollar Comcast Corporation decided it was the right time to acquire multi-billion dollar NBC-Universal, one of the concessions Comcast made to win federal approval of the deal was to deliver budget-priced Internet service to those too poor to pay the company’s current asking price of $40-60 a month.

Comcast Internet Essentials was the result, and as Comcast rolls its publicity train from city to city, promoting the new package, politicians and cable executives have teamed up to take credit, suggesting the company’s limited-access $9.95 1.5Mbps service will somehow erase the high-tech job deficit, eliminate the digital divide, and will even somehow help America’s broadband speed gap with the rest of the world.

But it will do none of those things for the vast number of income-challenged families who won’t actually qualify for the three year program, either because they already scrape up enough for Comcast service, don’t have children, or manage to miss a payment due date.  In fact, 1.5Mbps budget-priced Internet is a service providers should have been willing to offer all along, to anyone who wants the service.  But it took a colossal-sized merger concession to get Comcast to sort of do the right thing.

I say “sort of” because the terms and conditions that accompany the service resemble the gotcha fine print the banking industry so loves:

The program is only available to households that (i) are located where Comcast offers Internet service; (ii) have at least one child who receives free school lunches through the National School Lunch Program (the “NSLP”) and as confirmed annually while enrolled in the program; (iii) do not have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned equipment; and (iv) have not subscribed to any Comcast Internet service within the last ninety (90) days (sections 1(i)-(iv) collectively are defined as “Eligibility Criteria”). This program is not available to households that have children who receive reduced price lunches under the NSLP. The program will accept new customers for three (3) full school years, unless extended at the sole election of Comcast. Comcast reserves the right to establish enrollment periods at the beginning of each academic year in which it accepts new customers that may limit the period of time each year in which you have to enroll in the program.

2. In order to confirm your eligibility for the program, Comcast will need to verify that your children receive free school lunches through the NSLP in the initial enrollment year and each subsequent year you are enrolled in the program. In order to confirm eligibility, participants in the program will be required to provide copies of official documents establishing that a child in the household is currently receive free school lunches through the NSLP. Each year you will be required to reconfirm your household’s current eligibility by providing Comcast or its authorized agent with up-to-date documentation. If you fail to provide documentation proving your eligibility in the program, you will be deemed no longer eligible to participate in the program.

3. You will no longer be eligible to participate in the program if (i) you no longer have at least one child living in your household who receives free school lunches under the NSLP; (ii) you fail to maintain your Comcast account in good standing; (iii) Comcast ceases to provide the Covered Service to your location; or (iv) your account opened under the program is closed. A change in address may result in your account being closed, even if you continue to receive Comcast services at a different address. Program participation also may be terminated if the Covered Service is upgraded, altered or changed by you for any reason. If you are no longer eligible for the program, but continue to receive the Covered Service from Comcast, regular rates, and any other applicable terms and conditions will apply to the Covered Service.

No kids in your home?  No discount Internet access for you!  Refuse on principle to accept a government handout to pay for school lunches?  Sorry, you need to buy the full-priced Internet Comcast will happily sell you.  Missed a cable bill payment because you needed to buy medicine this month?  It will cost you your inexpensive access.  Comcast even reserves the right to cancel your discounted service if you choose (or are forced) to move.

Most would-be customers who assume they are eligible because they, like so many others, are income-challenged these days, are thrilled to read and watch news accounts about the discount Internet program for their kids.  But like Santa reneging on Christmas, the excitement turns to disappointment when they discover they are ineligible for one reason or another.

In Baltimore, WBAL-TV got nearly breathless with excitement telling their audience, “Things are looking up for Maryland families — way up. A new effort is under way to help connect 250 families to cyberspace at an affordable price.”

Baltimore is a city of 620,000 people.  Before the Great Recession, 15.4% of families and 19.3% of Baltimore’s residents fell below the poverty line, excellent candidates for inexpensive Internet access.  That’s more than 32,000 people, but Comcast is apparently making room for just 250.

Despite those figures, Comcast’s David Cohen thinks his company’s discount Internet will make all the difference.

“We believe we have a shot to be able to make a real impact on the digital divide with this program,” he told the Baltimore TV station.

He might be right… for 250 families anyway.  Everyone else… pay up or go without.

Terms and conditions apply

WBAL Investigative reporter Jayne Miller got slightly carried away on behalf of Comcast, equating their program with a solution for high-tech jobs and increased Internet speed:

Internet access and speeds have become national issues. The U.S. lags behind other countries in broadband availability, hurting what some believe to be the nation’s ability to compete, said Miller.

In comparison, “China recently graduated over 440,000 engineers, and we in the U.S. graduated 65,000,” said U.S. Rep. “Dutch” Ruppersberger.

I’m sorry to bring people back to reality, but 250 families getting the right to buy up to three years of Internet access at speeds that are half of what the FCC National Broadband Plan defines as actual broadband is not an answer to anything beyond Comcast’s poor public relations in the customer service department.  It’s not going to help America’s broadband speed rating (it will actually hurt it at 1.5Mbps).

WBAL is hardly the only station overdoing their celebrations of Comcast (a prolific advertiser by the way).  I’ve watched reports that suggest Comcast is doing this out of the goodness of their heart, not because they agreed to as a condition of their mega-merger with NBC.  Considering the lawyer-like limitations that are certain to keep many people out of the program and others from downgrading their existing service to something more affordable, charity is hardly a word I would extend to the nation’s largest cable operator who found cause to limit access to even the lowest broadband speeds to protect its bottom line, which it hopes will get much fatter with the acquisition of NBC-Universal.  When the three year program ends, let’s just see how charitable Comcast is about extending it.

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KASA-TV in Santa Fe talks with their “very good friend at Comcast” about Internet Essentials and the company’s general Internet expansion plans in New Mexico.  The interview resembles an infomercial for Comcast products and services.  (5 minutes)