Stevens

Sen. Ted Stevens death last week in a plane crash has shined a light on increasingly cozy relationships between Alaska’s most powerful politicians and the special interests that court their support.  Winning favor with a politician that can control and direct financial resources from Washington can secure your company millions in taxpayer dollars and legislative favors in America’s most rural state.

When he died, the former Alaskan senator was on his way, as an invited guest, to an isolated lodge owned and maintained for the use of executives at Alaska’s largest broadband provider — GCI.  Time alone in the Alaskan wilderness delivered the ultimate captive audience for those the company sought to influence and Stevens was always a company favorite.

Accompanying Stevens on the doomed flight were GCI’s senior lobbyist Dana Tindall and William D. Phillips Sr., a lawyer, lobbyist and former chief of staff for Mr. Stevens.  Both also perished in the crash.

Even after Stevens was voted out of office after being initially found guilty in a federal corruption trial, special interests like GCI continued to court Stevens, who all-too-willingly mixed business and pleasure — including the ill-fated fishing trip sponsored by the Alaskan telecom company.

Stevens didn’t go quietly out of politics after losing to Democrat Mark Begich in 2008.  The New York Times noted he split his time between Washington and Alaska, providing “consulting” services and worked on resource issues.

His close connections to beltway politics kept him in favor among Alaska’s corporate interests, many of whom had supported Stevens financially and rhetorically for decades.

Tindall’s close relationship to Stevens paid GCI dividends in favors and support — both of which they returned in the form of generous campaign contributions, as the Times reports:

Ms. Tindall, 48, did not work for Mr. Stevens, but several people said they had a strong mutual respect and a warm rapport. She is credited with helping the company she worked for, GCI, grow rapidly in Alaska at the same time that Mr. Stevens was influential in telecommunications issues in Congress. He frequently brought members of the Federal Communications Commission to Alaska and helped steer money toward improving communications in rural areas. Another of his former chiefs of staff, Greg Chapados, is a vice president at GCI.

Tindall

“Senator Stevens was instrumental in helping get a satellite project started so that people in Alaska could watch same-day television and live events,” said Mike Porcaro, a radio personality and advertising executive whose clients include GCI. Mr. Porcaro recalled not being able to watch live network television in Alaska as late as the 1970s. “We went from the 1800s to the 20th century in one day, mostly because of him,” Mr. Porcaro said.

Executives at GCI were generous campaign contributors to Mr. Stevens. Since 1994, Ms. Tindall was the most generous, donating $7,100 to his campaigns, records show. But in 2007 and 2008, as the corruption case surrounded Mr. Stevens, Ms. Tindall and other GCI executives gave less. Ms. Tindall initially gave $1,000 that year, though she later reduced the amount to $400.

Roberta Graham, a public relations executive and a close friend of Ms. Tindall’s, said Ms. Tindall and Mr. Stevens were “kindred spirits,” similarly tenacious and dedicated to their work.

GCI can afford to wine and dine Alaska’s politicians from the rate hikes they will visit on their broadband customers with a proposed Internet Overcharging scheme that will limit customers to how much Internet access they can enjoy.

That abusive pricing is something Senator Stevens would have undoubtedly supported, even if he lacked an understanding of its implications.

The late senator embarrassed himself in 2006 when he sought to defend his friends in the telecommunications industry against Net Neutrality.  At one point, Stevens reduced the Internet down to a “series of tubes.”

But then companies like GCI didn’t contribute generously to his campaign for his broadband knowledge — they just wanted to make sure he was a safe vote in their column.

Broadband customers face dramatically higher prices for Internet service from a telecom company that wants to define for Alaskans an “appropriate” amount of “fair usage” of the Internet.

GCI, Alaska’s largest cable company, is currently embarked on a so-called “education” campaign over the summer telling residential customers it might be time for them to log off, or face the consequences of enormously higher broadband bills.

For one Anchorage coffee shop, that added up for several hundred dollars for just a single month of usage — all because they offer free Wi-Fi to their customers.

“People use it for their second space. Their home office,” Kaladi Brothers Coffee COO Dale Tran told KTVA news. “We’ve always offered an open network in our cafes, and after hours some people come by and park out front.”

Tran says the result was a bill from GCI several hundred dollars higher than expected.

GCI Communications Manager David Morris says at least two percent of their 110,000 customers are using “too much” service and violating the company’s “fair use” policies.  Morris also warned customers with wireless equipment that if they don’t take steps to lock down their routers with passwords and security, they could be exposed to a huge bill from GCI for providing free Internet service to the entire neighborhood.

Morris claims the company wants to specifically define what it considers “fair use,” claiming it will make things more equitable for everyone.

But GCI’s Internet Overcharging scheme will never save a single customer a penny.  Instead, customers will see only skyrocketing bills should they not fit within GCI’s arbitrary definition of “fair use”:

The company’s website states, “For a large majority of customers, normal usage activities are not expected to exceed the plan profiles defined below”:

GCI customers are not happy.  One reader of the AK Community forum provided additional insight:

To add a little dimension to this before I start ranting, here are the respective rates for the above service plans:

Now, those prices are misleading because they are only for the internet service portion of the “bundle.”  What they’re not telling you (anywhere on the web site that I can find, in fact) is that in order to receive that price, data transfer rate, and monthly bandwidth, you must also pay for GCI’s digital cable television service ($57.99 when part of a bundle), local phone service ($15.49 a month), and long distance service ($5.99 a month plus taxes and surcharges).

Without factoring in the various FCC fees and whatnot, the above information brings the total cost of GCI’s fastest, highest monthly bandwidth package to $179.46 per month!  That’s actually the cost they quoted me on the phone, too, so at least we know their “customer service” staff are at least intelligent enough to figure out an adding machine.

Oh, and did I mention that those speeds and transfer rates are not available for standalone cable modem [subscribers]?

[…] What happens when you do go over?  BAM!  $5.12 per gig tacked on to your bill!  I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick of getting ripped off by GCI.  Those of you who live outside of Alaska can confirm this, but GCI is just about the only cable company that still meters their customers’ bandwidth.  I have friends who tell me that they’re paying $49.00 a month for 8Mb/s transfer rate and unlimited bandwidth!

What GCI is doing is highway robbery.  How are they getting away with it?  I’ll tell you: no competition.  For very high speed broadband internet, they’re the only show in town, so they can charge whatever they want to anybody who wants more than 3Mbps (standard speed DSL service from Alaska’s other big telecom provider, the phone company).

[flv width=”478″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KTVA Anchorage GCI Fair Internet Use Crackdown 6-2-10.flv[/flv]

KTVA-TV in Anchorage ran this report about GCI’s plans to force many of their broadband customers to pay more if they enjoy the Internet “too much.”  (3 minutes)

Dream On: WildBlue's home page shows a user thrilled about an Internet experience she'll never truly enjoy with a monthly usage limit at low as 2.3GB. Exceed it and face the consequences: WildBlue's Time Out Corner: a speed throttle delivering 128kbps downstream and just 28kbps upstream.

When is broadband not broadband?  When it is delivered by hopelessly overloaded and underpowered satellite providers that annoy their subscribers with high prices and low usage allowances.

For many customers of WildBlue and HughesNet, getting high speed Internet access remains a far off dream. No broadband Internet service is more rationed and speed throttled than satellite “fraudband.”

Most satellite broadband customers live in America’s most rural areas, literally miles away from the nearest telephone exchange and often hundreds of miles away from a town with cable broadband.  Even wireless Internet providers can’t find enough customers to justify the costs of delivering service.

For America’s most rural, there are three choices:

1. Go without.
2. Use dial-up service.
3. Choose the least annoying satellite provider you can afford.

Just over one million Americans have stuck it out with choice number three, paying twice as much wired Americans pay for broadband and getting just a fraction of the speed and use.

But both providers claim that is all about to change.

WildBlue and HughesNet are in a hurry to launch brand new satellites with dramatically improved capacity that will deliver, they claim, “speeds as fast as fiber.”

For Stop the Cap! reader Adele in a rural part of Arizona, she’ll believe it when she sees it.

“As Stop the Cap! has said all along, anyone who thinks satellite ‘broadband’ is a useful alternative to DSL or cable Internet should be condemned to use it,” she writes.  “Everyday brings a new frustration, especially with so-called ‘Fair Access Policies’ that effectively restrict your use to web page browsing and e-mail.”

HughesNet explains how their satellite service uses your satellite dish to send and receive Internet data. (click to enlarge)

For many people running Microsoft Windows, the company’s monthly gift of bug fixes, service packs, and updates is just a minor nuisance. For satellite Internet customers, it can sometimes mean the “day of no Internet.”

Adele explains:

If you have multiple computers and Microsoft determines it has a lot of screw-ups to fix, the monthly updates can easily run into the hundreds of megabytes when every computer receives their individual updates.  HughesNet’s “budget” Home and Pro Plans cost up to $70 a month and only include a daily allowance of up to 300 megabytes.  It’s no trouble at all to exceed that usage on increasingly large web pages loaded down with video advertising, pop-ups, and other content.  Now deal with Microsoft Update Day and in our house, that means you get a good book and stay offline.

If she doesn’t, HughesNet inflicts a stinging punishment — 24 hours in the time out corner with barely dial-up speed penalties for exceeding the limit.

But both satellite providers promise better days ahead when their newest satellites are launched into space.

The New York Times notes WildBlue’s next generation of satellites will bring 10 times the capacity of its three current satellites combined.  That opens the door for faster satellite broadband, according to both companies, without price increases.

HughesNet believes satellite broadband’s best days lie ahead, especially as a contender in the rural broadband market.

“One advantage satellite has is ubiquity,” Arunas G. Slekys, vice president for Hughes Network Systems, said. “The cost of reaching you with a satellite dish is independent of where you are. Fiber or cable is labor-intensive and dependent on distance.”

As to satellite’s potential in rural regions, “clearly, there’s an unserved market,” Mr. Slekys said. “And it’s not as though they have terrestrial or satellite. They only have satellite as a choice.”

Can a new generation of satellites save satellite broadband?

One question the Times didn’t ask is whether increased capacity will mean the end of so-called “Fair Access Policies” that strictly ration the amount of browsing customers can manage before the speed throttle punishment begins.  Neither company is saying.

“When pigs fly,” Adele thinks.  “Sometimes these satellite companies think rural people are just plain stupid.  When you live this far out in the country, you learn to recognize snake oil salesmen when you see them.  Why give us more access when nobody else will provide the service?”

The sudden interest in satellite broadband in the nation’s paper of record is no coincidence.  Both HughesNet and WildBlue are upset they are not getting a bigger piece of the broadband stimulus pie.  The Times notes just $100 million out of $2.5 billion in U.S. Department of Agriculture grants for rural broadband will go to satellite companies.  Raising the question in a newspaper widely read in Washington can’t hurt your cause.

Thomas E. Moore, chief of WildBlue, said satellite technology would be able to serve thousands more rural residents than terrestrial services at a fraction of the cost. He cited a $28 million grant to a nonprofit group in North Carolina to extend fiber to 420 schools and libraries. That same grant could have instead directly served 70,000 residents in North Carolina through satellite service, Mr. Moore said.

“For every one of those people, there are literally hundreds more who won’t have access to stimulus funds,” he said.

But Joseph Freddoso, president of MCNC, the nonprofit group that manages North Carolina’s public education technology network, said satellites were not an ideal primary service for his users, who require a more reliable network for their research and data-heavy applications.

“To compare what we do with what satellite does as a service is an apples-to-oranges comparison,” Mr. Freddoso said, adding that the grant will serve one million students in 37 counties.

Adele is concerned that means even more people will fight for the limited resources satellite has until the next generation of satellites get launched, especially for rural customers trying to share a spot beam in North Carolina.

“These companies have really stopped heavily promoting themselves in parts of rural America because both are already at or over capacity in many places,” she says. “The advertised speeds for some parts of the country are straight out of Alice in Wonderland — total fiction, and with the lag time that comes naturally from sending and receiving data over a distance of 22,000 miles, it’s not getting any better.”

Adele is referring to the satellite providers’ regionally-directed signals.  Much like how satellite TV companies can deliver local stations within limited regions of the country, satellite Internet service can be divided up and delivered to certain parts of the United States.  One beam might serve rural Louisiana, another could be directed to northern California, and so on.  Once a region’s capacity nears saturation, speed and performance suffers.  In areas where capacity remains underused, the service performs better.

Regardless of the promises for enhanced satellite broadband, most cable and fiber broadband providers spend no time pondering the competitive impact, because there is none.  They plan to continue ignoring the likes of WildBlue and HughesNet for years to come.

Kevin Laverty from Verizon told the Times their FiOS fiber network is expensive to deploy but is light years ahead of satellite when it comes to speed and easy upgrades.

“Fiber optic is virtually an unlimited technology,” he said. “All you have to do is change the electronics on either end.”

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable said cable broadband speeds already easily exceed the satellite providers’ proposed new speeds, so they have nothing to worry about.

For most satellite customers, WildBlue and HughesNet are not choices, they are realities if rural Americans want to participate in the broadband revolution.

“Nobody chooses these satellite providers over DSL, cable, fiber, or even most wireless ISPs,” Adele says. “They choose satellite because of the absence of these other providers.”

Should Adele’s local phone company offer her DSL or a wireless broadband provider arrive to deliver service, would she switch away from HughesNet?

“In a shot,” she says. “I dream about throwing their dish into the biggest bonfire I can build and then my neighbors and I visit their headquarters to horse-whip them for years of horrible service and throttled speeds.”

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Satellite Fraudband.flv[/flv]

We’ve assembled some examples of advertising for both HughesNet and WildBlue, typically seen on networks catering to rural Americans, a brief interview with a representative from WildBlue, and some actual customer… uh… “testimonials” about the quality of service actually received.  Finally, we’ve included the most painful speed test ever encountered.  The original video was silent and some might think it’s actually stuck.  It’s not.  We’ve added some music to spice things up or to increase your pain and suffering.  You might want to get a piece of cake for this. Oh, and one last thing:  If you are using a satellite provider to access Stop the Cap!, forget about the video.  Watching it will eat almost a quarter of your daily usage allowance.  (6 minutes)

An increasing number of Verizon’s DSL customers are discovering their broadband speeds cut, sometimes significantly, by the phone company’s internal line testing “optimization” tool, designed to deliver stable DSL service over a deteriorating, aging network of copper phone lines.

Regular Stop the Cap! reader Smith6612, who is extremely familiar with the technical workings of DSL service, dropped us a note to report a disturbing trend of complaints from Verizon customers who are waking up to speed cuts that often don’t make sense.

At issue here is the highly variable nature of DSL speed and how providers manage it for customers.  Data delivery over America’s aging copper wire, meant-for-voice-calls-network has always been somewhat of a bootstrapped affair, all the way back to the days of dial-up.  Most phone companies have always included detailed disclaimers for customers relying on a phone network envisioned more than 100 years ago for 21st century data communications.  No guarantees on speed or access are among the most common, especially with DSL service which is highly distance and line quality sensitive.

In short, the further away you live or work from the phone company’s exchange (where your individual phone line eventually ends up), the lower the speeds that line can support, if it can support DSL service at all.  Badly managed wiring along the way can dramatically reduce the quality of your service.  Sammy the Squirrel could chew enough insulation off a phone cable to expose it to interference from radio signals.  Water finding its way into cables and connection boxes can turn excellent DSL service into no service at all during bad weather.  Even temperature variations between seasons can eventually corrode, degrade, or destroy fittings, connectors, or any number of vital components necessary for good service.

Unfortunately, if companies do not properly invest resources to maintain their legacy phone networks, service problems are bound to increase sooner or later.

Many DSL customers do not really have an understanding of what speeds they should be getting from their providers, much less be able to easily identify when those speeds have declined.  But they do understand service outages.  When a DSL modem runs into trouble supporting the speeds it is configured for, the unit will try to re-establish the connection.  This “sync” process can occur once a day or continuously — it all depends on what condition the line is in.

While this process is underway, anyone trying to use the Internet is likely to find their service unavailable.  That often results in a service call.

Calling to complain about a troublesome Internet connection is expensive — even when reaching one of the overseas call centers Verizon regularly uses for customer support.  Sending a repair truck to your home is even more costly.

One way to reduce these expenses, without upgrading or improving maintenance of your network, is to simply reduce the speed of the connection.

Verizon ironically calls their line testing process “optimization.”  Verizon’s software is designed to ascertain the maximum possible downstream and upstream speeds a line can continually support.  Those measurements are used as a basis for configuring the customer’s modem, placing a speed limit on how fast of a connection to negotiate, even if a customer is paying for a faster tier of service.  The goal is to stop the modem from losing a connection.

Unfortunately, sometimes customers with no service problems at all take a hit in speed along the way. For several weeks now, many long-standing Verizon DSL customers are discovering their speeds have been reduced and are finding Verizon’s “optimization” procedures directly responsible.  Some are accusing Verizon of recently configuring connections more conservatively to avoid service calls caused, in part, by years of neglect maintaining their landline network.

Bob in North Billerica, Massachusetts has experienced a speed cut himself.

Writing on the Verizon DSL forum at Broadband Reports, he noticed years of stable service at 1.792Mbps/448kbps are no more.  His maximum download speed has been cut to 1.5Mbps.

The same thing happened to Zaii in Philadelphia — despite stable service at higher speeds, he found himself cut back to 1.5Mbps as well.

Jack in Lakeland, Florida discovered his speeds has been “optimized” nearly in half by Verizon, and the company admitted it had capped his maximum speed as part of that process.  He was paying for 1.5Mbps service and received 700kbps-1Mbps service.

“The technician [sent to my house] found I could receive 2.6Mbps but Verizon had me “optimized” at 1.2Mbps because of my location,” Jack writes.  “The technician made a call and had the “optimize” cap removed and I am back to 1.54Mbps.”

It’s the same story in Ridgecrest, California where one Verizon DSL customer suddenly noticed a dramatic speed cut.  He pays for 1.5-2Mbps service and barely manages 1Mbps these days.  A Verizon technician thought even with the sudden speed loss, his speeds were still “pretty good.”

That attitude doesn’t exactly placate Verizon customers paying for more and receiving less.

Often, technicians sent to the home find their own line tests are far more optimistic about the speeds Verizon can support.  The customer in Ridgecrest, for example, learned from a technician his line can support 3Mbps, but Verizon’s corporate “optimization” software says otherwise.

A few anecdotal reports from customers listening to Verizon field technicians suggests many of these issues are being caused by Verizon’s “optimizing” software.  Once a service call commences, knowledgeable technicians manage to override the software settings and reset the connection back to support earlier, faster speeds.  But often these changes last only a few weeks before the problem returns.

Unfortunately, Verizon’s customer service department usually seems unconcerned about speed complaints.

“SDillman” in Uxbridge, Massachusetts relayed his experiences:

I talked Verizon DSL support and got them to run a line test and they confirm the data rate they are seeing is 1.216Mbps, which is exactly what I reported. Unless it drops under 1Mbps they won’t do anything because it is considered an acceptable speed.

What stinks is that up until last week my data rate was a constant 1.792Mbps and all my speed tests showed 1.5Mbps.  I even swapped out the modem today to try my backup and got the same rate.  So I’ve lost 500k for no reason at all and there is nothing I can do about it. It wouldn’t be so bad if I never had it, but losing it just doesn’t sit right with me. I might be looking at alternate providers and or mediums of broadband in the near future because that just leaves a poor taste in my mouth.

A Verizon DSL Modem/Router

Angry, motivated customers can wreak havoc on bad customer service practices, and SDillman managed to overcome Verizon’s speed throttles and shares advice for others in the same situation:

1. Visit and register for an account on Broadband Reports.  Then visit and post a message in the Verizon Direct Support forum.  Those messages are kept private between you and a Verizon technical representative.  They have enhanced skills and authority over the traditional offshore customer service people, and in the words of “SDillman,” “are amazing — after getting the runaround from everyone else, those guys had a proper repair ticket created in no time.”
2. Carefully listen to the technicians that are sent to your home.  The technician in Uxbridge was frustrated that his service visit revealed a line in what he called “pristine condition,” yet Verizon’s “optimization” speed throttle said otherwise and was directly implicated in the speed reduction.  The frustration mounted when Verizon’s own employee encountered the same roadblocks Verizon’s customers do from overseas customer service agents.  In this case, a call center employee attempted to explain the basics of how telephone lines work to a Verizon technician with over 30 years of experience.  The technician also didn’t respond any better to arguments that 1.2Mbps was a good speed when the customer is paying for a higher level of service.
3. Most of these issues are best resolved between a Verizon service technician and employees at the central office exchange serving your home or business. Encourage a direct service call and do not accept over-the-phone assertions about speed issues, particularly from call center employees a half-world away.  If the problems go unresolved, a compliant about bad phone/broadband service filed with your state’s Public Service/Public Utilities Commission may bring about a higher level of response, even if broadband speeds are unregulated.

As SDillman shares, “For now my speeds are back up, until they ‘optimize’ the line again to try to free up some of the congestion on their crowded routers and begin stealing bandwidth [again]. I don’t know if this practice is illegal, but it certainly doesn’t pass the smell test. It feels a lot like going into a gas station and filling up your tank and then finding out 30% of it is water.”

Almost two years to the day Frontier Communications quietly introduced language in its customer agreements providing a monthly broadband usage allowance of just 5GB per month, the company has quietly removed that language from its terms and conditions.

The 5GB usage allowance was deemed generous by Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter.  Frontier claimed most of its 559,300 broadband subscribers (2008 numbers) consumed less than 1.5 gigabytes per month.  But news of the cap angered customers anyway, particularly in their biggest service area — Rochester, N.Y.  In fact, Frontier’s usage cap was what sparked the launch of Stop the Cap! in the summer of 2008.

While never universally enforced against the company’s DSL customers, Frontier has used that portion of its acceptable use policy to demand up to $250 a month from some “heavy users” in Mound, Minn.

Frontier’s usage limit language also played a role in a major controversy in April, 2009 when Time Warner Cable planned usage limits of their own for western New York customers already faced with Frontier’s 5GB usage limit.

The phone company used Time Warner’s planned usage cap as a marketing tool to switch to Frontier DSL service.

Frontier used Time Warner Cable's usage cap experiment against them in this ad to attract new customers in the spring of 2009.

This website has pounded Frontier for two years over its continued use of the 5GB language as part of its broadband policies.  We raised the issue with several state regulatory bodies as part of Frontier’s purchase of Verizon landlines in several states.  Several state utility commissions raised the usage cap issue with Frontier as a result, deeming it negative for rural broadband customers who would effectively endure rationed broadband service from a de facto monopoly provider.

We also criticized Frontier for promoting its MyFitv service, little more than a website containing Google ads and embedded videos already available on Hulu, while not bothering to tell its customers use of that service on a regular basis would put them perilously close to their 5GB allowance.

In the end, Frontier itself denied they would strictly enforce the 5GB limit, making its continued presence in the company’s terms and conditions illogical.

Now, the company has returned to the earlier language it formerly used, reserving the right to shut you off if you use the service excessively or abusively.  This resembles similar language from most broadband providers.  While not absolute in defining those terms, Frontier doesn’t commit to a specific number either.  Today’s “generous usage allowance” is tomorrow’s “rationing.”

If Frontier cuts off customers for using only a handful of gigabytes a month, deeming it excessive, we want to know about it.

Stop the Cap! opposes all Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, speed throttles, and so-called “consumption billing.”  We believe such limits retard the growth and potential of broadband service and are unwarranted when considering the ongoing decline in costs to provide the service.  We do not oppose providers dealing with customers who create major problems on their networks, but believe those issues are best settled privately between the company and the individual customer.

Providers must also be honest in recognizing that broadband is a dynamic medium.  They have a responsibility to grow their networks to meet demand, especially at current pricing which provides major financial returns for those offering the service.  We also believe broadband tiers should be limited to speed, not consumption.  Customers with higher data demands will naturally gravitate towards higher-priced, faster-speed tiers, providing higher revenue to offset the minimal costs of moving data back and forth.

Broadband customers will be loyal to the providers that treat them right.  We applaud Frontier Communications for finally removing the last vestiges of its infamous 5GB usage allowance.  Hopefully, going forward, Frontier will spend its time, energy and money improving its broadband service instead of trying to convince customers to use less of it.