Broadband Reports this morning heard from a trusted source who says America’s largest cable operator is considering offering 250Mbps service to customers, perhaps as early as 2011.

While some cable operators (Time Warner Cable) have dragged their feet on DOCSIS 3 upgrades, Comcast has not — it is expected to have 100 percent of its cable systems upgraded this year.

DOCSIS 3 provides vastly increased speeds across a more robust network.  Older standards provided neighborhoods with a single 6 Mhz channel, with a 36Mbps downstream pipeline.  While that may be fine for a neighborhood browsing web pages and checking e-mail, it doesn’t take much too much high bandwidth activity to start slowing speeds down.  DOCSIS 3 “bonds” multiple channels together to create one fat pipeline.  Newer chipsets support eight combined 6Mhz channels, capable of providing that same neighborhood with 320Mbps of capacity.  Using schemes like PowerBoost, or with few others online, Comcast can deliver occasional bursts of speed at 250Mbps to customers without further upgrades, notes Dave Burstein of DSL Prime.

The bigger question is will customers pay the premium price for 250Mbps if Comcast maintains its 250GB usage limit on it?  Super speed tiers like this are useful to customers using high bandwidth applications.  It doesn’t make sense to upgrade to premium speeds if they’re accompanied by a usage governor.

When AT&T’s U-verse system arrived in Lawrence, Kansas residents rejoiced at the prospect of finally getting broadband service that didn’t come with Internet Overcharging schemes attached.  Sunflower Broadband, the local independent cable system, tied its fortunes to broadband usage allowances as low as three gigabytes per month.  Exceeding the allowance kicked in an overlimit fee for every extra gigabyte used.

As AT&T continues to make inroads in Lawrence with U-verse, which doesn’t have usage limits, customers noticed and began dropping Sunflower.  The cable system also noticed, and has increased plan allowances.

On the low end, the Bronze plan still charges $17.95 per month for 3Mbps/256kbps service with a three gigabyte allowance .  The Silver plan — $29.95 per month — received a speed and allowance upgrade.  Up from 7Mbps to 10Mbps, the monthly limit has now doubled to 50 GB per month.  Upload speeds remain an anemic 256kbps, however.  The biggest change comes for Gold plan users.  For $59.95 per month, the company offers 50/1Mbps service with a considerably more generous allowance — 250GB per month, up from 120GB.

Sunflower Broadband's Old Pricing/Service Plan (from January 2010)

Sunflower also sells a flat rate, unlimited plan called Palladium that doesn’t offer customers a set speed.  The company cut the price from $49.95 to $44.95 a month, perhaps in response to an underwhelmed customer base.  As we reported in January, Palladium speeds do not impress many Sunflower customers.  But some local residents report speeds are improving for those moved to Sunflower’s new DOCSIS 3 platform, an upgrade from Sunflower’s older system, where most of the speed complaints were noted.

The Lawrence Broadband Observer says AT&T and Sunflower are becoming close competitors in most respects, except upload speeds:

The one area where Sunflower still lags is upload speed, which even on the high-end plan is still limited to 1 megabit. This seems puzzling, and the 50 down to 1 up ratio of is greater then any other DOCSIS 3 cable company I was able to find, and makes it difficult to use services like photo and movie uploading, file sharing and online backup services. If Sunflower ever raises their upload speeds, they might just be able to lure this former customer back into the fold!

They could lure many more back if they dropped the hated usage limits and overlimit fees.  DOCSIS 3 provides substantially improved bandwidth, making such limits unnecessary.

Sunflower's New Broadband Plans & Pricing (February 2010)

TelstraClear serves New Zealand

Some broadband customers in New Zealand are treating their monthly usage allowances as usage targets, dedicated to ringing every last penny of value out of the Internet Overcharging schemes.  That means bandwidth usage increases just because customers don’t want to leave their remaining allowance on the table at the start of a new month.

PC World New Zealand notes “caps are essentially stupid” because your allowance resets at the end of every billing cycle:

If I’m away for a month and use zero bytes, it costs just the same as if I’d used my full 20GB. This wouldn’t be so galling if some allowance were made for under-utilising my capacity. It doesn’t have to be a 1:1 thing or roll over from month to month, but some concession would be nice. Perhaps a 1:2 ratio that must be used within the next billing period; in this case an allowance to go up to 30GB in the next month seems reasonable.

That would also get around the other irritating thing about data caps, the punitive charges if you go a single byte over your limit. In the case of TelstraClear it’s $2.95 per GB or part thereof.

TelstraClear - The Internet. Overcharged.

Readers shared their two cents:

I have a 40GB cap which I regularly go over. Telscum charge $20/Gb so it hurts like hell. I tried [switching] to TelstraClear but after three months all I had from them was a bill for services I didn’t receive.

We have 20Gb shared between the three of us and it is rare to go over but we do try like you to use it all up simply because we have paid for it. There is a company in NZ that allows you to roll it over it is Trust power Kinect. A friend uses them and roughly every three months he reckons he can save a month. You do need to have your power and phone with them though and for us it would actually work out more expensive but for others it might not. I do think caps suck though and wish they could be scrapped as I think we would actually use less bandwidth.

I think this part of the world and UK is an exception when it comes to data caps. In Europe data caps are very rare (except in UK which is not typical for Europe in any aspects). Being from Sweden I was a bit surprised moving to NZ and discovered data caps as well as very slow and expensive Internet. Sweden is similar to NZ (e.g. size, population) so it’s a fair comparison. You are being ripped off!

El Paso, Texas

More than 14,000 residents of El Paso are under investigation for potential cable theft.  That remarkable number comes from El Paso, Texas TV station KFOX-TV.  Reporter Martina Valverde notes that Time Warner Cable is now engaged in a city-wide system audit to identify and disconnect illegitimate cable connections.

“Our paying customers who rely on us for phone service, video service, and Internet service,” Gary Underwood, vice president of communications for Time Warner’s Texas operation told KFOX viewers. “They might not be able to access those services when they most need them because the damage that was caused further down the line.”

The company told KFOX when it discovers an illegal connection, it makes two attempts to convert the customer to legitimate service.  On the third attempt, local law enforcement becomes involved.  Those found guilty face fines of $500.

“We have what’s called a tab audit team. They go out and they look at different areas to see. We have a system of tagging and flagging on these lines to so our folks can identify an authorized versus unauthorized connection,” Underwood said.

Cable theft is not just a problem in El Paso.  Some brazen entrepreneurs go further, pretending to represent providers willing to hook customers up for a one time, flat fee they pocket.

Grande Communications faced one such individual, who last summer slapped a magnetic sign with Grande’s logo on his truck and pitched cable service to apartment complexes and homes around San Marcos, Texas.

Unwitting customers who signed up for the deal were offered special discounts by Grande when their illegal cable connection was discovered.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KFOX El Paso Time Warner Cable Cracks Down On Illegal Taps 2-17-2010.flv[/flv]

KFOX-TV in El Paso, Texas ran this report last night claiming more than 14,000 residents were under investigation for cable theft in the community. (1 minute)

[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KXAN Austin Fake Cable Guy Selling Cable 7-24-09.flv[/flv]

Last summer, Grande Communications had to contend with someone illegally hooking up customers around San Marcos, Texas. KXAN-TV in Austin ran this report July 24th. (2 minutes)

HBO Go is currently only available directly to Verizon FiOS customers. Comcast customers have access through Fancast, and Time Warner Cable indicated it wasn't interested in participating in HBO Go, for now.

HBO subscribers who are also Verizon FiOS TV customers are the first to get access to the premium channel’s new online video portal — HBO Go, launched Wednesday with over 600 hours of HBO programming, available free to authenticated HBO and FiOS subscribers.

HBO Go is another project spawned from the cable and pay television industry’s TV Everywhere project — putting television programming online for anytime viewing, for free, as long as you maintain a cable or pay television subscription.

Ironically, the service launched Wednesday on Verizon’s telco-TV service FiOS, leaving lots of cable subscribers waiting for access.  If you subscribe to HBO through cable, satellite, or U-verse, the service remains unavailable to you, for now.  Comcast subscribers already had access to HBO’s programming through the Fancast Xfinity TV website.  If you don’t pay for television, the service remains unavailable to you indefinitely — they won’t sell it to you at any price.

“Ultimately this is about extending the subscriber lifecycle,” HBO co-president Eric Kessler said. “It’s more about subscriber retention.”

Subscriber retention through incumbent providers, he means.  HBO doesn’t want to risk selling direct to online consumers who might want to cut ties with their cable or other pay television provider.

Stop the Cap! reader Jared has FiOS and HBO and let us sample the service through his FiOS connection (his 25Mbps/25Mbps connection with remote access maxed out our Road Runner Turbo connection and still left him plenty of leftover speed).

Let’s start with the viewing experience.

It’s a big improvement over HBO’s Wisconsin trial in 2008 with Time Warner Cable, which required viewers to download Windows Media-encoded video files protected with Microsoft’s annoying digital rights management scheme.  It was cumbersome for trial participants, and dealing with Microsoft’s player and DRM cut Mac owners out of the trial.

HBO Go is Flash-based, using Adobe’s Real-Time Messaging Protocol to keep viewers from saving permanent copies for themselves (and potentially their friends.)  Using Verizon FiOS, viewers should rarely encounter any artifacts or speed-related viewing problems.  The picture was fine, even for me using remote access software. Of course, if your Internet connection is considerably slower than FiOS or your neighborhood suffers from online congestion, you could experience issues streaming HD content, but HBO Go is designed to buffer when encountering slower connections.  The files are encoded in MPEG-4 at 1.2Mbps and 2.6Mbps, which theoretically should be fine for the majority of viewers.  Comcast subscribers – remember watching counts against your usage cap.

Wandering around the HBO Go library was simple  — easier to navigate and less cluttered than Hulu.  The site was intuitive and should be easy to use for just about everyone.

Up to three members of your household can each watch programming from the service at the same time, even away from home, anywhere in the country.

HBO Go claims to be a work in progress — about 25% of the content will be refreshed by HBO every week, with new episodes available on the service immediately following their TV premiere.

But the service hardly offers a comprehensive viewing experience.  It’s much closer to Hulu or your cable company’s HBO on Demand service.

For example, rights issues limit virtually all of HBO’s original series to a handful of recent episodes or seasons.  Only The Wire has a complete library to watch from its premiere forward.  Curb Your Enthusiasm, aptly named when considering HBO Go, is missing completely.  So is Real Time with Bill Maher, although four of his earlier specials are archived on the site.

As for movies, there are gaping holes there as well.  Available titles resemble Cinemax’s selection of movies you’ve already seen.  There are gaps between what you can watch on HBO itself and what is available on HBO Go.  Babe is online, for instance, but anything Harry Potter isn’t.

In other words, what could have been a compelling addition for HBO subscribers feels redundant.  I would never pay anything extra for HBO Go, nor will it be a factor in keeping HBO.

Online viewers need not apply.

HBO could have used the opportunity to sell the service to non-cable subscribers for a monthly fee and pick up some additional revenue, but that wouldn’t sit well with the pay television cartel that is behind the TV Everywhere concept.  They don’t want you cord cutting — those that have are locked out of the HBO Go Clubhouse.  For now, I suspect few were clamoring to get in.