Stop the Cap! reader John, who lives in Beaumont, Texas, went shopping for Internet access recently and was sold on broadband from AT&T:

I looked for and did not find any reference to caps, and called the sales department. I was told there were no caps. I signed up and when tech support helped me with the registration, the tech bragged how AT&T had no caps when cable companies (Time Warner) did. The day after I installed, I received the express letter stating there was a cap trial in the Beaumont area. The cap is 80GB for my “Elite” service plan. The overage charge is $1.00 per Gig.

Of course what John, and many other residents in Beaumont may not have realized is that AT&T is continuing to test their Internet Overcharging schemes in Beaumont, Texas and Reno, Nevada.  AT&T’s website and marketing materials are generally targeted to a nationwide customer base, and it’s easy to receive marketing materials that don’t disclose you reside in the two unluckiest cities in America to be an AT&T broadband customer.

If John is subject to any long term service commitments, he should have the right to exit his contract and terminate service without any further obligation.

Time after time, customers learning of Internet Overcharging with unwarranted limits and penalties are left angry and upset.

“One customer may have to move his business [from New Hampshire] to Massachusetts because he can’t get [phone] service in his store.” — WMUR Manchester (3/13/09)

Third world phone service?  Now into spring, the saga of FairPoint continues with no end in sight.  Customer complaints achieve alarming proportions in all three New England states where FairPoint Communications assumed control of customers discarded by Verizon.

Across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, local media present disturbingly similar stories of customers left weeks without service, unable to reach customer service representatives.  Palpable frustration over what seems to be an endless litany of excuses about why things have gone wrong, and how things are “getting better” start to ring hollow.

Now there is a new complication.  Questions about FairPoint’s financial health are now openly pondered by the media, as FairPoint asks for a three month delay in paying back its debt.  The Associated Press reports FairPoint is struggling.  Even before the transition problems erupted, the company lost 12% of its New England customers in 2008.  The Maine Public Utilities Commission received 1,200 complaints about the company and the company’s stock price was rapidly declining.

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WMUR Manchester Fairpoint Says Payment Delay Request Not Due To Customer Problems 3-13-09.flv[/flv]

Of course, no nightmare with a phone company is ever complete without them botching your bill.  FairPoint doesn’t disappoint, and as customers begin to receive their monthly statements from the new “transitioned” FairPoint, all too often they were wrong.  Customer payments were applied late or not at all, late fees charged even to customers on “autopay” plans, and new charges billed for lines that were disconnected.  Even customers on their way out the door were snared, as WMUR discovered from one Manchester resident who swore “I’ll never go back to FairPoint.”

Kate Bailey from the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission: “The level of service that FairPoint is providing to its customers is unacceptable right now.”

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Politico published an article this week attempting to navigate the waters of the nation’s telecommunications regulatory policies, as seen in the eyes of the Federal Communications Commission.  As Stop the Cap! readers already know, Net Neutrality has a tendency to be defined in many different ways.  It’s the color-changing Magic Sprinkles of regulatory policy.  Everyone has a favorite color.

We define Net Neutrality as giving equal access and treatment to all data on broadband networks without favor or foe.  Usage caps indirectly impact on Net Neutrality because they can artificially limit consumption with the potential of exempting “preferred partner” content. Another example: “digital phone” products from the bandwidth provider that are excused from consumption meters violate Net Neutrality principles when the competition doesn’t get the free pass your own product does.

Obama’s appointments to the FCC claim to support Net Neutrality principles and state they will keep those in mind as they regulate telecommunications for at least the next four years.

“In the beginning of the storm, we were in this frenzy because of statements being made by the CEOs about charging websites and application providers for different levels of access to reach Internet users. That got policymakers engaged, and the president made it his No. 1 tech agenda item,” he said. “Now we have a brand-new government. The community is looking to see what is going to happen. If things don’t happen in a timely way, you will see the back end of that storm.”

Tom Tauke

Tom Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs, policy and communications at Verizon tried to put banana colored sprinkles on a watermelon flavored ice cream cone when he attempted to conflate the concept of Net Neutrality with wireless phone companies handing out free phones to victims of stalkers and domestic violence.  Huh?  Under Net Neutrality, the stalkers should also get phones?

Tauke also demonstrated either a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept, or deliberately tried to muddy the waters of Net Neutrality. Verizon has traditionally despised and has lobbied against Net Neutrality for years.

In Tauke’s eyes, Net Neutrality protections may somehow impact parents’ abilities to monitor and control their children’s access to the Internet, interfere with identify theft control measures, and force an end to protecting your wireless cell phone call from deterioration because too many kids at the mall are texting on the same network.

Bizarroworld definitions like that cheapen the reality that enforced Net Neutrality will go a long way to protect consumers from predatory practices of a different kind — greedy providers looking for another payday by demanding compensation to move your web page, video, or download along at a “reasonable” speed.  Those unfortunate enough to not pay may find the very definition of “broadband” redefined as well… “Internet access mildly faster than dial-up most of the time, except on weekends when ‘freeloaders’ have to wait until after 11pm.  Material owned, controlled or partnered with us are always exempt, of course.”

Meanwhile, the rest of Verizon thinks American broadband is highly competitive, fast, and that companies are implementing new pricing and service “options” to bring “greater value” (ie. mandated usage caps) to their customers. A preview of the remarks Verizon will make at today’s Free State Foundation panel on broadband was highlighted on Verizon’s Policy Blog:

Link Hoewing, V.P. for Internet and technology policy for Verizon, previews his discussion about the health of the U.S. broadband marketplace. The Capitol Hill panel he references is hosted by the Free State Foundation and will take place 6/5/09.

“I can walk outside of this building and touch FairPoint, and they were telling me back in February that they couldn’t find my building!”

It takes a special kind of incompetence to run a telephone company into the ground and allow customers to achieve a level of exasperation unparalleled in history.  Well beyond a month after the “transfer” from Verizon to FairPoint, the company was literally tearing up the fabric of New England business customers, unable to obtain telephone service despite weeks of trying, as WCAX discovered up in White River Junction, Vermont:

[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington Problems Continue for Some 3-15-09.flv[/flv]

Nearly a month without e-mail, Internet service interruptions, and six week waits before a repair or installation truck bothers to show up in your driveway.  Life under FairPoint this past spring was hardly a picnic.  Comcast ran a veritable festival of advertising telling customers there was an alternative, and where cable was available, they did a good business picking up customers fleeing FairPoint’s nightmarish service.

Up in Maine, business customers arriving for work started to discover their phone lines had been disconnected without warning, potentially costing them thousands in dollars of lost business when customers dialing their numbers heard “this number has been disconnected” in response.

How could this happen?  WCSH in Portland finds out:

[flv width=”480″ height=”360″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCSH Portland FairPoint Business Customers Angry 02-13-09.flv[/flv]

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Stop the Cap! reader Bob, who gave Frontier Communications another shot for his broadband needs, finally threw in the towel and went back to Time Warner Cable when he got his current bill.  B0b was happy enough with his DSL service, despite the nagging sense DSL is really losing the speed race, with an increasingly growing gap between the fastest speed Frontier can offer vs. Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service.  But the final straw came in this month’s bill.  It was messed up, and it turned out Frontier’s DSL was more expensive than Time Warner’s Road Runner, once taxes and fees were counted.

A Frontier Billing Mystery Sherlock Holmes Couldn't Solve

Welcome to my world.  I’m still dealing with billing nightmares prompted from my own test run of Frontier’s DSL “High Speed Internet Max” product, which wasn’t “High Speed” (maximum speed here was 3.1Mbps) and “Max” in giving me headaches because of the need to make repeated calls to the company to straighten out service and billing problems, which still aren’t fixed.

Frontier just sent its employees another one of those taunt-0-gram e-mails at Time Warner Cable’s expense, telling employees:

Time Warner continues to execute a seriously customer-unfriendly strategy for managing the pressure they feel from their customers’ usage of broadband services.

More proof that Time Warner is just focused on how to add PRICE INCREASES to their High-Speed services; Frontier’s focus has never wavered – we ADD VALUE for our customers.

I actually agree with most of that, and would be on board except for the Excedrin-size headache created by Frontier’s customer service in DeLand, Florida.  They’re confused about their own products and services and are prone to making lots of mistakes processing orders and requests.

Before taking shots at TWC, let’s get one’s own house in order first.

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