An inmate serving time for robbery is convinced the local cable company and state corrections department are robbing him on his monthly cable bill.

Joel Santos Maldonado, 28, of Lancaster is serving a 12- to 26-year sentence at the State Correctional Institute at Fayette in Labelle, Luzerne Township, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Maldonado already feels his monthly bill from Texas-based Correctional Cable TV (CCTV), which provides cable service to prisoners, is high enough, but when he discovered the state included a 75-cent monthly “administrative fee” he filed a lawsuit.

Maldonado accuses the state of interfering with his business relationship with CCTV by including the fee.  Without the fee, his bill would be $15.75 a month for the 47-channel cable package.

His suit asks for a reversal of the 75-cent fee as well as unspecified damages.

Prison officials counter the administrative fee has been part of the cable package for at least four years.

Trinity Broadcasting Network offers inmates special programming on CCTV that it claims "rebuilds inmate lives and reduces recidivism"

“The inmate signs an agreement that states we charge this fee when he elects to purchase cable,” corrections department spokeswoman Susan Bensinger told the newspaper. “If he doesn’t want to pay the fee, he can simply elect to not purchase cable TV service.”

Those outside of prison pay more for their cable service.  Cable pricing from Atlantic Broadband is a comparably worse deal.  For $19.99 a month, residents of Labelle get 20 channels, mostly local broadcast stations, public access, and a handful of basic cable channels.  To get a package comparable to what Madonado receives, a customer would have to upgrade to the 67-channel standard service package — for $59.99 a month.

The lawsuit awaits further action in Fayette County court.

Correctional Cable TV began providing cable service to Correctional Facilities in the early 1990’s and currently serves more than 130 facilities across 20 states, particularly in Colorado, Virginia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  The company furnishes, installs, and maintains the equipment to provide the programming at no up front cost to the prison authority.  Programming costs are recouped by charges paid by inmates to receive the service.

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban has once again entered the debate over online video, Internet Overcharging schemes, and giant corporate mergers… and mangled it.

Cuban, who owns HD Net as well as the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, occasionally presents cable industry talking points on his blog, but quickly gets into trouble when he strays from them.

This time, Cuban is annoyed with Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) over remarks the senator made about the proposed Comcast-NBC merger.  Cuban seized on comments by Franken that Comcast should put all of its television programming online.  Doing that, Cuban insists, would lead to higher prices for broadband and usage caps on it.

Where has Cuban been?  I realize the man is too wealthy to worry about the relentless rate increases Comcast and other companies force on consumers every year, but he also forgot Comcast already has a usage cap on its service, even before the feared video tidal wave arrives.

I get that no one really cares if Comcast has to spend money on capital improvements to add bandwidth to the home.  They should. Its pretty damn stupid to push consumption in a direction that will raise internet rates  to receive the same content for which there is already a phenomenal digital network in place to deliver that content.

Think about it for a minute Senator Franken. Comcast, and every large TV Provider has a digital network in place that can and does deliver gigabits of tv content perfectly,  every second of every day, to any TV set in any  home that is connected to their network. It works. Well.  What you are asking Sen Franken, is that Comcast duplicate the delivery of theirs and NBCUniversals shows on a network, the internet,  that is not, and has never been designed to handle the delivery of huge volumes of video and tv shows.

Cuban should be arguing that point with the cable industry.  TV Everywhere, the online video platform that will offer consumers access to “hundreds of TV shows and cable programming,” is their invention.  If Cuban’s fears are correct, why would the nation’s largest cable operators launch such an ambitious online video platform?

Cuban has bought into industry propaganda justifying usage caps.  There is always an excuse for rationing broadband service to boost profits.  First it was file sharing, now it’s online video causing the “serious problem” of customers using broadband service for more than just e-mail and web browsing.  Their solution – monetize it.  Usage caps and usage based billing are about preserving high profits, not protecting or increasing network capacity.  TV Everywhere proves that.

Franken does not advocate usage caps, as Cuban suggests.  The senator simply wants to be certain Comcast cannot act as a gatekeeper, determining who gets access to Comcast-NBC programming, and who does not.

Cuban should be welcome to such measures as a victim of Gatekeeper Abuse himself.  Mark, how many subscribers did you lose nationwide when Time Warner Cable unilaterally pulled the plug on your channels?

[Stop the Cap! will be closely following Google’s experimental gigabit fiber-optic broadband network.  We’ll be bringing regular updates about the communities applying, the strategies they are using to attract Google’s attention, what the competition thinks, and the impact of the project on American broadband.]

Columbia, Missouri is excited about the prospect of being chosen as a test city for Google gigabit broadband.

It’s just one of tens of communities seeking to apply for Google’s new experimental fiber to the home network delivering super fast broadband to residents and businesses.

Columbia is the fifth largest city in the state, with 100,000 residents who call the heart of mid-Missouri home.  Columbia is a classic college town, supporting the University of Missouri.  It’s uniquely known as one of the most-educated communities in the country, with over half of its residents holding college degrees.  Columbia residents are quick to embrace new technology, and this drive to adopt the latest and the greatest has fueled interest in Google’s fiber network.

Columbia’s Regional Economic Development, Inc. (REDI), promoting local business and economic development, has been coordinating what to do next.  They’ve been joined by ComoFiber, which is working to generate public interest in the project and help devise a strategy to win Google’s attention.

Columbia, Missouri

Mike Brooks, from REDI, said the city has seen a great deal of interest from the community to apply for Google’s plan.

Last week, both groups met to educate the public and start identifying why Columbia poses an attractive place for Google’s project.

Some believe Columbia would be the ideal city to build such a network.  ComoFiber explains:

The reasons are numerous, but the biggest reason is really quite simple: Columbia is on the knife’s edge: the sweet spot between big, highly-developed cities and small, under-served towns.

The reason this is so important is because it’s easy to see why Google might want to deploy its fiber in either a big city or a small town, but it’s equally easy to see why they wouldn’t. The big cities have high-tech industry, universities, highly educated populae and other capabilities that allow them to produce the kind of applications and creative products that Google wants to research. On the other hand, major cities already have a great deal of fiber infrastructure, and their broadband prices are generally reasonable. So really, they’re already enabled; adding marginally-faster service to those markets won’t be the kind of sea-change that the plan is designed to study.

ComoFiber compiled a list of strengths from both the “big city” and “small town” perspective:

Columbia/Boone County, Missouri

Columbia as Big City:

1. Multiple colleges and universities, including world-class research facilities.
2. A major life sciences epicenter. Life-science is perhaps the most data-intensive industry in the world.
3. A highly-educated, technically-skilled populace. Thirteenth-most educated in America, to be exact.
4. Many high-tech small businesses, including Internet-centric outfits such as Newsy.
5. Several major hospitals and health care businesses, including some at the forefront of technological advancement.
6. Small-business incubators run in cooperation with universities and the city.
7. The world’s foremost journalism school and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, which houses a state-of-the-art Technology Testing Center.
8. Several existing Internet service providers who can take advantage of this new open network.
9. Excellent data backhaul capability due to our position on the I-70 corridor.
10. With over 100,000 people, the population is high enough to meet Google’s goal for project scale.

Columbia as Small Town:

1. Sub-par broadband performance with high prices.
2. Very little existing fiber-to-the-home infrastructure.
3. High tariffed rates for enterprise-class data products (T1, DS3, etc.)
4. Midrange population density should be a good microcosm for suburbia nationwide.
5. Smaller building development (no high-rises) makes infrastructure deployment simpler.
6. ”The District” contains the kind of mom-and-pop small-town businesses that can innovate unencumbered by corporate imperatives.
7. Frequently listed in “best places to live” compilations, such as that of Money Magazine.
8. Location in the heart of middle America sends a powerful symbolic message.
9. Low cost of living will be nice for the employees Google will need to move in.
10. With only a bit over 100,000 people, the population is low enough not to dwarf Google’s goal for scale.

The incumbent cable operator, Mediacom, can’t understand why there is such excitement over Google’s fiber project.

“Google is going to be in select markets, and it’s kind of a test that they’re rolling out,” Mediacom director of operations Bryan Gann told KOMU-TV in Columbia. “It may be limited to some commercial applications in the beginning.”

Mediacom is Columbia's incumbent cable company

Mediacom doesn’t think most residents have any need for super fast broadband.

“I think when you get up to those higher speeds that fast, it’s a select group that would even be interested in it going at that speed,” Gann said.

Despite that remark, Gann quickly added Mediacom was already providing the fastest broadband access in town.  In early February, Mediacom boosted its top broadband speed to 50Mbps, and Gann says the company already has plans to boost that speed to 100Mbps in the future.

“We’re already supposed to go to 100, so we can press on the accelerator anytime we want to,” Gann said.

When a new fiber-based competitor threatens to arrive in town, most cable companies downplay the competitive threat.  Mediacom was no exception.

Gann told KOMU Mediacom was used to competition in broadband service and doesn’t see Google Fiber as a threat.

“With the technology that the cable industry put into Columbia, we’re ready to increase our speed to match competition,” Gann said.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOMU Columbia Faster Internet May Reach Mid-Missouri 2-16-10.flv[/flv]
KOMU-TV talks about Columbia’s prospects as a chosen city for Google’s new fiber-to-the-home experiment. (2/16/10 – 1 minute)

Channel Siberia

Looking for your local town government meeting on Charter Cable?  Missouri residents may have to send out a search party to find their local public, educational, and government (PEG) channels, because Charter has moved them way, way up the dial for some of their subscribers.

A Lewis & Clark-like expedition by Washington, Missouri councilman Guy Midkiff found his — in the channel 900s range:

PEG programing has been given the heave-ho to stratospheric 900 plus channel, closet. Apparently if your TV is more than 4 years old, you can’t even get the PEG channels without a $5 per month additional fee and a converter box.

What happened to them? Seems the state of Missouri took over the regulation of cable franchises back in 2007. What that meant was that local communities – like Washington, lost all leverage to demand cable hold up  the long standing bargain of making PEG programing available on the low channels. This was part of the original basic package of programing. 

If memory serves, 900 channels used to be the domain of online shoppers. How coincidental that these shopping channels are showing up in the old real estate that was once reserved for PEG. I am sure the fact that cable companies get a piece of the pie from shopping channel sales, has nothing to do with the change of addresses.

Midkiff

It’s another intended consequence of AT&T’s statewide video franchising bill, just one of many making their way across the state legislatures where AT&T provides service.  By removing local oversight of video franchising, the power to ensure residents access to local public, educational, and government programming is lost.  Only the benevolence of the pay television provider keeps it on the dial at all, and when shopping channels show providers the green stuff for an envied lower channel position, it’s a safe bet PEG channels will receive the industry equivalent of an eviction notice.

Cable channel real estate has good and bad neighborhoods.  The lower the channel number you secure, the more prestigious the address.  That’s because most viewers who start channel flipping start from the bottom and work their way up.  Most land on a channel below 40.  Channels 41-60, which used to be the cable ghetto, are now firmly in the “affordable housing” realm.  For those unlucky enough to find themselves above channel 60, the cable industry has a term for that landscape — Channel Siberia.

Under those circumstances, you can image how many viewers are brave enough to make the trek all the way to channels 900 and up.

A handful of large sized Internet Service Providers threaten to strangle Canada’s transition to a digital-ready economy.

The Globe & Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, this week called out the country’s broadband conditions.  The country is falling behind, says the editorial, and without fast action to change things, “the innovations that could employ our future work force could well pass us by.”

One passage should puncture Canada’s complacency: “Canada … is often thought of as a very high performer, based on the most commonly used benchmark of penetration per 100 inhabitants. Because our analysis includes important measures on which Canada has had weaker outcomes – prices, speeds and 3G mobile broadband penetration … it shows up as quite a weak performer, overall.”

The newspaper was particularly critical of current providers, and the regulatory body that oversees them — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).  Recent CRTC policies and rulings have allowed a handful of providers to place a strangehold on the Canadian broadband marketplace, reducing competition and controlling wholesale pricing and access policies.  Bell, Canada’s largest telecommunication company, was awarded approval of a policy to implement usage-based billing on the company’s wholesale accounts.  Many independent service providers obtain broadband access from wholesale accounts with Bell.  When they themselves face usage-billing, so shall customers, who now have fewer reasons to choose an alternative provider in the first place.

There is no magic recipe, but some prescriptions are worth heeding as Canada develops its Internet strategy. The report recommends open access policies, in which companies that build infrastructure for mobile and fixed broadband access are encouraged or required to lease that infrastructure to the competition.

But in Canada, limits on foreign ownership and inconsistent CRTC decisions have lowered the amount of competition needed to spur new and better offerings. There was less stimulus spending on projects to support more widespread Internet access in Canada than there was elsewhere. Decisions on related policy issues, such as copyright reform, have been delayed. A national conference on the digital economy generated buzz – ministers Tony Clement and James Moore are reputed to “get it” – but yielded few results. Our best hope to lead on Internet innovation, the Long-Term Evolution platform being developed by Nortel as a successor to 3G, is now largely in foreign hands.

The editorial provoked a response from Jay Innes, vice-president-public affairs, at Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest cable and wireless operators.  He sought to change the subject:

For Canada to win in a global digital economy, our country needs to establish a national vision that looks beyond the often-flawed statistical rankings of broadband infrastructure. What we need to understand is why so many Canadian households still don’t have computers, why Canada is lagging in scientific research, and how we should best promote the development of Canadian content and applications.

Internet providers called out for offering slow service at high prices routinely attack surveys that measure broadband speed as beside the point, and then just as quickly blame something else for their problems.

Innes fails to recognize that Canadian broadband service, speed, and access policies are directly on point when answering his question about the dearth of Canadian content and applications.  The fact is, with near-universal Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps and usage-based billing, no innovative high bandwidth developer is going to plunge headfirst into the Canadian market.  When that developer realizes Canadian ISPs also have the right to artificially impede their content using “network management” speed-throttling techniques, they won’t even dip a toe in the water.

Canadian media websites, for example, contain dramatically less multimedia content for visitors to explore than their American counterparts.  Multimedia eats into your monthly usage allowance, so Canadians think twice before watching.  Hulu and other online video enterprises don’t bother to license content for Canada because usage limits and overlimit amounts discourage viewing.  Canadians who don’t want even higher telecommunications bills may simply decide the Internet is not for them, and they can get by without a computer.

If Innes wants to get in touch with his fellow Canadians, who are already well aware of his industry’s pricing and usage schemes, he can read Canadian bloggers like Éric St-Jean, who calls out Vidéotron and Bell:

It’s funny how we hear about Vidéotron‘s Ultimate Speed 50 Mbps access, and now Bell‘s Fibe 25 Mbps access and we’re told how great they are. They’re actually both humongous ripoffs, if you have even basic math skills and five minutes ahead of you. Why? They both advertise great speeds, but hidden behind those figures, in very small print, behind two or three clicks from the product pages, you’ll find abysmal monthly transfer caps. This means that, yes you have a very fast connection. But if you were to use it fully, you’d very quickly fall into a lot of debt.

Vidéotron’s transfer cap for their 50 Mbps service is at 100GB/month combined up/down – this means you will bust your cap within 5 *hours* if you were to fill your pipe. In turn, this means that you simply CANNOT reasonably use this service.  If you were to use your service fully – at 50Mbps – for the whole month, you would get a bill for $24,132.50. Granted, that’s a lot of data. But I just want to point out how ridiculous the terms of that offer are – it should not be legal.

Bell’s 25Mbps service has – get this – a 20GB transfer cap on it. They offer an extra 40GB for 5$/month. The base rate is $64.95/month (after 12 months).  The overage is charged at the whopping rate of $2.50/GB. So, if we take the base service + the extra 40GB, we’ll get to that limit within about 5.3 hours.

All I have is a 5Mbps (DSL) connection from Teksavvy. But for $43.95 I have no transfer cap at all, a fixed IP, and immediate access to support techs who’ll know what I’m talking about.  But they can’t offer more than 5Mbps.

I honestly don’t understand how the media isn’t picking up on Bell and Vidéotron’s tactics, and how this can be legal. To me it’s completely false advertising: they advertise great speeds (barely on par with the international market, though), which you can’t reasonably use. All this needs is a lawsuit.

When will we get decent Internet access in Canada?

That’s a question Innes is not prepared to answer because, for him and his provider friends, “decent” access is already here.

Innovation requires freedom to innovate.  Rationed broadband service guarantees “stick to the basics” thinking.  But as long as providers can live comfortably off the proceeds, why should they change the winning formula that provides them with financial success?

from Digg