Sources say an elderly Vienna man is dead after falling down in a confrontation outside his home with a Verizon FiOS technician.

Police say 79-year-old Bill Cornelious was unhappy with the installation of a new service.

The Verizon employee left the home at about 5 p.m. Wednesday, and the elderly man followed him out and tried to block the technician’s van from leaving the driveway.

Vienna police say the man tried to reach inside the van and grab the steering wheel. It was then that he fell and suffered the injuries that caused his death. WJLA-TV reports on this tragedy which occurred in late June and was brought to our attention today:

[flv width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WJLA Washington – Elderly Man Dies After Encounter With FiOS Technician 06-18-09.flv[/flv]

It’s unfortunate that disputes over cable/television service can lead to these kinds of confrontations and tragic results.

Netflix, Apple, and Amazon — are you paying attention? This is your future, as your business plans go up in flames should Internet Overcharging schemes get a foothold in the United States.

Sky Television is New Zealand this week announced it was throwing in the towel on Sky Online, its broadband video on demand service for New Zealand.  It’s not that the service wasn’t popular and keenly sought by broadband customers in the country.

John Fellet, Sky New Zealand

Chief Executive John Fellet said the fault was entirely with broadband providers who annoyed customers with broadband usage caps.  In the end, “the service does not make sense in the current New Zealand broadband market.”

Subscribers got unlimited access to Sky Online for $5 a month, but they quickly learned the $5 charge was just the beginning.  Once customers consumed their paltry usage allowance, their speeds were dropped to dial-up for the rest of the month.

“It has not been a great viewer experience,” Fellet told The New Zealand Herald.

Fellet told the newspaper he thought these kinds of usage limits detracted from one of the primary selling points for broadband service in the first place — video content.

Fellet has fielded several customer complaint calls daily about the situation, something he considers the tip of the iceberg.

Until Sky can secure an arrangement to exempt usage caps from their video service, an unlikely proposition, the entire service will be put on hold.

The Herald provides an update on what other services are facing in the south Pacific:

Sky – which has invested heavily in online rights to its programmes – has not been alone in looking to open up the market.

Hybrid Television Services holds Australasian rights to TiVo, which has download capabilities and wants to offer an internet download service. Hybrid, one-third owned by TVNZ, has been talking to Kiwi telcos.

Sky launched its On Demand service this time last year, about 15 months after TVNZ had launched TVNZ ondemand.

Sky has been unable to make it work under a pay TV model. But TVNZ head of emerging markets Jason Paris says that TVNZ ondemand – funded through advertising attachments to programme downloads – has been profitable since March.

Unlike Sky, Paris insisted yesterday that TVNZ had received no complaints from viewers about breaching data caps.

TVNZ was the first broadcaster in Australasia to launch a full online catch-up service and nearly all of of its prime-time shows are available through this service. Each week nearly 250,000 New Zealanders stream 1.5 million shows to their homes, Paris says.

Some TVNZ traffic has been through a relationship with the state-owned ISP Orcon, which has allowed its subscribers to access the TVNZ ondemand website without affecting data caps.

Cable operators have been looking for a way to expand their broadband service to outside the home, and Comcast, Bright House, and Time Warner Cable have found their answer: WiMax technology from Clearwire.  They’ve joined Intel and Google as minority investors, collectively owning 25% of Clearwire, after investing more than $3 billion dollars in the wireless broadband service.  What do they get for the buy-in?  The chance to market Clearwire services to their cable broadband customers for “on-the-go” broadband.

Comcast High-Speed 2go Metro service launched Tuesday in Portland, Oregon providing consumers with portable speed up to 4Mbps in Clearwire’s own 4G network service area.  Comcast customers can sign up for a promotion for $49.95 a month for one year, which includes their wired cable modem service, a Wi-Fi router, and Clearwire wireless service (regular price after the promotion is $72.95 monthly).  Customers can access the service in any Clearwire 4G service area nationwide.  Where Clearwire doesn’t offer service, customers can “roam” on Sprint’s 3G data network nationwide for an additional $20 a month more.  There are no known usage limits at this time.  Existing Comcast broadband customers in Portland can add the Clearwire-based service starting at $30 a month.

The service will work for laptops, but not mobile data devices.  Comcast’s investment in Clearwire made such a venture possible, and is expected to compete with mobile phone broadband data plans, which typically offer 5GB of service for $50 a month.

Comcast will sell service in Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia by the end of 2009.

While the service will be useful for Comcast customers who travel or who want more reliable, fast wireless data access, Clearwire’s ability to serve as a true competitor to Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House may be compromised by those partnerships.

Could Clearwire effectively create promotions and plans that could lead to customers cutting the cord on their cable broadband provider?  Should cable companies increase their investments and ownership interest in Clearwire, would it ultimately matter to them where you obtained service?

The quest for fiber-based broadband service from consumers has reached the point where many have decided to accept or decline offers to purchase property in new housing developments based on whether they’ll have access to fiber or not.  Those were the findings in a study from the Fiber to the Home Council, which surveyed more than 600 existing fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) customers and 600 other broadband customers nationwide.

The results clearly show consumers love fiber optic broadband, far more than cable modems or DSL service from the phone company.

For example, 67% of FTTH users were very satisfied with their broadband speed compared to 58% of cable modem users and 46% of DSL users. A total of 70% of FTTH users were very satisfied with their Internet service up time compared to 64% of cable modem users and 55% of DSL users.

Consumers also reported that FTTH service was faster… much faster than competing technologies.  The median tested download speed from FTTH users was 10.4Mbps. FTTH tested download speed was 51% higher than cable modem service and 593% higher than DSL (DSL has abandoned the speed war, having lost that race to competing technologies, and now prevails only on price and where other alternatives are not available).

Upload speeds offered by FTTH users blew away the competition.  The average subscriber had 2.4Mbps of upload speed, which is 380% higher than cable modem users and 500% faster than DSL.

The survey also showed that robust competition, with at least one provider bringing true fiber to the home service to consumers, meant an average of six percent lower broadband bills.

Some cable and telephone industry executives downplay the lust for speed by consumers, claiming that most don’t understand the differences in speed, and don’t utilize services where speed matters most.  But the FTTH survey found entirely different results.  Not only are FTTH customers extremely loyal and happy with their service, they are reluctant to move to places that don’t offer it.

When asked to imagine purchasing a new home and given a list of five real estate development amenities, both current and non FTTH broadband users rated “Very high speed Internet from a direct fiber line” more important than other amenities such as green space/walking trails, 24 hour neighborhood patrol, a community pool, and a fitness center/club house. 69% of non FTTH users and 82% of current FTTH users said “Very high speed Internet” would be an important factor in buying a new home.

Even in this difficult economy, 49% of FTTH users said their broadband service would be the “last thing” they would give up.  Only 11% said it would be among the first things to go.

The demand is there, but the competition is not in many American communities.  Unless consumers reside in an area where an aggressive provider such as Verizon is willing to deploy fiber to the home, the chances of service arriving anytime in the near future is dismally low.  Few telephone companies are interested in deploying widespread fiber networks to consumers, and most cable operators believe their existing hybrid fiber/coaxial cable networks are “good enough” for consumers.  Only when a third player arrives in town, be it a private competitor or a municipally-owned fiber network, do telephone and cable providers get interested in performing their own fiber upgrades.

AT&T believes in its own copper-wire-based U-verse technology.  Smaller independent telephone companies are doing only limited experiments with fiber deployment, primarily to multiple dwelling units like apartment buildings and condos, and other uniform, expansive new housing developments.

Until prevailing attitudes among providers change, consumers hungering for fiber may simply have to pack up and relocate to the lucky communities that already have it, or will soon.