Stop the Cap! will shortly launch a new Terms of Service Tracker for the nation’s largest Internet Service Providers.  Born from an idea from the Electronic Freedom Foundation, our new tracker will check several provider websites every day looking for any changes to the content of Subscriber Agreements, Terms & Conditions, and any other legal notices that could impact your broadband Internet service.

Many Internet Service Providers don’t time stamp changes — they simply quietly replace one agreement with another, and too often fail to notify customers about what changed.

Most customer agreements have language that permits them to change their terms on a whim, even if they fundamentally change service descriptions, pricing, and try to sneak in usage caps, tiered pricing, bandwidth throttling, and other anti-consumer provisions.  Worse yet, customers under “price protection” or “term contracts” are often only given 30 days to “opt out” before the new terms automatically apply to their accounts.  Customers learning of changes too late to opt out are often stuck paying hundreds of dollars in early termination fees to escape a company that is no longer acceptable to them.

When a company changes any provision in a Subscriber Agreement, all existing customers should be notified by e-mail and on their bills about any changes, and given ample time to react without penalties or traps.  Until the nation’s ISPs begin to consistently provide that notice, we shall.

We’ll have more details shortly, and anticipate allowing our readers to subscribe to automatic updates, informing them about any changes that could impact their service and their wallets.

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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For the first time, an entire first world nation is threatened with being dumped into a broadband backwater by abusive practices from commercial Internet providers across Canada.

Usage caps with draconian limits, expensive overlimit fees, slow speeds, traffic “shaping” and overpriced monthly subscription fees have caused Canadian broadband to deteriorate rapidly in world rankings.  As measured by price per megabyte — how much one pays for speed — Canada ranks 28th out of 30 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ahead of only Mexico and Poland.

Canada’s disastrous decline from one of the world’s leaders in broadband service to today’s bottom of the barrel status in certain categories can be blamed on one thing: the nation’s commercial Internet providers.  The OECD report gives declining marks nearly across the board for Canada’s broadband marketplace.

“This reflects poorly on Canada’s advancement in the information economy,” said University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist. “Canada remains woefully uncompetitive … We’re getting a poor deal.”

In fact, competition in Canada continues to decline, with dominant providers typically limited to the local telephone company and cable operator, who are engaged in a competition to leverage higher profits from broadband at the expense of network investment and increased penetration.  Canadians now pay more for less than most industrialized nations because operators have increased rates while imposing miserly usage caps, bandwidth throttling, and stopped the competitive speed and price wars that were a hallmark of broadband competition in Canada 5-10 years ago.

Most Canadians now face a monthly broadband bill averaging $45.65 U.S. per month before taxes/fees.  That’s more than $15 higher than the average fee paid by Americans.  Canadians also belong to the dubious club of just four nations where virtually all providers impose paltry usage caps averaging 60GB per month (Belgium, Australia and New Zealand are the others).

Canadians are still enthusiastic about obtaining broadband access — they’re just angry with the limited choices they have, the lack of solid penetration in many rural areas, and the despised usage caps.

Providers claim they are investing in improving service, but independent observers disagree.  Canada holds the distinction of being one of the few industrialized nations with almost no fiber deployment to residential homes.  When providers cap, throttle, and tier, they artificially control the traffic growth on their networks, taking pressure off the need to keep up with demand, despite high profits.

In the past year, many of these providers also began imposing draconian caps and limits on their wholesale accounts, forcing independent ISP’s to increase rates and impose usage caps at levels that make many independent providers uncompetitive.

The OECD report specifically calls out usage capped broadband, warning it may begin to negatively impact the Canadian economy and the nation’s competitiveness.

“This may become an economic disadvantage in countries with relatively low bit caps, particularly as more high-bandwidth applications appear,” the report said.

Many Canadians have been jealous about the expansion of online video and other applications south of the border, but presently denied to them.  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation warns they may have to wait forever, because usage caps may have permanently eliminated the prospects of online video on a mass scale throughout the country.

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