911 Nightmare! After the ink was dry on the approval to transfer Verizon customers to FairPoint Communications, and the transition had begun, the foreshadowing of problems started in the late spring of 2008 when Maine experienced several 911 system crashes and outages, putting safety at risk for citizens whose urgent pleas for help went unanswered for hours at a time.

WMTW in Portland led the newscast on May 19th with the latest developments:

Not every municipal broadband provider assures customers of a cap-free broadband experience.  Some of the smaller providers serving the municipalities that cable passed by constructed their own networks decades ago to meet the cable television needs of their citizens.  But because they lack the economy of scale, volume discounts the big boys get are simply not available to smaller independents.  Often the result is a system compelled to charge higher prices, because its wholesale costs are greater.  That’s the case in San Bruno, California — a city of 40,000 12 miles south of San Francisco.

San Bruno Municipal Cable TV has been the incumbent, municipally owned operator since its inception in 1971.  In the late 1960s, local government officials asked residents whether they preferred a private or municipal operator.  The majority wanted local government to provide the service, and so it did.  San Bruno was an early adopter of cable television, building a system at least a decade before many other communities across the country saw their first cable television truck.

San Bruno is surrounded by Comcast, which has made a conscious decision to avoid San Bruno, despite the fact it could apply for a franchise, and one would likely be granted.

The company introduced broadband service to its customers in 1999 after completing a system rebuild.  Historically, the company has always made usage limits a part of its acceptable use policy, and enforcement over the years has varied between throttling speeds once a limit was reached, to threats of overlimit fees as high as $10/GB.  But most customers report those kinds of fees were never actually charged.  The company sought to use the limits to scare people into compliance.

San Bruno, California

Today, San Bruno’s cable TV company has three tiers of broadband service defined by consumption levels – 50, 100, and 150GB per month.  The company defends these policies by indicating their wholesale costs are higher to obtain Internet connectivity.  San Bruno’s high speed provider has fewer than 5,000 broadband subscribers.  Despite those higher costs, the company’s current “overlimit” fee is $0.25/GB, which is much lower than TWC’s proposed $1-2/GB overlimit fee.

So what do customers think?  Online reviews are consistently negative about the quality of service, and we’ve received many complaints about the consumption-based tiering, particularly when nearby Comcast customers live under a simple “please don’t exceed 250GB with a residential account per month” policy.  But San Bruno residents enjoy a respectable 12Mbps/512Kbps level of service for $32.95 a month, $10 less than Comcast subscribers pay, as long as they avoid exceeding 50GB of usage per month.

What everyone agrees on is the need for additional competition.  Currently, AT&T offers 3Mbps DSL service in parts of San Bruno for around $40 a month.  That’s hardly comparable in speed or cost.  Comcast has refused to compete across San Bruno, so another cable provider is unlikely.  Ultimately, the deployment of AT&T U-verse, if it happens, would be the closest equivalent competitor, because it can match and exceed the municipal cable provider’s speeds.

Another compelling question — why does San Bruno Municipal Cable, serving fewer than 5,000 broadband customers, find that charging just a quarter per gigabyte in overlimit fees recoups their expenses, while the far larger TWC proposes charging considerably more — $1-2/GB?  Perhaps overlimit fees aren’t as much about cost recovery as they are about emotionally conditioning customers to ration their use out of fear of a shocking cable broadband bill with overlimit fees at the end of the month.

Back in April, Time Warner advertised a “central” e-mail address it wanted customers to use to “share ideas and views” about their gouging Cap ‘n Tier pricing scheme.  The company promised it was on a listening tour, enthusiastically promising to read, consider, and respond to customer concerns.

Over on Broadband Reports, “De” finally received a reply to input sent more than a month ago:

Well I eventually submitted an email to TWC about the caps on April 14th. To prove they pay attention to their customers, they sent me this reply today (Over a month later) LMAO:

To: RealIdeas
Subject: Greedy Bandwidth Caps. The truth!?
Sent: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:22:52 -0400<  >

was deleted without being read on Sun, 31 May 2009 01:49:12 -0400

Just goes to prove they don’t care if the consumer wants the per byte billing or not – it’s coming anyway.

Our opinions and views are nothing to TWC — all that matters is the $$$$. The whole PR about them listening is just to ease media and political pressure. They have made their mind up already.

Promises, promises.  The one thing you can always count on with mergers and acquisitions: the promise what they’ll bring you tomorrow is better than what you have today, but only if you approve the deal.  The concept of forward momentum from change is very compelling when it comes to technology.  The lesson people have to learn is that not all change is good, and not all promises are always kept.  For New Englanders drawn into the transfer of their telephone service from Verizon to FairPoint Communications, the allure of faster broadband certainly sounded good, with promises made in July 2008 that 75% of Vermont would have access to FairPoint DSL service by the end of that year.

[flv width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WPTZ Fairpoint Announces Huge Expansion 9-30-08.flv[/flv]

This report, aired on September 30, 2008 on WPTZ Plattsburgh (viewable in Vermont) also displayed a company-made sign promising that 100% of Vermont would have broadband service available from FairPoint by 2010.  But the numbers were already in dispute when another station serving Vermont, WCAX in Burlington, reported that same day that just 80% of customers would have access by that time:

[flv width=”368″ height=”208″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCAX Burlington FairPoint Promises Internet Expansions 9-30-08.flv[/flv]

Why the discrepancy?  After all, the visual material on display at the town hall meeting covered by both stations clearly showed a map claiming 100% coverage.

With the benefit of time, the answer turns out to be that promises made by one company official were not always repeated by others.  Indeed, FairPoint has a history of tempering enthusiasm.  Enthusiasm that sometimes originated from the company itself.

Watch in amazement as the numbers drop and the excuses mount.  As the Bennington Banner quoted a FairPoint spokesman in 2008, the numbers and scope of the actual rollout was considerably smaller than the sweeping improvements being promised:

“By 2010, we hope to have at least 80 percent of households in the state with DSL access,” Fastiggi said. “We hope to have every customer in half of our exchanges to have access by 2010 as well.” According to Fastiggi, though, the expansion does not mean that every house in these towns will receive access to the service. “We’re doing certain areas in each town — nothing we’re doing encompasses the entire town,” Fastiggi said. “I don’t want to say we’re expanding bit by bit, but we are moving neighborhood by neighborhood.“

New Englanders, at the time of these announcements, were hopeful, but skeptical whether or not the company would meet its goals.  They were right to be.

As for those wireless connections promised to the most rural areas of the state, the company did sign a contract with Nortel Networks and Airspan Networks to construct a network based on the aging fixed wireless 802.16d standard. Known as “fixed WiMAX,” the technology is largely being abandoned by many providers in favor of the newer mobile WiMAX standard IEEE 802.16e, which has a lot more bells and whistles.  But the technology FairPoint wants to deploy will function for a basic wireless fixed “broadband” service, albeit a comparatively slow one, operating at 1-3Mbps.

So how is the company doing with its DSL “improvements?”  Not so good.  Since these announcements, the company has fallen behind schedule on virtually everything, and was one of the few providers to actually lose broadband DSL customers during the second half of 2008 as many switched to another provider or simply gave up.  They are set to lose MANY more in 2009, for reasons that will become obvious soon enough.

Relax today because the work begins again tomorrow.

Starting this week, we will begin some carefully coordinated pushback against Time Warner Cable’s changes to their Subscriber Agreement, because despite company claims that they’ve not implemented any Cap ‘n Tier system at this time, the writing is on the wall in 1000pt type, readable from space.  No company changes their legalese “just because,” and CEO Glenn Britt’s public statements late last week make it patently obvious which way this road is heading.

Here are the things YOU need to do today so you are prepared to act when we need you:

1. Bookmark this site and check it daily.  A Call to Action is most effective when everyone starts moving on it around the same time.  It’s less helpful to arrive here a week after the fact.  Everytime an article is posted here, our Twitter channel sends out a tweet.  You can follow us on Twitter from the stopthecap channel.  Just insert the text stopthecap in the box on that link and you’ll find us.  I am still working on finding a good e-mail notification system that will let you subscribe and be notified in e-mail when new items are published.
2. You will be asked to write, phone, and e-mail elected officials.  In all such communications, remember the three P’s rule: Be polite. Be persistent.  Be persuasive. I will, when time allows, provide you with sample letters or talking points to use.  Elected officials are wise to pre-formatted, automated contact campaigns, so I do not use them here.  You will always be expected to communicate in your own words, because elected officials will pay attention to those.  They toss out those online petitions, automated pre-written letters, and other communications that look automated.  It will literally take less than five minutes to follow through on most Calls to Action.  If you leave it to someone else, and they leave it to you, nobody picks up the phone or writes the letter.
3. Get educated.  A great deal of information and background material is already here.  You can follow specific company actions, cities, or policies from the menu options along the top of the screen, as well as in the search box.  If you have a question about an article, write it in the comment section.  I try and read and reply to many of them, along with others here.
4. Continue to pass along news tips, suggestions, or other pertinent material through our Contact form.  I try and credit people as often as possible, and some story ideas may appear later on, so don’t be discouraged if yours doesn’t turn up as an article in short order.
5. If you find value in what we do, consider making a contribution.  I am going to begin crediting our contributors (first names by default) here to thank them.  Your contributions pay for server expenses, a post office box, software expenses (this WordPress theme for example), and will also go towards mailing and printing expenses as we start educating elected officials on our issues.  Telecom companies just spent nearly a half million dollars in North Carolina alone to stop municipal broadband there through campaign contributions.  We have to rely on actual facts and a substantially lower budget to fight back!