Verizon FiOS customers are receiving letters this week informing them the company is locking down video content from being recorded and copied by viewers:

We also would like to inform you that on or after July 31, 2012, Verizon will begin to implement the requirements of certain premium channels (which requirements are authorized by the Federal Communications Commission), that prohibit the copying of recorded content to more than one recorder (such as a DVR or mobile device). This may affect the functioning of some multi-room DVRs. Recent software updates from the manufacturers of these devices may provide options, such as streaming, that preserve multi-room functionality for affected channels.

Consumers using DVR boxes should still be able to record whatever shows they want, but those using external copying or recording tools, or use CableCARDs, will be stymied from copying digital content protected by a copyright flag, and CableCARDs will now have to be pre-authorized to authenticate customers for access to the channels they want to watch.

In real terms, this will likely create hassles for customers using third party viewing devices that can stream shows from one place to another, if those devices detect and respect the copyright flag set by the provider.  This could also block access to certain streaming apps, unless they are rewritten to support the copyright sensitivity of the programmer.

As Verizon Wireless implements its new “Share Everything” plan today, customers who discard their unlimited data plan in favor of Verizon’s new usage-limited plan can give the company even more money to make sure they are not bill shocked if someone on a family plan goes hog wild.

Verizon’s “Usage Controls” feature runs $4.99 a month and gives customers a tool to customize allowances for each plan participant:

Even with the new usage controls, some customers are upset Verizon will extract more from customers’ wallets if they switch plans.

“My plan for my wife’s phone will be going from $33 for minutes, $10 for text, and $25 for data, all per month, to a plan that is $40 for minutes and text and $60 for data, all per month,” writes one Chicago Tribune reader. “So my monthly bill is going from $68 to $100, plus taxes and fees. If I add one more Smartphone, the total goes to $150 per month. How exactly am I saving anything?”

Comcast is running “welcome back” ads in Chattanooga that still claim they run America’s fastest ISP, when they don’t.

EPB, Chattanooga’s publicly-owned utility that operates the nation’s fastest gigabit broadband network, has already won the speed war, delivering consistently faster broadband service than any of its Tennessee competitors. So when facts are not on their side, competitors like Comcast and a conservative “watchdog” group simply make them up as they go along.

Comcast is running tear-jerker ads in Chattanooga featuring professional actors pretending to be ex-customers looking to own up to their “mistake” of turning their back on Comcast’s 250GB usage cap (now temporarily paroled), high prices, and questionable service.

“It turns out that the speeds I was looking for, Xfinity Internet had all along,” says the actor, before hugging an “Xfinity service technician” in the pouring rain. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

The ad closes repeating the demonstrably false claim Comcast operates “the nation’s fastest Internet Service Provider.”

“I see those commercials on television and I’m thinking, I wonder how much did they pay you to say that,” says an actual EPB customer in a response ad from the public utility.

It turns out quite a lot. The high-priced campaign is just the latest work from professional advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco, which is quite a distance from Tennessee. Goodby has produced Comcast ads for years. The ad campaign also targets the cable company’s other rival that consistently beats its broadband speeds — Verizon FiOS.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Comcast tried to ram their “welcome back” message home further in a newspaper interview with the Times Free Press, claiming “a lot of customers are coming back to Xfinity” because Comcast has a larger OnDemand library, “integrated applications and greater array of choices.”

Comcast does not provide any statistics or evidence to back up its claims, but EPB president and CEO Harold DePriest has already seen enough deception from the cable company to call the latest claims “totally false.”

In fact, DePriest notes, customers come and go from EPB just as they do with Comcast. The real story, in his view, is how many more customers arrive at EPB’s door than leave, and DePriest says they are keeping more customers than they lose.

EPB fully launched in Chattanooga in 2010, and despite Comcast and AT&T’s best customer retention efforts, EPB has signed up 37,000 customers so far, with about 20 new ones arriving every day. (Comcast still has more than 100,000 customers in the area.)

Many come for the EPB’s far superior broadband speeds, made possible on the utility’s fiber to the home network. EPB also does not use Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, which Charter, AT&T, and Comcast have all adopted to varying degrees. Although the utility avoids cut-rate promotional offers that its competitors hand out to new customers (EPB needs to responsibly pay off its fiber network’s construction costs), its pricing is lower than what the cable and phone companies offer at their usual prices.

Comcast claims customers really don’t need super high speed Internet service, underlined by the fact they don’t offer it. But some businesses (including home-based entrepreneurs) do care about the fact they can grow their broadband speeds as needed with EPB’s fiber network. Large business clients receiving quotes from EPB are often shocked by how much lower the utility charges for service that AT&T and Comcast price much higher. It costs EPB next to nothing to offer higher speeds on its fiber network, designed to accommodate the speed needs of customers today and tomorrow.

The competition is less able. AT&T cannot compete on its U-verse platform, which tops out shy of 30Mbps. Comcast has to move most of its analog TV channels to digital, inconveniencing customers with extra-cost set top boxes to boost speeds further.

The fact EPB built Chattanooga’s best network, designed for the present and future, seems to bother some conservative “watchdog” groups. The Beacon Center of Tennesee, a group partially funded by conservative activists like Richard Mellon Scaife through a network of umbrella organizations, considers the entire fiber project a giant waste of money. They agree with Comcast, suggesting nobody needs fast broadband speeds:

EPB also offers something called ultra high-speed Internet. Consumers have to pay more than seven times what they would pay for the traditional service — $350 a month. Right now, only residents of a select few cities worldwide (such as Hong Kong) even use this technology, and that is because most consumers will likely not demand it for another 10 years.

Actually, residents in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea do expect the faster broadband speeds they receive from their broadband providers. Americans have settled for what they can get (and afford). DePriest openly admits he does not expect a lot of his customers to pay $350 a month for any kind of broadband, but the gigabit-capable network proves a point — the faster speeds are available today on EPB at a fraction of price other providers would charge, if they could supply the service at all. Most EPB customers choose lower speed packages that still deliver better performance at a lower price than either Comcast or AT&T offer.

The Beacon Center doesn’t have a lot of facts to help them make their case. But that does not stop them:

• They claim EPB’s network is paid for at taxpayer expense. It is not.
• They quote an “academic study” that claims 75 percent of “government-run” broadband networks lose money, without disclosing the fact the study was bought and paid for by the same industry that wants to keep communities from running broadband networks. Its author, Ron Rizzuto, was inducted into the Cable TV Pioneers in 2004 for service to the cable industry. The study threw in failed Wi-Fi networks built years ago with modern fiber broadband networks to help sour readers on the concept of community broadband.
• Beacon bizarrely claims the fiber network cannot operate without a $300 million Smart Grid. (Did someone inform Verizon of this before they wasted all that money on FiOS? Who knew fiber broadband providers were also in the electricity business?)

The “watchdog” group even claims big, bad EPB is going to drive AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Cable out of business in Chattanooga (apparently they missed those Comcast/Xfinity ads with customers returning to Kabletown in droves):

Fewer and fewer private companies wish to compete against EPB, which will soon have a monopoly in the Chattanooga market, according to private Internet Service Provider David Snyder. “They have built a solution looking for a problem. It makes for great marketing, but there is no demand for this service. By the time service is needed, the private sector will have established this for pennies on the dollar.”

Ironically, Snyder’s claim there is no demand for EPB’s service fall flat when one considers his company, VolState, has been trying to do business with EPB for two years. He needs EPB because he is having trouble affording the “pennies on the dollar” his suppliers are (not) charging.

Snyder tells “Nooganomics” his company wants an interconnection agreement with EPB, because the private companies he is forced to buy service from — including presumably AT&T, want to charge him a wholesale rate twice as much as EPB currently bills consumers. Snyder calls EPB’s competition “disruptive.”

Nooganomics calls EPB’s low priced service a “charity” in comparison to what AT&T and Comcast charge local residents, and the free market can do no wrong-website seems upset consumers are enjoying the benefits of lower priced service, now that the local phone company and cable operator can’t get away with charging their usual high prices any longer.

Deborah Dwyer, an EPB spokeswoman, told the website the company got into the business with state and city approval, followed the rules for obtaining capital and pays the taxes or payments-in-lieu of taxes as the same rate as corporate players. “We believe that public utilities like EPB exist to help improve the quality of life in our community, and the fiber optic network was built to do just that. One of government’s key responsibilities is to provide communities with infrastructure, and fiber to the home is a key infrastructure much like roads, sewer systems and the electric system.”

Snyder can’t dispute EPB delivers great service. He also walks away from the competition-is-good-for-the-free-market rhetoric that should allow the best company with the lowest rates to win, instead declaring customers should only do business with his company to support free market economics (?):

“If you are a free market capitalist and you believe in free markets, you need to do business with VolState,” Mr. Snyder says. “And if you’re highly principled, every time you buy from a government competitor, what you’re voting for with your dollars is, you’re saying, ‘It’s OK for the government come in to private enterprise and start to take over a vast part of what we used to operate in as a free market.’”

Perhaps Snyder and his friends at the Beacon Center have a future in the vinegar business. They certainly have experience with sour grapes.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Comcast Ad Welcome Back.flv[/flv]

Comcast’s emotionally charged ad, using paid actors, was produced by advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners. The commercial running in Chattanooga is a slight variation on this one, which targets Verizon FiOS. (1 minute)

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/EPB Ad.flv[/flv]

EPB uses actual customers, not paid actors, in its own advertising that calls out Comcast’s false advertising.  (1 minute)

Squadron

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative business-funded lobbying group, has been sneaking around New York’s state capital pretending to be a charity when it is in reality responsible for authoring at least 39 bills during the current session of the legislature.

Sen. Dan Squadron, the ranking Democrat on the state Senate Investigations and Government Operations Committee told the Wall Street Journal the corporate-backed group should be registered a lobbying group and not a charity.

“You know they say if it looks like a duck quacks like a duck, it must be a lobbyist,” said Sen. Bill Perkins, a Manhattan Democrat. “As such it is required to be registered, and its activities are required to be transparent, and apparently that is not what’s happening right now.”

ALEC provides legislators with corporate-written sample legislation that elected officials can use as templates to produce their own bills that favor corporate interests. The group claims a 20 percent success rate getting bills passed through the New York State Legislature, which is not bad in a legislative body legendary for its dysfunction.

Maziarz

Common Cause New York says it will file a formal complaint next week with state ethics officials about ALEC’s failure to properly register itself as a lobbying group.

That brought a strong response from ALEC, which accused Common Cause of being part of a grand liberal conspiracy with George Soros to harass and silence the group.

Two state senators with reportedly close ties to ALEC are Sen. George Maziarz, a Republican from Niagara County, and ALEC state chairman Sen. Owen Johnson, a Long Island Republican.

Maziarz, who accepts campaign contributions from Verizon Communications, was in the middle of a 2010 dispute over a proposed Verizon data center to be built in Somerset, N.Y. Maziarz sided with Verizon and verbally attacked one of his constituents who opposed the pace of the project, and its lack of a complete environmental impact review.

Verizon ultimately changed its mind about the project after purchasing Terremark, which operates data centers.

Humm

T-Mobile USA’s chief executive Philipp Humm is stepping down from his position to accept a job offer from a European wireless carrier.

In a letter to T-Mobile USA staff released Wednesday, company executives disclosed Humm was hoping to leave T-Mobile by the end of September to be with his family in Europe. But now Humm has accepted a position with an unnamed European competitor to T-Mobile and plans to leave immediately.

Chief operating officer Jim Alling assumes the CEO position temporarily at a time when T-Mobile is struggling to regain its identity after a failed merger attempt with AT&T. The company is spending aggressively to upgrade its network to stem subscriber losses numbering 1.65 million contract customers last year.

Humm earlier indicated he wanted to see T-Mobile shed its image of being the place for cheap phones and not-well-respected service. The company has plans to launch its own LTE 4G network and is competing to bring the latest handsets to customers. T-Mobile is positioned between Sprint’s unlimited data and AT&T/Verizon Wireless’ data allowances with steep overlimit fees. T-Mobile limits data use, but does not charge overlimit fees, preferring to throttle data speeds until the next billing date.