Canada’s largest privately owned telecommunications provider is getting into the mobile broadband business.

EastLink, which owns cable systems in communities across nine provinces, is constructing its own mobile phone and data network set to launch in 2012.  Part of that network will be its own competitive wireless mobile broadband service.

EastLink is using licensed wireless spectrum acquired in a 2008 federal auction which will allow it to provide cell service in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, north and southwest Ontario, and the metropolitan region of Grand Prairie, Alta.  But its first priority is delivering service on Prince Edward Island and in Nova Scotia, where EastLink is based.

“With this network evolution, our customers will be able to work and communicate more reliably and faster than ever before,” said Matthew MacLellan, president of EastLink Wireless.

EastLink subsidiary Delta Cable delivers cable service in western Canada.

EastLink’s new wireless network will use HSPA technology, presumably at the speeds most common in Canada — 21 or 42Mbps.  Ericsson is providing the equipment for the network.

EastLink has nearly a half-million customers, a tiny number in comparison to market leaders Bell, Rogers, and Telus.  But the company has a reputation for delivering advanced service, and is well-regarded in Atlantic Canada, especially for delivering Internet at speeds up to 100Mbps.

“They have a very strong reputation so they’ll be likely to shake up the market down there,” Brownlee Thomas, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., told The Wire Report.

EastLink’s primary focus is on its Canadian subscribers, but the company has also investments in Bermuda, and its subsidiary Delta Cable delivers service to one American community — the enclave of Point Roberts, Washington, located south of Delta, British Columbia.

Five years ago, municipal Wi-Fi projects were enjoying a small boom.  The concept of providing low-cost or free Internet access seemed like a winner because it could provide service to those who could not afford traditional broadband, would stimulate economic development downtown, and possibly attract business as shoppers stopped in cafes or stores to use their wireless devices.  In some communities, just the spectacle of a city-wide high technology wireless network delivered worthwhile bragging rights that adjacent communities didn’t have.

For most city or town officials pondering investment in a Wi-Fi network, the idea germinates from a perceived lack of service from private providers.  If private companies were delivering the service, few communities would spend the time, effort, and money duplicating it.

In the community of Marshalltown, public Wi-Fi in 2005 was a service only found in a small selection of stores and cafes in the central business district.  The Marshalltown Economic Development Impact Committee sought to change that, promoting a plan to construct a free-to-use Wi-Fi network covering a 20-block radius centered on the Marshall County Courthouse.  The community of 27,000 got a three month trial of the downtown Wi-Fi network in 1995, with the city and county sharing 50 percent of its cost, with the remaining 50 percent paid for by private donations.

Mediacom, the cable company serving Marshalltown, was incensed by the notion of a community-owned broadband provider delivering improved (and free) Internet access across the city.  Even worse in their eyes, local government officials were pondering creating a public broadband utility.

Marshalltown (Marshall County), Iowa

It wasn’t long before new, shadowy groups with names like “Project Taxpayer Protection” showed up in town attacking the concept of municipal Internet access.  After a blizzard of brochures and exaggerated claims about “government broadband,” the network became a point of controversy among the locals.

Only later would the community learn the group (whose status as a non-profit was later revoked by the Internet Revenue Service for failure to file timely reports on its funding and activities) was actually funded mostly by Mediacom itself, with the full support of the Iowa Cable Association.

The astroturf campaign against public involvement in Wi-Fi, which could threaten Mediacom’s broadband service profits, was effectively an investment against competition.  It was an effort that paid dividends by late 2005, when the city and Mediacom suddenly announced a new “public-private partnership” to administer and expand the Wi-Fi network.  There were a few important changes, however:

1. Mediacom’s concept of “free” was markedly different than the designers’ original vision.  The cable company had other ideas, placing restrictions on how much “free use” was allowed;
2. Customers who used the newly-announced “free service” got it at speeds not much better than dial-up and definitely slower than 3G;
3. Residential Mediacom broadband customers could get unlimited time on the formerly-free network, if they paid $19.95 a month for 256kbps access;
4. To make the network seem business-friendly, business customers were told they could get up to 10Mbps service for $59.95 a month.

The goal of the partnership, according to Mike Miller, chairman of the Marshalltown Economic Development Impact Committee, was to see low-cost broadband Internet access citywide by the end of 2006.

Oh, and Mediacom insisted on something else: no more talk of a city-created municipal telecommunications provider, at least for a year anyway.

“We commend you on the foresight and vision to do this,” Bill Peard, Mediacom’s government affairs manager, told city officials at the time the deal was announced.

Friends until the community-owned...

Once Mediacom got its hands on the formerly community-owned network, it was the beginning of the end.

Business customers could not get Mediacom to sell them access at the promised price because representatives could not find the offer.

It was much worse for residential users.

Free Wi-Fi access soon became limited to one hour a day, up to 10 hours per month for non-Mediacom customers.  After that, you paid if you wanted more.

City and company officials spent most of their time wrangling over the costs of the service and its future potential.  What city officials were not planning for was the network’s virtual demise at the hands of the cable company.

...free Wi-Fi network is at an end.

Today, free access is a distant memory, as Mediacom pulled the plug claiming there was “limited interest.”

Effectively, Mediacom’s idea of a public-private partnership was the systematic decommissioning of a community’s public Internet alternative, all to protect its own broadband business.

That’s a lesson of caution for any community seeking to team up with private broadband providers.  Marshalltown allowed that partnership to first and foremost serve Mediacom’s business interests, not the public.  Now that network is effectively gone and largely-forgotten.

That suits Mediacom just fine.

For the sake of public relations, most cable and telephone companies are happily providing service credits to customers who ask after they lost service as a result of Hurricane Irene.  Denying those requests through invocation of weasel contract clauses referencing “acts of god” or “weather-related incidents” will assuredly leave customers less than pleased.  That’s a lesson some employees in Comcast’s call center still need to learn.

The fact is, most consumers shouldn’t have to pay for service undelivered.

Here is one Comcast customer’s plight:

When I contacted Comcast in the days following Irene I was initially told I’d be without service for a day and would receive credit for the loss. When I called two days later, I was told it would be two days, but I would receive credit. When I called six days later I was told they didn’t know how long it would be and that when it was restored I would not be receiving credit for the lost service.

“Wait, you’re telling me you’re going to try and bill me for service I never received,” I asked the customer service agent.

“We’re not going to try. We will be billing you,” he responded.

Another customer service representative verified the information with a supervisor, but sounded as incredulous as I felt when he came back to the phone.

The outage, he explained, is now considered an “act of god”.

“I can’t believe we’re going to do this,” he said.

He suggested I call back when the service was restored for credit.

“I can’t believe we’re not going to give credit,” he said again, before telling me to have a nice weekend.

To be fair, this is the experience of a single customer, and a search of prior storm events in Comcast service areas does show the company is usually willing to issue storm-related credits, as long as it was their service that was disrupted.  One of the issues cable providers have to deal with in weather disasters is ascertaining exactly who and what suffered the outage.  If the area’s local power company loses service, Comcast cable service could be affected directly or not at all.  A widespread outage could cause amplifiers to lose power, cutting off cable service to those with or without power.  But should Comcast credit you for lost service if the only thing keeping you from watching is a downed power line in your neighborhood that hasn’t affected cable service?

That dilemma many customer care professionals solve with courtesy credits to maintain customer goodwill.  But not every provider may automatically issue them, especially when dealing with low level employees in a customer care center.

If Comcast is refusing to provide you with service credits, there are a few quick steps to bypass “the unauthorized to give you what you want”-team and get your money back:

1. If calling by phone, ask if you are talking with a local customer care representative or one located thousands of miles away.  Ask to be transferred to a local office for assistance.  Those on the ground going through the same storm nightmares you are are likely to be more amenable towards giving you a service credit.
2. If using an e-mail form or online chat, call Comcast or visit your local Comcast cable store instead.  Again, someone sharing your misery is more likely to find a way to get you a service credit than someone who hasn’t lived through it.
3. File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau online requesting your service credit.  While Comcast is not BBB accredited, the organization has helped satisfactorily close more than 2,000 customer complaints.
4. Call your local television or newspaper “consumer reporter” and alert them.  Bad publicity is a great way to get any unyielding business to bend.

We expect a few negative stories in the media will be more than enough to inspire Comcast to provide service credits, gracefully.

Besides, if Comcast gives you a hard time about “acts of god,” you can always tell them the same thing when they ask to be compensated for cable equipment that succumbed in the storm.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WABC Hassling LIPA 9-2-11.mp4[/flv]

Storm-weary Long Island residents are getting fed up with extended service outages.  One went as far as to allegedly threaten a “Columbine-style attack” on a Long Island power facility.  Repair crews are also being hassled.  WABC in New York reports.  (3 minutes)

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCBS Anger in LI 9-1-11.mp4[/flv]

WCBS found the same kind of anger in Suffolk County, aggravated by self-congratulating press conferences by utility companies even as hundreds of thousands of customers remained in the dark with no end in sight.  One Connecticut man even threatened a repair crew with a gun for trespassing.  (2 minutes)

Netflix streaming customers who happen to share their account with other family members are having a frustrated Labor Day weekend as Netflix completes implementation of strict new limits on the number of concurrent video streams available for viewing.

Netflix has always unofficially had streaming limitations:

Some membership plans allow you to watch simultaneously on more than one personal computer or Netflix ready device at the same time. If you are on the 1 disc out at-a-time plan [or stream-only plan], you may watch only one device at a time. If you are on the 2 discs out at-a-time plan, you may watch on up to two devices at the same time. Members on the 3 disc plan can watch on up to three devices. The maximum is four devices simultaneously, and that is available for members on the 4 or greater discs out at-a-time plans.

But many of our readers have told us they have never had problems running two or even three concurrent streams at the same time on a “stream-only” plan… until recently.  What Netflix’s “official policy” was and what customers could actually do were two different things.

“Netflix never liked two streams at the same time on the same browser, but if you have several family members, two or three people could watch different shows on their own devices at the same time, but no more,” says Stop the Cap! reader Jared Ustel.  “As of this weekend, streaming customers can only watch one show at a time.”

Stop the Cap! was able to verify this ourselves this weekend.  Sure enough, while in the recent past we were able to support up to three video streams running at the same time, now it is just one.

This new restriction seems timed to coincide with Netflix’s recent price increases, which took effect Sept. 1.  Now, large families sharing a Netflix account will either have to reserve time to watch their respective favorites or:

1. Pay considerably more for a combo disc-rental/streaming plan which unlocks a corresponding number of concurrent streams.  If you want two concurrent video streams, you will need to pay $19.98 a month, which also allows you two mailed DVD’s out at a time.  Three streams (and DVD’s) runs $23.98, four: $29.98;
2. Sign up for a second Unlimited Streaming account at an additional $7.99 a month;
3. Forget about Netflix.

While Netflix may have been hoping to cut down on the number of “shared accounts” with friends and distant family members, their policy change will hit families hard.

With the controversial Sept. 1 price increase effectively near-doubling the cost to watch video streams and rent one DVD at a time by mail, now may not be the best time to further antagonize loyal customers.

[Updated 9/7/11 — 12:22pm ET — “No Netflix member is limited to less than two concurrent streams,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey reports. “A few Netflix members have heard differently from us, which is an error that we are correcting.”

They have not corrected it as of yet.  Jared updates us to say he is still unable to stream more than one program at a time, and as of 11:45am ET this morning, launching more than one stream at Stop the Cap! HQ brings the error message shown below.  Technical glitch or last-minute policy shift?  Two concurrent streams still don’t work for us or for several of our reporting readers (at the moment anyway) and their long-standing FAQ still states Unlimited Streaming customers are limited to a single stream.  Mr. Swasey can help his own customers by ensuring concurrent streaming is restored and the FAQ updated to reflect the information he shared.]

[Updated 9/7/11 — 3:00pm ET — Two concurrent streams are back.  More details here.

As of late this morning, Netflix was still delivering this error message.