Another month, another colossal mistake from Frontier Communications.

As dead-tree-format telephone directories make their way to residents in western New York, customers noticed Rochester’s largest employer — the University of Rochester/Medical Center, was largely missing from the company’s Yellow Pages.

Oops.

During the production process for your 2011 FrontierPages Rochester Metro directory, multiple listings were inadvertently omitted or printed in error.  On behalf of FrontierPages and out telephone directory publisher, The Berry Company LLC, I’d like to sincerely apologize for this oversight and any confusion this may have caused.

Frontier printed and enclosed a supplement, University of Rochester Special Edition, to cover the lost listings.  It was the least they could do for the community’s biggest employer.  Ordinary consumers (like myself), don’t get similar treatment.  For the seventh year in a row, Frontier’s White Pages lists an old address we left in 2004.  This, despite not less than 15 reminders asking them to fix it.

Should any family have to fight over the monthly Internet bill?

One of the side effects of Internet Overcharging is the one-two punch of the usage cap combined with a steep overlimit penalty.  While usage capping providers pay pennies for your Internet traffic, they can charge you up to $10/GB if you dare exceed your plan allowance.

Making sure you don’t… too much… is the job of the provider who will helpfully educate you on how to use your service less, how to establish an in-home Ministry for State Security — tracking down those malfeasant family members who want to deny running the bill up, and providing inaccurate monitoring tools designed to make you think twice about everything you do online.

Far-fetched?

Not really.  Just ask Mathew Ingram, a Rogers Cable customer in Ontario who tells Techdirt he spends much of his free time trying to figure out who is doing what with the family broadband account:

I have three teenage daughters who also download music, TV shows and so on. I figured someone had just gone a little overboard, and since it was close to the end of the month, I thought it wasn’t anything to be worried about. The next day, however, I went online and checked my usage (Rogers has an online tool that shows daily usage), and it said that I had used 121 GB more than my allotted amount for the month. In other words, I had used more than 100 GB in less than two days.

I just about spit my coffee all over the computer screen. How could I possibly have used that much? According to Rogers, I owed $181 in overage charges. Luckily there is a maximum extra levy of $50 a month (just think what it would cost if I was subject to usage-based billing).

With the help of Rogers (who also helped themselves to $50 of Ingram’s money for overlimit fees), an employee identified security holes in his wireless router which could have let all the neighbors join the broadband usage party at his expense.  But in reality, after considerable family tension and drama, one of Ingram’s daughters confessed to downloading some TV shows and forgot to close the file sharing software used to grab them.

Ingram learned a $50 (this month) lesson — he is not free to sit back and enjoy his broadband account that costs him much more than American providers charge for the same thing (without a usage cap).  He serves at the pleasure of Rogers Cable, who wins if Ingram succeeds in keeping his family’s usage under the limit — costing Rogers less money, or by pocketing the overlimit fees charged when he fails.

What scares many Canadians are plans by some providers to eliminate the monthly maximum overlimit fee.  That would have left Ingram paying a $181 penalty instead of $50.  As far as cable companies like Rogers are concerned, it’s his own fault for not keeping his family under control, and now he will pay the price.

In what one website is calling a data witch hunt, AT&T is reaching out and touching some unlimited data plan customers the company suspects of “tethering” — the practice of sharing your smartphone data plan with other devices such as a laptop, iPad, or even home computer.

Just a short time ago, Stop the Cap! reported AT&T was tracking down “heavy users” that were using over 10GB of wireless usage per month.  But now it appears AT&T is starting to contact customers using less — as little as 5GB, warning them they must sign up for a tethering plan if they intend on tethering their phones.  Only many getting the warnings are not tethering at all.  Modmyi, which has an active forum discussing the subject, reports their latest findings:

The first round appeared to be users on AT&T unlimited data plans that used more than 10GB of data in March. The latest round appears to be similar users using more than 5GB in March. It appears AT&T is on a data witch hunt. We’ve seen the message sent to users who simply use a lot of bandwidth (and never even tether/jailbreak) as well as users that use unauthorized tethering.

What’s most shocking is that many users have reported calling AT&T and were asked if they were using Netflix, Pandora, etc. Some have been told that using those services is the definition of tethering. We’re not sure if this is coming down from the AT&T top, or if this is simply non-technical AT&T customer service reps that are confused about what tethering is. However, based on the number of user reports, and the chances that users are very likely reaching different reps, this seems like deliberate AT&T rep training. Seemingly unethically, many customers are being convinced to pay for a tethering plan when they’re in fact not tethering at all.

AT&T has sought to monetize data usage across all of their networks, first imposing a 2GB usage cap on their wireless customers and now plans a 150-250GB cap on their wired broadband services.

Resort communities like Wildwood, N.J. become near ghost-towns when the lucrative summer season comes to an end.  But Comcast expects motel owners to keep paying for cable service even after they lock their doors and shut down during the winter.

Now more than three dozen area independent hotel owners have told Comcast to take a hike — they are switching to satellite.

For owners, Comcast has added insult to financial injury with higher rates and new requirements for year-round service that nobody watches from October-April.

It wasn’t always this way.  Comcast formerly grandfathered seasonal service into contracts for area resorts.  No converter boxes were required either, making it easy to install in hotel rooms.

But no more.

The cable company claims it needed “rate consistency” in the region and raised prices.  Plus, Comcast has notified hotel owners they’ll need to accommodate digital set top boxes — one to a television, something owners considered the final straw.

James “Jimmy” Johnson, owner of the 48-room Imperial 500 told the Philadelphia Inquirer he invested almost $60,000 for flat panel televisions in his rooms that Comcast now wants to slap cable boxes on.  Johnson is not happy about that, because guests could walk off with them and their accompanying remote controls.

“I go through remotes like you go through underwear,” Johnson told the newspaper.  Comcast charges substantial fees for lost or stolen cable equipment.

Comcast also sought pricing changes that would charge motel owners for service per-television, instead of per-room.  Several motels have multiple televisions in each room, substantially raising prices.

As a result of the rate increases and what many owners have called the cable operator’s intransigence, they are kicking Comcast out, installing satellite television from DirecTV instead.

After an initial investment of $6,400 for the satellite equipment, many owners expect significant savings from DirecTV’s seasonal service contracts, although some guests may find regional sporting events exclusive to Comcast unavailable in their satellite-TV equipped rooms.

But for Johnson, the savings are worth it.

“I’m renting rooms; I’m not running a sports bar. . . . With computers now, you can get a lot of games on your computer, or your phone,” Johnson told the Inquirer.

Time Warner Cable’s business services division today unveiled a new scalable online storage service for business class customers that automatically backs up computer and server files to a remote data center over its cable broadband network.

“Businesses are increasingly reliant on vital computer data, and their need to protect and maintain this critical information also continues to grow,” said Craig Collins, Senior Vice President, Business Services Sales & Marketing, Time Warner Cable Business Class. “Our new Business Class Online Backup provides our customers with a reliable and secure data storage service that will enable their business operations to proceed unimpeded should data loss occur.”

The service can support backups running well into the terabytes of data, uploaded over the cable company’s increasingly DOCSIS 3-compliant broadband network, which can help maximize upload speed.

Business class customers already enjoy “prioritized” service for business broadband traffic, which travels over the same cable lines used by residential cable customers.

With the introduction of online file backup, one of the most data-intensive services around, Time Warner Cable is demonstrating it believes its network can sustain the increased traffic online cloud storage will bring, all without usage limitations.

Some broadband providers, including Time Warner Cable, have historically claimed broadband traffic growth has necessitated experiments to control and manage usage.  But with necessary infrastructure upgrades, the cable operator has proven it can deliver a more robust broadband service to customers, and earn additional revenue selling products that take advantage of increased capacity.