Oklahoma residents — your state government needs you… to test your broadband speeds.

Mapping the state’s broadband access will require the participation of all levels of state, county, and local government as well as Oklahoma citizens. A new website makes it easy for any Oklahoman to contribute some results of their own.

All Oklahomans are invited to test their Internet connection speed at the broadband mapping website. Visitors can then select their location (work, home, or other), street address, zip code, and what Internet provider they utilize. All the data collected will be consolidated onto a map of Oklahoma depicting what areas of the state are served, underserved, and unserved by broadband.

The Oklahoma Broadband Mapping Initiative is being conducted under the direction of the Secretary of State and a partnership of several state agencies.

Mark Lowenstein was a vice president of strategy at Verizon Wireless, where helped set pricing for the carrier.

The key to turning America into a haven for Internet Overcharging schemes is Re-educating customers to accept that unlimited ‘isn’t fair,’ especially in wireless mobile broadband.

Mark Lowenstein, an industry analyst and commentator, has given his prescription to Internet providers just itching to slap usage limits and overlimit fees on consumers enjoying unlimited broadband service:  you have to Re-educate consumers to accept Internet Overcharging schemes as a “positive” rather than a “punitive” development.

Fierce Wireless, where Lowenstein’s ideas were published, left out the fact he was also a senior executive at Verizon Wireless.

Despite the billions in profits earned from today’s broadband marketplace, some in the industry want to banish “unlimited” from subscribers’ lexicons.  Sure it’s true that many companies’ investments in broadband expansion and upgrades have actually declined in the last few years, right along with the costs to provide the service.  But in a world where revenues in other parts of the business are drying up, someone has to make up the difference — you.

For AT&T, the decision was easy.  If you want the raging-popular iPhone, you’re going to need a two-year service contract and a data plan limited to 2 GB of usage per month.  Exceed that at your financial peril (or use a Wi-Fi hotspot and stay off our 3G network).  Don’t like it?  Too bad for you.  Where else will you find a subsidized iPhone?

Now that AT&T has thrown down the smartphone cap gauntlet, Lowenstein is ready to offer carriers advice on how to make their abusive pricing schemes go down better with consumers.  He wants everyone to take a crash course in computer science. Grandparents everywhere will come to understand the meaning of megabyte and get into the habit of contemplating how many of those will be eaten from usage allowances everytime they use their phones.

A key part of the transition to usage-based pricing is going to be educating users and the app development community about what a “megabyte” is, as well as developing more advanced tools and the right early warning systems to ensure wireless operators don’t end up testifying before Congress for Bill Shock, Part 2. U.S. consumers are accustomed to flat-rate pricing in all other aspects of their connected life: landline phone, wireless voice (increasingly), cable, broadband and so on.

Lowenstein considers AT&T Usage Estimator to be “nifty,” missing the irony of his own declaration that AT&T’s nasty cap means “moderate usage of anything multimedia gets you to 2 GB pretty fast.”  AT&T, he notes, also helpfully notifies customers they are about to bust through AT&T’s subjective definition of an appropriate usage allowance.

He concedes there are some “gray areas” — mere minutiae in AT&T’s greater scheme for fatter profits:

• New generation multitasking smartphones can run apps and other bandwidth-consuming features in the background, sometimes simultaneously, leading to exponential increases in data usage;
• The model of the “constant connection” means apps in the background exchanging data over the mobile network 24/7 could consume plenty of data, or perhaps not.  Few know for sure;
• Consumers are forced to pay for spam, advertising, unwanted file transfers and attachments, and other data not specifically requested;
• Family plan users now need to track something else on AT&T’s website — how much data their kids are using.  Remember the wars over cell phone voice calling plan overages and text messaging?  Wait.

In Lowenstein’s world-view, this all represents opportunity.

Among his suggestions:

1. Add special ratings to apps that are highly consumptive of content.
2. Provide notification before certain content downloads or heavy usage apps.
3. Provide a view into other family plan users.
4. Provide the option for sponsored content and value exchange.

That last one may prove to be the most controversial at all.  It assumes the Kindle model — where the content producer builds in the price of network consumption.  That would make AT&T’s day — forcing content producers to cough up money to deliver content over the same network AT&T already charges customers to access.  Who would turn down being paid twice for the same thing?  Lowenstein’s model allows for advertisers to defray part of the costs:

An advertiser or sponsor could pick up some of the network cost. Or the content publisher could bundle the price of data into the app. Users are comfortable with the “choice” model in the TV world: view it for free on broadcast or Hulu, with commercials; pay a monthly fee for the DVR service and skip the ads; or pay a premium to view that content on-demand, commercial-free.

That suggestion benefits AT&T enormously, but does nothing for content producers who can’t even sustain themselves with advertising.  Lowenstein suggests they should now seek out advertisers to remunerate AT&T?  The implications of wireless carriers deciding who gets the usage-cap-exempt content deal and who doesn’t opens a whole new Pandora’s Box.  It effectively allows a handful of companies to pick the winners and losers in the mobile broadband marketplace.  After all, if AT&T offered free videos on its own video portal but didn’t exempt other websites with the same video content, guess where users will choose to watch.

Lowenstein believes taking these kinds of steps will somehow insulate the wireless industry from charges it’s barely competitive, restricts too much, and charges even more.  Yet usage limits like AT&T’s, coming even as carriers enrich themselves with gotcha add-on plans and extra fees will speak far louder than AT&T providing customers a guide on how to be abused by the wireless carrier just a little less.

I also think how usage-based pricing is handled in wireless will be closely watched in the wired broadband world. Consumers have become accustomed to flat-rate pricing for unlimited data from their broadband provider. But with the exponential growth of video consumption, and the notion of more TV and movie programming being downloaded from or streamed via the Internet, usage-based pricing for certain types of content or highly consumptive customers might be coming to a broadband neighborhood near you.

The “unlimited” ride might be coming to an end, but there’s an opportunity to implement it in a positive, rather than a punitive, manner.

In spite of Lowenstein’s love of telecom industry talking points (hardly a surprise considering he works for that industry), his notions that consumers will accept increasing broadband bills even as the level of service provided is reduced makes him not only wrong, but hopelessly out of touch.

Frenzied stock trading of shares of Frontier Communications began Tuesday as bearish investors placed a record number of bets the company would lose more than a third of its value by August.

Nearly 87,000 “puts” on Frontier changed hands, which is 66 times the monthly average.  This form of derivative trading lets an investor sell stock at a pre-specified, fixed price within a limited time frame, even if the stock price crashes.  These “puts” are comparable to insurance policies, usually sought by investors who believe a stock is about to rapidly decline in value.

Almost all of the volume was generated in two major trades yesterday.  Investors bought July and August puts at the $7.50 level, which suggests at least some investors are betting Frontier stock will decline below that amount.  If it does, they can still sell shares at $7.50.  Frontier fell 17 cents to $7.69 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading Tuesday. It has dropped 1.5 percent so far this year.

Speculation about why the sudden pessimism about Frontier Communications was sprinkled throughout the financial press.

“The motivation for the trades could be outright bearish,” Caitlin Duffy, an equity options analyst at Greenwich, Connecticut-based Interactive Brokers Group told Bloomberg News. “But it could also be someone buying downside protection if they’re long with a large position in Frontier.”

One factor they may be forgetting is the recent completion of Frontier’s acquisition of Verizon landlines in more than a dozen states.  On July 1st, Verizon will spin off its entity New Communications Holdings Inc., created specifically for the tax-free sale, to Frontier.  In effect, Verizon shareholders will suddenly own between 66 and 71 percent of the shares of Frontier and Frontier stockholders will be left with the remaining 29-34 percent.

Should Verizon shareholders decide that Frontier could follow earlier Verizon spinoffs into financial disaster, they’ll want to dump their shares of Frontier stock as fast as possible, causing the share price to plummet.  Those investors buying “puts” may be guessing that is precisely what is about to happen, and they’re hedging their bets.

AT&T offers up the common practice of boasting about how much you can do with a usage-limited account, based on the thousands of e-mails you'll never send, the 500 pictures you'll never take, or the one minute YouTube clips you'll never watch. Notice they never seem to include figures for streaming multimedia applications like music, movies, and TV shows or playing more bandwidth-intensive games. To do so would only upset customers further.

AT&T claims that 98 percent of its customers will save money under its new lower-priced usage-limited data plans, but an analyst predicts those savings will vanish for half of AT&T’s customers by 2013, exposing them to steep overlimit penalties.

Independent analyst Chetan Sharma crunched the numbers:

The average customer will consume more than 2 gigabytes of data a month within three years, up from 150 megabytes in 2009. Though AT&T could change its rates in the future, the cost of such data use at current rates is $35 a month. That would make it more costly than the $30 AT&T previously charged for unlimited data use.

“The devices are getting much, much better so the opportunities to multitask are more attractive,” said Sharma, who has written five books on mobile technologies and consulted for companies such as Motorola Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.

It’s not only heavy data users who may be affected, Sharma said. By year’s end, the average AT&T customer will have doubled their data consumption from 2009 to 320 megabytes, according to his estimates. Only 35 percent of AT&T’s smartphone customers use 200 megabytes of data or more, the company said.

Sharma’s forecast that half of AT&T’s smartphone customers will use more than 2 gigabytes of data is “not unreasonable,” said Christopher King, a Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst in Baltimore, though he said it’s difficult to predict such trends because they depend on the introduction of new phones, applications and wireless technologies.

AT&T’s new Internet Overcharging scheme has built-in profits as customers increasingly bump into the subjective limits the company imposes on its wireless customers.  Many customers have complained the 200 megabyte plan is too small to accommodate anyone but the most casual data user, while others find 2 GB too small to make video viewing more than an occasional treat.  Customers who exceed either limit face higher bills:

• Customers exceeding 200 MB in a monthly billing cycle face a $15 overlimit penalty, which nets them another 200 megabytes of service;
• Users who exceed the 2-gigabyte level will be forced to pay an additional $10 per month for an additional 1 gigabyte of service.

Even King believes AT&T’s limits are too low.

“There’s no way that AT&T is going to maintain their tiered pricing as they do today,” he said. “They’ll have to raise the caps on data usage.”

Frontier Communications filed suit Tuesday against Google claiming the search giant stole its patent for giving users one phone number connecting their home, work and cell phones, the core feature of Google Voice.

Frontier, the independent phone company based in Stamford, Connecticut, claims it holds the patent for allowing a subscriber to “be reached on multiple telephone lines from a single dial-in number.”

“Google’s deliberate infringement of the patent has greatly and irreparably damaged Frontier,” the lawsuit charges.  Frontier is seeking unspecified damages and an injunction to stop the use of the technology.

The lawsuit distracted from Google’s announcement that Google Voice was out of beta and now available to anyone in the United States.  Google Voice lets users obtain a free phone number that will ring multiple telephones and screen calls.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

The one number follow-me feature is hardly new to either Google or Frontier.  Phone companies have offered similar features to businesses through telephone products like Centrex since the 1960s.

Frontier filed its lawsuit hours after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Frontier’s requested patent.

“We believe these claims are entirely without merit, and we’ll defend against them vigorously,” said Google spokesman Andrew Pederson.

Frontier will likely face an uphill battle in its lawsuit, because the company’s patent request from 2007 comes two years after Google Voice’s predecessor, GrandCentral launched service in 2005.  Google acquired GrandCentral in 2007, rebranding it as Google Voice. GrandCentral offered the same “one number” feature Frontier is complaining about two years before the phone company applied for its patent.

Perhaps Frontier’s lawyers might acquaint themselves with the concepts of “prior art” and “first-to-invent.”