The Plain English Campaign’s Golden Bull Award is given to companies that prefer gobbledygook over plain English.

Comcast is outraged by slanderous suggestions it has data caps on its broadband service.

In response to the scathing report from the Writers Guild of America that pleads for the FCC to block the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, Comcast has accused to WGA of getting its facts wrong and being nothing more than a meddling union.

The WGA writes in their filing with the FCC:

The WGAW has also joined Public Knowledge in asking the FCC to enforce the condition that Comcast not use “caps, tiers, metering, or other usage-based pricing” to treat affiliated network traffic differently from unaffiliated traffic. Comcast has violated this condition by exempting its online video service, Xfinity Streampix, from its own data caps, while the viewing of content by other, unaffiliated video services such as Netflix or YouTube would count against a user’s data cap. The violation of this merger condition is a clear threat to competition from online video distributors, and the FCC should respond by requiring Comcast to stop exempting its Streampix service from data caps.

Comcast pounced on the WGA filing, calling it inaccurate.

“We don’t have data caps — and haven’t for about two years,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications. “We have tested data thresholds where very heavy customers can buy more if they want more — but that only affects a very small percentage of our customers in a few markets.”

Until 2012, Comcast had a uniform usage cap of 250GB a month, above which a customer risked having their broadband service suspended. In 2013, the usage allowances were back, reset at 300GB a month and rolled out to a series of expanding “test markets” that today include Huntsville and Mobile, Ala., Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Ga., Central Kentucky, Maine, Jackson, Miss., Knoxville and Memphis, Tenn., and Charleston, S.C.

Customers who exceed this allowance won’t have their broadband service suspended, they will just get a higher bill, as Comcast charges $10 for each additional 50GB of usage.

In contrast, Time Warner Cable neither has a data cap or a data threshold. Stop the Cap! made sure that didn’t happen when Time Warner attempted to impose its own usage limits back in 2009. We successfully organized protests sufficient to get Time Warner executives to back off and shelve the idea. If Comcast takes over, Time Warner Cable customers will likely eventually face Comcast’s “data thresholds,” which are a distinction without much difference. Whatever you call it, it’s a limit on how much a customer can use Comcast’s already-expensive broadband service before bad things happen.

The WGA and Comcast get along about as well as oil and water, so the back and forth is to be expected. The Writer’s Guild also fiercely opposed Comcast’s merger with NBCUniversal. But when it comes to who is playing fast and loose with the truth, it isn’t the group that writes for a living. Comcast’s doublespeak about data caps is no better than calling The Great Recession a periodic equity retreat. It isn’t fooling anyone.

Canadians are demanding a better deal from their cable and phone companies and they are forced to respond.

As the United States battles back against the introduction of usage caps and rising prices for broadband service, increased competition and regulated open wholesale access to some of Canada’s largest broadband providers have given Canadians an advantage in forcing providers to cut prices and improve service.

Canadians can now easily get unlimited broadband access from one of several independent ISPs that piggyback service on cable and phone networks. Some large ISPs have even introduced all-you-can eat broadband options for customers long-capped by the handful of big players. As customers consider switching providers, cable and phone companies have been forced to cut prices, especially for their best customers. Even cell service is now up for negotiation.

The more services a customer bundles with their provider, the bigger the discount they can negotiate, say analysts who track customer retention. Bell, Rogers, Telus, and others have a major interest keeping your business, even if it means reducing your price.

“It’s far more lucrative for the telecom company to keep you there for the third or fourth service,” telecom analyst Troy Crandall told AP. It cuts down on marketing, service and installation calls, he added.

Getting the best deal often depends on your services, payment history, and how long you have been a customer. Cellphone discounts are the hardest to win, but customers are getting them if they have been loyal, carry a large balance and almost never pay late.

Bigger discounts can be had for television and Internet service — cable television remains immensely profitable in Canada and broadband is cheap to offer, especially in cities. Americans often pay $80 or more for digital cable television packages, Canadians pay an average of $60.

Internet service in Canada now averages $45 a month, but many plans include usage caps. It costs more to take to the cap off.

Because of Canada’s past usage cap pervasiveness, online video is not as plentiful in Canada as it is in the United States. There has been considerably less cord-cutting in the north. Despite that, Canadians are ravenous online viewers of what they can find to watch (either legally or otherwise). As usage allowances disappear or become more generous, online video and the Internet will continue to grow in importance for service providers.

Customers should negotiate with their provider for a better deal, particularly if Bell’s Fibe TV is in town. Bell has been among the most aggressive in price cutting its fiber to the neighborhood television service for new customers ready to say goodbye to Rogers or Vidéotron.

Shaw and Telus battle for market share in the west and also have room to cut customer bills and still make a handsome profit.

Broadband in the United States costs far more than in other countries — nearly three times as much as in the UK and France, and at least five times more than South Korea, according to BBC News.

The New America Foundation compared hundreds of available packages around the world and found customers in America’s largest cities are getting the biggest bills.

Customers in San Francisco with a discounted low-medium speed bundle including broadband pay $99 a month. A near-equivalent package costs London residents $38. New Yorkers get some savings from Time Warner and Cablevision facing down Verizon FiOS. But it isn’t enough. In the Big Apple, a promotional bundle averages $70 a month. “C’est la vie,” say Parisians. They only pay $35 for about the same. Even Washington, D.C. residents, which include the country’s most powerful politicians, pay Comcast its $68 asking price. In Seoul, South Korea, a comparable offer costs $15 a month.

High asking prices don’t buy better service. According to a report by the OECD issued over the summer, the United States ranks among the worst in terms of broadband-only pricing. With an average price of $90 a month for 45Mbps service, the U.S. ranked 30th out of 33 countries. Add phone and television service and the price spikes to around $200.

The BBC pondered why there is such a disparity in pricing. The answer was easy to spot: the lack of true competition.

“Americans pay so much because they don’t have a choice,” said Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama on science, technology and innovation policy. “We deregulated high-speed Internet access 10 years ago and since then we’ve seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply Internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight.”

Although Americans can name the largest and deep pocketed providers — Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Cablevision, CenturyLink, Cox, and Frontier — most cannot choose from more than one cable provider and one telephone company. Comcast does not compete against Time Warner and AT&T does not compete against Verizon, except in the wireless world where both companies offer near-identical plans and pricing.

Comcast is quite the gouger in San Francisco.

Bay area customers told the BBC they get bills ranging from $120 a month for television and broadband (not including a $7 modem rental fee) to $200 a month for phone, TV, and Internet access. That same cable company is now testing a 300GB monthly usage cap on broadband in several American cities.

In contrast South Korea offers ubiquitous free Wi-Fi letting customers avoid usage charges. Home broadband is fast and cheap. Most pay $20 a month for 100Mbps.

Digging deeper, the BBC found clues why robust broadband competition delivers savings for consumers in Europe and Asia while Americans pay more.

Rick Karr, who made a PBS documentary in the UK comparing broadband costs at home and abroad, said the critical moment came when the British regulator Ofcom forced British Telecom to open its network and allow other companies to sell broadband over its copper telephone wires. In the United States, regulators never forced cable operators to open their networks, and after a 6-3 Supreme Court decision upheld the cable industry’s insistence it need not share access with competitors, telephone companies quickly called for parity.

A 2005 Supreme Court decision upheld the cable industry’s right to keep competitors off its cable broadband network.

Some argue the ruling promotes more competition by provoking competitors to build their own networks. But current conventional wisdom among the investment community teaches one cable and one phone company is considered good enough. Additional providers would erode the standing of all and force price cutting to compete.

There are exceptions. Although Google’s fiber to the home service has drawn national attention for its inexpensive gigabit fiber broadband network ($70 for broadband-only service), at least 150 cities are served by the public sector — co-op or publicly owned utility companies that offer broadband, often delivered over fiber optic networks.

Those networks often charge considerably less than the incumbent cable operator or phone company, a fact that has driven many privately run operators to seek legislative bans on community broadband.

In response to the report, telecommunications companies avoided the topic of prices and focused instead on value for money and the future.

Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Communications, said Europe was replete with a decade of underinvestment, leaving many with less than 30Mbps service. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association said it was difficult to make international comparisons on price and Scott Cleland, part of the industry-funded NetCompetition website claimed although people may pay higher bills, they can at least choose among phone, cable, wireless or satellite.

“We may be paying more in your eyes today but we are building for tomorrow and the long-term,” said Cleland.

All too often customers who sign up for “price lock” agreements or 12-24 month service contracts find themselves trapped when a provider finds a clever way to increase rates or introduce usage caps and still subject customers to a steep early termination fee if they want out of the deal.

In the United Kingdom, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) wants providers to tell customers at least 30 days before any price or service changes and show customers how to cancel the contract and leave without a termination fee.

Ofcom says its new rules on ISPs, landline and mobile operators are designed to stop mid-contract price hikes or service reductions.

The regulator is responding to multiple consumer complaints where providers have used “wiggle room” in contract language designed to let customers off the hook if a provider attempts a “materially adverse” change mid-contract that a customer does not accept. This language is common in both the United Kingdom and North America.

Several years ago, providers on both sides of the Atlantic began adding non-regulatory fees to customer bills to hide rate increases. The charges often sound “official,” but are in fact not. When customers demanded to cancel over charges like “regulatory recovery fees,” “rights of way fees,” or other costs of doing business now broken out on their bills, many successfully invoked the “materially adverse” clause of their contract to escape termination fees.

These days wireless carriers have gotten wise to that. When a customer now calls to demand out of their contract, companies refuse, claiming the small dollar amounts involved are not “material” changes. They often reinforce this by offering to credit a persistent customer’s account for the amounts involved.

Ofcom considers this practice an end run around the contract, and wants it stopped. The regulator is notifying providers it is now likely to regard any and all price increases of any kind to be “materially adverse/detrimental.” The regulator warns it will also treat reductions in voice minutes, texting, and data usage allowances the same as a price hike.

“Ofcom is today making clear that consumers entering into fixed-term telecoms contracts must get a fairer deal,” said Claudio Pollack, director of Ofcom’s Consumer Group. “We think the sector rules were operating unfairly in the provider’s favor, with consumers having little choice but to accept price increases or pay to exit their contract. We’re making it clear that any increase to the monthly subscription price should trigger a consumer’s right to leave their contract – without penalty.”

Ofcom has also found that some consumers were caught unawares by mid-contract price rises and were not sufficiently warned this could happen when they signed up. In some circumstances, consumers may also have not been made adequately aware of their right to exit their contract, or of the amount of time they had to exercise this right.

To address this problem, the new rules explain how providers should communicate any contract changes, pricing or otherwise, to consumers.

These measures include ensuring that letters or e-mails about contract changes should be clearly marked as such, either on the front of the envelope or in the subject header.  Notifications of price increases must also be clear and easy to understand and make customers aware of the nature and likely impact of the contract change.

Where relevant, information about the customer’s right to exit the contract should be made clear upfront – for example, on the front page of a letter or in the main e-mail message, rather than via a link. The period within which consumers can cancel their contract (Ofcom’s guidance sets out that providers should allow consumers 30 days) should also be made clear.

The new rules take effect in 90 days.

Cable ONE broadband customers will soon benefit from the cable operator’s increased investment in its operations with faster broadband speeds and a less complicated “usage guideline” system with no overlimit fees.

The cable operator, owned by The Washington Post, has announced effective June 10, customers will be able to buy 5-70Mbps packages with allowances up to 500GB a month.

Cable ONE now only sells two broadband tiers:

• 5Mbps/512kbps (3GB daily limit to avoid speed throttle) No overlimit fees ($50/month)
• 50/2Mbps – 50-100GB monthly usage limit depending on how many Cable ONE services you receive ($50/month, $0.50/GB overlimit fee)

Starting Monday, the monthly usage allowance for the 50Mbps plan will be increased to 300GB per month and no overlimit fee will be charged. The price will remain $50 a month. Other new tiers include:

• 60/2Mbps – 400GB usage limit ($75/month)
• 70/2Mbps – 500GB usage limit ($100/month)

Customers will also lose the “grace period” between 12am-8am when usage was formerly not counted against the monthly allowance. Effective June 10, all usage counts 24 hours a day.

“We are very excited to launch these new, more flexible Internet plans. Our customers are spending more time online than ever before and have voiced the need for faster service and no overage charges,” said Joe Felbab, Cable ONE vice president of marketing. “We’re committed to listening to our customers and delivering the latest products and technical advancements while maintaining the highest level of reliability and customer care.”

Customers who exceed their monthly cap will not pay overlimit fees but will receive warnings from Cable ONE. If those warnings are ignored, the company will “invite” customers to upgrade to the next higher tier or convert to a business account.