Cable, satellite and telco-TV subscribers around the country can now watch most of the hit shows on Turner’s TBS and TNT Networks for free, assuming two things are true:

1. You pay for a package of television channels from Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Suddenlink Communications, Verizon FiOS, or AT&T U-verse.
2. You are not a Time Warner Cable subscriber.

The new TV Everywhere app, available for phones and tablets, comes free of charge.  Once authenticated as a legitimate pay television subscriber, users can watch hit series and some older shows from both networks.

Once again, Time Warner customers are on the outside, looking in.  The nation’s second biggest cable operator has not been a TV Everywhere team player, preferring to launch its own live streaming iPad application and steering clear, so far, from on-demand, online viewing from most of its partner networks, including HBO.  Time Warner Cable executives have, in the past, alluded to licensing fees and user authentication complications for not launching TV Everywhere on-demand viewing for its customers, but the company has not explained why it has not signed on for Turner’s app.

TV Everywhere, a concept on the drawing board for almost two years, is an attempt by the pay television industry to lock down online video programming for paying customers, in an effort to slow down “cord cutting” by consumers trying to save money on their cable TV bill.  The concept delivers unlimited access to popular cable programming, but only to those who already pay to subscribe.

Many TV Everywhere projects have been soft-launched without much publicity, but that is not true for Turner’s app.  The network has commissioned several clever advertisements featuring various network stars promoting the app, and now Turner wants to educate consumers about how to use it to watch shows online.

The most complicated part of the process is getting “authenticated” by the application for authorized viewing.  Some cable companies like Time Warner want customers to launch access to TV Everywhere programming from the cable company’s website, where customers have already been authenticated when they sign up for an online account.  Other companies are using customer account numbers, PIN codes, or passwords printed on monthly bills to let customers register directly for access.  When the application matches a customer account number or PIN code, the content becomes accessible.  It is typically a one-time-only hassle, but there have been cases where customers have had to grab a recent bill more than once to re-authenticate themselves.

Not every show will be made available for online viewing.  Many rerun off-network shows shown on TNT and TBS don’t currently include streaming rights.  So while users can watch past episodes of Conan O’Brien, they’re out of luck if they want to watch Friends.

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

Watch a selection of spots from the new advertising campaign for Turner’s ‘TV Everywhere’ app.  (4 minutes)

Some proponents for AT&T U-verse suggest people will quickly get used to AT&T's metal cabinets.

A coalition of neighborhoods opposed to the installation of more than 700 4-foot tall metal cabinets across the city of San Francisco have filed suit against AT&T in Superior Court demanding the city follow its own environmental codes and conduct an environmental impact assessment.

The suit comes in response to last month’s close 6-5 vote by the Board of Supervisors permitting AT&T to install up to 726 boxes on the public-right-of-way — typically street corners and sidewalks — to support expansion of its U-verse television, broadband, and phone service.

San Francisco Beautiful, San Francisco Tomorrow, the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association, the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association, and the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association are all parties to the lawsuit filed Wednesday, which calls the boxes graffiti targets, a safety problem for traffic and pedestrians, and just plain ugly.

Milo Hanke, past president of San Francisco Beautiful, accuses the city of ignoring its own rules to give a green light to AT&T.

“We really don’t want to sue, but we are left with no choice when the city refuses to uphold its own environment codes and is about to give away our sidewalks for the benefit of a private company without objective review,” Hanke told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Long time observers of city politics are frankly surprised AT&T won permission for the controversial boxes.

“It wasn’t that long ago that something like this would have been stopped dead in its tracks in [one] environmental review [after another],” said KCBS-TV reporter Phil Matier.  “But this year, whether it’s a change in the tone for business or for jobs it actually got the six votes needed, and that is going to be interesting as this plays out in an election year in San Francisco.”

Lane Kasselman, an AT&T spokesman countered: “This is about choice and competition for San Francisco residents. It’s about new, better technology that enhances peoples’ lives. AT&T thanks the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for supporting the deployment of U-verse throughout San Francisco. We’ve already started construction and are working as quickly as possible to bring next generation IP network services to every block and household that wants it.”

But Hanke thinks the city has gone too far for the benefit of AT&T at the expense of local residents.

“This is a private enterprise with a benefit to private parties,” Hanke told KCBS.  “Why should the public be subsidizing a Dallas-based corporation, and having to look at these ugly boxes in the process.”

Sean Elsbernd, who serves on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors personally thinks the boxes are a great idea, suggesting Comcast needs competition.

“I have a suspicion that four or five months after they are in, people aren’t going to notice them anymore,” Elsebernd said.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCBS San Francisco Groups Sue ATT 8-24-11.mp4[/flv]

KCBS in San Francisco covers the continuing controversy over AT&T’s 4-foot tall utility boxes and the lawsuit designed to stop or delay their installation.  (3 minutes)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KBAK Bakersfield Homeowner fights utility project in her front yard 5-27-10.flv[/flv]

KBAK in Bakersfield shows what happened when AT&T brought their lawn refrigerator-sized boxes to that city in the spring of 2010 — one woman woke up and found AT&T crews tearing up her yard, without any notice, as part of a major construction project.  (3 minutes)

The Federal Communications Commission today released MEASURING BROADBAND AMERICA, the first nationwide performance study of residential wireline broadband service in the United States.  The study examined service offerings from 13 of the largest wireline broadband providers using automated, direct measurements of broadband performance delivered to the homes of thousands of volunteers during March 2011.

Among the key findings:

Providers are being more honest about their advertised speeds: Actual speeds are moving closer to the speeds promised by those providers.  Back in 2009, the FCC found a greater disparity between advertised and delivered speeds.  But the Commission also found that certain providers are more likely to deliver than others, and certain broadband technologies are simply more reliable and consistent.

Fiber-to-the-Home service was the runaway winner, consistently delivering even better speeds than advertised (114%).  Cable broadband delivered 93% of advertised speeds, while DSL only managed to deliver 82 percent of what providers promise.  Fiber broadband speeds are consistent, with just a 0.4 percent decline in speeds during peak usage periods.

Cable companies are still overselling their networks.  The FCC found during peak usage periods (7-11pm), 7.3 percent of cable-based services suffered from speed decreases — generally a sign a provider has piled too many customers onto an overburdened network.  One clear clue of overselling: the FCC found upload speeds largely unaffected.

DSL has capacity and speed issues.  DSL also experienced speed drops, with 5.5 percent of customers witnessing significant speed deterioration, which could come from an overshared D-SLAM, where multiple DSL customers connect with equipment that relays their traffic back to the central office, or from insufficient connectivity to the Internet backbone.

Some providers are much better than others.  The FCC found some remarkable variability in the performance of different ISPs.  Let’s break several down:

• Verizon’s FiOS was the clear winner among the major providers tested, winning top performance marks across the board.  Few providers came close;
• Comcast had the most consistently reliable speeds among cable broadband providers.  Cox beat them at times, but only during hours when few customers were using their network;
• AT&T U-verse was competitive with most cable broadband packages, but is already being outclassed by cable companies offering DOCSIS 3-based premium speed tiers;
• Cablevision has a seriously oversold broadband network.  Their results were disastrous, scoring the worst of all providers for consistent service during peak usage periods.  Their performance was simply unacceptable, incapable of delivering barely more than half of promised speeds during the 10pm-12am window.
• It was strictly middle-of-the-road performance for Time Warner Cable, Insight, and CenturyLink.  They aren’t bad, but they could be better.
• Mediacom continued its tradition of being a mediocre cable provider, delivering consistently below-average results for their customers during peak usage periods.  They are not performing necessary upgrades to keep up with user demand.
• Most major DSL providers — AT&T, Frontier, and Qwest — promise little and deliver as much.  Their ho-hum advertised speeds combined with unimpressive scores for time of day performance variability should make all of these the consumers’ last choice for broadband service if other options are available.

Some conclusions the FCC wants consumers to ponder:

1. For basic web-browsing and Voice-Over-IP, any provider should be adequate.  Shop on price. Consumers should not overspend for faster tiers of service they will simply not benefit from all that much.  Web pages loaded at similar speeds regardless of the speed tier chosen.
2. Video streaming benefits from consistent speeds and network reliability.  Fiber and cable broadband usually deliver faster speeds that can ensure reliable high quality video streaming.  DSL may or may not be able to keep up with our HD video future.
3. Temporary speed-boost technology provided by some cable operators is a useful gimmick.  It can help render web pages and complete small file downloads faster.  It can’t beat fiber’s consistently faster speeds, but can deliver a noticeable improvement over DSL.

More than 78,000 consumers volunteered to participate in the study and a total of approximately 9,000 consumers were selected as potential participants and were supplied with specially configured routers. The data in the report is based on a statistically selected subset of those consumers—approximately 6,800 individuals—and the measurements taken in their homes during March 2011. The participants in the volunteer consumer panel were recruited with the goal of covering ISPs within the U.S. across all broadband technologies, although only results from three major technologies—DSL, cable, and fiber-to-the-home—are reflected in the report.

Groups like San Francisco Beautiful fear AT&T's U-verse cabinets will succumb to graffiti, like this one in nearby Oakland. For the group, U-verse cabinets on the sidewalk promote urban blight.

Construction of the first of nearly 500 four-foot-tall utility cabinets is scheduled to begin this morning by AT&T, eager to expand its U-verse fiber-to-the-neighborhood service in the city of San Francisco.

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 6-5 last Tuesday to allow AT&T to begin building the metal cabinets, which hold the interface between the company’s fiber optic network and individual subscribers’ copper phone lines.

Mark Blakeman, AT&T’s vice president of external affairs, wasted no time announcing the location for the first box, to be situated on La Playa in Outer Richmond.  AT&T promises to launch U-verse service in the area within six months.

Most of the company’s initially-proposed 495 cabinets will be located on public sidewalks or other nearby rights-of-way.  Unlike San Francisco’s other utilities, AT&T will be able to install its boxes above-ground.  That has brought years of criticism from neighborhood groups who decry the cabinets are ugly, block the view of pedestrians and vehicle traffic, and are magnets for graffiti.

For groups like San Francisco Beautiful, it’s just the beginning.  AT&T’s longstanding goal is to install more than 700 boxes across the city’s landscape.

“It is going to put the blight of 726 utility boxes on our streets,” San Francisco Beautiful spokesperson Milo Hanke said. “Utility boxes from AT&T that are ugly and in most instances we still believe they are unnecessary; they should be on private property.”

AT&T will roll out its U-verse service in different parts of the city in segments, starting with the Richmond and Sunset Districts.

AT&T anticipates taking at least two years to complete the project across the city, but claims it remains open to bypassing neighborhoods that simply refuse to accept its boxes.  AT&T might not have a choice, considering the agreement they have with city officials.

Neighborhoods must be given time to provide input to city officials before permits are issued to AT&T.  If a city supervisor in a particular district doesn’t like the boxes, the “memorandum of understanding” grants the politician ultimate veto power over AT&T’s permit requests.  That means AT&T will be forced to do a lot of hand-holding public relations throughout the city to win support for their equipment.

That’s something AT&T is not used to in other states, where the company has won the right through deregulation to install its equipment cabinets anywhere it pleases, so long as they are located in a public right of way.  That has left a series of 4-6 foot tall boxes in the front yards of consumers in states like North Carolina, with absolutely no recourse.

AT&T will install its "compact model" cabinet within city limits, not the 6' tall boxes some homeowners in other states contend with.

In California, regulators can require utilities screen equipment with plants, maintain boxes to remove graffiti and correct noisy cabinet fans, and give property owners some input about where the often-unsightly boxes end up.  But those regulations are only as good as those willing to enforce them.

San Francisco Beautiful notes AT&T boxes in nearly Oakland are often covered in graffiti for extended periods, reducing property values and promoting neighborhood blight.

Hanke claims last week’s agreement violates a 2005 city order from the Department of Public Works mandating utilities put their equipment underground wherever possible.

“The supervisors fell victim to AT&T’s bluster,” said Hanke. “This benefits a private company at the public’s expense.”

AT&T’s Lance Kasselman told the San Francisco Chronicle it won’t go where it isn’t wanted.

“Obviously, those who clearly want it will get it first,” Kasselman told the newspaper. “People who want it or don’t want it, or have questions and concerns, should tell us on our website. We’ll meet with whoever wants to talk about it.”

With a close 6-5 vote, some city supervisors are well aware of the public minefield that awaits them in neighborhoods that despise AT&T’s equipment.  With opponents calling on citizens to complain, Supervisor Scott Wiener (Castro/Noe Valley/Diamond Heights) knew he needed to prepare.

“This morning, I did a yoga class to clear my head before writing a letter to neighborhood associations in my district,” Wiener told the Chronicle.  “I’m trying to make sure people understand what (Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors) vote means.”

[flv width=”600″ height=”358″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KGO San Francisco ATT Utility Boxes 7-19-11.flv[/flv]

KGO-TV in San Francisco covers the AT&T U-verse box controversy, and the Board of Supervisors’ decision to approve their installation.  (2 minutes)

Among the public interest groups that have historically steered clear of the fight against usage caps and usage based billing is Public Knowledge.

Stop the Cap! took them to task more than a year ago for defending the implementation of these unjustified hidden rate hikes and usage limits.  Since then, we welcome the fact the group has increasingly been trending towards the pro-consumer, anti-cap position, but they still have some road to travel.

Public Knowledge, joined by New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, has sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission expressing concern over AT&T’s implementation of usage caps and asking for an investigation:

[…] Public Knowledge and New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative urge the Bureau to exercise its statutory authority to fully investigate the nature, purpose, impact of those caps upon consumers. The need to fully understand the nature of broadband caps is made all the more urgent by the recent decision by AT&T to break with past industry practice and convert its data cap into a revenue source.

[…] Caps on broadband usage imposed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can undermine the very goals that the Commission has committed itself to championing. While broadband caps are not inherently problematic, they carry the omnipresent temptation to act in anticompetitive and monopolistic ways. Unless they are clearly and transparently justified to address legitimate network capacity concerns, caps can work directly against the promise of broadband access.

The groups call out AT&T for its usage cap and overlimit fee model, and ponder whether these are more about revenue enhancement than network management.  The answer to that question has been clear for more than two years now: it’s all about the money.

The two groups are to be commended for raising the issue with the FCC, but they are dead wrong about caps not being inherently problematic.  Usage caps have no place in the North American wired broadband market.  Even in Canada, providers like Bell have failed to make a case justifying their implementation.  What began as an argument about congestion has evolved into one about charging heavy users more to invest in upgrades that are simply not happening on a widespread basis.  The specific argument used is tailored to the audience: complaints about congestion to government officials, denials of congestion issues to shareholders coupled with promotion of usage pricing as a revenue enhancer.

If Bell can’t sell the Canadian government on its arguments for usage caps in a country that has a far lower population density and a much larger rural expanse to wire, AT&T certainly isn’t going to have a case in the United States, and they don’t.

The history of these schemes is clear:

1. Providers historically conflate their wireless broadband platforms with wired broadband when arguing for Internet Overcharging schemes.  When regulators agree to arguments that wireless capacity problems justify usage limits, extending those limits to wired broadband gets carried along for the ride.  Dollar-a-holler groups supporting the industry love to use charts showing wireless data growth, and claim a similar problem afflicts wired broadband, even though the costs to cope with congestion are very different on the two platforms.
2. Providers argue one thing while implementing another.  Most make the claim pricing changes allow them to introduce discounted “light user” plans.  But few save because true “pay only for what you use” usage-based billing is not on offer.  Instead, worry-free flat use plans are taken off the menu, replaced with tiered plans that force subscribers to guess their usage.  If they guess too little, a stiff overlimit fee applies.  If they guess too much, they overpay.  Heads AT&T wins, tails you lose.  That’s a clear warning providers are addressing revenue enhancement, not network enhancement.
3. Claims of network congestion backed up with raw data, average usage per user, and the costs to address it are all labeled proprietary business information and are not available for independent inspection.

There are a few other issues:

In the world of broadband data caps, the caps recently implemented by AT&T are particularly aggressive. Unlike competitors whose caps appear to be at least nominally linked to congestions during peak-use periods, AT&T seeks to convert caps into a profit center by charging additional fees to customers who exceed the cap. In addition to concerns raised by broadband caps generally, such a practice produces a perverse incentive for AT&T to avoid raising its cap even as its own capacity expands.

In North America, only a handful of providers use peak-usage pricing for wired broadband.  Cable One, America’s 10th largest cable operator is among the largest, and they serve fewer than one million customers.  Virtually all providers with usage caps count both upstream and downstream data traffic 24 hours a day against a fixed usage allowance.  The largest — Comcast — does not charge an excessive usage fee.  AT&T does.

Furthermore, it remains unclear why AT&T’s recently announced caps are, at best, equal to those imposed by Comcast over two years ago.  The caps for residential DSL customers are a full 100GB lower than those Comcast saw fit to offer in mid-2008. The lower caps for DSL customers is especially worrying because one of the traditional selling points of DSL networks is that their dedicated circuit design helps to mitigate the impacts of heavy users on the rest of the network. Together, these caps suggest either that AT&T’s current network compares poorly to that of a major competitor circa 2008 or that there are non-network management motivations behind their creation.

AT&T has managed to create the first Internet version of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, combining Comcast's 'tolerated' 250GB cap with AT&T's style of slapping overlimit fees on data plans from their wireless business.

As Stop the Cap! has always argued, usage caps are highly arbitrary.  Providers always believe their usage caps are the best and most fair around, whether it was Frontier’s 5GB usage limit or Comcast’s 250GB limit.

AT&T experimented with usage limits in Reno, Nevada and Beaumont, Texas and found customers loathed them.  Comcast’s customers tolerate the cable company’s 250GB usage cap because it is not strictly enforced — only the top few violators are issued warning letters.  AT&T has established America’s first Internet pricing version of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup: getting Comcast’s tolerated usage cap into AT&T’s wireless-side overlimit fee.  The bitter aftertaste arrives in the mail at the end of the month.

Why establish different usage caps for DSL and U-verse?  Marketing, of course.  This is about money, remember?

AT&T DSL delivers far less average revenue per customer than its triple-play U-verse service.  To give U-verse a higher value proposition, AT&T supplies a more generous usage allowance.  Message: upgrade from DSL for a better broadband experience.

Technically, there is no reason to enforce either usage allowance, as AT&T DSL offers a dedicated connection to the central office or D-SLAM, from where fiber traditionally carries the signal to AT&T’s enormous backbone connection.  U-verse delivers fiber to the neighborhood and a much fatter dedicated pipeline into individual subscriber homes to deliver its phone, Internet, and video services.

A usage cap on U-verse makes as much sense as putting a coin meter on the television or charging for every phone call, something AT&T abandoned with their flat rate local and long distance plans.

Before partly granting AT&T’s premise that usage limits are a prophylactic for congestion and then advocate they be administered with oversight, why not demand proof that such pricing and usage schemes are necessary in the first place.  With independent verification of the raw data, providers like AT&T will find that an insurmountable challenge, especially if they have to open their books.

[flv width=”640″ height=”368″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bell’s Arguments for UBB 2-2011.flv[/flv]

Canada’s experience with Usage-Based Billing has all of the hallmarks of the kind of consumer ripoff AT&T wants Americans to endure:

• A provider (Bell), whose spokesman argues for these pricing schemes to address congestion and “fairness,” even as that same spokesman admits there is no congestion problem;
• Would-be competitors being priced out of the marketplace because they lack the infrastructure, access, or fair pricing to compete;
• Big bankers and investors who applaud price gouging and are appalled at government checks and balances.

Watch Mirko Bibic try to rationalize why Bell’s Fibe TV (equivalent to AT&T U-verse) needs Internet Overcharging schemes for broadband, but suffers no capacity issues delivering video and phone calls over the exact same line.  Then watch the company try and spin this pricing as an issue of fairness, even as an investor applauds the company: “I love this policy because I am a shareholder.  That’s all I care about.  If you can suck every last cent out of users, I’m happy for you.”  Finally, watch a company buying wholesale access from Bell let the cat out of the bag — broadband usage costs pennies per gigabyte, not the several dollars many providers want to charge.  (11 minutes)