[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/There’s a Map for That 1.flv[/flv]

Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” Advertising Campaign: Spot 2 (pre-revision — includes “out of touch” language (30 seconds)

Verizon's advertising only displays network coverage of 3G service areas

AT&T Mobility has filed suit against Verizon Wireless in the Northern District Court of Georgia (Atlanta Division) demanding the court order Verizon to stop running ads that suggest AT&T has lousy wireless 3G data coverage.

The suit comes in response to a series of advertisements from Verizon that compare the coverage maps of both companies “3G” wireless data networks.  The term “3G” refers to the third generation (3G) of mobile telephony standards – IMT-2000.  In general terms, local wireless networks upgraded to provide 3G service can provide much faster wireless data speeds than those still operating under older standards like “2G.”

Verizon Wireless has aggressively deployed 3G upgrades across its service area, while AT&T has largely focused on more urban population centers for their 3G upgrades, something Verizon’s advertising calls out.

The crux of the suit is exactly how Verizon depicts the differences in coverage.

AT&T claims the ads leave viewers with the impression that those vast white areas depicted on the coverage map designated by Verizon as “AT&T,” are areas without any data coverage at all.  Most cell phone company coverage maps routinely depict “no service” areas in white, and AT&T claims Verizon underlined the impression in its ads, including one on radio, that included the phrase “out of touch” when speaking about non-3G AT&T service areas.  AT&T described the ad above as showing “a frustrated or sad AT&T customer sitting alone on a bench because she is not able to use her wireless device to meet up with her friends.”

AT&T Mobility’s own coverage map depicts data coverage in varying hues of blue, designating the different types of data service coverage available nationwide, but those different hues and service areas only become apparent after starting to zoom in on specific regions of the country.

AT&T's "Nationwide" Coverage Map for Data

AT&T's coverage map changes when you zoom in, depicting the different types of network standards used in different areas. This map of eastern Texas shows coverage ranging from 3G to woefully slow EDGE networks owned by "AT&T partner" companies

On AT&T’s maps, areas in white are labeled “no service available.”

On October 7th, AT&T Mobility contacted Verizon Wireless and demanded that they either cease the ads or modify them to make them, in AT&T’s words, “less misleading.”

In response, Verizon dropped the “out of touch” language from the ads and inserted a fine print disclaimer at the bottom indicating “Voice and data services available outside of 3G areas.”

AT&T considers the modifications inadequate and filed the lawsuit asking for a cessation of the ads and monetary damages from perceived ill-gotten profits from Verizon snatching away AT&T customers.

Verizon’s defense?  Accuracy.  Verizon Wireless’ ads never stop referring to “3G service” and both maps include specifically labeled “3G Coverage.”

AT&T argues that their network is actually more expansive than Verizon’s, when you also include AT&T’s more prevalent 2G and earlier wireless data standards.  But that’s arguing apples and oranges.  Verizon intends to promote and leverage benefits from upgrading its service areas, large and small, to 3G service.  AT&T has not done that, and in fact has been on the receiving end of criticism from customers frustrated at times with the poor performance of its network, including slow data speeds, dropped calls, and insufficient coverage in certain areas.

Verizon's ads clearly depict "3G Coverage" on their map comparison

The gadget enthusiast press has not been enthusiastic about AT&T’s lawsuit, wishing the company would be as enthusiastic with network upgrades as they are engaging their legal team to fight Verizon, or is little more than a whining villain that has been exposed for its inadequacies.

AT&T customers frustrated with their mobile experience are probably still better off than T-Mobile customers, some of whom spent much of yesterday with no service at all.  In the second nationwide outage in two months, T-Mobile claims about two million customers nationwide experienced voice and data service outages for much of the day, although anecdotal reports suggest a company estimate of “five percent of customers impacted” is low.  No explanation for the outage was given.  This comes after an embarrassing server failure in October which led to some T-Mobile Sidekick customers being without service for up to a month, as well as a loss of stored data which company officials have slowly tried to restore weeks after the system crashed.

LUS Fiber - Lafayette, Louisiana's public utility municipal broadband provider, offers fast speeds with great rates

Frustrated communities across America, take note.

If your town or city government starts making serious noises about constructing your own, municipally-owned broadband network (especially one built with fiber optics to the home), existing providers who have repeatedly said “no” to requests for faster service at more reasonable prices have a track record of quickly turning around and saying, “yes — why didn’t you ask us before?”

Big existing telecommunications players loathe the thought of facing a new competitor in their midst.  They are accustomed to the usual arrangement of one cable operator and one phone company.  Cable companies provide cable modem service, phone companies mostly provide DSL.  In smaller cities, and where a competitor is missing (or provides a lower quality service), there is almost no drive to upgrade.  Cable will set speeds just above what the phone company is offering, and both will co-exist happily ever after.

For communities being bypassed by the fiber revolution now underway by Verizon, and to a lesser degree AT&T, requests from civic leaders, businesses, and consumers for upgraded service fall on deaf ears.  ‘What you have now is good enough for this market, so be quiet and be lucky we give you what you’ve got now.  Oh, and we’re raising rates, too.’

In Rochester, the one upstate New York city not on the “to-do” list of Verizon (which is merrily wiring urban and suburban communities across their service areas with fiber optic cable FiOS), Time Warner Cable sees little incentive to raise speeds or upgrade to DOCSIS 3 with a phone company competitor that has no apparent plans to move beyond traditional old school DSL service.  Where FiOS does threaten, Time Warner Cable is in a hurry to provide “wideband” broadband as quickly as possible.

In Wilson, North Carolina, years of pleading from local officials to provide something beyond anemic broadband in their community was met with yawns from Time Warner Cable and Embarq, the local phone company.  Wilson decided to build their own municipal fiber network, offering faster speeds at better pricing.  Time Warner and Embarq did what most existing competitors do — they moved through the Four Stages of Telecommunications Competition Grief:

1) Behind the Scenes Threats and Anger: Companies work the phones with local officials trying to browbeat them into dropping the plans to construct municipal broadband, try to gin up partisan opposition, issue overinflated cost estimates, issue warnings about the trouble they’ll cause local politicians who support such initiatives, and snow a blizzard of documents illustrating how wonderful and reasonable their existing service is;

2) Stall Tactics Through Negotiation: Once home office is notified, a series of negotiations to attempt to forestall the project begins, such as throwing crumbs for incrementally better service, offers to build showcase mini-projects that represent a “win” for local politicians, or “looks good on paper” concessions that end up amounting to far less.  Most of these discussions are designed simply to stall to allow the company to prepare for stage three.

3) PR and Legal Blitzkrieg: Assuming local officials haven’t been discouraged away from their idea, or dropped it after starring in a company-sponsored press event – ribbon cutting a small wi-fi or school connectivity project, the next stage is a multi-front battle involving company legal teams filing lawsuits to delay or kill projects, public relations and astroturf lobbying efforts to distort issues and build public opposition, legislative maneuverings to make such projects untenable through industry-friendly laws, and often vague promises about impending upgrades making the entire project unnecessary.

4) Acceptance, Competition, and Better Service: The final stage is the realization consumers don’t always get suckered by astroturf groups and company scare tactics.  They accept the project is moving forward, and send out the press release saying they welcome the competition and are announcing their own significant service upgrade because “customers asked for it.”  Price increases slow, speeds increase, and service improves, all because of the reality that an aggressive competitor is in their future.

Wilson city officials tried negotiations for better service, got nowhere, and had to fight back against a blizzard of nonsense from the telecommunications industry trying to legislate such projects out of existence with changes to state law.  Americans for Prosperity, an astroturf group, even hassled residents in other nearby communities with robocalls to try and stop similar projects.

The arrival of Wilson’s Greenlight service, which offers speeds far faster than Time Warner and Embarq ever did, at lower prices, was a shock to Time Warner’s call centers.  As customers canceled, representatives taking those calls were in denial residents were actually achieving the speeds Time Warner failed to deliver.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Chattanooga Builds Fiber Network.flv[/flv]

Chattanooga’s public power utility fought back against telecommunication company propaganda to construct fiber to the home service across the city, which launched this year. (5 minutes)

In Monticello, Minnesota, local telephone company TDS had spent years refusing requests to improve service in the city.  Speed and access issues plagued the community, northwest of Minneapolis.  Local officials had enough and voted to construct their own fiber to the home municipal network.

Enter the four stages.  TDS started by telling city officials the company’s network was state of the art for Monticello, and couldn’t be immediately improved because there was insufficient return on investment.  Companies want to be assured they are paid back for investments they make, and because Monticello is a relatively small city, there were questions whether the costs for a fiber network would be paid back quickly enough through revenues.

When that didn’t work, the company sued the city as a stalling tactic.  Despite the fact Monticello won case after case, TDS kept filing.  A full assault by large telecommunications interests also began, trying to gin up public opposition.  While the project was approved by voters, and Monticello was tied up in court, TDS quickly moved to stage four and started rapidly building their own fiber network in Monticello, actually putting down fiber the city was prohibited to wire themselves as the lawsuits dragged through the courts.

The company told Ars Technica that despite its earlier refusals to provide fiber service, TDS didn’t act earlier because it didn’t actually know that people really, really wanted fiber; once the referendum was a success, the company moved quickly to give people what it now knew they wanted.

Then, in June, the company said with the advent of its own fiber network, the city of Monticello should back away from constructing theirs, because its economic viability report was partly premised on the fact TDS refused to provide that service.

To underline that, TDS’ new fiber network doubled customer speeds to 50Mbps, trying to keep customers from taking their business to  FiberNet Monticello.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Vote Yes on Fiber.mp4[/flv]

Lafayette staged a multi-year battle with Cox and other providers to bring municipal fiber broadband to it’s corner of Louisiana.  This 30 second ad promoted a “yes” vote on the project.

In Louisiana, Cox Cable is facing accusations it’s engaged in predatory pricing to kill Lafayette Utility System’s fiber to the home network and EATel’s fiber network in Ascension Parish.  Cox Cable froze rates and moved in with DOCSIS 3 upgrades, delivering up to 50Mbps service.  Cox chose to upgrade Lafayette before any other Cox-served community.

The Lafayette Pro-Fiber Blog found this EATel billboard taunting Cox

EATel, an independent phone company that wired fiber across Ascension Parish, also faced down Cox.  When the cable company began promoting cut-rate pricing in Ascension, EATel took out advertising promoting Cox’s special prices — in other cities, much to Cox’s consternation.  EATel’s ads, much like those run by Novus against Shaw in British Columbia, tell Cox’s customers to call the company and ask for the lower price they are advertising elsewhere.

“Cox came in with an incredibly aggressive promotion for TV service with every bell and whistle you could imagine. We couldn’t figure out how they could even make money on it. So we took out an ad in the Lafayette newspaper that basically said, ‘Hey Lafayette, look at the great prices you are going to get from Cox.’ Cox was not amused,” Trae Russell, communications manager for EATel told Telephony Online.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>Joey Durel, Jr., president of Lafayette parish, testifies before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Lafayette’s municipal fiber network on February 27, 2008. (7 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

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p style=”text-align: center;”>

Lesson learned — just threatening to bring in a municipal competitor is often all it takes to turn a persistent “no” from the local cable and phone companies into “yes, Yes, YES!”

Of course, not every project is successful.  Some, such as Burlington Telecom Stop the Cap! reported on yesterday face political and cost challenges.  Others are killed through stage managed opposition and astroturf campaigns paid for by the telecommunications industry before they even get started.

In North St. Paul this year,  “PolarNet,” a planned fiber optic broadband network to stimulate the local economy was killed by an astroturf propaganda campaign undertaken by Qwest, Comcast, and other telecommunications companies that would have to deal with PolarNet as a competitor.  The telecommunications companies claimed it would result in higher local taxes and “more government” where it wasn’t needed.  Citizens defeated the proposal 67-33%.

Windom, Minnesota faced similar challenges and their fiber project was shot down in 1999, but with lessons learned, proponents brought it back up and won in 2000.  To this day, the community of 4500 in western Minnesota face considerable envy from adjacent communities — they want service from the fiber-to-the-home system as well.

Almost universally, opponents to municipal broadband systems claim they are financial failures and saddle communities with debt.  In reality, most have forced those opponents to provide improved service in their competitive communities, or those companies will become the financial failure.

[flv width=”427″ height=”240″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Terry Huval of Lafayette Utility System April 2009.flv[/flv]

Terry Huval of Lafayette Utility System talks with the Fiber Revolution blog about the challenges Lafayette experienced building their own municipal fiber network.  Huval offers excellent advice for other municipalities exploring similar projects.  (April, 2009 – 10 minutes)

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p style=”text-align: left;”>Thanks to Stop the Cap! readers Tim and Matt who suggested this story idea.

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona)

What a week.  Broadband policy now has its very own death panel, in the form of accusations that Net Neutrality policies are:

• a Marxist-Obama plot to control the Internet;
• designed to silence conservative talk radio like the Fairness Doctrine;
• going to ruin Sen. John “I don’t use e-mail” McCain’s (R-Arizona) day.

Just a few years ago we watched former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) tell us the Internet is not a truck but a series of tubes.  Glenn Beck earlier this week was coddling a small, terrified puppy that he claimed represented cowardly media missing out on the grand Marxist conspiracy underway, and Net Neutrality was just the latest piece of the coup puzzle.  Now one Tennessee congresswoman believes Net Neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine of 2009 and is being run by a czar.

Let’s review:

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) has introduced the ironically named “Internet Freedom Act” to free the broadband industry from potential oppressive government overregulation.

“Today I’m pleased to introduce ‘The Internet Freedom Act of 2009’ that will keep the Internet free from government control and regulation,” said McCain.  “It will allow for continued innovation that will in turn create more high-paying jobs for the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeking new employment,” McCain continued.  “Keeping businesses free from oppressive regulations is the best stimulus for the current economy.”

It’s certainly a stimulus — for broadband provider coffers and for McCain himself, who is Congress’ top recipient of big telecom money in the form of campaign contributions (over $900,000 and counting).  He’s the best senator the telecom industry could buy.  But wait, the guy who doesn’t own a computer or use e-mail says ‘father knows best’ for America’s online communities? McCain released a statement introducing his new bill:

The wireless industry exploded over the past twenty years due to limited government regulation.  Wireless carriers invested $100 billion in infrastructure and development over the past three years which has led to faster networks, more competitors in the marketplace and lower prices compared to any other country.  Meanwhile, wired telephones and networks have become a slow dying breed as they are mired in state and Federal regulations, universal service contribution requirements and limitations on use.

And we all know who has one of those dying breed rotary dial wired telephones, don’t we?

In fact, wireless industry profits have exploded over the past twenty years as the vast majority of Americans signed up for service.  The industry has been so awash in cash they’ve been on a consolidation shopping spree for at least the past three years, buying each other out through mergers and acquisitions.  The number of competitors John McCain thinks he sees growing is, in reality, a case of double vision.  He should get that checked.  Lower pricing?  Not quite.

Consumers don’t dump wired telephones because of government regulations:

“Honey, I can’t believe they are doing a Reverse Morris Trust deal with the phone company over in West Virginia.  We should cancel our Verizon phone line and take our business elsewhere… to Verizon Wireless instead — that will show them!”

Consumers confronting two telephone bills, one for the wireless and one for the wired phone, makes one redundant for those Americans trying to economize in this difficult economy.  The McCain family doesn’t have to

The dog knows more than it's telling

economize thanks to Comcast, AT&T and Verizon – just a few cutting checks to the self-described maverick.  Increasingly, consumers are looking for better deals and finding one with the cable company’s “digital phone” product, or an Internet-based Voice Over IP service.  State and federal regulations aren’t the problem — the quality and price of the service can be.

The vast majority of those consumers switching to wireless do not escape “universal service contribution requirements” either.  More often than not, wireless phone bills are decorated like Christmas trees with add-ons for everything from USF fees to 911 support surcharges, local, county, state and federal taxes, among others.

Limitations on use?  That would not be the wired telephone line’s flat rate calling plan.  The limitations are more commonly found on the wireless side, where many consumers get an allowance and a per-minute fee for exceeding it.  It sounds like the out of touch senator probably still makes station to station calls to “enterprise numbers.”  Welcome to the 21st century.

In short, John McCain doesn’t understand what he is talking about.  He apparently does understand those big telecom industry checks he gets, however.  No doubt that is the real inspiration for this industry-friendly legislation.

Rachel Maddow spent several minutes Friday night breaking down McCain’s legislation and what Net Neutrality is really all about.

[flv width=”596″ height=”336″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/MSNBC Rachel Maddow Net Neutrality 10-23-09.flv[/flv]

Rachel Maddow and Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing discuss Sen. McCain’s “Internet Freedom Act” and Net Neutrality. (6 minutes)

Glenn Beck from His Morning Zoo days on KZZP-FM Phoenix - Would Thomas Paine approve?

We’ve already dealt with the psychotic world of Glenn Beck.  The self-described “rodeo clown” is entertaining, as long as you recognize reality has a restraining order against Beck and must keep at least 900 feet away from him at all times.  Art Brodsky from Public Knowledge speaks to Beck’s worldview:

“Mr. Beck fails to understand the fundamentals of how the Internet works. He should be in favor of Net Neutrality, because it guarantees streaming of his program will not be able to be placed behind, say, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown. That could happen if NBC’s owner decided to pay protection money for prioritized data transmission.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) took time out from her tireless efforts to root out the czar problem in the Obama White House to conflate Net Neutrality with the Fairness Doctrine, conservative talk radio’s garlic-to-a-vampire bugaboo.  Appearing at an event sponsored by the Astroturf group “Safe Internet Alliance,” Blackburn railed against “government interference” in broadband, as Kim Hart from The Hill took it all down.  It was an amazing feat, considering she stumbled her way through a statement:

“Net neutrality, as I see it, is the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” she said.  The creators “fully understand what the Fairness Doctrine would be when it applies to TV or radio.  What they do not want is the federal government policing how they deploy their content over the Internet and they want the ISPs to manage their networks and deploy the content however they have agreed on with ISP.  They do not want a czar of the Internet to determine when they can deploy their creativity over the Internet. “They do not want a czar to determine what speeds will be available….  We are watching the FCC very closely as it relates to that issue.”

When it comes to broadband expansion, she said, she wants to make sure “all individuals’ rights are respected and that we look at the freedom of all broadband participants.” She said Congress needs to make sure the groups receiving stimulus funds for broadband expansion are able to deploy reasonable and effective network management tools so they can be helpful in tracking down illegal activity.”

“We shouldn’t look at technology as how do we punish and impede, but how do we encourage innovation,” she said.  “That needs to be a key thought as we move forward.  How do we encourage that innovation and not impede it?”

Blackburn herself is impeding a rational discussion with her word salad.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee)

Blackburn doesn’t see or understand much of anything.  Her off the rails representation of Net Neutrality as the equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine is bizarre at best, just plain rock stupid at worst.  Indeed, the Fairness Doctrine did dictate a form of balance in opinions for licensed radio and television stations in this country before it was repealed.  Net Neutrality specifically requires Internet providers, and everyone else, to keep their hands out of determining whether something is balanced or not.  The Internet is not a licensed medium, and the free exchange of ideas possible on today’s Internet already provides the ultimate fairness, where ideas can be freely expressed by anyone.

Glenn Beck sees Marxists.  Marsha Blackburn sees czars.  These folks need to cut down on the borscht for lunch.

Blackburn’s only priority for broadband stimulus seems to be using the money to help ferret out illegal activity online.  Perhaps she can come over and clear out my spam folder.

I didn’t even realize we had a Broadband Speed Czar.  I want to be the Broadband Speed Czar, moving across the land and banishing slow, expensive, and just plain lousy slow broadband technologies.  I decree no Internet Overcharging experiments and fiber-fast speeds for all!

As for the “Safe Internet Alliance,” considering their members include AT&T, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, Verizon, and a whole mess of other astroturfers (many who also belong to Broadband for America), we can guess the kind of safety they are looking for.

Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility

AT&T Mobility has news for its customers: “You’ll be hearing something from us in the near future,” says AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega.  He was speaking about an end to “unlimited” usage of its wireless network.  Stop the Cap! reader Jeremy learned about it and sent word our way.

Of course, AT&T has always reserved the right to impose overlimit fees or terminate accounts that exceed 5 gigabytes per month, but most of the horror stories about enormous bills come from consumers using AT&T’s wireless broadband service on a computer.  For iPhone users, who are force-fed a mandatory $30 monthly “unlimited” data plan, their wireless usage has not been subjected to an AT&T crackdown for whatever they consider “excessive” that month.

But that is likely to change, and soon.  De la Vega warned listeners on a conference call held this week that AT&T’s considerations of ways to deal with extreme bandwidth users are “all in flux, but we will come up with ways that mitigate the [network] impact we’ve seen by a small number of customers who are driving inordinate usage.”

The company has been holding focus groups about Internet Overcharging schemes, trying to conjure up a public relations message that consumers will be duped into believing is fair.  They’ve tested everything from meal scenarios to toll roadways, comparing “heavy users” with 18 wheelers and ordinary light users with Mini Coopers, asking participants if they felt it was fair “for the truckers to pay more?”  One of our readers clandestinely participated in one of these, and managed to debunk their nonsense over a free lunch, with consumers incensed to discover the tolls they are charging are ludicrously profitable even at current rates.

When facts about Internet Overcharging are revealed, it’s not a question of who should pay more — it’s a demand to know why everyone isn’t paying less -and- why companies like AT&T aren’t investing a greater percentage of their fat profits in expanding their network.

As I’ve written on several previous occasions, it comes as no surprise to me that some companies in the broadband industry have been looking for an excuse to throw all of our “favorite” Internet Overcharging schemes on customers — usage allowances, overlimit fees and penalties, or just throttling your connection to dial-up speeds.  As I predicted, some will try an “either/or” scam on consumers, telling them they are “forced” to impose these kinds of profit grabs because the government is demanding Net Neutrality.  One has absolutely nothing to do with the other of course, but it’s a convenient excuse to help rally consumers against Net Neutrality now, and impose higher pricing on consumers anyway.  It is crucial that consumers do not fall for this ploy.  There is no fairness in being overcharged for Internet access, such plans never truly provide “only paying for what you use” pricing, and no one should be willing to give up one for the other.  In Canada, they ended up with no Net Neutrality -and- Internet Overcharging schemes, precisely what would happen here.

As has always been the case, AT&T blames a “small percentage” of their users for consuming massive amounts of bandwidth.  Earlier this summer it was “three percent of Smartphone users use 40% of AT&T’s wireless network.”  The us vs. them mentality is designed to divide consumers into finger pointing camps blaming their neighbors for “the problem” instead of asking pointed questions of the carrier making the claim.  Some questions are:

1. Exactly how much data do those “heavy Smartphone users” consume?
2. What is AT&T’s cost per megabyte/gigabyte to deliver that data to consumers?
3. Why does AT&T mandate iPhone customers purchase an “unlimited” data plan and then complain when customers utilize what they are paying for?
4. Will AT&T significantly reduce pricing for mandatory data plan customers, or simply throw a usage allowance on existing accounts and expect consumers to pay the same?
5. What percentage of AT&T’s profits are spent on their network and its expansion, and has that amount as a percentage increased or decreased in the last five years?
6. If AT&T is suffering from smartphone congestion, why continue an exclusive deal for the iPhone, which AT&T claims contributes to a significant amount of that congestion?
7. Why does AT&T marketing claim their wireless broadband plans are “unlimited” when, in fact, they are limited to 5 gigabytes of usage per month?

Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, told Computerworld carriers have a legitimate issue in considering an “overage charge,” for users who surpass a certain number of gigabytes of data per month.

“People will complain about an overage charge,” Gold said. “I guarantee complaints, but there’s no other way to deal with it short of building out more networks to give people the bandwidth they crave. There really are bandwidth hogs. You have 5% of the users taking up 90% of the bandwidth sometimes.”

Gold said he agrees with net neutrality rules that allow users to reach any Web site on the Internet, but argued that carriers can’t provide unlimited bandwidth to all users. Doing so “means everybody else is limited … The AT&Ts and Verizons have a legitimate point.”

Of course, Gold is in the business of representing business interests, not consumers.  Does Gold have direct evidence of his numbers, or does he simply repeat what he has heard carriers tell him?  Since consumers cannot easily find truly unlimited mobile broadband accounts in the American wireless industry today, de la Vega’s urgent statements about imposing limits on customers must target iPhone and other smartphone users specifically, because those are the only accounts AT&T hasn’t held hard to their 5GB usage cap.

Phillip Dampier

The Wall Street Journal today published an article reviewing the landscape of flat rate broadband service and how some Internet providers want to change it.

The article quotes me on the issue of Internet Overcharging becoming a political football in the Net Neutrality debate.

“This could come down to carriers saying, ‘If you don’t allow us to manage our networks the way we see fit, then we will just have to cap everything,’ ” says Phillip Dampier, a consumer advocate focusing on technology issues in Rochester, N.Y. “They’ll make it an either/or thing: give them more control over their network or expect metered broadband.”

Mr. Dampier was among those who forced Time Warner Cable to shelve a metered Internet pilot program in several cities last year. The company, which had argued the plan would be a fairer way to charge for access, acknowledged it was a “debacle.” It won’t say if it plans to revive the trials.

Unfortunately, the article never bothers to mention Stop the Cap!, the website dedicated to fighting these overcharging schemes.

AT&T weighs in on their experiment to overcharge consumers in Beaumont, Texas and Reno, Nevada, and analysts think Net Neutrality arguments may give providers an excuse to expand those experiments, launch price increases and blame it on Net Neutrality policies:

“Some type of usage-based model, for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns, seems inevitable,” an AT&T spokesman says. AT&T declined to provide more details on its trials.

“Unquestionably, the carriers erred in their initial selling of broadband with a flat rate,” says Elroy Jopling, research director of Gartner Inc. “They assumed no one would use it as much as they do now, but then along came high-definition movies. They’re now trying to get around that mistake.”

Network neutrality deals primarily with ensuring that Internet providers don’t favor any online traffic over any other. Still, Mr. Jopling and other analysts argue, the net neutrality debate might provide the carriers with an opening to argue for changing that pricing.

“With network neutrality enforced, the only other option for carriers is to charge by the byte or to raise the flat-rate pricing,” says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research. “Right now they’re just deciding which one to do. Just be prepared to pay more.”

It's "Rep. Eric Massa," Not 'Joe Messa'

The article has several flaws.

• It mis-identifies Rep. Eric Massa (D-New York) as “Rep. Joe Messa.”  Rep. Massa introduced legislation to ban Internet Overcharging when companies cannot produce actual evidence to justify it, particularly in the limited competitive marketplace for broadband in the United States.
• The article fails to mention the usage limits proposed by smaller broadband providers, including Frontier’s infamous 5GB usage definition in their Acceptable Use Policy.  This is a very important fact to consider when the article quotes Professor Andrew Odlyzko, an independent authority on broadband usage, as stating the average broadband consumer uses triple that amount (15 gigabytes per month).
• The quotation about the number of e-mails or web page views available under plan allowances that routinely appear in such articles ignores the increasing use of higher bandwidth applications like online video.  Telling a consumer they can send 75 million e-mails is irrelevant information because no consumer would ever need to worry about usage limits if they only used their account for web page browsing and e-mail usage.  They very much do have to be concerned if they use their service to watch online video from Hulu or Netflix, or use one of the online backup services.
• The article makes no mention of publicly available financial reports from broadband providers like Time Warner Cable that prove that at the same time their profits on broadband service are increasing, the company’s costs to provide the service continue to decline, along with the dollar amounts they spend to maintain and expand that network to meet demand.  Providing readers with insight into the true financial picture of a broadband provider, instead of simply quoting the public relations line of the day would seem particularly appropriate for The Wall Street Journal.
• The article doesn’t make mention that the same providers arguing increased Internet traffic is creating a problem for them are also working to launch an online video distribution platform that will rival Hulu in size and scope.  TV Everywhere will consume an enormous amount of the broadband network they claim can’t handle today’s traffic without Internet Overcharging schemes being thrown on customers.  Of course, such usage limits are very convenient for companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and AT&T, which are now in the business of selling pay television programming to consumers.  Should a consumer choose to watch all of their television online instead of paying for a cable package, a usage allowance will help put a stop to that very quickly, as will planned restrictions that only provide online video to “authenticated” existing pay television subscribers.

One thing remains certain – providers are still itching to overcharge you for your broadband service.  Consumers and the public interest groups that want to represent them must stand unified in opposition to Internet Overcharging schemes and for Net Neutrality protection, and never accept sacrificing one for the other.