Customers don’t care who wins, because they don’t need faster broadband, claims Bright House Networks.

Bright House Networks thinks customers do not need or want faster broadband speeds and have no plans to match newly-announced speed increases offered by its competitor Verizon FiOS.

The cable operator, which serves central Florida, is downplaying the importance of Verizon’s upgraded service which will bring 300Mbps broadband to cities like Orlando and Tampa.

“Research indicates that the vast majority of customers do not have interest in these types of speeds for their homes, not to mention the potential expense,” Bright House spokesman Joe Durkin told the Tampa Bay Times. “Our network can deliver these speeds if we felt there was a residential market for it.”

Bright House speeds currently max out at 40Mbps. The cable operator says customers seeking faster service won’t face the sticker shock Verizon delivers for their fastest speed package, which comes in at $200 a month. Bright House sells its fastest package at “an additional $15 or $30 a month,” Durkin said.

Durkin believes most consumers can survive just fine with a slower speed package, even with multiple wireless devices sharing the connection.

“Whether you are downloading music or streaming video to your laptop or iPad, you can do it all with Road Runner Lightning,” he said.

Bright House retains the Road Runner brand for its broadband service that Time Warner Cable retired earlier this year. Bright House has partnered with Time Warner to handle programming and certain other contract negotiations.

When a company like Comcast grows so big, it no longer cares whether its marketing claims are true or false, perhaps it is time to put those claims to the test in court or before a state attorney general for review.

Recently, Comcast’s claim it runs the fastest Internet Service Provider in the nation came under scrutiny by the Better Business Bureau. The simple truth is, Comcast is not the fastest ISP in the nation — not even close. But because PC Magazine ran a limited test of some national broadband providers and found Comcast barely making it to the top, the cable giant has been running ads across the country that are disingenuous and incomplete at best, completely misleading and false at worst.

Phillip “Comcast is not too big to deserve a FAIL“ Dampier

The National Advertising Division of the BBB, a self-regulating industry-controlled body, found the advertising deceptive, which says a lot for a group that lives or dies on the whims of the industries that support its operations.

NAD previously determined that Comcast cannot, based on its current offerings, make an unqualified claim in national advertising to be faster than the competition. NAD noted that while Comcast is the fastest Internet option for 94 percent of the 52 million households in its competitive footprint, it is not the fastest where Verizon FiOS is available.

Consumers need deep pockets to read the actual report that mildly criticizes Comcast. The NAD keeps the public out of its business with a subscription rate of $550 a year to read detailed individual case reports. We learned about the case from one of our readers who shared a copy.

Among the false claims Comcast is still making:

• “It’s official.  We’re the fastest.” — Officially, Comcast is not the fastest.
• “…the fastest downloads available.” — False.
• “FiOS Does Not Live up to Expectations….With Speeds of Up to 105Mbps, XFINITY was rated as the fastest Internet provider in the nation by PC Magazine.” — But FiOS speeds are faster than Comcast. PC Magazine did not test Verizon FiOS.

Comcast agreed to consider making changes to their advertising to comply, but that now appears to be a non-starter.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., EPB Fiber broadband beats the pants off Comcast. No, it’s actually worse than that. EPB embarrasses Comcast’s comparatively slow broadband service. While Comcast was looking for a way to manipulate customers into using its Xbox online video app to avoid their unjustified usage cap, EPB customers were bypassing that problem altogether by choosing EPB’s fiber to the home service that doesn’t have usage caps and delivers speeds up to 1Gbps.  Comcast, (remember they are “America’s fastest”) tops out at 105Mbps.

One would think Comcast would be hurrying their blatantly false advertising off the air and out of sight in Chattanooga, but the company has refused.

The Times Free Press reports Comcast won’t be making any changes to their ads, and has actually doubled-down with more blatantly false marketing claims. Why? Because EPB is too small of a player for Comcast to be concerned with telling the truth:

Jim Weigert, vice president and general manager of Comcast in Chattanooga, said the request won’t apply to this area and advertising will stay the same.

“I don’t see any changes at all,” he said. “Our use of that designation as the fastest ISP and fastest commercial ISP is still the same and will still be used the same as it is today.”

Weigert said local networks such as EPB, which delivers maximum download speeds about 10 times faster than those of Comcast, is too small of a player to affect the region’s advertising or PC Magazine‘s designation.

“Those awards exist, and we just need to make sure we’re using it properly and quoting it properly,” he said. “It doesn’t reference EPB at all because they’re not national. They’re not big enough to get that attention.”

In other words, actual facts about broadband speed don’t matter. With standards like this, it is only a matter of time before we’ll be seeing program length commercials for snake oil.

Beyond the fact Comcast is morally and ethically wrong here, I’m not sure I would want my company admitting to customers truth should come in second. With that kind of attitude, Comcast customers should put their wallets in their front pockets, leave the kids home and lock their car doors before visiting a Comcast Cable Store.

Deborah Dwyer, public relations supervisor for EPB, notes the Comcast ads are self-serving and “cause pretty significant confusion among the public.”

At least the public that still believes what Comcast Cable tells them represents the truth.

Customers promised big savings from dropping their old Verizon plans found tricks, traps, and speed reductions.

Beware of telemarketers bearing gifts.

Frontier Communications has embarked on a sales push to convince customers adopted from Verizon Communications to “upgrade” their grandfathered Verizon broadband plans to new offerings from Frontier.

But Stop the Cap! has received more than a dozen complaints from customers who discovered their broadband speeds were slashed, sometimes significantly, after taking Frontier up on one of their offers.

“Whenever you call Frontier customer service, they always have an offer for you that they claim will save you money and I fell for it,” Tim Falston says.

Falston has been a Stop the Cap! reader since he learned Frontier Communications was buying out his Verizon landline in 2010.

“Frontier promised me nothing would change after they took over from Verizon, but of course a lot changed when I agreed to switch to a new bundled service package Frontier was offering for my phone and Internet service,” Falston writes.

Falston thought he was keeping his 8Mbps DSL service Verizon had been selling him for nearly five years, only now he would save at least $10 a month bundling some of Frontier’s other products into his package. A few days after signing up, he found his broadband speeds were lacking. It turned out Frontier reduced his speed to just under 3Mbps. A few days later, the company also mailed him a new DSL modem/router that he later learned came with a monthly fee that more than wiped out his “savings.”

“This was the worst decision I ever made, and Frontier never warned me the package I was signing up for cut my speeds more than half and stuck me with a modem I don’t want or need,” Falston said.

Unfortunately, when Falston called Frontier to switch back to his old plan, he was told it was no longer available and he had to choose from Frontier’s current services that came with higher prices and term contracts.

Surprise! Modem rental fee!

“It’s bait and switch and should be illegal,” Falston said. “I was told that everything about my service was to stay the same if I agreed to their bundle, and I think they figured most people have no idea about speeds and just accept what they are given, but I was never told about the modem or the rental fee that comes with it, and my old Verizon equipment worked just fine.”

Frontier won’t even sell Falston 8Mbps service, even though he had it for half a decade.

“They want to sell me 3Mbps and tell me that is all my line will support,” Falston complains. “That was after I finally convinced them to talk to me — the account is in the wife’s name and Frontier blocked me because of ‘security reasons’ until they spoke with her.”

Stop the Cap! recommended Falston schedule a service call and speak to a local technician about the problem. Experience shows employees on the ground far away from the customer service department can often cut through Frontier’s red tape. That worked for Falston who quickly got his old Verizon plan back after the technician made a few phone calls from Falston’s home.

“The tech shook his head and said he deals with these problems all day long and has managed to get customers back on old plans Frontier’s customer service says are long gone,” Falston said. “He told me specifically ‘do not change any plans you signed up for with Verizon — all of the offers from Frontier come at higher prices and fewer features.'”

So if Frontier has an offer you cannot refuse, refuse it anyway, at least if your old phone company was Verizon Communications. You are probably better off with what you have today.

Despite claims from some of their competitors that customers don’t want or need super-fast broadband, Verizon Communications is taking broadband speeds to the new level, upgrading service to as high as 300Mbps in selected areas.

Our friends at Broadband Reports had the scoop on this a few weeks ago, but now it’s official: speed -and- price increases for Verizon are on the way for the company’s fiber optic network FiOS.

Many customers will see their broadband speeds double or more in June. At the same time, the company has been sending out letters informing customers of price increases, often $5 a month for those not locked into service contracts.

Verizon's Speed Upgrade Chart (Courtesy: Broadband Reports)

Verizon’s new top tier of 300/65Mbps will be introduced in areas that have Verizon’s Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON). Pricing has not yet been announced.

The company is targeting its speed upgrades to premium broadband customers who subscribe to faster tiers. Customers on Verizon’s standard 15/5Mbps tier will see no changes in service.

Six college towns will benefit from the nation’s first multi-community broadband gigabit deployment, thanks to $200 million in capital funding to get the broadband networks off the ground.

The Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program leverages local government, universities, private capital, and the public to jointly support and foster the development of new fiber optic networks.

The new program claims it will offer competitively-priced super-fast broadband through projects that will cover neighborhoods of 5,000-10,000 people and communities up to 100,000 in size.  Selection of the six winning communities will be announced between this fall and next spring.

“Gigabit Squared created the Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program to help select Gig.U communities build and test gigabit speed broadband networks with speeds from 100 to 1000 times faster than what Americans have today,” the company said in a statement.

“The United States is behind in the world for Internet speed,” said Mark Ansboury, Gigabit’s president and co-founder. “The goal is to help get us out front for a platform of innovation.”

That platform is certainly not forthcoming from the country’s largest broadband providers, who according to Ansboury have been pulling back on wired infrastructure upgrades in recent years, shifting focus to more profitable wireless networks.

Gigabit Squared defines the next generation of broadband Internet in terms of speed, declaring 2,000Mbps (2Gbps) as the target to achieve.

The winning projects will be sponsored by Gig.U members, which include:

• Arizona State University
• California Institute of Technology
• Case Western Reserve University
• Colorado State University
• Duke University
• Florida State University
• George Mason University
• The Georgia Institute of Technology
• Howard University
• Indiana University
• Michigan State University
• North Carolina State University
• Penn State University
• University of Alaska – Fairbanks
• University of Arizona
• University of Chicago
• University of Colorado – Boulder
• University of Florida
• University of Hawaii
• University of Illinois
• University of Kentucky
• University of Louisville
• University of Maine
• University of Maryland
• University of Michigan
• University of Missouri
• University of Montana
• University of Nebraska – Lincoln
• University of New Mexico
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of Oklahoma
• University of South Florida
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington
• Virginia Tech
• Wake Forest University
• West Virginia University

Blair Levin, executive director at Gig.U, believes private American telecom companies will always be constrained from delivering world class broadband comparable to South Korea or Japan because of Wall Street opposition to the investment required to construct them. In the eyes of investors, today’s slower networks, in their estimation, do just fine.

Gig.U believes that they have a solution, at least for towns with a sizable university system that can serve as host of the next generation broadband network:

First, any community that wants its residents to have access to a network that delivers world-leading bandwidth can do so. The barrier is not technology or economics. The barrier is organization; specifically, organizing demand and improved use of underutilized assets, such as rights of way, dark fiber, or in more rural areas, spectrum. The responses identified a multitude of ways local communities can improve the private investment case by lowering investment and risk, and increasing revenues for private players willing to upgrade or build new networks without budget outlays from the local government.

Second, the responses confirmed that university communities have the easiest organizing task and greatest upside. Their density, demographics and demand make the current economics more favorable for an upgrade than other communities. For example, the high percentage of the population in university communities living in multiple dwelling units makes the economics of an upgrade far more favorable than for communities composed largely of single-family homes. With the growing importance of Big Data for the economy and the society, university communities are the natural havens for such enterprises to be born and prosper. Through the Gig.U process, our communities are already exploring more than a half-dozen paths to achieve an upgrade; paths that will be replicable for others and will deliver a major step forward in providing America a strategic broadband advantage.

Outside of a handful of upstart private competitors like California-based Sonic.net, most fiber broadband expansion come from private companies like Google — building an experimental fiber-to-the-home network in Kansas City, community-owned broadband services coordinated by local town or city government, co-op telecommunications companies owned by their subscribers, or municipal utilities.

While those efforts are typically committed to the concept of “universal service” — wiring their entire communities — the Gig.U project targets funding only for networks in and around university campuses.

The New America Foundation builds on Gig.U’s premise in its own recent report, “Universities as Hubs for Next Generation Networks,” which argues affordable expansion of broadband can win community support when the public has the right to also benefit from those networks. While Gig.U’s approach suggests the project will target fiber broadband directly to the homes qualified to receive it, the New America Foundation supports the construction of mesh wireless Wi-Fi networks to keep construction costs low for neighborhoods targeted for service.

An earlier project in Orono and Old Town, Maine may afford a preview of Gig.U’s vision, as that collaboration between the University of Maine and private fiber provider GWI is already in its construction phase. For those lucky enough to live within range of the fiber project, broadband speeds will far exceed what incumbents Time Warner Cable and FairPoint Communications deliver. FairPoint has fought similar projects (and GWI specifically) for years.

Will private providers object to the Gig.U effort to win local governments’ favor in the six cities eventually chosen for service? History suggests the answer will be yes, at least to the extent local cable and phone companies demand the same concessions for easy pole access, reduced pole attachment fees, and easing of zoning restrictions and procedures Gig.U project coordinators expect.

Levin has stressed Gig.U projects are based on university and private funding sources, not taxpayer dollars. That may also limit how much objection commercial providers may be able to raise against the projects.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WABI Bangor Orono Maine Getting Faster Service 5-16-12.flv[/flv]

WABI in Bangor previews the new gigabit broadband network being constructed in Orono and Old Town, Maine.  (2 minutes)