Suddenlink is throwing a hissyfit over Frontier’s aggressive advertising.

Now come on, you are both pretty… slow that is.

Suddenlink Communications is crawling mad that Frontier Communications has been hammering the cable company over their broadband speeds, which PC Magazine this week proclaimed were nothing to write home about. The cable operator successfully challenged some of Frontier’s ads with the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus.

The group recommended Frontier cease making claims that its DSL service offers “dedicated” lines to the Internet in contrast to Suddenlink, which forces customers to share their connection with the whole neighborhood.

Frontier claims Suddenlink’s network can bog down during peak hours, while Frontier makes sure customers consistently get the speeds they pay for.

Many of the ads targeted customers in West Virginia, who regularly tell Stop the Cap! neither provider competing there offers particularly good service.

“Is Frontier kidding?,” says Shane Foster, a former Frontier customer in West Virginia. “I was supposed to be getting up to 6Mbps service and I was lucky to get 1.5Mbps at 2 am.”

Foster says he believes Frontier oversold its DSL network in his area, with speeds slowing even further during the evening and weekends when everyone got online. While Frontier may not require customers to share a line from their home to the company’s central office, congestion can occur within Frontier’s local exchange or on the connection Frontier maintains with Internet backbone providers.

“The technician sent to my house even privately admitted it,” Foster tells Stop the Cap!

Foster switched to Suddenlink, but he is not exactly a happy customer there either.

“Their usage caps suck, the service is slow, and their measurement tool is always broken,” Foster shares. “West Virginia doesn’t just get the bottom of the barrel, it gets the dirt underneath it.”

Frontier Communications says it has been making improvements in West Virginia and other states where it provides DSL broadband. Some areas can now subscribe to 25Mbps service because of network upgrades. Foster says he would dump Suddenlink and go back to Frontier, if they can deliver speeds the rest of the country gets.

“Sorry, but 1.5Mbps is not broadband and with their prices, tricky fees and contracts it is robbery,” says Foster. “They need to clean up their act and I’ll come back. I hate usage caps with a passion.”

Frontier says it will appeal the NAD’s decision. But Frontier might do better advertising its broadband service as usage cap free — something customers consistently value over those running Internet Overcharging schemes.

Susan Crawford, President Barack Obama’s former Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy has the solution for America’s lack of universal broadband, and she solves it in just four Tweets:

• Step 1 gives private companies the push they need to get rural broadband financing within their existing Return on Investment formulas by reducing capital costs for unserved areas;
• Step 2 stops the corporate welfare legislation that protects the incumbent duopoly from publicly-owned competition that can ignore Wall Street’s insistence that more competition = fat profit erosion;
• Step 3 gives the ISPs access to public land and infrastructure either at no or low cost in return for recognizing they are benefiting from that taxpayer-owned infrastructure, so they better not abuse the privilege;
• Step 4 makes ISPs common carriers that have no financial interest in the content transported down broadband lines, thus no incentive to favor their own services while discriminating against others.

Whether such policies can withstand court challenges claiming violation of corporation free speech rights is, of course, another matter. But Crawford’s ideas create incentives for broadband providers to aggressively wire their respective service areas while avoiding monopolizing what travels down those broadband pipelines.

{from Engadget)

Carefully laid plans for a surprise launch of the long-awaited next generation of the Slingbox were ruined when shelf stockers at Best Buy mistakenly put units out on store shelves two weeks before the official launch date.

The Slingbox 350 and 500 represent major updates in the Slingbox product line. The devices independently stream video, television, and cable programming to remote computers and wireless devices like smartphones without the kinds of copyright and location restrictions imposed on cable, satellite, and telco TV companies’ “TV Everywhere (Inside Your House)“-offerings. In short, if you can watch a channel at home, you can use the Slingbox to stream it anywhere.

Engadget reports the new models seem capable of offering 1080p streaming, assuming your wireless connection is capable of keeping up. The premium 500 model also adds built-in Wi-Fi, a major improvement over earlier Slingbox units that required either a wired Ethernet connection or a wireless bridge. But the 500 apparently deletes the built-in ATSC tuner, which seems to suggest Slingbox is targeting the device more for streaming personal media collections, not streaming broadcast TV. The 500’s inclusion of built-in USB media sharing and HDMI also seem to point in this direction. The 350, obviously a budget model, relies entirely on component and composite jacks.

The larger problem for Slingbox is coping with broadband and wireless usage caps, which could make streaming HD programming an allowance-eater. Slingbox has routinely dealt with Hollywood studios and other content owners objecting to the streaming of their television programming, but usage caps and overlimit fees could present an even bigger threat to their business model.

Slingbox’s Pro-HD and SlingCatcher models — the two most recent major releases — have been around since 2008. The company has since been largely focused on licensing its technology for inclusion in cable and satellite company set top boxes.

Best Buy realized its error when consumers attempted to buy the new units. They have since been pulled from shop shelving but will be back, slated to go on sale officially for an undisclosed price in the middle of October.

Shaw Cable, Canada’s dominant broadband provider in the west, has admitted it has stopped enforcing usage caps as the company upgrades its Internet Overcharging scheme.

Jim MacDonald, a Stop the Cap! reader, long-standing Shaw customer and member of the company’s “Shaw Friends” program noticed on a recent bill he qualified for “additional Internet usage” by belonging to the company’s loyalty club.

“I used Shaw’s concierge chat to learn more about what this means and found I would qualify for an additional 25GB allowance as a Shaw Friend, but the representative didn’t seem to think it was an important distinction,” MacDonald writes.

Apparently that is true, considering a Shaw representative admits the company has stopped monitoring customers’ Internet use:

MacDonald: I am wondering how I can get the extra 25GB added to my account as a Shaw Friend. The usage meter does not seem to reflect anything about it.

Shaw: We plan to apply that extra usage in the near future. I’m not exactly certain of the date but it should be soon. But no worries, we are not even monitoring the data right now. Once upgrades are complete and when we do monitor, you will have the extra space on your account and visible on the ‘view usage’ screen.

PC Magazine has declared fiber to the home service America’s fastest broadband technology, and among larger providers, Verizon’s FiOS once again took top honors for delivering the fastest and most consistent broadband speeds.

Over the past nine months, the magazine’s readers have been conducting regular speed tests using their personal broadband connections. The magazine found fiber optics remains the best current technology for delivering cutting-edge broadband service, with an average speed rating for FiOS reaching 29.4/16.7Mbps. Since PC Magazine readers were subscribed to various speed tiers while conducting the tests, the magazine’s ratings do not measure the fastest possible speeds on offer from different providers. Verizon’s most-popular service bundle includes 15/5Mbps service, heavily weighting Verizon’s speed rating which is capable of even faster speeds with their 50-300Mbps premium service tiers. But on average, consistently fast speeds kept them in the top spot.

Cable broadband technology was the second-best choice, depending on how cable operators implement it. Cable companies depend on a singl, shared broadband pipeline in each neighborhood. DOCSIS 3 upgrades allow a cable operator to vastly expand that pipeline by “bonding” several channels together to increase the maximum bandwidth. Cable operators that combine the latest technology with the smallest number of customers sharing a connection do the best.

Midcontinent Communications (better known by customers as Midco), achieved first place nationwide. The company, which serves customers in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin, took top honors with an average speed of 24.7/4.4Mbps — the best of any cable operator.

Ratings sometimes show the level of investment made by cable operators in their network. A sudden boost in average speeds is a sure sign a cable operator is rolling out network upgrades. A speed decline can expose a cable company trying to oversell an already constrained network. Charter Cable, which has routinely gotten poor ratings in Consumer Reports’ rankings, showed dramatic improvement in PC Magazine’s ratings, achieving third place with an average speed increase from 15Mbps to 18.5Mbps. But while the added speed is nice, the company’s usage caps are not. Conversely, WOW!, which achieved top scores in Consumer Reports’ ratings, scored towards the bottom of PC Magazine’s tests.

Comcast, which last year trumpeted its high rankings in controversial ads claiming to deliver the fastest broadband in the nation has now been overrun by both Midco and Charter. Comcast Xfinity is now in sixth place, hardly the fodder for any future ad campaign.

Cox Cable actually lost ground since last year, with average speed now down to 14.8Mbps. The bottom four: Time Warner Cable, Mediacom, WOW!, and Suddenlink — are all hampered by slow upload speeds and more anemic “take-rates” on higher speed broadband plans with the speeds on offer. With fewer premium speed customers, average speed ratings take a hit from the larger proportion of customers sticking with standard service.

Phone companies barely appeared in the magazine’s top ratings. AT&T’s U-verse could not even make the top-15. While 25Mbps was adequate when U-verse was first deployed, the broadband speed race has quickly overshadowed the company’s fiber to the neighborhood service, which still relies on home phone lines and antiquated copper infrastructure in the immediate neighborhood.

Phone companies still offering traditional ADSL on almost all-copper networks turned in even more dismal results — most too low to rate. Only Frontier’s adopted FiOS network kept them in the rankings in the overall broadband “slow zone” in the Pacific Northwest, along with CenturyLink’s acquired ADSL2+ and bonded DSL networks built by Qwest.

ISPs that perform poorly typically criticize the methodology of voluntary speed tests as the basis for speed and performance ranking. Most criticize the apparent lack of consistency, random sampling, the possibility rankings may be weighted in certain geographic areas, and may mix a disproportionate number of customers with standard or premium level speeds to unfairly boost or diminish average speed rankings. But overall, PC Magazine’s rankings show some technologies superior to others. If a customer has a choice, finding a fiber to the home provider is likely to provide an improvement over what the cable company offers, but the differences between phone company DSL and cable broadband are even starker.

The FCC speed test program, conducted by SamKnows, takes more regular snapshots of broadband quality from volunteer panelists. Your editor’s home broadband connection from Time Warner Cable is profiled above, showing results from January-September 2012