NY City Council members are reviewing an application by Time Warner Cable and Cablevision to offer Wi-Fi services in 32 New York-area parks… for a fee that could bring the companies as much as $10 million dollars a year in new revenue.

The controversial proposal would frustrate efforts by the nonprofit group NYCWireless to find free Wi-Fi providers to deliver service in New York’s public parks.

In September, the city of New York renewed franchises for both Cablevision and Time Warner Cable that included a commitment to spend $10 million to install Wi-Fi service in area parks.  But nobody said the companies had to provide the service for free.

Instead, users will only get free samples — up to three ten-minute sessions per month.  Additional time on the network will cost 99 cents per day.  Cable customers will get unlimited access for free.

Dana Spiegel, executive director of the nonprofit NYCWireless, says handing over the wireless space in public parks to private fee-based providers is “absolutely unconscionable.”

City council members don’t have a final say over the deal — a state commission does — but intends to investigate the deal and its fairness to New York residents.

Verizon FiOS has a growing presence in New York City, and those customers would be locked out of free Wi-Fi access on the proposed park network.

NYCWireless offered the council several reasons why relying on cable companies to deliver public park Wi-Fi was not a great deal:

First, the plan does not establish any form of “Free Public Wi-Fi”, an amenity of New York City parks since NYCwireless began our work, and one replicated by the Parks Department and many other organizations around the City. Free Public Wi-Fi Hotspots were a very significant recommendation of the Diamond Consulting “Broadband Needs Assessment Study,” and the “Free” part of these public hotspots are exactly the part of these amenities that make them so valuable and essential for local residents.

Make no mistake: DoITT’s plan establishes a $1 per day fee for internet service in parks. There may be a few free 10-minute blocks per month, and there may be ways to hide the $1 per day charge in a resident’s cable service internet bill, but with DoITT’s plan, NYC won’t have Free Wi-Fi. We’ll have $1 per day Wi-Fi, delivered to public spaces that are maintained by our tax dollars, paid to a couple of huge private corporations.

In fact, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable stand to make tens of millions of dollars per year providing this service. Central Park gets about 25m visitors per year, and if we ignore all other parks, and figure that fewer than half of those visitors buy one day of internet service per year, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision get paid $0.99 x 10 million visitors = $10,000,000.

Second, the industry standard for gaining access to such types of subscription service as are contemplated by DoITT and the cable companies requires that a prospective user of a fee-based Parks Hotspot will need to create an account and enter their billing information. This requires the submission of identity, address, and credit card information into a web form prior to gaining access to the hotspot. Essentially, by promoting this solution, DoITT is pushing NYC citizens and visitors to hand over deeply personal and secure information to a private organization over which neither the user nor DoITT has any control.

Contrast this to the way that NYCwireless offers free Wi-Fi to citizens: we do require registration of a user account so that we can track agreement to our Acceptable Usage Policy. However we require only a valid email address. No billing address, no credit card, no other identity information.

Personally, I am fearful of handing over such information to such private organizations, though I have in the past. But I am more fearful for the harm that will be done to those that depend more significantly upon Park Hotspots. How many city residents don’t have a credit card? How many children in playgrounds who couldn’t get a credit card even if they wanted to? Adults? How many city residents live in neighborhoods that are otherwise safe, but in which they would prefer not pulling out their wallet and a credit card just to get what should be Free Internet Access? How many city residents depend upon Free Wi-Fi because they live below the poverty line, and because they can’t afford or don’t want cable internet, cannot afford the $5 it would cost them to get internet access in a city park during the week?

Lastly, because of DoITT’s “whole package solution”, most NYC residents and visitors won’t see any Wi-Fi, for free or for fee, for years, since local organizations that would otherwise have sponsored the creation of a Free Public Wi-Fi Hotspot say “oh, well, the city is going to do this someday, so we won’t bother doing this now for our community.” If past experience is any predictor of future performance, it will be years before the first Paid Wi-Fi Hotspot is opened, and many more before many others are opened, if at all. Meanwhile, DoITT’s actions will have stopped in its tracks any plans for more hotspots that local organizations may be contemplating.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/NY 1 Time Warner Cable Offers Free WiFi Hotspots For City Customers 3-26-10.flv[/flv]

NY1 reported on Time Warner Cable’s expanded Wi-Fi hotspots in New York in this story from last March.  (1 minute)

A company claiming to own a broad patent covering ‘storage and retrieval playback systems’ has sued six large cable companies claiming they are infringing its patents.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Bright House Networks, Charter Communications, and Cablevision have all been accused of violating patents that could cover their respective video-on-demand systems.

Pragmatus, whose website is “under construction,” acquired the patents from Intellectual Patents, which has extracted more than a billion dollars in licensing fees on broad-based general patents.  Law.com calls both firms “patent trolls,” because they exist largely to collect money from deep pocketed technology companies.

The lawsuit covers patents 5,581,479 and 5,636,139 which describe technology that uses “information service control points” that send blocks of data to remote stations.  That could cover just about any server.

As proof of infringement, the legal filing simply includes the URL’s of websites that promote video-on-demand services.

Many lawsuits eventually settle out of court quietly, with licensing deals that extract a portion of each subscriber’s monthly payment and send it on to companies like Pragmatus.

Harry Cole, who has dealt with these nuisance suits before, says they are a product of a broken patent system.

“[A patent trolls does] not produce anything. It does not sell anything bought or processed, nor does it buy anything sold or processed, nor does it process anything sold, bought or processed, nor does it repair anything sold, bought or processed … All the company does is speculate on patents, which it purchases on the secondary market in the hope that one such patent will hit it big.”

Cofetel is Mexico's equivalent to the American Federal Communications Commission

When Big Telecom companies deliver customers little service, Mexico is one step ahead of the United States in hitting bad actors right where it hurts — in their wallets.

Mexico’s telecommunications watchdog Cofetel announced it was recommending fines for a cell phone company that dropped more calls than it completed and a cable system that promised upgrades but delivered weeks of service outages instead.

Telcel/America Movil, Mexico’s largest cellular provider controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, was called out for dropping calls at a rate that would make AT&T customers wince.  Cofetel found more than half of all wireless calls placed over Telcel went nowhere, forcing customers to redial, sometimes repeatedly.

Cofetel reported the carrier blamed a “glitch” it failed to inform the regulator of back in November.

Cablevision (no relation to the American company of the same name) was called out for launching a system “upgrade” that left thousands of Mexico City customers with no cable or broadband service for weeks between October and November.

Cablevision's "upgrades" = outages

Cofetel said the cable company failed to get permission for the upgrade, which the regulator would have reviewed before granting permission.

Cofetel lacks the power to directly fine offenders, but has recommended the communications ministry consider imposing close to the maximum fines allowed, ranging between $93,000-$187,000 in American dollars.  The regulatory body recognizes the fines may not deliver much of a sting to either America Movil ($1.85 billion in third quarter earnings) or Televisa ($174 million in the last quarter), which is why is it asking lawmakers to authorize much higher fines for offenders.

Cofetel caught Telcel dropping more calls than it completed.

For Mexicans accustomed to bad service, major fines could provoke relief.  Mexican telecommunications companies have notoriously poor service records.  Service disruptions from light rain or wind can disrupt service across large neighborhoods.

The United States has systematically removed government oversight from telecommunications providers, suspecting consumers will simply switch providers if one fails to deliver good service.  But if both companies fail, Americans often find they have little recourse.

The cable company best known for serving suburban New York City has gone west with the purchase of Bresnan Communications

The new owner of Bresnan Communications is promising customers in Montana and Wyoming an end to anemic broadband service, but subscribers wonder who is going to pay for it.

Bethpage, N.Y.-based Cablevision is telling subscribers upgrades are on the way to bring faster broadband, better cable and phone service to 300,000 Mountain West customers formerly served by Bresnan.

John Bickham, president of Cable & Communications for Cablevision, told readers of the Billings Gazette improvements would arrive over the next year-and-a-half:

We’re going to start by increasing the number of high-definition channels we provide, with a goal of providing more than 100 free HD channels over the next 18 months. We will also be adding more movie choices and more free video-on-demand titles, including prime-time shows from leading broadcast networks.

High-speed Internet service in the towns we serve is going to get faster. Over the next 18 months, we will upgrade the speeds of our basic level of Internet service to up to 15 megabits per second, nearly double what they are today. And with our award-winning and top-rated phone service, we will be adding even more features, functions and value to the phone service available in these communities today, including access to an innovative Web site to manage account preferences, review calling records or check voice mail from any computer.

For many subscribers, the improvements cannot come soon enough.

One reader in Jackson Hole, Wyo., said Bresnan rarely provided broadband service at the advertised rates, noting their 8Mbps service really was closer to 3-4Mbps.

But residents in both Wyoming and Montana warn that if Cablevision plans to manage all of the spiffy upgrades with a rate increase, they’ll cancel.

“I’ll be watching my bill. If it goes up because of all these changes, I’ll drop you in a heartbeat,” wrote one Montana customer.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the cable industry’s top lobbying group, upped its lobbying activity during the third quarter, spending $4 million to press government officials to adopt a pro-cable legislative agenda.

That amount was up from $3.93 million spent in the second quarter, and $3.78 million spent during last year’s third quarter.

Among the issues on the cable industry’s agenda: stopping Net Neutrality, lobbying against consumer regulatory reforms, tax policies that favor cable companies, cybersecurity, and patent reform.

Among the companies chipping in: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision.

In addition to members of Congress, NCTA lobbyists appealed to the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the Federal Trade Commission.