Netflix today released statistics showing Frontier Communications was America’s worst ranked wired Internet Service Provider, ranking at the bottom for quality and speed when using Netflix’s streamed content.

Only Clearwire, a heavily-throttled wireless provider scored worse than Frontier Communications.  This says nothing good about Frontier considering they are a wired provider.

Charter Cable scored highest — a surprise from a company that scores near the bottom in Consumer Reports broadband rankings:

Charter is in the lead for US streams with an impressive 2667 kilobits per second average over the period. Rogers leads in Canada with a whopping 3020 kbps average.

Canada’s higher speed performance comes even as providers claim they need to implement Internet Overcharging schemes to handle congestion on their networks — congestion not apparent from Netflix’s online video performance. Perhaps Canadians have been already grown accustomed to avoiding too much online video.

Netflix promises to release their streaming performance statistics on a monthly basis. Track your ISP from the charts below:

Netflix USA Speed Rankings

Netflix Rankings for Canada

(Our reader Paul sent us a news tip about this story.  You can send yours using the Contact Form linked above.)

Unless you own Sprint’s premiere smartphones — the Evo 4G and the Epic, get out your wallet — Sprint is increasing the price on its unlimited data plan by $10, effective later this month.

Evo and Epic owners already pay the $10 “premium data” fee that will be extended to all smartphone customers Jan. 30 (customers on existing contracts will not be affected).

The reason for the price increase?  Heavy usage on its wireless network, which partly includes Virgin Mobile (ending its unlimited service Feb. 14) and Clearwire, which heavily throttles speeds of customers deemed to be “using too much.”

Chief executive Dan Hesse says Sprint will retain its unlimited service plans, which the company calls the best value in the wireless industry.  But the pricing change will present minor challenges as Sprint markets themselves as the least costly.

Sprint's marketing focuses on its unlimited use offers, some of which are about to get more expensive.

Sprint’s “Everything Data” plan, which also includes unlimited cell-to-cell calls will now cost $79.99 per month.  Comparable plans from T-Mobile are priced at $99.99 for that company’s 4G network and $119.98 on Verizon Wireless’ slower, but more ubiquitous 3G network.

“Sprint has been the price leader in the market,” said Jennifer Fritzsche, a Wells Fargo & Co. analyst in Chicago who has an “outperform” rating on the stock. “Sprint may be more confident in the pricing power it has with customers.”

The Wall Street Journal also shares positive views of the price increase from Wall Street:

Wall Street applauded the move, with many seeing it as a sign of pricing power returning to the wireless industry. “It is more likely that Sprint believes that consumers value unlimited and that they can get away with higher pricing,” said Jonathan Chaplin, an analyst at Credit Suisse.

The price hike also suggests that Sprint has seen stronger smartphone growth over the past three months, he added, noting that the carrier likely wouldn’t have made the change if it were still concerned about stabilizing its base on contract customers.

But some other analysts are less impressed with Sprint, especially because of challenges the company faces with its Clearwire partnership.

Patrick Comack from Zachary Investment Research has downgraded Sprint stock, particularly because of technology issues Clearwire faces.

Comack told CNBC Clearwire is stuck with defective spectrum for much of its wireless broadband service.

“It can’t penetrate walls,” Comack said, noting most Clearwire customers are trying to use wireless broadband in the 2GHz range, which presents plenty of problems from obstacles between the tower and the customer.

Comack also believes Sprint’s network simply cannot compete with Verizon Wireless, which he suspects could pick up a number of Sprint customers once it fully activates its 4G network nationwide.

Verizon Wireless network delivers significantly better coverage than Sprint, which focuses on urban and suburban markets, and the major highways that connect them.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC Sprint 1-12-11.flv[/flv]

CNBC: Debating Sprint and Clearwire, with Todd Rethemeier, Hudson Square Research and Patrick Comack Zachary Investment Research.  (6 minutes)

(Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader PreventCAPS for sharing the news.)

Virgin Mobile has begun notifying their Broadband2Go customers of how they plan to continue delivering “an outstanding customer experience”: by throttling the speeds of any customer who exceeds 5GB of usage per month.

Many Virgin Mobile customers have been in touch with Stop the Cap! about they feel is bait and switch pricing engaged by Sprint’s prepaid mobile division.  At issue — customers who invested $75-150 in equipment to sign up for a service they were sold on being “unlimited.”  Virgin Mobile made the “unlimited” part of its service the focus of its marketing.

The company characterizes the decision to adopt an Internet Overcharging scheme “a difficult choice,” but it’s one that that will ultimately help the company’s bottom line while costing many of their customers a substantial amount of money for a service they might never have purchased had they known it was going to be limited.

As is the case with almost every Internet Overcharging scheme we’ve seen, the same marketing that promised an “unlimited” experience now promises that such usage limits won’t impact most customers.  In fact, the company’s notification states, “you can send over 500,000 e-mails or browse the web for 250 hours a month!”  Of course, nobody except spammers send that much e-mail, so that kind of boasting is ultimately meaningless to customers.

What is more meaningful is that Virgin’s new 5GB cap will effectively mean customers have to heavily ration their online experience, especially if it includes multimedia.  In fact, customers won’t be able to watch more than a handful of HD movies using the service.  That’s a $40 movie pass some customers would have passed up had they known it came with limits.

This notification arrived in our e-mail box this morning. Despite the spin, the e-mail is likely to enrage customers, especially those who only recently invested money in Virgin Mobile equipment they can no longer return for a refund.

In fact, Virgin Mobile’s return to the land of Internet Overcharging is nothing new for the company.  Customer response to the company’s earlier prepaid wireless broadband plans were, to say the least, underwhelming.

Virgin Mobile’s new usage limits are less about “delivering the same quality service you’ve come to expect” and more about protecting Sprint’s more lucrative postpaid mobile data customers who pay more to use the same 3G network.  While Stop the Cap! agrees delivering an unlimited wireless broadband service remains a difficult challenge with the current limits on wireless capacity, Virgin Mobile’s about-face comes uncomfortably fast — just six months after unveiling and heavily promoting its “unlimited” service.  Just as with Clearwire, Sprint has managed to oversell its network and not invest sufficiently in expanding it to meet customer demands.  Nor has either company educated customers about the inherent limitations wireless broadband has, especially on an overcrowded network.

Sources tell us Virgin Mobile, much like Clearwire, suffered from some customers trying to use peer to peer software, sometimes for days on end (simply a ridiculous endeavor on most of the wireless networks we’ve experienced).  But the company did little to explain to customers that such software often does not work well on these types of networks, and using it 24/7 is likely going to create issues not only for that customer, but for others as well.  Instead, blanket usage limits punish everyone.

Customers deserve more than platitudes from Virgin Mobile.  Any customer that wants to cancel their service should be given a full refund by Virgin for equipment costs they incurred when signing up.  Further, Virgin Mobile’s customer policies do not generally allow money on account, but as of yet unspent, to be refunded to departing customers.  That policy should be waived in this instance.  Any unspent funds should be credited back to the customer’s credit card or refunded by check.

Your unlimited experience is about to hit a roadblock.

Sometimes being popular isn’t the best thing in the world.

When Virgin Mobile introduced an unlimited, prepaid wireless broadband plan in August, it created a small media frenzy and shocked an industry that assumed usage-capped wireless broadband was the only way to survive the incredible demand for wireless data.

The company’s introduction of a $40 monthly unlimited-use broadband plan, with no term contract and month-to-month billing was a dream come true for casual vacationers and business travelers who don’t need a two year contract for pricey broadband-on-the-go from one of the major carriers.

When the company unveiled the unlimited broadband plan, as Stop the Cap! reported last summer, the demand was so great it brought the company’s network to its knees.  The prepaid provider, a division of Sprint, has struggled ever since to keep up with customer demand.  This week they announced they were throwing in the towel, quietly notifying would-be customers in the fine print of Radio Shack ads effective with all renewals after Feb. 15, a monthly limit of 5GB would be enforced on its Broadband2Go service.  Several of our readers noticed, including Greg, Sam, Jenny, and others.

“Customers who use BB2Go for typical email, internet surfing and reasonable downloading will likely not be impacted/notice any difference,” Virgin Mobile’s Corinne Nosal told PC Magazine by email.

But those who manage to consume just over 200MB daily will notice when the network speed throttle kicks in for those who “use too much.”  Speeds will be slashed to as low as 256kbps.  If you can’t live with that speed, you can pony up an additional $40 to “renew your account” (even if your month isn’t up yet) and the speed throttle will be removed, until you hit 5GB of usage again.

“So much for Virgin Mobile — 5GB means the service is no better or worse than the other players in the market, and considering the problems Virgin has had with reliable service, I’ll probably go back to using Cricket,” writes our Buffalo reader Lance.

Virgin Mobile relies on Sprint’s 3G network which already gets quite a workout from existing Sprint customers, as well as those using Clearwire (and several “private label” wireless broadband services).  Cricket owns and manages their own network, exclusively for the use of its own customers.

“Cricket will also throttle you if you hit 5GB, but you rarely run into overwhelmed cell tower sites like you do with Sprint’s network,” Lance says.

PC Magazine’s Sascha Segan notes the new usage limits makes using Virgin Mobile broadband a difficult proposition if you love multimedia:

The problem comes if you like video or downloads. Streaming Netflix at 1000kbps (if you can get that speed on the Virgin/Sprint 3G network), you use up about 450MB per hour. Some Windows updates can be up to 200MB alone. Want a TV show from your favorite legal downloading Web site? That’ll be 350MB, thanks.

While there are some small wireless ISPs in some parts of the country, Virgin’s abandonment of truly unlimited high-speed data leaves Sprint 4G/Clear as the only remaining major player willing to take on the wired-Internet oligopoly with an unlimited high-speed, wireless solution.

Clearwire’s often-unclear “network management” policies are the subject of a lawsuit filed yesterday in Seattle seeking class action status.

Angelo Dennings vs. Clearwire Corporation was filed in the Western District of Washington federal court, and seeks refunds for consumers who were mislead by the company’s failure to disclose its network speed throttling and usage limitations, and charged early termination fees when subsequently canceling service.

Clearwire promises that its high-speed Internet service provides a “fast” and “always on, always secure” Internet connection allowing users to “[d]ownload pictures, music and videos.” But Clearwire does not provide an “always on,” “high-speed” connection as it promises. Clearwire purposefully slows the connection of its users because it cannot accommodate the high volume of traffic. Clearwire engages in a practice known as “throttling,” which is the intentional delay and/or blocking of Internet communications. This practice deprives Clearwire customers of the ability to “[d]ownload music and videos,” and leads to slow connection speeds.  Clearwire engages in throttling at times when demand for Internet use is highest, beginning at approximately 7:30 p.m. and ending at about 1:00-to-2:00 a.m.

If users attempt to cancel their service, Clearwire claims that, pursuant to its “contract” with them, it is entitled to collect an early termination or a re-stocking fee. The “contract” referred to by Clearwire is not a contract between it and its customers. The contract between Clearwire and its customers is simply that the customers will pay for, and Clearwire will provide, “unlimited” Internet usage at certain speeds, depending on the speed and payment plan selected in Clearwire’s stores, kiosks, or online.

The remaining “terms” invoked by Clearwire at its convenience are embedded in a document that consumers never see prior to subscribing to Clearwire’s service. Clearwire sells its services in its stores, kiosks at shopping centers, and online. Clearwire’s stores and kiosks do not have copies of this “contract” on hand for potential subscribers to read before they “agree” to its terms. Users who subscribe through Clearwire’s website never see the contract either because the link to it is at the bottom of a page, in substantially smaller font and lighter shade than all of the other text on the page. The text states: “Want to read the fine print (and who doesn’t read the fine print?) It’s all there in the CLEAR Legal Index.” No one wants to read fine print legalese and almost no one does. The statement is obviously and sharply ironic, and mocks anyone who may have been fussy enough to have considered continuing.

Despite not showing its terms to consumers, Clearwire refuses to allow users to cancel their service without paying the unconscionable fees it claims it is owed under this “contract.” These fees include an early termination fee (“ETF”), which penalizes consumers that want out before the end of the two-year term. Although Clearwire breached its contract with its customers, Clearwire insists on the payment of this ETF when customers realize they are not getting what they bargained for.

The suit argues that Clearwire has oversold its wireless broadband network, and allegedly quotes a company representative at one point telling Dennings, “Clearwire had signed up more customers than its cell towers could accommodate, and that therefore it was ‘managing’ users’ accounts.”

Attorney Clifford Cantor argues in the filing that Clearwire reduces customer speeds to 300kbps or lower when their network is congested, making the service unsuitable for most broadband applications.  Dennings, who lives near Ft. Worth, Tex., was outraged to learn Clear sold him a home and mobile broadband account that was advertised as a replacement for wired cable or DSL broadband, but was left with service he considered largely useless when throttled.  Even more upsetting, the suit alleges, Denning was asked to pay a $219 early contract termination and restocking fee when he tried to cancel service over the matter.

Cantor is asking for a court ruling declaring Clear’s policies to be unconscionable, attorneys’ fees of at least $5,000, and refunds for all impacted subscribers.

Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Michael in Chicago for sending along a copy of the lawsuit.  He runs the “Clear/Clearwire internet not as advertised” Facebook group.