More than two dozen NorthwesTel customers in Canada’s north are contemplating a class-action lawsuit against their Internet provider after being charged hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in overlimit charges for phantom traffic nobody can seem to identify.

Kyle Jennex of Whitehorse has always checked his usage, particularly because NorthwesTel charges very high prices for access and has a low usage cap. Running over a plan limit can prove costly at $5 per gigabyte. In November, Jennex discovered NorthwesTel’s usage meter was registering between 5-7GB of mysterious upload traffic every night even after the computer was physically disconnected from his Internet connection.

Despite complaining to NorthwesTel, the company billed him for nearly $1000 in overlimit fees, claiming he exceeded his allowance by nearly 200GB.

“I depend on the Internet for our lifestyle,” Jennex told Yukon News. “We like our music and our movies and our TV, so I download a lot of stuff. I also believe that if I’m paying for 150 gigabytes, I’m going to use that up. So because of that I monitor our usage carefully so I can spread it out throughout the month and to make sure we don’t go over.”

NorthwesTel has never suspected their meter of being responsible for the phantom usage measurements. To Curtis Shaw, NorthwesTel’s vice president of marketing, excess usage is entirely the customer’s responsibility. The company told Jennex his high usage was likely caused by torrent/peer-to-peer network traffic or a neighbor who had hacked into his password-protected Wi-Fi network. But neither explanation can account for usage that continued to rack up with nothing connected to his Internet modem.

Shaw recommends NorthwesTel customers shut down their computers when not in use, particularly overnight, to avoid excess charges. He also advises customers to change their passwords, regularly check usage, and install and update anti-virus software on their computers.

Bill Shock

Shaw also says users can sign up for e-mail that notifies customers when they approach their limit, “really to protect people from receiving a surprise bill.” He adds the company does monitor customer usage and has called customers in the past when their accounts show an unusual amount of activity.

But NorthwesTel didn’t bother to call a customer in Whitehorse who reports he was billed an extra $990 for the extra 198GB of usage he claims he never used. Nor did the company call the woman in the Northwest Territories bill shocked with $3,000 in overlimit fees in a single month.

The company says there have been repeated cases of neighbors “sharing” Wi-Fi connections which can quickly run up usage. But Jennex, who says he well understands the danger of unprotected Wi-Fi, believes he has taken the necessary precautions and has been overbilled anyway.

“The way they’re talking, it’s like every second neighbor is hacking into your wireless,” Jennex said. “I have passwords that are completely random that would take some pretty sophisticated equipment to hack into. We even tried disconnecting all our devices from the router and it still kept happening. The only way I could get them to stop was to physically unplug my modem.”

The company cannot or will not trace Jennex’s mysterious web traffic to identify the source, confident their meter is accurate. Besides, the company says, customers often underestimate the amount of traffic they consume using file sharing programs or watching video online. The company claims it worked hard on its usage meter and it received industry approval for its high degree of accuracy. But providers need not submit their meters for independent verification or subject them to periodic audits to verify meter accuracy.

NorthwesTel does not have a good record on meter accuracy. In 2010 the company was forced to admit it had overbilled hundreds of customers over a “meter glitch” when usage monitors were not reset. As a result, customers found enormous overlimit fees attached to their bills. In one example, a customer was charged a $2,500 overlimit fee on top of his usual bill of $88.

A glitch may indeed be part of the problem as one Yukon customer successfully confronted NorthwesTel for erroneous overlimit fees for consumption of data that was impossible to accrue at the speed of his Internet connection.

Angry customers complain that with so little competition, NorthwesTel has every incentive to play fast and loose with its meter, either because customers will cut their usage, upgrade to a higher cost tier with a bigger allowance, or pay the overlimit fees.

Customers who believe they were unjustly billed overlimit fees should take their case first to the Office of the President. Failing that, they should appeal to the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services, an independent agency that has a good track record of winning relief.

Some customers fear the expensive overlimit fees so much, they are following NorthwesTel’s advice and keeping their computers switched off when not being used, but that isn’t a good enough answer for Jennex, who plans to continue the fight.

“There’s no need to rip us off because we live so far North,” he told CBC North.

Two years after energy conservation groups revealed many television set-top boxes use almost as much electricity as a typical refrigerator, a voluntary agreement has been reached to cut the energy use of the devices 10-45 percent by 2017.

The Department of Energy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, the Consumer Electronics Association, and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association agreed to new energy efficiency standards for cable boxes expected to save more than $1 billion in electricity annually, once the new equipment is widely deployed in American homes. That represents enough energy to power 700,000 homes and cut five million tons of CO2 emissions each year.

“These energy efficiency standards reflect a collaborative approach among the Energy Department, the pay-TV industry and energy efficiency groups – building on more than three decades of common-sense efficiency standards that are saving American families and businesses hundreds of billions of dollars,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “The set-top box efficiency standards will save families money by saving energy, while delivering high quality appliances for consumers that keep pace with technological innovation.”

DVR boxes are the biggest culprits. American DVRs typically use up to 50W regardless of whether someone is watching the TV or not. Most contain hard drives that are either powered on continuously or are shifted into an idle state that does more to protect the life of the drive than cut a consumer’s energy bill. A combination of a DVR and an extra HD set-top box together consume more electricity than an ENERGY STAR-qualified refrigerator-freezer, even when using the remote control to switch the boxes off.

Manufacturers were never pressed to produce more energy-efficient equipment by the cable and satellite television industry. Current generation boxes often require lengthy start-up cycles to configure channel lineups, load channel listings, receive authorization data and update software. As a result, any overnight power-down would inconvenience customers the following morning — waiting up to five or more minutes to begin watching television as equipment was switched back on. As a compromise, many cable operators instruct their DVR boxes to power down internal hard drives when not recording or playing back programming, minimizing subscriber inconvenience, but also the possible power savings.

In Europe, many set-top boxes are configured with three levels of power consumption — 22.5W while in use, 13.2W while in standby, and 0.65W when in “Deep Sleep” mode. More data is stored in non-volatile memory within the box, meaning channel data, program listings, and authorization information need not be re-downloaded each time the box is powered on, resulting in much faster recovery from power-saving modes.

The new agreement, which runs through 2017, covers all types of set-top boxes from pay-TV providers, including cable, satellite and telephone companies. The agreement also requires the pay-TV industry to publicly report model-specific set-top box energy use and requires an annual audit of service providers by an independent auditor to make sure boxes are performing at the efficiency levels specified in the agreement. The Energy Department also retains its authority to test set-top boxes under the ENERGY STAR verification program, which provides another verification tool to measure the efficiency of set-top boxes.

Comcast, DirecTV, DISH Network, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision, Bright House Networks and CenturyLink will begin deploying new energy-efficient equipment during service calls. Some customers may be able to eventually swap equipment earlier, depending on the company.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WCCO Minneapolis Check Your Cable Box 6-27-11.mp4[/flv]

WCCO in Minneapolis reported in 2011 cable operators like Comcast may make subscribers wait 30 minutes or more for set-top box features to become fully available for use after plugging the box in. (1:50)

Cable ONE’s boost in cable infrastructure investment is paying dividends for its broadband customers with new upstream speed upgrades.

“Our customers have expressed a need for faster upload speeds and we’re committed to listening to our customers and delivering the latest products and technical advancements while maintaining the highest level of reliability and customer care,” said Joe Felbab, Cable ONE vice president of marketing.

The details:

• 50/2Mbps Streaming Plan gets a slight bump to 3Mbps upload speed;
• 60/2Mbps Premier Plan gets upload speed doubled to 4Mbps;
• 70/2Mbps Ultra Plan gets a triple boost to 6Mbps.

To activate the new upload speeds, reset your cable modem by briefly unplugging it.

Cable ONE’s promotions often only last three months before increasing to the regular, undisclosed a-la-carte price. Modem lease or purchase is extra.

In June, Cable ONE scrapped its confusing consumption billing scheme and replaced it with standard usage caps that our readers report are unevenly enforced.

The 1.5Mbps, 5Mbps, 8Mbps, 10Mbps, 12Mbps, & 50Mbps services (some plans grandfathered for existing customers) have a cap of 300GB per billing cycle, while the 60Mbps and 70Mbps services respectively have 400 and 500GB data caps per billing cycle. Surfing Internet has a 50GB cap.

While 6Mbps upload speed is slightly better than what Time Warner Cable and AT&T U-verse customers get, Cable ONE remains well behind companies like Comcast and Verizon FiOS.

Cable ONE in April announced a two-year, $60 million network upgrade across 42 cable systems in its mostly rural footprint to enhance reliability and deliver faster Internet service. Upstream speeds are the most difficult to increase for cable broadband providers because the DOCSIS standard was designed to deliver fast download speeds.

Earlier this month, Cable ONE adopted TiVo for its new Whole Home DVR, which offers 650 hours of recording time with four built-in tuners and an Advanced TiVo on-screen guide.

In large parts of its national service area, Cable ONE competes with telephone companies AT&T, CenturyLink, and Windstream.

The median bandwidth use slowdown (Image: BTIG Research)

Despite perpetual cries of Internet brownouts, usage blowouts, and data tsunamis that threaten to overwhelm the Internet, new data shows broadband usage has leveled off in North America, undercutting providers’ favorite excuse for usage limits and consumption billing.

Sandvine today released its latest broadband usage study, issued twice yearly. The results show a clear and dramatic decline in usage growth in North America, with median usage up just 5% compared to the same time last year. That is a marked departure from the 190% and 77% growth measured in two earlier periods. In fact, as Richard Greenfield from BTIG Research noted, mean bandwidth use was down 13% year-over-year, after the second straight six month period of sequential decline.

Companies like Cisco earn millions annually pitching network management tools to providers implementing usage caps and consumption billing. For years, the company has warned of Internet usage floods that threaten to make the Internet useless (unless providers take Cisco’s advice and buy their products and services).

“Demand for Internet services continues to build,” said Roland Klemann from Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. “The increasing popularity of smartphones, tablets, and video services is creating a ‘data tsunami’ that threatens to overwhelm service providers’ networks.”

Providers typically use “fairness” propaganda when introducing “usage based pricing,” blaming exponential increases in broadband usage and costly upgrades “light users” are forced to underwrite. A leveling off in broadband usage undercuts that argument.

A Cisco White Paper intended for the eyes of Internet Service Providers further strips the façade off the false-“fairness” argument, exposing the fact usage pricing has little to do with traffic growth, pricing fairness, or the cost of upgrades:

In 2011, broadband services became mainstream in developed countries, with fixed-broadband penetration exceeding 60 percent of households and mobile broadband penetration reaching more than 40 percent of the population in two-thirds of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Meanwhile, traditional voice and messaging revenues have strongly declined due to commoditization, and this trend is expected to continue. Therefore, operators are now relegated to connectivity products. The value that operators once derived from providing value-added services is migrating to players that deliver services, applications, and content over their network pipes.

As if this were not enough, Internet access prices are dropping, sales volumes are declining, and markets are shrinking. The culprit: flat rate “all-you-can-eat” pricing. Such a model lacks stability—sending service provider pricing into a downward spiral—because it ignores growth potential and shifts the competition’s focus from quality and service differentiation to price.

While Klemann was spouting warnings about the dire implications of a data tsunami, Cisco’s White Paper quietly told providers what they already know:

Maximum Profits

“[Wired] broadband operators should be able to sustain forecasted traffic growth over the next few years with no negative impact on margins, as the incremental capital expenses required to support it are under control.”

If usage limits and consumption billing are not required to manage data growth or cover the cost of equipment upgrades, why adopt this pricing? The potential to exploit more revenue from mature broadband markets that lack robust competition.

“In light of the forecasted Internet traffic growth mentioned earlier and competitiveness in the telecommunications market, Cisco believes that fixed-line operators should consider gradually introducing selected monthly traffic tiers to sustain [revenue], while a) signaling to customers that “traffic is not free,” and b) monetizing bandwidth hogs more sustainably.”

Cisco makes its recommendation despite knowing full well from its own research that customers hate usage-based pricing.

“The introduction of traffic tiers and caps—especially for fixed broadband services—is not welcomed by the majority of customers, as they have learned to ‘love’ flat rate all-you-can-eat pricing. Most customers consider usage-based pricing for broadband services ‘unfair,’ according to the 2011 Cisco IBSG Connected Life Market Watch study.”

Cisco teaches providers how to price broadband like trendy boutique bottled water and blame it on growing Internet usage.

But with competition lacking, Cisco’s advice is to move forward anyway, as long as providers initially introduce caps and consumption billing at prices that do not impact the majority of customers… at first. In uncompetitive markets, Cisco predicts customers will eventually pay more, boosting provider revenue. Cisco’s “illustrative example” of usage billing in practice set prices at $45 a month for up to 50GB of usage, $60 a month for 50-100GB, $75 for 100-150GB, and $150 a month for unlimited access — more than double what customers typically pay today for flat rate access.

Usage billing arrives right on time to effectively handle online video, which increasingly threatens revenue from cable television packages.

Sandvine’s new traffic measurement report notes the increasing prominence of online video services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon Video.

“As with previous reports, Real-Time Entertainment (comprised of streaming video and audio) continues to be the largest traffic category on virtually every network we examined, and we expect its continued growth to lead to the emergence of longer form video on mobile networks globally in to 2014,” Sandvine’s report noted.

Sandvine found that over half of all North American Internet traffic during peak usage periods comes from two services: Netflix and YouTube. YouTube globally is the leading source of Internet traffic in the world, according to Sandvine.

An old excuse for usage caps on “data hogs” – peer-to-peer file-sharing, continues its rapid decline towards irrelevance, now accounting for less than 10 percent of total daily traffic in North America. A decade earlier, file swapping represented 60 percent of Internet traffic.

Cisco’s answer for the evolving world of popular online applications is a further shift in broadband pricing towards “value-based tiers” that monetize different online applications by charging broadband users extra when using them. Cisco is promoting an idea that well-enforced Net Neutrality rules would prohibit.

Citing the bottled water market, Cisco argues if some customers are willing to pay up to $6 for a liter of trendy Voss bottled water, flat rate “one price fits all” broadband is leaving a lot of money on the table. With the right marketing campaign and a barely competitive marketplace, providers can charge far higher prices to get access to the most popular Internet applications.

“Research from British regulator Ofcom shows that consumers are becoming ‘addicted’ to broadband services, and heavy broadband users are willing to pay more for improved broadband service options.”

Wharton School professors Jagmohan Raju and John Zhang concluded price is the single most important lever to drive profitability.

The political implications of blaming phantom Internet growth and manageable upgrade costs for the implementation of usage caps or usage-based billing is uncertain. Even the “data hog” meme providers have used for years to justify usage caps is now open to scrutiny. Sandvine found the top 1% of broadband users primarily impact upstream resources, where they account for 39.8% of total upload traffic. But the top 1% only account for 10.1% of downstream traffic. In fact, Apple is likely to provoke an even larger, albeit shorter-term impact on a provider’s network from software upgrades. When the company released iOS7, Apple Updates immediately became almost 20% of total network traffic, and continued to stay above 15% of total traffic into the evening peak hours, according to Sandvine.

Some other highlights:

• Average monthly mobile usage in Asia-Pacific now exceeds 1 gigabyte, driven by video, which accounts for 50% of peak downstream traffic. This is more than double the 443 megabyte monthly average in North America.
• In Europe, Netflix, less than two years since launch, now accounts for over 20% of downstream traffic on certain fixed networks in the British Isles. It took almost four years for Netflix to achieve 20% of data traffic in the United States.
• Instagram and Dropbox are now top-ranked applications in mobile networks in many regions across the globe. Instagram, due to the recent addition of video, is now in Latin America the 7th top ranked downstream application on the mobile network, making it a prime candidate for inclusion in tiered data plans which are popular in the region.
• Netflix (31.6%) holds its ground as the leading downstream application in North America and together with YouTube (18.6%) accounts for over 50% of downstream traffic on fixed networks.
• P2P Filesharing now accounts for less than 10% of total daily traffic in North America. Five years ago it accounted for over 31%.
• Video accounts for less than 6% of traffic in mobile networks in Africa, but is expected to grow faster than in any other region before it.

Comcast’s Wireless Gateway is part of the company’s plans to further monetize broadband.

Comcast wants investors to believe customers slightly prefer losing access to unlimited broadband in return for a 300GB usage cap and $10 overlimit fees.

Neil Smit, president and CEO of Comcast Cable Communications this morning told Wall Street analysts Comcast plans to further monetize its broadband product after testing usage caps, consumption billing, and collecting increased in-home Wi-Fi fees collected from a growing number of customers with an XFINITY Wireless Gateway.

Phil Cusick from JPMorgan asked Smit about how broadband tiering trials now underway primarily in southern states were going for Comcast.

“We have a number of trials in place in markets,” Smit responded. “We’re testing different types of usage-based pricing offerings. Thus far the consumer response has been neutral to slightly positive. We’ll continue to monitor it.”

Customers in the affected areas tell Stop the Cap! they have never been asked what they think about Comcast’s usage caps and consumption billing, so they are unsure how Smit can draw conclusions about customer preference.

“I’m canceling Nov. 1 when the caps arrive in South Carolina,” says Dennis Johnson. “I’m heading to U-verse because AT&T isn’t enforcing any caps here. I plan to tell Comcast why they lost me, but it sounds like the company really isn’t interested in what customers think.”

Every research study done on broadband usage caps show customers loathe them and up to 50% are prepared to switch providers if they can find a competitor providing comparable service.

Comcast is also moving forward with plans to share your in-home Wi-Fi with other customers, configuring company-supplied gateways to offer a second, open access Wi-Fi channel. Comcast currently charges customers $7 a month for the XFINITY Wireless Gateway, combining a DOCSIS 3 cable modem, a telephone eMTA, and a wireless router.

Despite the fact Comcast customers regularly complain about the poor Wi-Fi range of the XFINITY Wireless Gateway and the monthly rental fee, Smit believes they are key to further monetizing broadband.

“We’ve rolled out about six million Gateway devices which increased the in-home Wi-Fi fees and we think there’s going to be more people hanging more devices off of their Wi-Fi,” said Smit.

The more devices, the higher the usage. The higher the usage, the closer customers get to exceeding their cap and charged overlimit fees.