Phillip "Swimming Upstream... slowly" Dampier

I spent the better part of today finding, assembling, and finally uploading the audio and video content covering Canada’s ongoing hearings about Internet Overcharging.  Locating and editing the content took about two hours, writing the piece to accompany it took another hour, and then everything  s   l   o   w   e   d  down from there.

Uploading several hundred megabytes of audio and video, included in today’s articles, was by far the most cumbersome part of the operation.  In all, it took nearly four hours to upload a handful of video and audio files, and that saturated our cable modem to the brink of un-usability.

While most providers concentrate upgrades on boosting download speeds, upload speeds have remained remarkably consistent — and painfully slow, for several years now.

Time Warner Cable, which provides our Internet connection, tops out at just 1Mbps for uploads locally, and it is slower during peak usage times.  Contrast that with 2Mbps in more competitive cities (with 5Mbps now common wherever DOCSIS 3 technology has been deployed).  Still, at least it is better than the 384kbps residents in upstate New York contended with for a decade earlier.

Cable modem technology is built on the premise that you will download far more than you will need to upload, and speeds are provided accordingly.  DSL service from some phone companies has managed to keep up with upload speeds… barely, if only because many cable providers have largely ignored the upstream component.

But as the Internet and social media become a more interactive part of our lives, we increasingly need to give as much as we get, and our Internet Service Providers continue to let us down in too many cases.

The one exception is fiber-to-the-home service, which can deliver synchronous (identical upload and download) speeds to their customers.  Community-owned fiber networks continue to be the kindest to their customers, thinking of speed equality as an advantage, not a marketing option that commands a high price.  Many of these networks are owned and operated by local governments — you know, the people we’re told never do anything right.

Yet in many instances they alone have the prescience to recognize broadband speeds have a direct impact on efficiency — at home and at work.  Many are building networks that leverage as many megabits per second they can get.  Why?  Because they can.  Such a response is scoffed at by many cable and phone companies, most of whom claim you don’t need that kind of speed.

For those of us without access to such state-of-the-art networks, we’ll have to continue setting our sights considerably lower.  Time Warner will finally bring 50/5Mbps service to Rochester early this year.  As far as they’re concerned, we should be glad to have it.  It will cost just shy of $100 per month on a standalone basis.  If we lived in Chattanooga, Tenn., home of EPB, the municipal broadband provider would sell us 50/50Mbps service for nearly $20 a month less — $79.99 per month.

Two years after Time Warner promised upgraded speeds for Rochester, they finally arrive this spring.

After much of upstate has already been upgraded for DOCSIS 3 service, New York’s second largest economic center — Rochester, will finally see speed upgrades for cable broadband service this spring.

Time Warner Cable, which promised Rochester would be among the first cities to see faster speeds if they accepted the company’s Internet Overcharging experiment instead took their upgrades elsewhere (like Watertown) when the community collectively said “no.”

Two years later, the upgrade other cities including Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and New York received last year will finally make its way to the Flower City this spring.

“Time Warner Cable delivers cutting-edge products that speak to the growing needs of both the tech-savvy user and multi-media families who simply want the fastest speeds right now,” said Terence Rafferty, Regional Vice President of Operations for the Northeast communities of Time Warner Cable.

That “right now” part may true as long as you don’t live in Rochester.  With anemic (at best) competition from also-ran Frontier Communications, which delivers DSL service that long since forfeited its position in the broadband speed race, Time Warner wasn’t exactly pressed by market conditions to deliver upgrades in a hurry, and they didn’t.

Instead, Verizon service areas where FiOS, the company’s fiber-to-the-home network loomed got the fastest service, without threats of Internet Overcharging schemes hanging over their heads.

As elsewhere, Time Warner will bring two tiers of DOCSIS 3 service: 30/5 service for $20 more than Road Runner’s Standard service (10/1Mbps) or 50/5Mbps service for $99.  The “sweet spot” will be 30/5 service, which is just $10 more than Road Runner Turbo customers currently pay.

Rochester and Finger Lakes area customers interested in the service can pre-register and get notified when the service becomes available in your area.  A new cable modem is required, but since Rochester area customers do not own their own (the modems are provided free with the service), the swap is a minor inconvenience.

The new cable modems include wireless connectivity, so up to five devices can share your broadband connection without wires.

Charlotte, N.C. Time Warner Cable customers can thank city officials in nearby Salisbury for finally provoking Time Warner Cable into boosting speeds for residents across the region.  Just as community-owned Fibrant was opening its doors for business promoting its new fiber to the home service, the area’s dominant cable company managed to steal some of their thunder.

Time Warner Cable this week announced the entire Charlotte service region, which encompasses Salisbury, is getting a free broadband speed upgrade this week.

“We substantially increased our download speeds and essentially doubled upload speeds for all of our Turbo and Standard Internet service customers,” said Mike Smith, area vice president for Time Warner Cable’s Charlotte operation.

The announcement allows Time Warner Cable to maintain its position as the fastest downstream Internet provider in the Charlotte region because Fibrant’s marketing department decided that 25Mbps service was fast enough.  No, it’s not, and Time Warner Cable showed them up.

Salisbury is located northeast of the city of Charlotte, N.C.

“This service upgrade demonstrates our commitment to deliver enhanced value to our customers. We are satisfying their thirst for more throttle,” said Smith. To access the new speeds, customers need to reboot their cable modem which is easily accomplished by leaving it unplugged for about one minute.

The company is also introducing two speed tiers in Charlotte this week. Customers will have the option of purchasing or upgrading to DOCSIS 3 Wideband Internet or Road Runner Extreme service. Wideband Internet–the fastest residential Internet experience in Charlotte–provides customers with speeds up to 50 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream for $99.95 per month.

Road Runner Extreme delivers speeds up to 30 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream for as low as $64.95 per month when bundled with any other Time Warner Cable Service.

As Stop the Cap! has strongly advised all municipal providers — there is not much point in providing fiber to the home service if you are not willing to capitalize on its benefits.  Offering a maximum speed of 25Mbps just is not going to cut it, as Time Warner Cable demonstrates.

Fibrant’s pricing models are also endangered by this week’s developments.  Road Runner Extreme delivers 30Mbps downstream for $65 a month (admittedly a bundled price) while Fibrant offers 25Mbps service for the same price (standalone service).  Fibrant still kills Time Warner on upload speed, but that’s a distinction that could be lost among many potential customers, and is easily solved by boosting download speeds as well.

Fibrant must immediately consider speed upgrades for their existing tiers to assure its value proposition and launch a new super-premium speed tier that can show off fiber to the home’s true capacity to deliver the best possible Internet speeds in the region.

South Florida Comcast customers signed up for the Blast! broadband plan are getting noticeably faster speeds from the cable company this week with a free speed upgrade.

Blast! in southeastern Florida used to deliver 16/1Mbps service, but customers in the region are now reporting speeds are up to 20/2Mbps.  PowerBoost, which delivers a temporary speed boost, has also been upgraded to provide improvements in both downstream and upstream speeds at rates as fast as 25/5Mbps.

Comcast will inform customers with outdated cable modems they’ll need to upgrade them to receive the newest available speeds.  All others only need power cycle their existing modem by briefly unplugging it to obtain the new speeds.

Videotron last week unveiled 120/20Mbps broadband service loaded down with tricks and traps that will cost many Canadians far more than the $149.95CDN monthly asking price.

Québec’s largest cable operator introduced Ultimate Speed Internet 120 for “users who want to experience the fastest Internet access in Québec.”  But with a download limit of just 170GB per month combined with an upload limit of a paltry 30GB per month, what many Internet enthusiasts are also likely to experience is a huge bill.

Videotron is rolling out a high-speed Internet access service that will give residents of the Québec City area the fastest speeds in Canada. As of tomorrow, Ultimate Speed Internet 120 will support download speeds of 120 mbps and upload speeds of 20 mbps, a first for Québec City.

“Ultimate Speed Internet 120 pushes back the frontier for intensive Internet users,” said Robert Dépatie, President & CEO of Videotron. “Today, we are launching the high-speed Internet service of the future. With the pace at which users’ needs are changing, we are not so far from the day when 120 mbps will be a must-have convenience.”

Astonishing capacity
As of tomorrow, Ultimate Speed Internet 120 will be available in nearly 80% of the greater Québec City area, or to nearly 310,000 households and businesses. The service will be accessible throughout the Québec City area by December 31, 2010 and will then be gradually rolled out to other parts of Videotron’s service area.

Astonishing Overcharging

Yanette is going to the bank to withdraw more funds to pay her exorbitant Videotron broadband bill.

Unlike many other Internet Overcharging plans from Canada’s usage cap-happy providers, Videotron’s highest-speed plans don’t limit the amount of overlimit fees customers will be exposed to once their allowance is exhausted.  In little more than three hours of usage at near-maximum speeds, overlimit fees of $1.50CDN per gigabyte kick in until your usage allows resets the following month.  That’s more than $50 an hour in overlimit fees if running the service near top speeds.

Videotron’s press release says those limits are “well in excess of the current needs of heavy bandwidth users.”

Even worse, Videotron targets its highest speed broadband plan for “traffic management,” which throttles upload speeds dramatically for customers who “have uploaded a statistically significant amount of data,” which is never defined:

Every 15 minutes, a system checks the usage rate for each upload channel (each upload channel typically serves a few dozen modems). If the usage rate has reached a threshold beyond which congestion is imminent, the system identifies the USI 120 modems on that channel that have uploaded a statistically significant amount of data. Uploading from these modems is then momentarily given lower priority. Depending on the severity and duration of the congestion, uploading speed may be slowed for these modems.  […]The above measures are applicable at all times.

That assures customers of a less-than-blazing-fast broadband experience they have paid top dollar to receive.  In effect, this means Videotron’s customers who pay three times the regular price for a concierge-like-broadband-experience are pushed to the back of the line if they actually use it.

A Videotron customer on Broadband Reports wrote, “It’s like driving a jet-car in an alley. You can probably start the engine, but don’t open the gas too much!”

Another customer from Montreal noted it takes no time at all for customers to blow through those kinds of limits:

This is merely a political play to be able to advertise as “the fastest ISP in Quebec/Canada”. Obviously such ridiculous caps are nowhere near the needs of someone who would pay $150 for that kind of speed, but they don’t mind saying things like “well in excess of the current needs of heavy bandwidth users” because 90% of the population, even the journalists themselves, have no idea what gigabytes are in the first place.

Considering most recent games released on Steam/D2D can be over 20GB, one HD episode is 1.3GB to stream each, 170GB is very little.

The cable operator will also throw some small bones to their existing customers effective Oct. 13:

• Customers with Videotron’s standard High Speed Internet service ($42.95CDN – 7.5Mbps/720kbps) will get a 10 gigabyte usage allowance increase — to 40GB of usage per month.  The overlimit fee remains a stunning $4.50 per gigabyte, up to a maximum of $50 per month;
• Upstream speeds on Ultimate Speed Internet 50 service ($81.95CDN – 50/1Mbps) will be doubled from 1Mbps to 2Mbps with no price increase.  Considering that plan limits consumption to 125GB per month, the faster speeds mean unlimited overlimit fees of $1.50 per month will add up even faster.

Delivering high speed broadband at premium prices with usage limits and speed throttles is a business plan disaster.  Customers willing to pay the highest prices for fast broadband don’t seek those Cadillac plans to browse web pages.  They want to leverage the fastest possible speeds to make high bandwidth applications work better and faster.  In a business environment, those faster speeds save time, which saves money.  But broadband providers who engage in Internet Overcharging schemes that limit use and charge confiscatory overlimit fees destroy demand for their own products, because few customers are willing to pay the premium prices these plans charge -and- expose themselves to overlimit fees if they happen to exceed an arbitrary usage limit.

Further south in the United States, Americans are still rejecting overpriced DOCSIS 3-premium speed broadband plans, and they come with no usage caps.  Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3 expansion delivers a premium price on the resulting faster speed tiers, and the company managed to sign up fewer than 2,000 customers as of January.

Now imagine a plan that commanded a premium price -and- slapped a limit on usage.

As they say in Québec: c’est ridicule!