Verizon FiOS is the fastest nationwide broadband service available.

That was PC Magazine’s assessment in its ranking of the fastest Internet Service Providers of 2013. It’s not the first time Verizon FiOS has taken top honors. In fact, the fiber to the home broadband service has consistently won excellent rankings not only for its speed, but also for its value for money and quality of service. The worst thing about FiOS is that many Verizon customers cannot buy the service because its expansion was curtailed in early 2010.

Verizon FiOS has seen its national speed rankings increase this year. In 2012, the provider’s nationwide download speeds averaged 29.4Mbps; this year FiOS average downstream speeds jumped to 34.5Mbps. Upstream speeds are also up from 26.8Mbps to 31.6Mbps. In part, this is because a growing number of customers have moved away from Verizon’s entry-level 15/5Mbps package with a $10 upgrade to Quantum FiOS 50/25Mbps service. FiOS TV customers can upgrade themselves with their remote control.

Frontier Communications made the top five in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to FiOS infrastructure the company inherited from Verizon.

Other high-ranking ISPs included Midcontinent Communications, a small cable provider serving the north-central states. Midco’s DOCSIS 3 upgrade allows the company to offer most customers up to 100Mbps service. The average download speed for Midco customers is 33.1Mbps; average upload speed is 6.4Mpbs.

Where cable operators face head-on competition from Verizon FiOS, the usual competitive response is speed increases. Cablevision is a good example. It came in fourth place nationally with average speeds of 25.9/5.9Mbps. Comcast has also been boosting speeds, especially in the northeast where it faces the most competition from fiber. It came in third place with average speeds of 27.2/6.8Mbps and offers Internet speeds up to 505Mbps in some areas.

There were companies that performed so poorly, they barely made the regional rankings. The most glaring example largely absent from PC Magazine’s awards: Time Warner Cable, which has lagged behind most cable operators in the speed department. It scored poorly for the second largest cable company in the country, beaten by Charter, Mediacom, and CableONE — which all usually perform abysmally in customer ratings. The only regional contest where Time Warner made a showing at all was in the southeast, where it lost to Verizon FiOS, Comcast, and Charter. Only TDS, an independent phone company, scored worse among the top five down south.

Even more embarrassing results turned up for AT&T U-verse, which performed so bad it did not even make the national rankings. AT&T has promised speed upgrades for customers this year, and has implemented them in several cities. Unfortunately for AT&T, its decision to deploy a fiber to the neighborhood system that still depends on copper to the home is turning out to be penny wise-pound foolish, as it continues to fall further behind its cable and fiber competitors. At the rate its competitors are boosting speeds, U-verse broadband could become as relevant as today’s telephone company ADSL service within the next five years.

Other players scoring low include WOW!, a surprising result since Consumer Reports awarded them top honors for service this year. Also stuck in the mud: Atlantic Broadband (acquired by Canada’s Cogeco Cable, which itself is no award winner), Suddenlink, Wave Broadband and Metrocast, which serves smaller communities in New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama.

The magazine also ranked the fastest U.S. cities, with top honors going to the politically important Washington, D.C., and its nearby suburb Silver Spring, Md, which took first and second place. Alexandria, Va., another D.C. suburb, turned up in eighth place. No cable or phone company wants to be caught delivering poor service to the politicians that can make life difficult for them.

Brooklyn, N.Y., took third place because of head-on competition between Cablevision and Verizon FiOS. Time Warner’s dominance in Manhattan and other boroughs dragged New York City’s speed rankings down below the top ten. Among most of the remaining top ten cities, the most common reason those cities made the list was Verizon FiOS. Florida’s Gulf Coast communities of Bradenton (4th place) and Tampa (6th place) have fiber service. So does Plano, Tex. (5th place) and Long Beach, Calif. (7th place). The other contenders: Hollywood, Fla. takes ninth place and Chandler, Ariz. rounds out the top 10.

Verizon executives in Florida are telling workers that speaking Spanish on the job is unfair to the company’s English-only workers who feel excluded.

The Tampa Tribune reports the telecom company took the unusual step of asking employees to stick to English while on the job after an employee at a Verizon dispatch center felt left out while co-workers chatted away in Spanish.

“Generally, we tell employees they can speak Spanish (or any other language) on break, lunch or any time away from the work area,” a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement.

But the spokesman added that when employees are on the dispatch center floor or other work setting, they should speak English, promoting “positive employee relations.”

The implication is that speaking Spanish in front of other workers who speak only English is discourteous and uncomfortable because, as Verizon says, it can create feelings of separation versus inclusion.

A cultural affairs liaison for Hillsborough County says the controversy is common in Florida where a large Spanish-speaking population resides and works. Tony Morejon told the newspaper it comes as a result of friction between cultures.

It’s a touchy subject for companies that value their multilingual employees, often used to communicate with customers and to market products and services to a wider audience. Telling them to speak Spanish at certain times but not others can create resentment, said Morejon.

It can also place a company squarely in the center of the language-culture wars, with one side promoting language diversity and others demanding English as the one official language of the United States.

A senior IT manager at Bright House Networks used his broadband account to download kiddie porn, authorities allege.

James E. Cooper, 49, of Pinellas County, Fla., faces three counts of child pornography, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Authorities confiscated numerous computers and hard drive storage units from Cooper’s home under a search warrant. Authorities from the St. Petersburg Police, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office, and the Department of Homeland Security coordinated in the investigation and subsequent arrest of Cooper.

Cooper was being held at the Pinellas County Jail in lieu of $15,000 bail. The Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office is expected to prosecute the case in criminal court.

Cablevision has begun notifying Florida customers it is pulling the plug on its market trial OMGFAST wireless broadband and voice services Aug. 19.

The cable operator launched the venture in 2012 advertising $29.95 broadband service delivered over Multichannel Video and Data Distribution (MVDDS) frequencies it won in a 2004 FCC auction.

FierceCable learned the service had not been a runaway success, attracting only 1,600 customers in the market test conducted in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

The writing may have been on the wall for the future demise of the service after the company laid off workers at its Pompano Beach headquarters at the end of June. The 10,000 square-foot building reportedly housed about 60 employees.

Cablevision sold its MVDDS spectrum to Dish Network last fall. Dish had been leasing the spectrum back to Cablevision to keep the service up and running.

Cablevision said it was still in the process of notifying customers they will have to get their phone and broadband service from somewhere else starting next month.

OMGFAST marketed up to 50Mbps service for $29.95 a month, charging an extra $10 a month to lease the required equipment.

Would you be surprised to learn a company with just a basic, outdated website replete with spelling and grammar errors holds at least 760 television station construction permits and licenses and just wrote a check for $46.5 million to buy 52 more stations from nine different owners, with plans to shut every last one of them down in the future?

That is precisely the business plan of “Landover Wireless Corp.” and its series of limited liability corporate entities, which are grabbing up as much UHF television spectrum they can apply for across the country.

They are not alone.

CTB Spectrum Services, a company associated with Landover 2 LLC, has 356 UHF TV construction permits/licenses. Its website offers slightly more information about its operations, but not much.

DTV America, a mysterious Sunrise, Fla.-based venture with an official mailing address of 12717 W. Sunrise Boulevard (Suite 372) has its headquarters inside a private mailbox at a UPS Store. The company also has countless requests for television licenses on the UHF dial. DTV America manager John Kyle is also listed as chairman and president of The Pharmacy Television Network, which appears to broadcast its programming on video displays inside pharmacies. DTV America has the lowest profile of all three companies, with no apparent website.

And you thought over the air television was dead.

DTV America’s home is inside a mailbox at the UPS Store in Sunrise, Fla.

A number of low power television owners are surprised to see the sudden rush to launch more than 1,000 new television stations across the country, particularly in rural markets that have been considered a financial dead-end for low power television. Being in the LPTV business and making a living at it often depends on whether a local cable company or satellite dish provider will pick up and relay the station to the majority of Americans that do all of their television viewing on a paid platform. Without this carriage, low power television outlets have several strikes against them: challenging reception from operating with relatively low power, the lack of compelling programming — many of these outlets air paid religious, home shopping, music, or infomercial programming 24 hours a day, and the lack of familiarity by viewers who may not realize these stations are on the air.

From information Stop the Cap! has obtained, none of these ventures actually intend to stay in the over-the-air television business. Instead, they are using FCC licensing rules to get valuable UHF spectrum without having to bid for it at forthcoming spectrum auctions. At least two of the companies claim they are raising capital to build a unicast 4G wireless content delivery network. But some critics contend they are actually spectrum squatters — speculators that have no intention of building anything. Instead, critics charge they will conduct minor experiments to effectively stall the FCC, hanging onto their permits and licenses until they can sell their holdings to a wireless provider hungry for 500-700MHz spectrum and willing to pay top dollar to get it.

Meanwhile, Landover’s $46.5 million buys them dozens of low power stations airing 30-minute commercials like “Skin Solutions by Dr. Graf.” The company claims it will keep those stations on the air until their wireless network is ready, and then the infomercials (along with the rest of the television programming) will be gone for good. Landover also managed to acquire larger Class A TV stations as part of the deal, including one each in Las Vegas and Sacramento, and three in Texas. These stations might become part of the company’s 4G network, sold off or compensated to sign-off forever as part of forthcoming “spectrum packing” by the FCC — further shrinking the UHF TV dial and auctioning off the “excess” spectrum to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and other cell companies.

CTB’s License Map

CTB also holds multiple TV licenses in several of its markets. The company claims it will combine those stations together in something akin to a high-powered cellular network to create a bigger wireless data pipe using “patent pending multi-frequency cellular terrestrial network technology [that] increases capacity by hundreds of times through frequency re-use, while also enabling full mobility, broadband Internet, and location-based services.”

CTB’s sales pitch claims its TV licenses offer up to 228MHz of bandwidth that is “essentially identical to 700MHz spectrum, but can be acquired at a fraction of the cost.” The company also claims it has exclusive rights to TV “White Space” spectrum via first adjacent channels, which are treated like guard bands to protect against interference from nearby stations.

All of these companies are applying for channels largely in low-interest rural markets, where they face few challenges from competing applicants. CTB calls this part of their rural “corridor” strategy. One such corridor covers stations in a line from Wisconsin west to Idaho.

All three companies are betting the FCC will allow them to eventually convert their over-the-air television licenses into wireless data networks, or let them sell the spectrum to deeper pocketed players in keeping with the Commission’s plan to open up more frequencies for data-hungry users. If the FCC allows it, these three entities will end up with the rights to prime wireless spectrum covering up to 90 percent of the country without having to spend a penny at forthcoming spectrum auctions.

But there are financial risks. The type of low power station licenses held by most of these companies do not get them a seat at the spectrum packing table. LPTV outlets are considered low-priority stations, and in larger communities, many could be forced off the air without compensation to make enough room for more important, full power stations.

No license, no 4G data network for Landover, CTB and others. But the chances of that happening in rural markets, where residents are lucky to have two or three over the air stations, are slim.

The technology might offer unique broadband opportunities for rural areas where conventional low-range cell towers are too expensive, if the technology works. A higher powered transmitter serving a rural, larger geographic area might prove financially attractive in low population density areas. Only time will tell if any of these entities will be able to raise the capital needed to fulfill the FCC’s construction permit obligations, which give owners just a few years to get their stations on the air or face forfeiture of their permit and/or license.