PSP Go

The arrival of Sony’s update to the PlayStation Portable, the PSP Go, gives potential buyers more to ponder than its $250 price tag and the fact it excludes a UMD drive, which means many consumers will now download their games from the PlayStation Store. LevelUp casino is a website wherein you can play games without needing to download anything.

In areas where broadband service is loaded down with Internet Overcharging schemes like usage allowances and overlimit fees, the first question for potential PSP Go owners is, “how big are these games?”

They are right to be concerned… and confused.  There has been considerable debate over the size of the average PSP Go game.  Some retailers have been talking about Go games running 50-100 megabytes.

But Al De Leon, PR Manager for Sony Computer Entertainment America, has stated the average size of a PSP Go downloadable game will be between 600-800 megabytes and no upper limit has yet been announced.  A few consumers who purchased the device discovered “no upper limit” is the operative phrase.  They found some examples among PSP titles on offer:

• Gran Turismo is 937 megabytes
• God of War: Chains of Olympus is 1.29 gigabytes
• Resistance: Retribution is 1.4 gigabytes

Of course, some games will be much smaller, especially those designed for playing on the Go. Enjoy competitive odds on kabaddi games with https://4rabetsite.com/sports/kabaddi-138.

Sony’s experiments with online game distribution could foretell a future where game titles are increasingly distributed online to consumers, which reduces manufacturing costs and speeds delivery to eager buyers.  But that future may be hampered if broadband providers implement usage allowances, particularly at the lower limits some companies have experimented with.  Frontier’s infamous 5 gigabyte, unenforced limit in their Acceptable Use Policy is a good example.

NY State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo

The New York State Attorney General has slapped Frontier Communications with a $35,000 fine and ordered the phone company to refund up to $50,000 it wrongfully charged consumers in so-called “early termination fees” for telephone and broadband service — fees consumers were never properly informed about at the time they ordered service.

“Frontier failed to spell out in its contracts the existence of costly fees,” said Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo. “The company is now fixing the issue by providing written notices of these fees and paying back consumers who were wrongfully charged.”

Frontier, located on South Clinton Avenue in Rochester, provides high speed broadband Internet service (FrontierHSI) and local and long distance telephone service. Between January 2007 and September 2008, Frontier sold bundles of various services under one-, two- or three-year agreements known as Price Protection Plans that offered a lower rate than month-to-month service as well as a promise that the subscription rate would not increase during the term of the plan. However, Frontier charged early termination fees to consumers who terminated a service before the end of the term. These fees typically ranged between $50 and $400, depending on the contents and services included in the package.

The Attorney General’s investigation determined that consumers who purchased one-year bundle agreements were never provided with written notice of the term or the existence of an early termination fee. The investigation also uncovered that consumers were not notified in their monthly billing statement that their agreements contained early termination fees. Therefore, many consumers first learned about the fee only after they canceled their service with Frontier and the charge appeared on their final bill.

In at least one instance, Frontier automatically re-enrolled a consumer to a term commitment after the initial term expired and then charged an early termination fee when she canceled after the initial term.

This is not the first time Frontier’s promotions have faced scrutiny by a New York Attorney General.  In March 2006, Frontier agreed to pay $80,000 in penalties and around $300,000 in customer refunds for what former Attorney General Eliot Spitzer called “misleading advertising and marketing tactics.”

Frontier’s customer service centers have often provided uneven service to consumers calling for information about products and services.  Stop the Cap!‘s editor, yours truly, had a number of problems when sampling Frontier’s DSL service during the Time Warner Cable Internet Overcharging experiment.  In addition to inconsistent product information, pricing, and terms and conditions, customer service representatives were ill-equipped to properly describe their own lineup of products, at one point promoting their wireless wi-fi network service in Rochester as “wee-fee.”

After the company couldn’t provide DSL service to my residence at speeds better than 3.1Mbps, service cancellation did not result in an early termination fee, but did cause serious billing foul-ups that took multiple calls to sort out.

In 2008, Stop the Cap! helped many customers cancel their DSL service without incurring early termination fees when the company introduced a 5GB usage limitation in their Acceptable Use Policy, under the provision allowing customers to opt-out of materially adverse changes in their service.  The company later announced customers under their Price Protection Agreement would not be subject to any service limitations until those agreements expired.

In January 2009, Attorney General Cuomo’s Office began investigating Frontier Communications and its subsidiaries after receiving dozens of complaints from consumers who were unexpectedly charged early termination fees.

Through an agreement with Attorney General Cuomo’s Office, Frontier must pay up to $50,000 in refunds and credits of early termination fees paid by eligible consumers who filed complaints prior to December 31, 2008. The company has provided the Attorney General’s Office a list of those eligible for refunds or credits.

Frontier's headquarters in Rochester, N.Y.

Other consumers who believe they are eligible for a refund or credit may submit a claim to the Attorney General’s Office by December 21, which will review the claims and act as the final arbiter for eligibility for reimbursement. Consumers wishing to file a complaint should call the Attorney General’s Rochester Regional Office at (585) 327-3240.  A promised web-based claim form could not be located on the NY Attorney General’s website at press time.  Residents living outside of New York State are not eligible to participate, but you may want to contact your own state’s Attorney General and ask them to review the New York settlement agreement, which could provide the basis for similar settlements in other states.

Frontier must also pay $35,000 in fees and costs. Frontier will send written notices to all customers who subscribe to new services regarding early termination fees. The company will not collect any such fee until after the notice has been sent. Frontier must also include a written notice of the term of any service agreement on consumers’ monthly billing statement for any agreement with an early termination fee.

Many customers never realized Frontier automatically renewed their Price Protection Agreements without their explicit consent, generating early termination fees of $300 for some customers who left after more than five years of service with the company.

JuniPerez, a former Frontier customer, wondered whether Frontier was offering a Price Protection Lifetime Agreement: “I had Frontier’s DSL and phone service for about five to six years (phone service for much longer). After my last move, I switched to Time Warner’s phone, cable, and broadband package. Within two weeks of notifying Frontier of my service cancellation, they sent me my last bill — $300.00! This was for what they called an “Early Termination Fee”. After five to six years I had an early termination fee? I didn’t even get a chance to dispute it. Within days (not weeks or months) they turned the account over to a collection agency. They still dare to send me ‘come back to us’ flyers and specials.”

Some Frontier customers sign up for bundled packages of service to receive incentives, such as heavily discounted satellite television service or a “free” Dell netbook (after paying $45 in fees for taxes and shipping), in return for signing a two- or three-year Price Protection Agreement.  The agreement promises customers will not see any changes in pricing for the length of the agreement.  At the same time, the agreement “locks-in” the customer to stay with the company for the length of the contract, or face a penalty for canceling service early.  In many cases involving incentives, the early termination fee amounted to $300.

But Frontier appears to have made some changes even before yesterday’s settlement with the Attorney General.

As of at least this past spring, customers signing up for a promotion with a Price Protection Agreement were directed verbally to an e-mail copy of the agreement sent to them, urged to read it, and were required to electronically consent to the terms of the agreement in order to participate in the company’s promotions.  Follow-up e-mails were sent to customers who did not complete this process.  The contract also included provisions notifying customers that agreements were automatically renewed for an additional term unless the customer notified the company in advance they did not consent to automatic renewal.  In fact, customers could cancel the contract renewal almost immediately after electronically consenting to it.

Frontier’s e-mail was sent to the customer’s Frontier e-mail account, which some customers never used and never accessed.  For some, the terms amounted to “fine print” that many never read.  While the New York Attorney General ultimately found Frontier Communications responsible for failing to adequately notify customers about such fees, Stop the Cap! reminds the public they have a responsibility to carefully read and review the terms and conditions of all service agreements, especially those involving promotional giveaways tied to service commitments like Price Protection Agreements.  Many have historically carried steep cancellation penalties as well as automatic renewal provisions designed to keep you from switching providers.  Such agreements should be considered only if you are certain you are happy with your service provider.  If you are trying a service for the first time, inquire whether you can sample the service for a trial period and retain the right to cancel without incurring penalties.  Frontier traditionally offers a 30-day trial period for DSL service.  Always record the time and day you made the inquiry, and the name of the customer service representative you spoke with.  Should you be given incorrect or inconsistent information, being armed with this information may help convince the provider to agree to what you were promised.

Customers who are not satisfied with the response they receive from a customer service representative or their immediate supervisor should check the front of their telephone directory for the number of the “executive customer service office,” sometimes also called, “unresolved complaints.”  These special representatives are empowered to resolve complaints customer service representatives may not have the authority to fix.  Failing that, contact your state’s Public Utilities/Service Commission or the Attorney General’s office.

Two video news reports appear below the fold.

… Continue Reading

Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them.

This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment of some $4 million dollars in its broadband networks in Charles Town and Princeton, West Virginia.  But the best part was the claim the upgrades would “offer customers fast broadband speeds and near-unlimited bandwidth capacity.”

In Princeton, 44 miles of fiber-optic cable will connect all Frontier High-Speed Internet (HSI) equipment to the exchange`s main switch, and 37 additional miles of fiber cable are being installed in the Charles Town exchange. These upgrades will allow Residential HSI speeds of up to 6 Meg and Business HSI speeds of up to 12 Meg. The upgrades will allow provisioning of Metro Ethernet service of up to 100 Meg, resulting in very high data speeds for private networks among multiple business locations.

These upgrades are all well and good, and are perhaps more than urban-focused Verizon was willing to do in the state, but before West Virginians get too excited by the words “fiber cable” and “near-unlimited bandwidth capacity,” it might be wise to consider the implications of transferring an entire state’s telephone business to a company that still insists on defining an “appropriate amount of usage” on that near-unlimited network at a piddly 5GB per month.

The company also promoted their “computer giveaway” program:

Recognizing that the lack of a personal computer is a barrier for many families, since 2006 Frontier has provided more than 10,000 free computers to qualifying customers in West Virginia. A large percentage of the computers went to first time computer households, who also benefited from free on-site installation.

To the uninitiated, that may suggest a benevolent phone company handing out free computers to the needy with no strings attached.  In fact, this was a Frontier customer acquisition promotion.  Customers signing up for a bundle of telephone and broadband and/or satellite service could qualify for a free basic Dell Netbook (valued at under $400), if they are in good standing with the company, agree to a “price protection agreement” holding them to the company for two years (or facing a nasty early termination fee running several hundred dollars), and also pay a handling fee:

Customer pays handling charges and taxes totaling $45. Customers must subscribe to a new package of Frontier residential local service with features, Unlimited Nationwide or Statewide Long Distance voice-calling and qualifying High-Speed Internet service. Requires a two-year Price Protection Plan on Frontier services (excludes satellite TV) with a $300 early termination fee. Offer available while supplies last. Frontier reserves the right to substitute a comparable Mini Laptop. Other offers available for existing High-Speed Internet customers. Applicable taxes and surcharges apply. Electronic or other written contract signature for Frontier services is required. Some Frontier services are subject to availability. Installation charges may apply. Unlimited U.S. Long Distance minutes are for residential voice usage and exclude 900, international, directory assistance and dial-up Internet calls.

For a whole lot of West Virginia, broadband service means one thing – DSL from the phone company.  Satellite broadband is costly, capped, and has terrible customer satisfaction ratings.  Cable television is a dream for significant parts of the mountainous state.  Do West Virginians want to risk their broadband future on a company that insists on an Acceptable Use Policy with a 5GB usage limit in it?

Residents of Rochester, New York know Frontier Communications all too well.  They’ve been our local telephone company since being absorbed by Citizens Communications after the colossal downfall of Global Crossing, which took ownership of the formerly independent Rochester Telephone Corporation.

Don’t let dreams of fiber dance too much in your head.  Frontier routinely installs fiber, but only between their central offices and remote equipment that helps reduce the distance between telephone switch equipment and the copper wiring out on the telephone poles.  It does help provide the potential of speed increases for DSL service by reducing the length of copper wire DSL travels on, but by no means should imply West Virginia will see fiber to the home in their near future.

If Frontier Communications lacks the means and the will to wire New York’s second largest economy and third largest metropolitan area with more than 1,000,000 residents with fiber to the home, don’t think for a moment they’re going to be any hurry to light up the state of West Virginia.

Indeed, for many residents of the Flower City, the bloom is well off Frontier’s rose, trapping this community in a broadband backwater with a telephone company unwilling and/or unable to provide the kind of 21st century broadband service that is presently being provided in several other upstate cities as Verizon installs its FiOS fiber network.  For Rochester, and for too many other cities, the broadband superhighway from the phone company has little more than tumbleweeds blowing across.

This site was founded last year when Frontier introduced its 5GB usage cap, and we coordinated a consumer response which forced the company to pull back from its enforcement.  But the threat still looms over the heads of their customers from coast to coast as long as it remains a part of their Acceptable Use Policy.

The time has come for Frontier to banish the 5GB language from its Acceptable Use Policy once and for all and stop toying with Internet Overcharging schemes altogether, especially as it seeks to bring the threat of those schemes to millions of Americans that may find their only realistic broadband option coming from this provider.  Otherwise, it’s time for consumers to get on the phones and tell their elected officials and public utility commissions how they feel about getting broadband service from a phone company that tells them:

Frontier may suspend, terminate or apply additional charges to the Service if such usage exceeds a reasonable amount of usage. A reasonable amount of usage is defined as 5GB combined upload and download consumption during the course of a 30-day billing period. The Company has made no decision about potential charges for monthly usage in excess of 5GB.

Phillip “Doesn’t Derive a Paycheck From Writing This” Dampier

I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes.

Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by the majority of broadband consumers.  However, a new study from Robert Shapiro and Kevin Hassett at Georgetown University is forcing me to reexamine my personal bias against usage caps.

There’s a shock, especially after telling your readers caps “were needed.”

As I predicted, our astroturfing and industry friends would have a field day over this narrowly focused report that demands readers consider their data, their defined problem, and their single proposed solution.  The real world is, of course, slightly more complicated.

I used to debate some of my economist friends on why I thought metered pricing or more restrictive usage caps were a bad idea, but I couldn’t honestly say that my opinion was entirely objective.  My dislike for usage caps stems from the fact that I am a heavy broadband user and an uncapped broadband service is very beneficial to me since everyone else pays a little more so that I can pay a lot less on my broadband service.  But beyond self interest, I can’t make a good argument why the majority of broadband users who don’t need to transfer a lot of data should subsidize my Internet requirements.

Your opinion is still not entirely objective, George.  Your employer has industry connections.

Our readers, many of whom are hardly the usage piggies the industry would define anyone who opposes these overcharging schemes, all agree whether it’s 5GB or 150GB per month, they do not want to watch an Internet “gas gauge” or lose their option of flat rate broadband pricing that has worked successfully for this industry for more than a decade.  George and his friends assume this is an “us vs. them” argument — big broadband users want little broadband users to subsidize their service.

That’s assuming facts not in evidence.

What is in evidence are studies and surveys which show that consumers overwhelmingly do not want meters, caps, usage tiers, or other such restrictions on their service.  They recognize that a provider who claims to want to “fairly charge” people for service always means “everyone pays more, some much more than others.”  To set the table for this “fairness,” they’ve hired Washington PR firms to pretend to advocate for consumers and hide their industry connections.  Nothing suspicious about that, right?

Although George can’t make a good argument opposing usage caps, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.  Among the many reasons to oppose caps:

• Innovation: Jobs and economic growth come from the online economy.  New services created today by U.S. companies, popular here and abroad, would be stifled from punitive usage caps and consumption billing.  Even the broadband industry, now in a clamor to provide their own online video services, sees value from the high bandwidth applications that would have never existed in a capped broadband universe, and they are the ones complaining the loudest about congested networks.
• Consumer Wishes: Consumers overwhelmingly enjoy their flat rate broadband service, and are willing to pay today’s pricing to keep it.  The loyalty for broadband is much greater than for providers’ other product lines – television and telephone.  That says something important — don’t ruin a good thing.
• The Fantasy of Savings: As already happened across several Time Warner Cable communities subjected to “experimentation,” the original proposals for lower consumption tier pricing offered zero savings to consumers who could already acquire flat rate “lite” service for the same or even lower prices.  Even when tiers and usage allowances were adjusted after being called out on this point, consumer outrage continued once consumers realized they’d pay three times more for the same broadband service they had before the experiment, with absolutely no improvement in service.  Comcast and other smaller providers already have usage caps and limits.  Pricing did not decline.  Many combine a usage allowance -and- lower speed for “economy” tiers, negating the argument that lower pricing would be achieved with fast speeds -and- a usage allowance.
• Justifying Caps Based on Flawed Analysis: The report’s authors only assume customer adoption at standard service pricing, completely ignoring the already-available “economy” tier services now available at slower speeds.
• Speed Based Tiers vs. Consumption Based Tiers: Consumers advocate for speed-based tiering, already familiar to them and widely accepted.  New premium speed tiers of service can and do already generate significant revenue for those who offer them, providing the resources for network expansion providers claim they need.
• Current Profits & Self Interested Motives: Broadband continues to be a massively profitable business for providers, earning billions in profits every year.  Now, even as some of those providers reduce investments in their own networks, they claim a need to throw away the existing flat rate business model.  Instead, they want paltry usage allowances and overlimit penalties that would reduce demand on their networks.  That conveniently also reduces online video traffic, of particular concern to cable television companies.
• Competition & Pricing: A monopoly or duopoly exists for most Americans, limiting competition and the opportunity for price savings.  Assuming that providers would reduce pricing for capped service has not been the result in Canada, where this kind of business model already exists.  Indeed, prices increased for broadband, usage allowances have actually dropped among some major providers like Bell, and speed throttles have been introduced both in the retail and wholesale markets.

More recently, building our colocation server for Digital Society has made me realize that usage caps not only has the potential to lower prices, but it can also facilitate higher bandwidth performance.  Case in point, Digital Society pays $50 per month for colocation service with a 100 Mbps Internet circuit, and at least $20 of that is for rack space and electricity.  How is it possible that we can get 100 Mbps of bandwidth for ~$30 when 100 Mbps of dedicated Internet bandwidth in colocation facilities normally costs $1000?  The answer lies in usage caps, which cap us to 1000 GBs of file transfer per month which means we can only average 3 Mbps.

One thousand gigabytes for $30 a month.  If providers were providing that kind of allowance, many consumers would consider this a non-issue.  But of course they are not.  Frontier Communications charges more than that for DSL service with a 5GB per month allowance in their Acceptable Use Policy (not currently enforced.)  Time Warner Cable advocated 40GB per month for $40-50 a month.  Comcast charges around $40-45 a month for up to 250GB.  Not one of these providers lowered their prices in return for this cap.  They simply sought to limit customer usage, with overlimit fees and penalties to be determined later.

Of course, web hosting is also an intensively competitive business.  There are hundreds of choices for web hosting.  There are also different levels of service, from shared web hosting to dedicated servers.  That is where the disparity of pricing is most evident, not in the “usage cap” (which is routinely more of a footnote and designed to keep Bit Torrent and high bandwidth file transfer services off their network). There is an enormous difference in pricing between a shared server environment with a 1000GB usage cap and a dedicated rack mount server located in a local facility with 24 hour security, monitoring, and redundancy/backup services, even with the same usage cap. For those seeking reliable and scalable hosting solutions, Voxfor’s offerings, including lifetime VPS plans and customizable management services, provide exceptional value and flexibility without the recurring costs.

So the irony of a regulation intended to “protect” the little guy from “unfair usage caps” would actually force our small organization onto the permanent slow lane.

Actually, the Massa bill has no impact on web hosting usage caps whatsoever.  George’s provider friends would be his biggest risk — the ones that would “sell” insurance to his organization is he wanted assurance that his traffic would not be throttled by consumer ISPs.  I’d be happy to recommend other hosting providers for George if he felt trapped on a “slow lane.”  That’s because there is actual competition in web hosting providers.  If the one or two broadband providers serving most Americans had their way, it would be consumers stuck on a permanent slow lane with throttled service, not organizations like his.

So, who is in agreement with George on this question?  None of his readers, as his latest article carries no reader responses.  But fellow industry-connected astroturfers and providers themselves share their love:

• “This is the story that ISP’s have failed to tell effectively — that consumption-based billing may, in fact, be fairer for consumers.” — Michael Willner, CEO Insight Communications
• “Ars Technica reports on an interesting theory being floated by former Clinton economic advisor Robert J. Shapiro and Federal Reserve economist Kevin A. Hassett” — Brad, astroturfer Internet Innovation Alliance
• “The only way … is to introduce some form of equitable pay-as-you-use pricing.  And I could not agree more.” — Ulf Wolf, Digital Communities Blogs (sponsored by AT&T, Qwest, etc.)

PC Magazine reported even Robert Shapiro, one of the report’s authors, is not advocating for usage caps:

“We’re not talking about a bandwidth cap,” Shapiro said during a call with reporters. “We were looking simply at the different pricing models and their impact on the projections of broadband uptake based on these income sensitivities.”

The report does not specify how ISPs should implement pricing, Shapiro said. “The most important thing to me as an economist is the flexibility – that is, Internet Providers can better determine than I can the particular model that works best.”

That’s not the message astroturfers are taking forward, as they try and sell this as “pro-consumer.”

Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider.

PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community.

The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking their actual broadband speeds, and questioned them about their overall satisfaction with their online access.

The findings indicate consumers live with what provider they can get.  Even lower rated providers scored “satisfactory,” in part because consumers don’t have many choices with which to compare.

Click to enlarge

In the war between coaxial cable modem vs. copper wire DSL technology-of-the-1990s battle, PC Magazine declared the cable industry the winner, consistently delivering faster speeds more reliably than possible with telephone company DSL.  Overall, the average cable speed was “688 Kbps, while the average DSL lets you surf at just 469 Kbps—cable connections, on average, are 47 percent faster.”  Those speed measurements are based on actual web page and content delivery, not on marketed available speed.

In fact, users rated DSL an unsatisfying service, with only 20% of rural and suburban customers very impressed with DSL.  But for many who have no other choice, 50% think it’s good enough.

Or better than nothing.

One DSL provider did extremely well speed-wise in PC Magazine‘s survey, however.  Frontier Communications was rated as the fastest DSL provider in the nation, averaging “real-world” speeds of 724 Kbps, according to the survey.  But even they could only score a 20% customer satisfaction rating, with 30% dissatisfied.

There was one technology that did much, much worse.  Satellite broadband, the last possible choice for many Americans between dial-up and going without, is provided by companies like HughesNet and WildBlue, and they are unmitigated disasters in consumers’ eyes.

Just 6% of Hughes customers were satisfied, with a whopping 74% dissatisfied.  That’s because satellite broadband is extremely slow, averaging just 145 Kbps, heavily capped, and very expensive.  But for some rural Americans who live too far away from their local phone company central office, and will never see cable television, it’s likely their only choice.  Even mobile broadband signals won’t reach many of these consumers.

So what is the good news from all of this?  There is one technology that, hands-down, beats all of the rest — fiber optics to the home.  The nation’s top-rated ISP in PC Magazine’s survey is Verizon FiOS, with 71% satisfied, and just 6% dissatisfied.  Other fiber optic providers, mostly smaller local, regional, or municipal systems, scored 61% satisfaction.  Just one cable company matched that rating – Cablevision’s Optimum Online.

AT&T, with a combination of DSL and their newer U-verse platform, did considerably worse, with 38% satisfied and 24% dissatisfied.

Clearly, subscriber satisfaction comes highest from fiber optic broadband.

Click to enlarge

In statewide rankings, it all boils down to where you live.  The more populated states and those with large cities often scored higher than those with lots of wide open rural areas.  The larger the community you live in, the better the chance for fast, quality service.  In states like Wyoming or South Dakota, where more than 57% of customers reported dissatisfaction, it’s more about living with what you’re stuck with.