Verizon Communications this morning announced it will buy AOL, Inc., in a $4.4 billion cash deal that will provide Verizon with powerful mobile video and advertising platforms.

Originally known for its ubiquitous dial-up Internet access, AOL today is better described as a content and advertising aggregator — putting online video in front of viewers bolstered by AOL’s powerful advertising technology that can match a targeted advertising message to a specific viewer in milliseconds.

AOL’s portfolio also includes the well-known Engadget, TechCrunch and Huffington Post websites, which many analysts expect will not be part of the deal, quickly spun off to a new owner(s) to avoid any political headaches over Verizon’s control of the well-known content sites, some including coverage critical of Verizon.

All signs point to the AOL acquisition as more evidence Verizon management is shifting priorities to its mobile business, Verizon Wireless. In 2014, Verizon acquired the assets of Intel Media, which was planning an Internet TV service called OnCue. Verizon’s acquisition will help it develop an alternative television platform and many analysts expect it will primarily reach Verizon Wireless customers.

Complimenting online video with AOL’s ad placement and insertion platform will likely be the best chance Verizon has to monetize that video content.

“Certainly the subscription business and the content businesses are very noteworthy,” confirmed Verizon’s president of operations, John Stratton. “For us, the principal interest was around the ad tech platform.”

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Bloomberg says Verizon’s real interest in AOL is their online advertising platform, which can bolster Verizon Wireless’ mobile video service. (2:39)

Verizon’s $4 billion investment in AOL did not go into expanding its fiber optic platform FiOS.

Verizon Wireless Multicast

“For the price it’s paying for AOL, Verizon could deploy its FiOS broadband service across the rest of its service area, bringing much-needed services and competition to communities like Baltimore, Boston and Buffalo,” said Free Press research director S. Derek Turner. “Instead, the company is spending a fortune to wade into the advertising and content-production markets. In terms of the latter, Verizon has already shown a willingness to block content and skew news coverage.”

As Stop the Cap! reported last week, that isn’t a surprise to some utility companies that believe all signs point to Verizon’s growing disinterest in its wireline division. Florida Power & Light expects Verizon will become a wireless only company within the next 10 years.

While AT&T explores expanding its wireless service internationally and seeks approval for its acquisition of satellite service DirecTV, Verizon Wireless is moving to monetize increased customer usage of its network with the forthcoming introduction of a video service this summer. The product would offer a mix of ad-supported and paid short video content and may offer live multicast programming that can reach a larger audience without disrupting network capacity.

Increased viewing of high bandwidth video will force Verizon customers to continually upgrade data plans, further monetizing Verizon’s wireless business. AOL’s ad insertion technology will allow Verizon to earn advertising income from viewers, creating a dual revenue stream.

Verizon can also sell advertisers information about its massive customer base of wired and wireless customers, including their browsing habits and demographic profile to deliver “data-driven marketing and addressable advertising.”

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Bloomberg News puts together several of Verizon’s puzzling recent acquisitions, which point to a shift of Verizon’s business towards its mobile and content platforms. (5:42)

In a complete about-face for eastern Canada’s largest cable operator, Rogers Communications is inviting customers to take the brakes off their usage and go hog-wild with high bandwidth HD streaming and downloading with an unlimited use plan.

“Whether you use shomi^™, Netflix, YouTube or all three as your go-to streaming service(s), if you’re a subscriber to an unlimited Rogers Internet package, you don’t have to worry about streaming video in anything other than their highest-quality settings – the image is pristine and the sound is awesome,” the company writes on its online blog.

Rogers had argued for at least five years before Canada’s telecommunications regulator that compulsory usage caps and overlimit fees were necessary to manage congestion on their networks and to make sure that heavy users pay their fair share.

Those days of congestion are evidently over because Rogers takes customers through several tutorials to teach them how to turn up their streaming settings to deliver HD and 4K video streams.

“Rogers comes very close to implying it is Netflix and YouTube that compromise the video experience of customers, despite the fact Netflix created its user-definable video playback settings precisely to help Canadians manage usage allowances from companies like Rogers,” said online video analyst Rene Guerdat. “It’s clear that competition from independent providers offering unlimited use accounts has made Rogers’ usage cap regime impossible and they were forced to market an unlimited option of their own.”

Here is Rogers’ guide for cranking up the video quality of video streams, useful for anyone else who subscribes to these services as well:

shomi

This new video-streaming service for Rogers Internet or TV customers has three video-quality settings (Good, Better, Best). Each uses different amounts of bandwidth and offers different levels of viewing quality. These settings can be individually changed for each user profile, and can be made only from the Web application via the account holder’s profile.

To check / change your stream settings

1. In a browser, go to shomi.com and log in with your account credentials.
2. Go to the dropdown menu at the top far-right corner of the Web page.
3. Select ‘Manage Account and Profiles.’
4. Select the profile that you want to edit (or create a profile if it is a new profile), and under the ‘Manage Profiles’ menu you’ll see your ‘Max Video Quality’ settings.
5. Click ‘Edit’ and then select the video-quality setting that you want.

Note: These profile settings update all devices except your Rogers cable box (if you’re using one).

Netflix

Netflix has streaming-video playback settings that use less data (in case you have a small monthly data cap). If you’re on an unlimited Rogers Internet package, though, you can get a better experience by streaming at the highest settings. Here’s how.

To check / change your stream settings

1. In a browser, go to Netflix.ca and sign in with your Netflix username and password.
2. If prompted, select the appropriate user profile you want to change.
3. In the top-right corner, click the downward arrow, then click ‘Your Account.’
4. In the Your Profile section, click ‘Playback Settings.’
5. Click the radio button to select the highest-quality streaming setting (‘High’), then click ‘Save.’

This setting will be your new default across all your devices. If you have multiple user profiles under your Netflix account, follow the above process for them, too.

YouTube

YouTube gives you a lot of playback control, and typically does a pretty good job of balancing video quality and connection. However, to ensure you’re seeing the best-quality video possible from YouTube, you can change the settings for the videos you watch. Here’s how.

Play a YouTube video in HD (when available)

1. While playing a video, move your cursor over the player window. Video-player elements will appear.
2. Click the gear icon in the lower right of the player.
3. In the bottom of the pop-over menu that appears, click on the ‘Quality’ option.
4. Select the highest video-quality setting and click it to apply.

Tip: Not all video content that’s uploaded to YouTube is available in full 1080p HD. If no HD option is offered, just choose the highest-quality setting that’s available.

Default to high-quality YouTube playback

Setting default playback behaviour on YouTube requires an account. If you have a Google account (Gmail, Google+, etc.), you already have everything you need.

1. Log in to YouTube using your Google or Gmail account ID.
2. Click on your username and, in the menu that appears, choose the gear icon. If you’re already logged in, click your profile image in the top-right corner to find the gear icon instead.
3. In the left navigation pane, click ‘Playback.’
4. Select ‘Always choose the best quality for my connection and player size.’
5. Click Save in the top right.

Now, YouTube will give you the best-quality video it can, based on the above-mentioned factors. Double-click a video to launch it in full-screen and to get a full-HD version of the video, where available.

Big Telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T use phony numbers and perpetuate myths about broadband traffic and network investments that have conned investors out of at least $1 trillion in unnecessary investments and consolidation.

Alexander Goldman, former chief analyst for CTI’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grants, is warning Wall Street and investors they are at risk of losing millions more because some of the largest telecom companies in the country are engaged in disseminating bad math and conventional wisdom that relies more on repetition of their talking points than actual facts.

Goldman’s editorial, published by Broadband Breakfast, believes the campaign of misinformation is perpetuated by a media that accepts industry claims without examining the underlying facts and a pervasive echo chamber that delivers credibility only by the number of voices saying then same thing.

Goldman takes Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam to task for an editorial published in 2013 in Verizon’s effort to beat back calls on regulators to oversee the broadband industry and correct some of its anti-competitive behavior.

McAdam claimed the U.S. built a global lead in broadband on investments of $1.2 trillion over 17 years to deploy “next generation broadband networks” because networks were deregulated.

Setting aside the fact the United States is not a broadband leader and continues to be outpaced by Europe and Asia, Goldman called McAdam’s impressive-sounding dollar figures meaningless, considering over the span of that 17 years, the United States progressed from dial-up to fiber broadband. Wired networks have been through a generational change that required infrastructure to be replaced and wireless networks have been through at least two significant generations of change over that time — mandatory investments that would have occurred with or without deregulation.

Over the past 17 years, the industry has gotten more of its numbers wrong than right. An explosion of fiber construction in the late 1990s based on predictions of data tsunamis turned out to be catastrophically wrong. University of Minnesota professor Andrew Odlyzko, the worst enemy of the telecom industry talking point, has been debunking claims of broadband traffic jams and the need to implement usage-based pricing and speed throttling for years. In 1998, when Wall Street was listening intently to forecasts produced by self-interested telecom companies like Worldcom that declared broadband traffic was going to double every 100 days, Odlyzko was telling his then-employer AT&T is was all a lot of nonsense. The broadband traffic emperor had no clothes, and statistics from rival telecom companies suggested Worldcom was telling tall tales. But AT&T executives didn’t listen.

“We just have to try harder to match those growth rates and catch up with WorldCom,” AT&T executives told Odlyzko and his colleagues, believing the problem was simply ineffective sales, not real broadband demand. When sales couldn’t generate those traffic numbers and Wall Street analysts began asking why, companies like Global Crossing and Qwest resorted to “hollow swaps” and other dubious tricks to fool analysts, prop up the stock price and executive bonuses, and invent sales.

Nobody bothered to ask for an independent analysis of the traffic boom that wasn’t. Wall Street and investors saw dollars waiting to be made, if only providers had the networks to handle the traffic. This began the fiber boom of the late 1990s, “an orgy of construction” as The Economist called it, all to prepare for a tidal wave of Internet traffic that never arrived.

After companies like Global Crossing and Worldcom failed in the biggest bankruptcies the country had ever seen at the time, Odlyzko believes important lessons were never learned. He blames Worldcom executives for inflating the Internet bubble more than anyone.

A bubble of another kind is forming today in America’s wireless industry, fueled by pernicious predictions of a growing spectrum crisis to anyone in DC willing to listen and hurry up spectrum auctions. Both AT&T and Verizon try to stun investors and politicians with enormous dollar numbers they claim are being spent to hurry upgraded wireless networks ready to handle an onslaught of high bandwidth wireless video. Both Verizon’s McAdam and AT&T’s Randall Stephenson intimidate Washington politicians with subtle threats that any enactment of industry reforms by the FCC or Congress will threaten the next $1.2 trillion in network investments, jobs, and America’s vital telecom infrastructure.

Odlyzko has seen this parade before, and he is not impressed. Streaming video on wireless networks is effectively constrained by miserly usage caps, not network capacity, and to Odlyzko, the more interesting story is Americans are abandoning voice calling for instant messages and texting.

That isn’t a problem for wireless carriers because texting is where the real money is made. Odlyzko notes that wireless carriers profit an average of $1,000 per megabyte for text messages, usually charged per-message or through subscription plan add ons or as part of a bundle. Cellular voice calling is much less profitable, earning about $1 per megabyte of digitized traffic.

Wireless carriers in the United States, particularly Verizon and AT&T, are immensely profitable and the industry as a whole haven’t invested more than 27% of their yearly revenue on network upgrades in over a decade. In fact, in 2011 carriers invested just 14.9% of their revenue, rising slightly to 16.3 percent in 2012 when companies collectively invested $30 billion on network improvements, but earned $185 billion along the way.

While Verizon preached “spectrum crisis” to the FCC and Congress and claimed it was urgently prioritizing network upgrades, company executives won approval of a plan to pay Vodafone, then a part owner of Verizon Wireless, $130 billion to buy them out. That represents the collective investment of every wireless provider in the country in network upgrades from 2005-2012. Verizon Wireless cannot find the money to upgrade their wireless networks to deliver customers a more generous data allowance (or an unlimited plan), but it had no trouble approving $130 billion to buy out its partner so it could keep future profits to itself.

Odlyzko concludes the obvious: “modern telecom is less about high capital investments and far more a game of territorial control, strategic alliances, services, and marketing, than of building a fixed infrastructure.”

That is why there is no money for Verizon FiOS expansion but there was plenty to pay Vodafone, and its executives who walked away with executive bonuses totaling $89.6 million.

As long as American wireless service remains largely in the hands of AT&T and Verizon Wireless, competition isn’t likely to seriously dent prices or profits. At least investors who are buying Verizon’s debt hope so.

Goldman again called attention to Odlyzko’s latest warning that the industry has its numbers (and priorities) wrong, and the last time Odlyzko had the numbers right and the telecommunications industry got its numbers wrong, telecommunications investors lost $1 trillion in the telecommunications dot.com bust.

As the drumbeat continues for further wireless consolidation and spectrum acquisition, investors have been told high network costs necessitate combining operations to improve efficiency and control expenses. Except the biggest costs faced by wireless carriers like Verizon are to implement strategic consolidation opportunities like the Vodafone deal, not maintain and grow their wireless network. AT&T is putting much of its spending in a proposed acquisition of DirecTV this year as well — at a cost of $48.5 billion. That could buy a lot of new cell towers and a much more consumer-friendly data plan.

Voice to text substitution (US)

Cell phone network companies (if you can believe their SEC filings) are incredibly profitable, and are spending relatively little on infrastructure:

Verizon Wireless and AT&T have invested billions expanding and improving their wireless networks, telling investors that revenue from exploding wireless data usage would more than recoup their investments, but the growing availability of low-cost and free Wi-Fi is threatening to derail those plans.

Business Week reports that as carriers have dropped unlimited use data plans in favor of costly, restricted-usage offers, savvy customers have learned to conserve their data allowance by switching to Wi-Fi wherever possible. Adobe Systems reported this week that more than half of all wireless data traffic from smartphones occurs over Wi-Fi, not 3G or 4G networks. Total Wi-Fi traffic passed mobile data networks more than a year earlier.

AT&T and Verizon’s business plans depend on smartphone users accessing faster 4G LTE networks to consume high bandwidth online applications like video streaming, but that isn’t happening at the rate they expected. Instead, customers are waiting to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot before watching.

The carriers are partly to blame for the Wi-Fi habit by encouraging customers to switch to Wi-Fi to reduce congestion on their 3G and 4G networks while they were upgraded and expanded. But after carriers completed those upgrades, customers are sticking with Wi-Fi.

“There’s a flavor of too much of a good thing here, where Wi-Fi offloads start to really impinge on the prospects of monetizing all that additional usage,” says industry analyst Craig Moffett. “All the carriers have put their eggs in the basket of incremental usage as the source of revenue growth. It isn’t going according to plan.”

AT&T and Verizon hoped customers would face upgrades to more costly plans with more generous usage allowances as data usage increased. Early efforts to monetize data usage seemed encouraging. Both carriers reported surprising success from in-store marketing efforts to push families to upgrade to deluxe 10GB+ usage plans in larger numbers than anticipated. But customers are now increasingly trying to stay within their budget and current usage allowance, with the help of Wi-Fi.

‘As customers become more aware of the limits on their data plans, they’re more careful about moving to Wi-Fi as often as possible,’ says Tamara Gaffney, an analyst with Adobe’s Digital Index.

Wi-Fi hotspots are easier to find as cable companies provide them for their customers. Major shopping, dining and entertainment venues often offer free access to draw and keep customers.

As carriers began to realize smartphones would not be the data sucking vampires they were expecting, both AT&T and Verizon eagerly dove into the tablet business, hoping to convince customers to buy mobile-ready versions of the devices that would more likely be used for data allowance-killing online video.

But customers outsmarted them again, preferring tablets equipped only with Wi-Fi. Carriers responded by slashing prices, to no avail. Even those who splurged on 3G and 4G-ready tablets rarely use them on AT&T and Verizon’s wireless networks. More than 93% of tablet traffic is done over Wi-Fi, derailing a potential wireless data money train.

Their latest plan is to push the “Internet of Things” — machine to machine communications. Both AT&T and Verizon have invested heavily in wireless utility meter technology and are pushing manufacturers to add 4G capability to all sorts of home appliances from refrigerators, ovens, and dishwashers to home laundry centers, alarm systems, and even pet-webcams. But early efforts have not been promising. Reception in fixed indoor locations, especially basements, is often very poor to non-existent, and manufacturers don’t see much benefit adding mobile network connectivity when traditional Wi-Fi is cheaper and much more reliable.

That hasn’t stopped AT&T, which won a lucrative contract to offer 4G LTE and/or HSPA+ support inside Audi and GM vehicles. To them, the “connected car” is a cash cow waiting to be milked.

“Five or six years ago when we talked to car OEMs, it was about safety and embedded modules and cheap rates,” said Glenn Lurie, CEO of AT&T Mobility.

That was the era of OnStar and other competing telematics systems that can monitor vehicle performance and notify emergency responders in the event of an accident. Verizon Wireless has supported GM’s OnStar system for years and until GM’s bankruptcy reorganization offered Verizon customers the option of adding their OnStar speakerphone to a Verizon Wireless family plan for $9.99 a month, sharing that plan’s voice calling minutes. Starting this year, AT&T has the contract.

AT&T is celebrating the end of cheap rates and see big dollar signs selling in-car connectivity, which will be available in dozens of car models.

Mary Chan from GM committed to offer AT&T 4G access on 33 GM model vehicles by the end of this year.

Customers will get a free sample of the service in promotions lasting from 30-90 days. After that, customers will need to pay:

• OnStar’s data plan (doesn’t include voice calling/emergency response) will cost $10 a month to add the car as a device on your AT&T Mobile Share plan and $10 a month for 200MB of data; $30 a month for 3GB of data, or $50 a month for 5GB;
• Applicable taxes and federal/state universal service charges, regulatory cost recovery charge (up to $1.25), gross receipts surcharge, administrative fees and other government assessments which are not taxes or government required charges are not included in the above-stated prices;
• A $5 day pass will be available for occasional users providing 250MB of access for up to 24 hours;
• All payments must be made in advance of receiving service and will be automatically renewed month-by-month until the customer cancels;
• The built-in Wi-Fi hotspot will support up to seven devices;
• Excessive roaming may result in service termination.

“The connected car will change the entire wireless industry,” said AT&T Mobility’s Ralph de la Vega. AT&T expects as many as 10 million connected cars will be signed up for service in just a few years.

But at AT&T’s prices, Moffett suspects the ingenuity of Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs will eventually find a much cheaper solution, potentially robbing AT&T of yet another expected cash coup.

Verizon Wireless’ ongoing campaign to get rid of its grandfathered unlimited data customers continues this week with news the carrier will begin throttling speeds of off-contract customers still hanging on to their uncapped data plans starting Oct 1.

Verizon doesn’t call the enforcement of speed reductions a “throttle,” but rather “Network Optimization”:

Verizon Wireless strives to provide its customers with the best wireless experience when using our network. In 2011, Verizon Wireless launched Network Optimization, which slows the data speeds of its unlimited data subscribers with 3G devices who are in the top 5% of data users when they connect to a cell site experiencing high demand.

Effective October 1, Verizon Wireless will expand its existing Network Optimization policy to include its unlimited data subscribers using 4G LTE devices who have fulfilled their minimum contract term. Based on your plan and recent data usage, one or more lines on your account may experience a reduction in data speeds when connected to a cell site experiencing high demand. Customers on MORE Everything or other usage-based data plans are not subject to Network Optimization. For more information about our Network Optimization, please refer to www.verizonwireless.com/networkoptimization.

Verizon Wireless customers on the company’s 3G network have been subject to speed throttling for several years if Verizon deems them a “heavy user,” but the company’s 4G LTE network avoided the speed noose until now. Customers who find themselves subjected to Verizon’s speed limiter report it is a very unpleasant experience.

“My phone has been throttled and is now essentially unusable for the very things it is marketed for,” reports one customer sentenced by Verizon’s “Network Optimization.”  “I can send texts, emails, and view basic websites but any sort of streaming is now out of the question for the remainder of the billing cycle and possibly the next cycle as well.”

The throttle effectively limits speeds to well under 300kbps, and in most urban areas where cell tower usage is higher, punished customers have to live with speeds of around 50kbps — the same as dial-up.

Verizon’s logic and consistency about its “Network Optimization” faced customer scrutiny as well.

“This is not about equal opportunity bandwidth, it’s about Verizon realizing they can increase their revenue stream, otherwise, wouldn’t those tiered folks be getting throttled as well if they ‘abused’ and used ‘inordinate’ amounts of data?  Oh no, of course not, Verizon just bills them more.  This scenario is as ridiculous as charging $20/month for text messaging, which, by the way, is also data.”

What makes you speed-throttling-worthy? According to Droid Life, which broke the story, anyone using more than 4.7GB of data per month on a busy cell tower is likely to end up on a speed diet.

Verizon claims its “Network Optimization” is designed to protect the usage experience among all of its customers, and suggests the speed reductions will only occur when a heavy user is connected to a “high demand” cell site.

“Once you leave that site and attach to a new cell site without high demand, your speeds return to normal,” claims Verizon. “Other carriers often throttle you no matter what throughout the end of a billing cycle.”

But Verizon’s gesture isn’t as generous as it first suggests.

Once a customer is suspected of being a data hog and forced to endure Verizon’s speed throttle, they can stay in Verizon’s speed prison for up to 60 days after being sentenced. The result is dramatically reduced data speeds when a customer happens to travel through a busy cell site area, regardless of whether they are using a lot of data at the time or not.

Network congestion problems may be a result of too many customers connected to a single cell site at any one time, several customers concurrently engaged in high bandwidth traffic exchanges through a cell site, or Verizon’s inadequate capacity to meet even the reasonable needs of its wireless customers.

But regardless of the cause, only one group will be punished for their usage-excess: unlimited data plan customers who are now mostly off-contract (Verizon requires most customers signing a contract renewal that includes equipment discounts to migrate off their unlimited plan, which stopped being sold to new customers in June, 2012.)

Customers can get out of speed jail permanently simply by agreeing to give up their unlimited data plan. Then they can use (and abuse) Verizon’s limited wireless bandwidth, whether it slows every other customer down or not.