Phillip 'Not Picking Up What Moffett Puts Down' Dampier

Tech, business, and even a few mainstream media outlets have been booking Sanford Bernstein’s Craig Moffett as an independent observer of all-things-broadband, without revealing he literally has a vested interest in boosting profits for the telecommunications industry.

The latest of Moffett’s heavily-slanted ideas appeared over the weekend on ZDNet, where Larry Dignan’s Between the Lines column used one of Bernstein’s “research notes” to provoke readers into a discussion about Internet Overcharging:

Metered broadband access is inevitable and may even be good for adoption of speedy Internet access.

That’s the argument from Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett in a research note. Moffett sets the scene:

• The FCC’s open Internet push allows for metered broadband.
• AT&T has introduced usage caps across its wireline business. DSL customers are limited to 150 GB of monthly consumption. U-Verse subscribers get 250 GB, or the same as Comcast. Users will be charged an extra $10 a month if they exceed the cap and it’s $10 per 50 GB after that.
• AT&T has already introduced tiered wireless plans.
• Time Warner Cable has a few usage based pricing pilots underway.

Moffett

Nowhere in Dignan’s column does he disclose Moffett is a paid Wall Street analyst working for the interests of investor clients of Sanford Bernstein who want to maximize the value of their telecommunications stocks.  Moffett’s long history of statements about industry pricing reflect those interests, which are often very different from those of most consumers.  Moffett’s world view: anything that brings in more revenue is good for shareholders (rate hikes, metered billing), anything that drives down shareholder value is not (infrastructure upgrades, pricing cuts, customer defections).

On that basis, Moffett has been called a “cable stock fluffer” by our friends at Broadband Reports for his relentlessly pro-cable industry commentary, even while ridiculing transformational projects like Verizon’s FiOS fiber to the home network for being “too expensive” and not delivering enough return on shareholder investment.  Consumer Reports delivers the opposite view: high marks for Verizon FiOS, mediocre to lousy marks for most of the nation’s cable operators.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with Moffett doing his job on behalf of his paying clients, using his views outside of that context — particularly when those interests go undisclosed — is journalistic malpractice.

Oh, and Time Warner Cable abandoned their usage-based pricing pilots in 2009 after customers declared war on the cable company.  Those darn customers, ruining the industry’s plans!

The rest of Moffett’s research note doesn’t get much better in the “true facts”-department:

The goal of moving to usage based pricing is not to undermine competition from Netflix (or anyone else… although it certainly wouldn’t be good news for Internet video). And it is most decidedly not to simply “raise prices for broadband” as Public Knowledge or New America would have it (although it might well do precisely that, too). Instead, it is nothing less than to re-align the entire business model of today’s infrastructure providers with the next generation of communications… so that broadband providers might stop fighting against the tide and embrace it instead.

With usage based pricing, broadband providers, and Cable operators in particular, can create an “iso-profit” curve, where the amount they make from a physical connection is about the same whether someone uses that connection for linear video or, alternatively, web video. The goal is not to stifle competition, but instead to create indifference not just to the end state of video by-pass, but indeed for all points along the way. The adoption of usage based pricing would be transformational to the debate for Cable operators, inasmuch as it would essentially indemnify them against all potential outcomes.

Moffett represents his interests, not yours.

Yet some of Moffett’s earlier statements would seem to argue with himself.

For instance, back in March Moffett was making plenty of noise about AT&T’s caps precisely targeting video providers like Netflix:

Moffett believes usage caps have everything to do with stopping the torrent of online video.  He notes AT&T’s caps are set high enough to target AT&T customers who use their connections to watch a considerable amount of video programming online.

“Only video can drive that kind of usage,” Moffett writes.

Moffett has repeatedly predicted any challenge to pay television models from online video will be met with pricing plans that eliminate or reduce the threat:

“[I]f consumption patterns change such that web video begins to substitute for linear video, then the terrestrial broadband operators will simply adopt pricing plans that preserve the economics of their physical infrastructure,” Moffett said. “Of course, any move to preserve their own economics has far-ranging implications. Any move towards usage-based pricing doesn’t just affect the returns of the operators, it also affects the demand of end users (the ‘feedback loop’).”

The only thing usage-based pricing indemnifies is the industry’s confrontation with revenue-eroding cable-TV cord-cutting.  And Moffett knows this, although he would probably give rave reviews to bringing similar usage-based-billing to cable television packages, which would charge you for every show you watched on top of your monthly bill.

These pricing models, already firmly rooted in Canada, have done nothing to bring the “next generation of communications” to our neighbors to the north.  Indeed, Canada’s ranking in broadband continues its decline as large cable and phone companies pocket the profits instead of committing to wholesale upgrades of their networks to deliver the kind of service increasingly common in Europe and Asia.

But the real laugh out loud moment comes last: Moffett’s prediction that AT&T’s usage pricing will increase broadband adoption.  Perhaps that’s true if you prefer telecommunications companies abuse you, but as we’ve documented over the past three years, these pricing schemes never save anyone money — they just increase the price of your service while decreasing the value of it.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Canada went to the polls last week and managed to deliver a predictable majority for incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party.  Even Americans ignorant of Canadian politics knew as much, but more than a few with an interest in the country’s telecommunications future were stunned to watch some long-standing parties get handed their hats and ushered out the door into the political wilderness (for at least a few years anyway).

The former mighty Liberal Party — the one that always saw themselves as Canada’s Natural Governing Party, succumbed to an embarrassing election failure.  Leader Michael Ignatieff not only oversaw the loss of more than 40 Liberal seats in the House of Commons, he couldn’t even manage to hold his own, losing his Toronto-area seat in Etobicoke-Lakeshore.  The centrist party won just short of 19 percent of the popular vote.  That’s a long fall for the party of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who won three successive majority governments in 1993, 1997 and 2000.  Much of the party’s strong support in Ontario collapsed, with seats swiped by Conservative and NDP candidates.  The centrist era is evidently over for now.

The Liberals take on telecommunications issues seemed mostly to rely on bashing whatever the Conservatives were doing.  Much of their criticism seemed to delight in Tory missteps and disorganization, particularly over what the party felt was incoherent policy direction for telecom issues.  Unfortunately, presenting a credible digital strategy alternative was not a high priority for the Liberals, and voters fretting about Internet Overcharging saw as much.  The Liberals have also taken flak for being too “establishment” and business friendly in recent years.  As a result, many former Liberal voters took their votes elsewhere.  At least Liberal Industry critic Marc Garneau survived.  He was successful at crystallizing the usage based billing (UBB) issue (and the CRTC’s failure by adopting it) in a way that consumers could easily understand.

The biggest catastrophe befell the Bloc Québécois, the separatist-motivated party in Quebec.  Outside of wins on the Gaspé Peninsula riding that covers the rural regional county municipalities of La Haute-Gaspésie, La Matapédia, Matane and La Mitis, and a few victories around Trois-Rivières, the Bloc was effectively obliterated — left with just four seats.  They had 47. That means the BQ is now too small to even count as an official party in Canada.  Observers say it was Quebec’s version of “throw the bums out,” with a very strong voter sentiment against “the establishment,” which in Quebec means the BQ.  Which Canadian party is the least establishment?  The NDP — and votes flowed in that direction.

On telecom issues, BQ members didn’t seem to appreciate Bell and Videotron’s usage-based-billing policies any more than the rest of Canada, and Bell in particular endured harsh questioning from BQ members at earlier hearings.

But the big news from the election was the sweeping realignment of Opposition to the Tories into the hands of the NDP – Canada’s social-democratic, left-wing New Democratic Party.  The NDP has championed opposition to UBB like no other party in Canada. Digital affairs critic Charlie Angus, who is a brash firebrand against corporate telecom abuse and their lackeys on the CRTC, will get an even larger platform to blast away at anti-consumer policies on offer from the telecom regulator.  Both Angus and the NDP champion Net Neutrality as well.  Two MPs from Toronto, Peggy Nash and Andrew Cash, will also bring strength to the NDP’s policy platform on copyright issues.

The NDP won most of the seats lost by the BQ in Quebec, and also won strongholds in western Ontario, northern British Columbia, Manitoba, and the Western Arctic.  In fact, NDP wins in Quebec were so frenzied, Leader Jack Layton found himself presiding over a dramatically younger caucus, including three McGill University students and a bartender in the heavily francophone riding of Berthier-Maskinonge.  That presents a problem for newly elected Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who so disbelieved she was a serious candidate, she spent the last week of the campaign running around Las Vegas.  She also doesn’t speak French.  A local station that finally reached her in Las Vegas to discuss her win had to abandon the interview when she was unable to offer coherent answers to questions in Quebec’s majority language.  Rosetta Stone is in her near future.  So is a trip to her district — Brosseau told the Trois-Rivières newspaper Le Nouvelliste she has never stepped foot in the riding before.  But she offered the people there seemed nice.

While the NDP doesn’t have a majority, they are sure to call out any Conservative telecommunications policies that appear to be anti-consumer, and turn them into media events — good news for a country whose television media often ignores telecommunications stories.  A five minute interview with Charlie Angus will surely deliver plenty of amusing soundbites for the evening news.

With the strengthened majority of the Conservative Party, it’s a safe bet Canadian telecommunications policies will no longer be stuck in neutral.  There are open questions if Tony Clement, Industry Minister will retain his portfolio or make a move elsewhere in government.  Clement has steadfastly insisted UBB is unacceptable to him and the government.  The upcoming review by the CRTC of their earlier decision is likely to give the government some time to sort things out.  The Conservatives ignored Openmedia.ca’s request for a formal position against UBB, something that does give us pause.

It will remain important for Canadian consumers to keep the pressure on the Tories to act when regulatory bodies like the CRTC fail.  The natural view of the Conservatives in to let the marketplace sort things out, but even they recognize that is an impossibility in a duopoly.  When 500,000 Canadians sign a petition against UBB, standing with big cable and phone companies would be political suicide.

What Conservatives are likely to promote is increased competition.  So far, that has not meant much, especially as consolidation continues in the broadcasting and telecommunications sector.  The Tories best answer for now is throwing doors open to foreign investment in telecommunications, especially in wireless.  That will mean relaxing foreign ownership rules which could help new cell phone entrants — Wind Mobile, Mobilicity and Public Mobile expand their competitive reach.  If the Tories adopt the new rules, even AT&T could move north of the border — but that will bring no relief to Canadians seeking an escape from Internet Overcharging schemes.  Other issues likely to come up — copyright reform legislation, royalty taxes imposed on digital devices, and piracy.

With Time Warner Cable’s broadband now running as high as $50 a month for standard, stand-alone service, getting the best deal possible can save you as much as $20 a month off those prices.  Time Warner Cable has been repricing their services to deliver the most value to customers who bundle all of the company’s products into a single package.  But if you don’t want television or telephone service from the cable company, you are going to pay a lot more than your service-bundled-neighbors for Road Runner High Speed Internet.

Stop the Cap! presents our strategy to help broadband-only customers get the best possible prices from Time Warner Cable:

Choose Earthlink

Customers paying Time Warner Cable’s regular prices for broadband service are paying too much.  Time Warner currently charges just short of $50 a month for Standard 10/1Mbps service (speeds are slower in some areas).  That’s up from years of charging $40 a month, slightly higher if you were a broadband-only customer.  But with the help of Earthlink, you can cut that broadband bill to $29.99 a month for the first six months.  Earthlink co-exists with Road Runner, Time Warner Cable’s own broadband service.  With just a few mouse clicks and a quick phone call, Time Warner can switch your regular price Road Runner to Earthlink without any equipment changes.  Billing and service will continue to be provided by Time Warner and the change literally takes less than five minutes by phone.

Earthlink’s broadband service is indistinguishable from Road Runner — same speeds, same level of service, with two exceptions:

• Earthlink does not benefit from PowerBoost, which delivers temporary speed increases during file downloads
• You will forfeit your rr.com e-mail address

We recommend you avoid using ISP-provided e-mail addresses when possible, because they help tie you down to an existing provider.  Instead, sign up for a free e-mail account from Google’s Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail, or any of the dozens of other web-based e-mail providers.  Or, purchase your own domain name from GoDaddy or 1and1, which includes e-mail, and either read it on those sites or forward it to a web-based e-mail provider.  Domain names can be had for under $10 a year and deliver maximum flexibility for those who want the freedom to change Internet providers.

After Six Months, Switch Back to Road Runner

When your Earthlink promotion expires at the end of six months, your price will increase to $41.95 per month.  Just before that happens, switch back to Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service.  You qualify for new customer pricing promotions.  As of this week, Time Warner Cable in western New York is offering one year at $29.99 per month for 10/1Mbps service.  Other areas may have different pricing promotions.

After the year is up, you can start all over again, heading back to Earthlink for another six month promotional term.  Earthlink has offered its promotional plan for more than two years, and it shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Promotional Half-Truths

Promotions come and go from Time Warner Cable, so it is wise to check with them often if the $29.99 deal is not currently running in your area.  Start by checking Time Warner Cable’s website, and remember if you are using Earthlink, you will want to select pricing for new customers.  If you find a good price on the website, you may be able to complete your order online.  Otherwise, call your local office and ask about currently running promotions.  Some common ones:

• Road Runner Turbo at 50% off for the first year;
• Road Runner Turbo free for six months;
• Road Runner with wireless router/modem free for six months to one year;
• Road Runner with free installation (especially useful if you want Road Runner Extreme/Wideband service, which carries a pricey installation fee);
• Road Runner for $29.99 for six months;
• Bundled promotions — $99 for all three services, $79 for broadband/cable or broadband/phone

Not every promotion delivers the best deal for customers, and some have been slightly deceptive, such as this speed comparison we found on the cable company’s website this morning:

Our View:

1. Time Warner Cable has been spanked before for their claims about running a “fiber network.”  In fact, their “Fiber Rich Network” is a marketing stretch.  All modern cable systems use fiber optics to help distribute their service into various communities, but coaxial copper cable delivers the signal through neighborhoods to your individual home.  Cable companies still cannot match the broadband speeds available on an all-fiber network.
2. “Powertasking” is a meaningless marketing claim.  Any high speed network will allow the entire family to effectively share a broadband connection.
3. We’re glad to know Time Warner Cable has “massive bandwidth” — more than enough to go around.  We’ll remember that if and when the company ever entertains bringing back their experimental Internet Overcharging scheme they claimed was necessary to pay for equipment upgrades to cope with broadband traffic growth.
4. It would be simpler to install Time Warner’s DOCSIS 3 upgrade if we could do it ourselves, but the cable company currently requires a mandatory service call ($67.98 fee) to install it.
5. Time Warner is being cute comparing their broadband speed with Verizon FiOS.  In fact, FiOS is faster because of what isn’t mentioned here — upstream speeds.  Time Warner tops out at 5Mbps, Verizon offers 20Mbps for uploads.  But Time Warner’s pricing is better at that download speed.  Verizon is more aggressively priced when they bundle services together.  For example, Time Warner’s $99 triple play bundle only offers 10/1Mbps service.  Verizon offers up to 25/25Mbps service for the same price.  Both include phone and television service.

Cable One or Cellular One?

Cable One is unique among America’s top-10 large cable system owners for its nearly incomprehensible broadband usage policies, only fully disclosed to customers after they sign up for service.

The cable company, owned by the owners of the Washington Post, have been tinkering with their broadband pricing and Internet Overcharging schemes as they embark on upgrades to DOCSIS 3 broadband service.  The result: faster broadband service priced like a cell phone plan.

Currently, Cable One controls usage of their customers with a daily usage ration coupled with a speed throttle.  For customers, it means keeping track of usage, time of day, and whether you are in the over-usage doghouse with speeds cut in half.

Stop the Cap! went through the sign-up procedure offered online at the Cable One website, suggesting we were new customers in the Anniston, Alabama area.  While the company is quick to disclose speeds and plan features, it takes some deep wading through an Acceptable Use Policy for new customers to unearth the company’s extensive and complicated limits on broadband usage.  The company doesn’t even like to disclose they are throttling your speeds in half as a punishment.  Instead they refer to them as ‘Standard Speeds’:

Company officials have been telling Cable One customers some of these complicated usage formulas are about to be relaxed as they introduce their new 50Mbps DOCSIS 3 broadband service.  With Cable One delivering service primarily in small cities and rural areas, the arrival of 50Mbps broadband has generated considerable excitement, until customers learned the cable company has decided to market it like a cell phone plan.

Cable One primarily serves small cities and towns in the central and northwestern United States.

“The new 50Mbps plan is downright bizarre here in Fargo, N.D.,” writes Stop the Cap! reader Paul.  “It actually costs less than their 10Mbps plan — I was quoted $45 a month for the broadband-only option, $35 if I signed a two year contract.  That actually saves me money as I currently spend just over $50 a month for their 10Mbps plan.”

But Paul learned the super fast broadband plan comes with some major strings attached.

“It is limited to 50GB of usage per month on what they are calling their ‘data plan,'” Paul shares.  “The customer service representative said it was like ordering a data plan with your wireless phone.”

Currently, the 50GB limit is the only data plan on offer, and the usage cap does not apply to usage overnight from midnight until noon the following day.  But those exceeding it at other times face a $0.50/GB overlimit fee.

Paul also says Cable One appears to be ready to dispense with the complicated speed throttle it uses on its mainstream 3-12Mbps broadband plans.  Cable One traditionally gave customers a daily usage allowance ranging from 1-11GB, after which accounts were subject to throttled speeds for the next 24 hours.

“Customers have complained about the slow speeds, throttles, and usage limits for years, if only because they couldn’t navigate all of them and Cable One’s usage measurement tool is often offline or inaccurate,” Paul writes.

“I first learned about Stop the Cap! when Cable One tried to charge some of our local residents $1,000 for cable equipment lost in a fire,” Paul says.  “Cable One has been so bad my wife was hoping Mediacom… Mediacom, would deliver us from them with a buyout.”

Cable One is an example of a cable company that has gone all out with Internet Overcharging, delivering customers an expensive and speed throttled broadband experience.

“Even though the lower price for the 50Mbps plan looks nice, it’s not if you start going over the limit,” Paul says.  “Sorry, broadband is not cell phone service.”

He is sticking with his current 10/1Mbps service plan.

Cable One representatives argue very few customers exceed any of the company’s plan limits, less than 1 percent exceeding them consistently.

Among the public interest groups that have historically steered clear of the fight against usage caps and usage based billing is Public Knowledge.

Stop the Cap! took them to task more than a year ago for defending the implementation of these unjustified hidden rate hikes and usage limits.  Since then, we welcome the fact the group has increasingly been trending towards the pro-consumer, anti-cap position, but they still have some road to travel.

Public Knowledge, joined by New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, has sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission expressing concern over AT&T’s implementation of usage caps and asking for an investigation:

[…] Public Knowledge and New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative urge the Bureau to exercise its statutory authority to fully investigate the nature, purpose, impact of those caps upon consumers. The need to fully understand the nature of broadband caps is made all the more urgent by the recent decision by AT&T to break with past industry practice and convert its data cap into a revenue source.

[…] Caps on broadband usage imposed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can undermine the very goals that the Commission has committed itself to championing. While broadband caps are not inherently problematic, they carry the omnipresent temptation to act in anticompetitive and monopolistic ways. Unless they are clearly and transparently justified to address legitimate network capacity concerns, caps can work directly against the promise of broadband access.

The groups call out AT&T for its usage cap and overlimit fee model, and ponder whether these are more about revenue enhancement than network management.  The answer to that question has been clear for more than two years now: it’s all about the money.

The two groups are to be commended for raising the issue with the FCC, but they are dead wrong about caps not being inherently problematic.  Usage caps have no place in the North American wired broadband market.  Even in Canada, providers like Bell have failed to make a case justifying their implementation.  What began as an argument about congestion has evolved into one about charging heavy users more to invest in upgrades that are simply not happening on a widespread basis.  The specific argument used is tailored to the audience: complaints about congestion to government officials, denials of congestion issues to shareholders coupled with promotion of usage pricing as a revenue enhancer.

If Bell can’t sell the Canadian government on its arguments for usage caps in a country that has a far lower population density and a much larger rural expanse to wire, AT&T certainly isn’t going to have a case in the United States, and they don’t.

The history of these schemes is clear:

1. Providers historically conflate their wireless broadband platforms with wired broadband when arguing for Internet Overcharging schemes.  When regulators agree to arguments that wireless capacity problems justify usage limits, extending those limits to wired broadband gets carried along for the ride.  Dollar-a-holler groups supporting the industry love to use charts showing wireless data growth, and claim a similar problem afflicts wired broadband, even though the costs to cope with congestion are very different on the two platforms.
2. Providers argue one thing while implementing another.  Most make the claim pricing changes allow them to introduce discounted “light user” plans.  But few save because true “pay only for what you use” usage-based billing is not on offer.  Instead, worry-free flat use plans are taken off the menu, replaced with tiered plans that force subscribers to guess their usage.  If they guess too little, a stiff overlimit fee applies.  If they guess too much, they overpay.  Heads AT&T wins, tails you lose.  That’s a clear warning providers are addressing revenue enhancement, not network enhancement.
3. Claims of network congestion backed up with raw data, average usage per user, and the costs to address it are all labeled proprietary business information and are not available for independent inspection.

There are a few other issues:

In the world of broadband data caps, the caps recently implemented by AT&T are particularly aggressive. Unlike competitors whose caps appear to be at least nominally linked to congestions during peak-use periods, AT&T seeks to convert caps into a profit center by charging additional fees to customers who exceed the cap. In addition to concerns raised by broadband caps generally, such a practice produces a perverse incentive for AT&T to avoid raising its cap even as its own capacity expands.

In North America, only a handful of providers use peak-usage pricing for wired broadband.  Cable One, America’s 10th largest cable operator is among the largest, and they serve fewer than one million customers.  Virtually all providers with usage caps count both upstream and downstream data traffic 24 hours a day against a fixed usage allowance.  The largest — Comcast — does not charge an excessive usage fee.  AT&T does.

Furthermore, it remains unclear why AT&T’s recently announced caps are, at best, equal to those imposed by Comcast over two years ago.  The caps for residential DSL customers are a full 100GB lower than those Comcast saw fit to offer in mid-2008. The lower caps for DSL customers is especially worrying because one of the traditional selling points of DSL networks is that their dedicated circuit design helps to mitigate the impacts of heavy users on the rest of the network. Together, these caps suggest either that AT&T’s current network compares poorly to that of a major competitor circa 2008 or that there are non-network management motivations behind their creation.

AT&T has managed to create the first Internet version of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, combining Comcast's 'tolerated' 250GB cap with AT&T's style of slapping overlimit fees on data plans from their wireless business.

As Stop the Cap! has always argued, usage caps are highly arbitrary.  Providers always believe their usage caps are the best and most fair around, whether it was Frontier’s 5GB usage limit or Comcast’s 250GB limit.

AT&T experimented with usage limits in Reno, Nevada and Beaumont, Texas and found customers loathed them.  Comcast’s customers tolerate the cable company’s 250GB usage cap because it is not strictly enforced — only the top few violators are issued warning letters.  AT&T has established America’s first Internet pricing version of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup: getting Comcast’s tolerated usage cap into AT&T’s wireless-side overlimit fee.  The bitter aftertaste arrives in the mail at the end of the month.

Why establish different usage caps for DSL and U-verse?  Marketing, of course.  This is about money, remember?

AT&T DSL delivers far less average revenue per customer than its triple-play U-verse service.  To give U-verse a higher value proposition, AT&T supplies a more generous usage allowance.  Message: upgrade from DSL for a better broadband experience.

Technically, there is no reason to enforce either usage allowance, as AT&T DSL offers a dedicated connection to the central office or D-SLAM, from where fiber traditionally carries the signal to AT&T’s enormous backbone connection.  U-verse delivers fiber to the neighborhood and a much fatter dedicated pipeline into individual subscriber homes to deliver its phone, Internet, and video services.

A usage cap on U-verse makes as much sense as putting a coin meter on the television or charging for every phone call, something AT&T abandoned with their flat rate local and long distance plans.

Before partly granting AT&T’s premise that usage limits are a prophylactic for congestion and then advocate they be administered with oversight, why not demand proof that such pricing and usage schemes are necessary in the first place.  With independent verification of the raw data, providers like AT&T will find that an insurmountable challenge, especially if they have to open their books.

[flv width=”640″ height=”368″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bell’s Arguments for UBB 2-2011.flv[/flv]

Canada’s experience with Usage-Based Billing has all of the hallmarks of the kind of consumer ripoff AT&T wants Americans to endure:

• A provider (Bell), whose spokesman argues for these pricing schemes to address congestion and “fairness,” even as that same spokesman admits there is no congestion problem;
• Would-be competitors being priced out of the marketplace because they lack the infrastructure, access, or fair pricing to compete;
• Big bankers and investors who applaud price gouging and are appalled at government checks and balances.

Watch Mirko Bibic try to rationalize why Bell’s Fibe TV (equivalent to AT&T U-verse) needs Internet Overcharging schemes for broadband, but suffers no capacity issues delivering video and phone calls over the exact same line.  Then watch the company try and spin this pricing as an issue of fairness, even as an investor applauds the company: “I love this policy because I am a shareholder.  That’s all I care about.  If you can suck every last cent out of users, I’m happy for you.”  Finally, watch a company buying wholesale access from Bell let the cat out of the bag — broadband usage costs pennies per gigabyte, not the several dollars many providers want to charge.  (11 minutes)