The cable industry believes the majority of America not using the Internet remain offline by choice.

The National Cable Telecommunications Association (NCTA) says the digital divide is not their fault. Price have very little to do with it, according to an NCTA infographic showing just 6% cite “cost” as the main reason they are not signed up for Internet service.

“Cable has made extensive efforts to connect all Americans to the Internet. And while high-speed Internet adoption has rapidly increased in the United States, still too many low-income families remain unconnected and are at risk of falling behind in the global information economy,” writes NCTA blogger John Solit. “Connecting all Americans in order to bridge the digital divide and expand the availability of broadband service remains a national goal embraced by cable companies. In a recent blog post, David L. Cohen, Comcast Executive VP & Chief Diversity Officer said, “[I]n just over two years through our Internet Essentials program, Comcast has connected an estimated 1 million low-income Americans, or more than 250,000 families, to the Internet at home.”

The “digital divide” — broadband have’s and have-nots — has been a regular topic among regulators and legislators for more than a decade. A suspicion that cost is a major factor keeping people from signing up could result in legislation compelling providers to offer low-cost Lifeline broadband service to the income-disadvantaged. In the last three years, the cable industry has tried to fight off that type of approach with voluntary programs that selectively target non-customers.

Comcast’s Internet Essentials provides 5/1Mbps service for $9.95 a month, but signing up isn’t easy.

The discounted service is available only to families with school-age children that qualify for the school lunch aid program. Comcast often promotes its discount program to legislators and others in the industry as an example of the voluntary effort the cable industry is making to solve the digital divide. Target customers who most likely qualify for the service are not going to learn about it through television ads or cable company mailers targeting low-income zip codes. Most of Comcast’s marketing effort is in cooperation with area schools.

Ironically, Comcast’s Internet Essentials actually forces some people to temporarily give up Internet access if they want to participate.

Customers must be current on their Comcast bills and must not have a subscription to any Comcast Internet service for the last 90 days to receive consideration. If you already have Comcast broadband service, you must disconnect it for at least three months before you can apply for Internet Essentials.

This requirement is designed to protect Comcast’s bottom line. Why offer a discount to customers already willing to sacrifice for home Internet service at Comcast’s regular price?

“How is this helping me and my family out,” asks one Tennessee customer who tried to sign up for Internet Essentials but couldn’t because they were already paying for Comcast Internet service. “The Comcast representative said that if I wanted to be enrolled in the program I would have to discontinue my Internet service for 90 days and then reapply. We have the Economy Internet Promotion and pay $19.95 per month. After the promotion ends our fee will increase to $26.95 a month. In our current economy and financial situation saving $17 per month would greatly help our family to keep our service. I will not rest until I find a solution to this problem. My children at least deserve that.”

Comcast also makes it its business to check your household to make sure at least one child still qualifies for the National School Lunch Program. The company reserves the right to immediately cancel service if you miss a payment or move. Participants also must not upgrade, alter or change Comcast service for any reason or risk being removed from the program.

Comcast’s Wi-Fi Ban

Shapiro

One of the most annoying conditions of the Internet Essentials program is that it does not allow Wi-Fi access.

Phil Shapiro, who refurbishes donated computers and distributes them to needy families regularly runs into Comcast’s Wi-Fi ban — a significant issue for larger families that need to be online concurrently.

“I’ve taken three donated computers to [one] family and I was expecting to get them all online with this cable modem service,” Shapiro tells The Hechinger Report.  “But not so fast. Comcast’s telephone tech support tells me that Internet Essentials users cannot use Wi-Fi with their cable modems. Nowhere in Comcast’s printed literature or on the website is this limitation mentioned. Naturally, families who sign up for Internet Essentials get confused about this, but they are not well positioned to advocate for their needs.”

Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesperson, confirms that Internet Essentials does not offer Wi-Fi service, although he noted a customer could theoretically buy a wireless router themselves and use that to provide wireless connectivity. But that isn’t what Comcast’s technical support team recommends. Any deviation from the terms of the service offered to Internet Essentials customers could lead to an immediate disqualification. Comcast defines Internet Essentials as a wired service, including one outlet and a basic (not wireless) modem.

“The family that I was helping patiently waited for me while I talked on the phone,” said Shapiro. “They could see that I spoke very politely with the tech support person. They also saw that I had reached the end of my patience.”

A representative told Stop the Cap! Internet Essentials accounts have insufficient bandwidth and speed for Wi-Fi service, so it is not offered.

Shapiro dismisses Comcast’s explanation. Many public Wi-Fi networks offer even slower service than Comcast.

Douglas defended Comcast’s policy noting families served by the program don’t miss Wi-Fi and don’t need it.

But those using tablets might disagree, and with an increasing number of students using them as school textbooks are gradually phased out, Wi-Fi will only grow in importance.

Many large school districts, including Los Angeles, are introducing Wi-Fi only tablets for student use because they are cheaper and easier to support. When Internet Essentials participants ask about Wi-Fi access with the discounted broadband service, Comcast representatives are trained to up sell customers out of the program and sign them to a more costly plan than includes built-in Wi-Fi support.

Customers can successfully, if covertly, connect a router with Wi-Fi capability to the basic cable modem supplied by Comcast and configure wireless Internet Essentials service. But there are no guarantees Comcast will not give customers grief about it, if they wish.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Comcast Internet Essentials Key Milestones 11-13.mp4[/flv]

Comcast produced this video marking the start of the second year of its Internet Essentials program. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel gushed Internet Essentials was “top of the line” Internet access. He was joined by other recognizable political leaders and the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Julius Genachowski. (2:47)

More drive-by reporting on Comcast’s usage caps.

When the media covers Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps and consumption billing, it is often much easier to take the provider’s word for it instead of actually investigating whether subscribers actually need their Internet usage limited.

Comcast’s planned reintroduction of its usage caps on South Carolina customers begins Friday. Instead of the now-retired 250GB limit, Comcast is graciously throwing another 50GB of usage allowance to customers, five years after defining 250GB as more than generous.

The Post & Courier never bothered to investigate if Comcast’s new 300GB usage cap was warranted or if Charleston-area customers wanted it. It was so much easier to just print Comcast’s point of view and throw in a quote or two from an industry analyst.

In fact, the reporter even tried to suggest the Internet Overcharging scheme was an improvement for customers.

The newspaper reported Comcast was the first large Internet provider in the region to allow customers to pay even more for broadband service by extending their allowance in 50GB increments at $10 a pop. (Actually, AT&T beat Comcast to the bank on that idea, but has avoided dropping that hammer on customers who already have to be persuaded to switch to AT&T U-verse broadband that tops out at around 24Mbps for most customers.)

Since 2008, the company’s monthly limit has been capped at 250 GB per household. When customers exceeded that threshold, Comcast didn’t have a firm mechanism for bringing them back in line, other than to issue warnings or threaten to cut off service.

“People didn’t like that static cap. They felt that if they wanted to extend their usage, then they should be allowed to do that,” said Charlie Douglas, a senior director with Comcast.

Charleston is the latest in a series of trial markets the cable giant has used to test the new Internet usage policy in the past year. As with any test period, the company can modify or discontinue the plan at any time.

During the trial period in Charleston, customers will get an extra 50 GB of monthly data than they’re used to having. If they exceed 300 GB, they can pay for more.

“300 GB is well beyond what any typical household is ever going to consume in a month,” Douglas said. “In all of the other trial markets with this (limit), it really doesn’t impact the overwhelming super-majority of customers.”

The average Internet user with Comcast service uses about 16 to 18 GB of data per month, Douglas said.

Customers who use less than five GB per month will start seeing a $5 discount on their bills.

“We think this approach is fair because we’re giving consumers who want to use more data a way to do so, and for consumers who use less, they can pay less,” Douglas said.

Data caps are designed to stop content piracy?

The Charleston reporter asserts, without any evidence, “data-capping is a trend many Internet service providers are expected to follow in the next few years as the industry aims to reduce network congestion and to find safeguards against online piracy.”

Suggesting data caps are about piracy immediately rings alarm bells. Comcast and other Internet Service Providers fought long and hard against being held accountable for their customers’ actions. The industry wants nothing to do with monitoring online activities lest the government hold them accountable for not actively stopping criminal activity.

“It’s not about piracy, per se,” said Douglas. “We don’t look at what people are doing. The purpose is really a matter of fairness. If people are using a disproportionate amount of data, then they should pay more.”

Comcast’s concern for fairness and disproportionate behavior does not extend to the rapacious pricing and enormous profit it earns selling broadband, flat rate or not.

MIT Technology Review’s David Talbot found “Time Warner Cable and Comcast are already making a 97 percent margin on their ‘almost comically profitable’ Internet services.” That figure was repeated by Craig Moffett, one of the most enthusiastic, well-respected cable industry analysts. That percentage refers to “gross margin,” which is effectively gravy on largely paid off cable plant/infrastructure that last saw a major wholesale upgrade in the 1990s to accommodate the advent of digital cable television and the 500-channel universe. Broadband was introduced in the late 1990s as a cheap-to-deploy but highly profitable, unregulated ancillary service.

How things have changed.

Just follow the money….

Customers used to being gouged for cable television are now willing to say goodbye to Comcast’s television package in growing numbers. Today’s must-have service is broadband and Comcast has a high-priced plan for you! But earning up to 97 percent profit from $50+ broadband isn’t enough.

A 300GB limit isn’t designed to control congestion either. In fact, had she investigated that claim, she would have discovered the cable industry itself disavowed that notion earlier this year.

In fact, it’s all about the money.

Michael Powell, the head of the cable industry’s top lobbying group admitted the theory that data caps are designed to control network congestion was wrong.

“Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost,” said Powell.

Powell mentioned costs like digging up streets, laying cable and operational expenses. Except the cable industry long ago stopped aggressive buildouts and now maintains a tight Return On Investment formula that keeps cable broadband out of rural areas indefinitely. Operational expenses for broadband have also declined, despite increases in traffic and the number of customers subscribing.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC Internet v. Cable 8-20-10.flv[/flv]

Don’t take our word for it. Consider the views of Suddenlink Cable CEO Jerry Kent, interviewed in 2010 on CNBC. (8 minutes)

“I think one of the things people don’t realize [relates to] the question of capital intensity and having to keep spending to keep up with capacity,” said Suddenlink CEO Jerry Kent. “Those days are basically over, and you are seeing significant free cash flow generated from the cable operators as our capital expenditures continue to come down.”

Unfortunately, Charleston residents don’t have the benefit of reporting that takes a skeptical view of a company press release and the spokesperson readily willing to underline it.

If Comcast seeks to be the arbiter of ‘fairness,’ then one must ask what concept of fairness allows for a usage cap almost no customers want for a service already grossly overpriced.

(Image: DownDetector)

A major outage caused by a failing fiber optic switch owned by Level 3 Communications left millions of cable subscribers along the eastern seaboard without Internet access Saturday.

The outage affected Cablevision and Time Warner Cable customers from Albany, N.Y. eastward to Long Island and north into Maine.

Some cable operators did a better job dealing with Level 3’s troubled equipment than others.

A Cablevision spokesperson indicated technicians discovered the problem, routed around it, and restored service about an hour later.

Time Warner Cable apparently waited for Level 3 to repair or replace the switch, leaving their broadband customers offline for most of Saturday morning.

The switch failure did not just affect Internet Service Providers. Some content distribution networks and regional servers for major websites including Facebook and Twitter also had problems.

Although the outage was too brief for Cablevision customers to qualify for a service credit, affected Time Warner Cable customers can use the company’s online chat platform or call to request a one day broadband service credit for the interruption.

Efforts by local officials to attract more cable competition are paying off in suburban Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit, Mich. where customers will soon be able to choose between two cable companies or AT&T for cable service.

WOW!, a Denver-based cable overbuilder, has announced it will expand service to Lathrup Village, Mich. and Sheffield Lake, Brunswick, and North Ridgeville, Ohio between now and the middle of next year.

North Ridgeville City Council president Kevin Corcoran last week announced WOW! would begin head-to-head competition with Time Warner Cable starting in 2014. Corcoran told The Chronicle Telegram the city began looking for a competing cable provider after hearing complaints from residents about Time Warner Cable’s poor customer service and reliability. He approached WOW!, which has provided competitive service in parts of the greater Cleveland area, about expanding in North Ridgeville.

“My only pitch was that people are dying for some competition,” Corcoran told the newspaper.

Corcoran met informally with WOW! officials to discuss the prospects of expanding into North Ridgeville before more formal meetings were held with city officials including the mayor and the safety-service director.

Making life easier for WOW!’s entry is the presence of existing utility easements, which means WOW! can run cable on existing utility poles without formal approval by the city council. But WOW! will still need certain permits from the Building Department to move forward with wiring. The company will use Ohio’s statewide video franchising law, originally pushed by AT&T for U-verse, to obtain video service permits and a franchise agreement with the Ohio Department of Commerce.

WOW!’s regular prices are much lower than Time Warner Cable’s promotional prices for new customers:

• Standard triple play (15/1Mbps Internet, Cable TV, phone) costs $105.98/month from Time Warner ($118.97 with DVR), $85/month from WOW! ($92 with DVR);
• Standard double play (15/1Mbps Internet, Cable TV) still costs $105.98/month from Time Warner ($118.98 with DCR), $75/month from WOW! ($82 with DVR);
• Internet-only service (15/1Mbps) costs $40.98/month from Time Warner Cable, $30/month from WOW! (promotional pricing expires after 12 months).

Time Warner Cable said it welcomes the competition.

Frustrated YouTube fans have complained all year about degraded performance, videos that don’t play, and endless rebuffering of online videos. Now a third-party has placed the blame for this on YouTube’s owner Google, which is allegedly running server farms overloaded with YouTube video traffic.

Sandvine’s Dan Deeth argues that super fast broadband speed and the providers that deliver it are not always the best indicators of subscribers’ ‘Internet quality of experience.’ More important, Deeth writes, is how well an Internet-delivered application or content works for consumers.

Broadband users typically blame their Internet Service Provider when a website refuses to load or an online video staggers from one “buffering” pause to the next. But the bottleneck is sometimes beyond the control of your provider and may even reside at the content distribution network sending you the streamed video.

Among the most frustrating online video experiences this year comes from YouTube, owned by Google. Users complain videos never start, timeout, constantly buffer, or downshift to lower video quality.

“The enormous increase in ads all seem to play fine, but there are dozens of times the video itself never begins at all or quickly times-out to rebuffer,” said James Bellwar.

Hyun Soo Park, a YouTube contributor that earns side income from sharing ad revenue says YouTube is getting hopeless.

“My fans are giving up and are occasionally even angry at me because they think I am responsible for the ads that play fine and the videos that do not,” said Hyun.

Blame Google, says Deeth:

We can rule out ISPs being the root cause of YouTube’s quality issue. Instead, we can conclude that the root cause of the degradation in quality is likely occurring because of an oversubscription in the Google server farm (where YouTube is hosted) which makes YouTube unable to meet high lunch time and evening video demand. This oversubscription would result from a commercial decision by YouTube to regarding how much capital they wanted to invest in server capacity to maintain quality.

For those interested in examining further, YouTube has a ‘my speed benchmark’ that seeks to measure ‘maximum demand’. You can use these benchmark tools to not only view your historical YouTube performance, but also measure in real-time the performance of a video you are viewing.

YouTube performance at Stop the Cap! HQ

While consumers are caught in the middle of the finger-pointing, there is a solution to keep YouTube videos from endlessly buffering. PC World offers a way to force YouTube to send the entire video instead of the current system that only pre-buffers small segments of content. Make sure to browse the comment section in the article for tips on getting it to work with your browser.