Alaska Communications has found a marketing angle to combat Alaska’s dominant cable operator — GCI, which has slapped arbitrary usage caps and overlimit fees (up to $30/GB) on its customers. ACS has made cap-free Internet browsing a hallmark of their marketing campaign:

Alaska Communications vs. the Cable Company

Why Alaska Communications Home Internet is the best choice.

No Nasty Surprises on Your Bill

Tired of nasty surprises on your cable company’s Internet bill from the cable company? With Home Internet Service from Alaska Communications, there are no overage charges. Surf, stream, download, watch, and play – all without worry of “extra fees” for going over your bill. With Alaska Communications Home Internet Service, you won’t go over – it’s unlimited!

No Data Limits

Say you hopped online just a bit more this month – surfing, watching your favorite streaming movies, or maybe the kids were trying to win the online tournament of their favorite game while you were posting to your favorite social media site. We don’t think your Internet should be capped or “throttled.” That means, if you get close to your data limit, the cable company will slow down your Internet to limit your connection. With our Home Internet Service, you’ll get to use the Internet the way you want to – at the speeds you deserve!

ACS recognizes the truth for most broadband customers: They loathe usage caps and throttled broadband speeds, overlimit fees and bill shock. Nobody should have to learn what a gigabyte is and be forced to watch a usage gauge before deciding whether or not to use the Internet as they wish. We congratulate ACS for delivering consumers a better choice in broadband and a worry-free Internet experience. We hope this will send a message to GCI  that Internet Overcharging is unacceptable.

Stop the Cap! recommends our Alaskan readers patronize the state’s largest cap-free ISP: ACS.

It’s back to school season and Bell is teaching Canadian students a lesson in “bait and switch” broadband — pitching attractive broadband offers with generous usage allowances that evaporate when the school year ends.

Our regular Canadian reader Alex fills us in on the fine print (underlining ours):

The main lure is an extra 250GB of usage per month, but only for the first eight months. The activation fee and part of the monthly fee is also waived for the same amount of time.

Unfortunately, once the promotion expires (timed precisely after two college/university semesters are over), the price can increase by as much as $14 while the usage caps will be decreased by as much as 94%. Bell currently has a $25/month option to add 125GB. With or without it, the limit for usage based billing overlimit fees is $80.

Rogers usually launches a similar promotion for students, at similar prices. Back-to-school is also a competitive market for Canada’s cell phone companies.

Upon closer examination, we found the devil is indeed in the details:

• Internet 5: After eight months, your Internet usage allowance takes five, dropping like a rock from 265GB to 15GB per month. Your overlimit fee is $2.50/GB, up to $80.
• Fibe 5/1: After school is out, you’ll wonder why you took this deal when your 265GB allowance gets slashed to 15GB per month. Same overlimit fee as above.
• Fibe 15/10: You better have a long summer vacation planned when your 325GB usage cap falls to 75GB a month. That’s speed you can’t really use with an overlimit fee of $2/GB, up to $80.
• Fibe 25/10: $50 a month should buy a lot, but after eight months your 375GB shrinks more than half — to 125GB a month with an overlimit fee of $1.50/GB, up to $80.

Openmedia.ca is recommending Canadians take their own permanent vacation from cable and phone company Internet Overcharging schemes and consider switching to one of several independent ISPs offering far better usage allowances or unlimited use plans. The consumer group has a website to help direct you to the providers serving your province. In their view, not doing business with the bait and switch providers will send them a message they have to do better to compete for your business.

In an example of corporate welfare at its finest, AT&T effectively paid no federal taxes in 2011. In fact, thanks to lucrative incentives and corporate subsidies, the telecommunications company walked away with a giant taxpayer-subsidized $420 million refund.

CEO Randall Stephenson was paid a higher salary — $18.7 million — than AT&T paid in taxes last year, and thanks to the Bush era tax cuts, Stephenson kept $1,137,456 more of that money for himself in 2011, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies.

How did AT&T actually get paid by the Internal Revenue Service when it effectively owed nothing in taxes? The company used new “accelerated depreciation” rules corporate America lobbied hard for over the past five years. While AT&T was slapping usage caps and overlimit fees on its customers ostensibly to help pay for network upgrades, AT&T wrote off the value of those upgrades on its federal taxes, winning turbo-charged tax deductions for every new cell tower, 4G upgrade, and just about everything else AT&T used to enhance its network.

Under the current accelerated depreciation rules, AT&T gets to write off a higher amount during the first few years an asset is acquired. That saved the company $5.2 billion on their 2011 taxes alone.

But for companies like AT&T, considered “capital-intensive” businesses, it is only the beginning. The Institute reports even greater savings will likely show up in AT&T’s future annual reports. In 2011, Congress expanded depreciation rules and allowed businesses to deduct the entire cost of new long-term investment purchases. Although billed as an anti-recession move, such tax breaks often result in taxpayers bearing a substantial portion of the cost of investments firms would have made anyway.

AT&T was also not hurt too badly by its aborted attempt to acquire Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA. The phone giant ultimately had to pay a deal breakup fee worth $3 billion in cash and $1 billion worth of wireless spectrum to the German phone company. AT&T wrote off those on their taxes, too, helping the company not only get their tax liability down to zero, it helped win them a taxpayer-subsidized refund.

Stephenson’s disastrous failed deal to acquire AT&T’s smaller rival did not hurt him too much either, although some under him quickly took early retirement after the deal fell apart. Ultimately, AT&T’s Board of Directors sent him a message he could afford to ignore — a salary cut of just $2 million — less than 10 percent of Stephenson’s pay package. But with the Bush era tax cuts softening the blow, that slap on his salary really only cost him $862,544.

The Institute’s larger point is that tax cuts and general corporate tax policy has now moved well beyond “lower taxes” and has now increasingly shifted to providing taxpayer-financed subsidies and corporate welfare to corporations earning record profits while the United States continues to rack up enormous deficits. CEO pay also continues to flourish, only enhanced further with the added financial benefits of a temporary Bush Administration tax cut that is long beyond its intended expiration date.

Mr. Greedy has just landed in Nashville and wants another $10 from Comcast customers who blow through their allowance.

Comcast’s temporary withdrawal of its 250GB usage cap did not last long. Although the company rescinded its usage limit in May to consider new options on how to handle “heavy users,” it hinted caps might be back, sometimes accompanied by automatic overlimit fees for customers who exceed their allowance.

Broadband Reports has learned Comcast plans to introduce a new 300GB usage cap on its customers in Nashville with an overlimit fee of $10 for each 50GB a customer runs over their limit.

Comcast customers in Nashville were told in an e-mail message from the company the new usage cap and overlimit fee represented “an evolution” for Comcast’s broadband service.

From Comcast’s website in Nashville:

When you exceed 300 GB of data usage, you will receive an email, an in-browser notice and an additional 50 GB will be automatically allocated. In order for customers to get accustomed to the new data usage management plan, we will be implementing a courtesy period. That means you will not be billed for the first three times you exceed the monthly 300 GB allowance during a 12-month period. Should you exceed the monthly allowance after the courtesy period expires, you will automatically be charged $10 each time we need to provide you with an additional 50 GB of data for usage beyond your plan.

How generous of them.

Customers traveling southeast from the city down Interstate 24 can be in Chattanooga in several hours and experience EPB Fiber — a community broadband provider that provides speeds up to 1,000Mbps and does not have usage caps, nor a “need” to charge customers another $10 whether they exceed their usage cap by 1 or 49 gigabytes.

Comcast’s newest Internet Overcharging scheme takes effect Aug. 1, and currently applies only to Nashville customers. Those who want to give Comcast a piece of their mind about the subject of usage caps can share their feelings by calling Comcast Customer Security Assurance at 1-877-807-6581 to speak with a service representative. Let them know you want no part of Comcast’s unnecessary usage caps and overlimit fees. If EPB and Google Fiber can offer unlimited broadband without any problems, so can Comcast. Let them know how you feel.

Suddenly Bought

Well-compensated management at Suddenlink are teaming up with private equity firm BC Partners and the Canada Pension Plan’s CPP Investment Board to buy out Suddenlink Communications in a deal for the $6.6 billion company.

The transaction will leave Suddenlink’s founder and current CEO Jerry Kent in charge and part-owner of the company. Some other members of top management are also participating in the buyout deal.

Suddenlink is currently owned by investment bank Goldman Sachs through its private equity arm, Quadrangle Group LLC and Oaktree Capital Management LP.

The buyers will assume $4 billion of Suddenlink’s outstanding debt and BC Partners and CPP Investment Board are taking on $500 million of additional debt to fund the purchase.

Kent

Kent says the deal is designed to infuse additional capital into Suddenlink’s operations, which primarily serve smaller communities in Texas, West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas. Suddenlink launched in 2003 with the acquisition of discarded cable systems originally owned by Cox and Charter Communications. Today the company serves 1.4 million residential customers, making it the seventh largest cable operator in the country.

With Kent remaining in charge, few changes are expected. In 2011, Suddenlink adopted an Internet Overcharging scheme including usage caps and overlimit fees that it is gradually rolling out to all of its customers.

Investors see revenue growth opportunities from Suddenlink, particularly as it further monetizes broadband.

“This represents a unique opportunity to acquire a leading cable operator that has consistently generated industry-leading results,” said André Bourbonnais, who heads private investments for CPPIB.

Kent had been reportedly shopping the cable system around to private-equity firms over the past several months, on the condition he got to remain in charge and early investors could cash out.