Today marks the first anniversary of news that Time Warner Cable planned to expand an Internet Overcharging scheme being tested in one Texas city to four additional cities within its service area.

Residents of Rochester, New York, the Triad Region surrounding Greensboro, North Carolina, as well as Austin and San Antonio, Texas first learned of the planned expansion of so-called “metered broadband” from a Business Week article dated March 31st, which has since accumulated more than 450 comments to date:

Web users, the meter is running. In a strategy that’s likely to rankle consumers but be copied by competitors, Time Warner Cable is pressing ahead with a plan to charge Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume. Starting next month, the company will introduce tiered pricing in several markets.

In April, Time Warner Cable will begin collecting information on its customers’ Internet use in the Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio and in Rochester, N.Y. Consumption billing will begin in those cities later this summer. In Greensboro, N.C., the billing changes will begin sooner. Spun off from Time Warner this month, Time Warner Cable had been testing a plan to meter Internet usage in Beaumont, Tex., since last year.

Proposed pricing models created by Time Warner Cable would have tripled broadband bills to an unprecedented $150 a month for consumers seeking the same level of broadband service they enjoyed a month earlier.  For a cable industry that was used to pushing through rate increases well above the annual rate of inflation, such an enormous rate increase was unprecedented, even for them.

For consumers willing to ration their broadband use, the news was slightly better — you’d still pay more for less service, and be exposed to overlimit fees and penalties should you exceed your monthly allowance, which was as low as a 1 GB per month for one proposed plan.

While residents of Beaumont, Texas had to endure these prices for several months prior to the announced expansion of experimental Overcharging, once news hit tech-savvy cities in Texas, New York, and North Carolina, an all-out consumer rebellion began.  Residents in Austin met with city officials to discuss alternatives to a cable company that threatened Austin’s high tech status.  For residents in Rochester, already coping with a 5 GB usage allowance for Frontier Communication’s DSL service, it was a clear-cut case of monopolistic greed.  In North Carolina, working to transition its way towards a digital economic future, an Internet rationing plan would hurt the economy of the entire Triad region.  San Antonio residents were equally unimpressed with the cable operator as well, demanding alternative providers.

Former Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY)

Consumers banded together on Stop the Cap! and other consumer-oriented websites to coordinate the pushback effort.  Protests were held, the media was engaged, and at least in New York, the politicians were not going to sit back in Time Warner Cable’s favor.  Former Rep. Eric Massa expressed outrage at the company for its new pricing plan and Senator Chuck Schumer personally called Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.

A few lapdogs in the trade press and “dollar a holler” astroturf groups praised Time Warner Cable’s price gouging plans.  One even went as far as to suggest Time Warner Cable “took one for the team” — referring to a cable industry just waiting to test some Internet Overcharging of their own.

Time Warner Cable dispatched some of their social media minions to try and explain away the outrageous price increases, offering to “listen” to consumers with suggestions about how to “improve the plan.”  One, like TWCAlex offered “proof” consumers wanted this kind of pricing.  The disingenuousness of the effort rivaled Lord Haw Haw’s Germany Calling propaganda broadcasts on the Reichssender Hamburg.  Company officials ignored the overwhelming consensus that consumers didn’t want metered or capped service and then weeks later those who did submit comments were notified they were “deleted without being read.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Massa’s office began drafting legislation to ban the unprecedented pricing schemes, culminating in a bill introduced in 2009 to ban unjustified usage caps and metered billing.

On April 9th, Landel Hobbs, Chief Operating Officer of Time Warner Cable, issued a recitation of the reasons why Time Warner Cable felt justified in exposing customers to up to 150 percent rate hikes — reasons we’ve managed to debunk over the past year’s coverage:

With the ever-increasing flood of content on the Internet, bandwidth consumption is growing exponentially. That’s a good thing; however, there are costs associated with this increased Internet usage. Here at Time Warner Cable, consumption among our high-speed Internet subscribers is increasing by about 40% a year. As a facilities based provider, we’ve built a network that must be maintained and upgraded. We have increasing variable costs and we have to continue to invest in the network itself.

As we’ve since proven, Hobbs statements to the public obscure the facts in his own company’s financial reports which are remarkably consistent quarter after quarter: revenues for broadband service are increasing while the costs to provide it are falling.  In fact, broadband is rapidly becoming the most important element of the cable industry’s quest for fat profits.  Time Warner Cable, as well as others, have plenty of financial resources from the billions in profits they earn from broadband every year to provide cost-effective upgrades that benefit them as well as consumers at today’s flat rate prices.

Just a few weeks ago, Hobbs told investors consumers are so devoted to their broadband service, the company could raise broadband prices anytime they like.  Funny how “increasing costs” never came into the discussion there.

This is a common problem that all network providers are experiencing and must address. Several other providers have instituted consumption based billing, including all major network providers in Canada and others in the U.K., New Zealand and elsewhere. In the U.S., AT&T has begun two consumption based billing trials and other providers including Comcast, Charter and Cox are using varying methods of monitoring and managing bandwidth consumption.

As Stop the Cap! has illustrated repeatedly, such consumption billing schemes are despised by consumers -and- most countries see them as hampering their digital economy.  Australia and New Zealand have government initiatives to improve broadband service to the point where consumption billing and usage caps are a distant memory.  Canada’s usage based billing schemes come from market concentration, particularly from Bell which is by far the largest wholesale supplier of bandwidth in the country.  Their quest for profits, along with a compliant regulatory body (the CRTC) has made such ripoff pricing commonplace.  The result on Canada’s broadband rankings are clear as the country continues to fall further behind other OECD nations.  Canadians do not want such pricing, but when a duopoly is allowed to exist unfettered by appropriate oversight, the end result is always the same – higher prices for poorer service.  In the United Kingdom, several flat rate plans are available, with more on the way as the UK embarks on its own Digital Economy plan.

There are other reasons why such consumption billing schemes are in place in other countries – namely insufficient international capacity to move traffic back and forth outside of the region.  That too is being addressed.

That other cable operators are overcharging consumers or limiting their usage is hardly a surprise considering insufficient competition in the marketplace makes that possible.  However, Comcast’s 250 GB limit is far more generous than anything Time Warner Cable proposed, Cox rarely enforces their limits, and Charter recently announced it had abandoned theirs.

For good reason. Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years. According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012. This could result in Internet brownouts. It will take a lot of money to fix the problem. Rather than raising prices on all customers or limiting usage, we think the fairest approach is to move to a tiered model in which users pay more if they use more.

Hobbs’ reliance on the “exaflood” or the “zettabyte” theory of Internet brownouts comes courtesy of the prostituting, industry-backed Discovery Institute — the people who will cough up bought and paid for “research studies” that say anything the buyer wants them to say and Cisco, which makes a handsome buck off selling broadband network equipment to providers they panic with stories of Internet data tsunamis and brownouts.

Hobbs

Two weeks after the Business Week article, Senator Schumer flew to Rochester and joined a few of our local Stop the Cap! members and myself to announce the end of the nightmare — no more Internet Overcharging consumers in any of the three states. Even Beaumont was soon freed from the ripoff pricing experiment.

But Time Warner Cable promised that one day, they could be back with the same schemes, after “educating their customers.”  Stop the Cap! has spent the last year assembling an extensive record of just how unjustified these pricing schemes really are, and we’ve been educating consumers about how an duopolistic broadband industry is seeking to monetize and control as many aspects of America’s online experience as possible.

We’ve exposed dozens of astroturf and other industry-backed groups trying to peddle the broadband industry agenda, often trying to hide who is paying the bills.  Whether it’s scare stories about broadband brownouts, fear that oversight and regulation will drive away investment and reduce service, or the need to stop Net Neutrality — it’s all designed to protect provider profits, not help consumers.

There is nothing fair about Internet Overcharging schemes.  There has never been a true consumption billing scheme that charged consumers nothing if they didn’t use the service, and the prices being charged for consumption above one’s allowance are often several thousand percent above actual cost.  Indeed the CEO of Crown Fibre Holdings CEO Graham Mitchell, admitted the truth about such pricing schemes when he told Techday that where ISP’s engage in such pricing schemes, they don’t make their money in providing access to broadband; they make it out of data caps.

We have no illusion providers won’t be back for a second bite at your wallets, which is why the education effort continues.  Over the last year, we’ve expanded our coverage to promote better broadband, and to expose bad actors among the broadband cable, telephone, wireless, and satellite industry.  We’ll continue to expose lobbying efforts to legislate away oversight, consumer protection, and limit potential competition.  Stop the Cap! also continues to fight for improved rural broadband that moves beyond today’s satellite fraudband that delivers woefully slow, heavily limited and expensive service.  We’ll also coordinate efforts to push back whenever Internet Overcharging schemes appear on the horizon, and we won’t let go until such language is banished from customer agreements and Acceptable Use Policies, whether they are formally enforced or not.

One year later, America’s broadband users are safer from such schemes, but not yet safe.  Thanks to all of our readers for staying engaged.

Following Comcast’s lead, Time Warner Cable will begin shrinking western New York analog customers’ channel lineups to accommodate additional HD channels.  While in most cases customers with set top boxes or digital-ready televisions will be able to continue watching (the latter by rescanning the channels on their televisions), those with older televisions without a box are out of luck.

Customers will not receive a corresponding rate decrease based on the lost channels from their lineups.  Here is a rundown of those networks and customers affected:

Buffalo, New York Channel Lineup Changes (effective April 15)

Western New York Suburban-areas

• Style from Broadcast Basic Ch 98 to Digital Basic Ch 176 (digital equipment and a subscription to Digital Basic Cable will be required to view Style)
• TruTV Ch 35 to Ch 70 (digital box required)
• Oxygen Ch 68 to Ch 66 (digital box required)
• YES Ch 70 to Ch 65
• Versus Ch 71 to Ch 35
• Hallmark Ch 69 to Ch 63

City of Buffalo

• Style from Standard Cable Ch 65 to Digital Basic Ch 176 (digital equipment and a subscription to Digital Basic Cable will be required to view Style)
• TruTV Ch 48 to Ch 70 (digital box required)
• Oxygen will remain on Ch 66 (digital box required)
• YES Ch 70 to Ch 65
• Versus from Ch 71 to Ch 48

Dunkirk

• Style from Standard Cable Ch 96 to Digital Basic Ch 176 (digital equipment and a subscription to Digital Basic Cable will be required to view Style)
• TruTV Ch 31 to Ch 70 (digital box required)
• Oxygen Ch 62 to Ch 71 (digital box required)
• Versus Ch 71 to Ch 62
• Shop NBC from Ch 27 to Ch 73 (digital box required)
• SyFy Ch 69 to Ch 31

Westfield

• Style from Broadcast Basic Cable Ch 98 to  Digital Basic Ch 176 (digital equipment and a subscription to Digital Basic Cable will be required to view Style)
• TruTV Ch 35 to Ch 70 (digital box required)
• Oxygen Ch 66 to Ch 71 (digital box required)
• Shop NBC Ch 70 to Ch 73 (digital box required)
• MSG Ch 67 to Ch 35

Olean/Olean North/Wellsville

• Style from Standard Cable Ch 71 to Digital Basic Ch 176 (digital equipment and a subscription to Digital Basic Cable will be required to view Style)
• TruTV Ch 64 to Ch 70 (digital box required)
• Oxygen Ch 57 to Ch 66 (digital box required)
• YES Ch 70 to Ch 64
• Versus Ch 66 to Ch 57
• Shop NBC Ch 31 to Ch 73 (digital box required)
• Fox News Channel Ch 68 to Ch 31

Rochester, New York Channel Lineup Changes (unless otherwise noted, effective April 15)

Metropolitan Rochester Area

• National Geographic Wild will replace FOX Reality on Ch 453 and National Geographic Wild HD launches on Ch 1051 (Effective March 29)
• Speed Channel, Ch 210 will be moved from Digital Basic to CPST (standard cable). Speed will remain available in digital format only (Effective April 1)
• Speed Channel HD, Ch 1065, be moved from Digital Basic to CPST (standard cable). Speed will remain available in digital format only (Effective April 1)
• Oxygen will move from Ch 70 to Ch 75 (digital format only)
• Photoshow TV located on Chs 821 and 822 will no longer be available.
• Vutopia will be added to Ch 968
• Vutopia HD will be added to Ch 1149

Livingston/Southern Monroe County

• All of the above changes, plus:
• Versus will move from Channel 75 to Channel 51
• Shop NBC will be removed from Channel 7 and will remain on Channel 66

Genesee/Wyoming and Orleans/Niagara Counties

• All of the above changes, plus:
• Versus will move from Channel 75 to Channel 51

Erie County

• All of the above changes, plus:
• Versus will move from Channel 75 to Channel 51
• Shop NBC will be removed from Channel 20 and will remain on Channel 66

Wayne, Ontario, Seneca and Cayuga Counties

• All of the above changes, plus:
• Versus will move from Channel 75 to Channel 55

Yates/ Ontario and Steuben/Schuyler Counties

• All of the above changes, excluding Vutopia, plus:
• Versus will move from Channel 75 to Channel 55

Franklin D. Roosevelt, seen here during his years as New York's governor

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Watching the debate raging through the 1920s was one Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected governor of New York in 1928 on a reformist agenda.  Like many other states, New Yorkers had a problem with their electric companies.  They charged too much, didn’t provide sufficient capacity, and ignored rural areas.

Roosevelt started his political life following in the philosophical (and political) footsteps of his fifth cousin Theodore, the 26th president of the United States.  FDR believed in individualist progressive ideals — improving privately held utilities but steering clear of advocating public ownership.

Roosevelt’s immediate predecessor, Al Smith, spent the 1920s in Albany arguing with the Republican state legislature over who would develop New York’s hydro power resources, which could deliver substantially lower-priced electricity from Buffalo to Long Island.  The legislature wanted the state’s private power companies to develop the resource, with a public service commission reviewing and, where necessary, regulating rates.  Smith wanted the state to build the plants as public utilities, arguing endless lawsuits by private power companies had made rate regulation meaningless.

Early into his term as governor, Roosevelt picked up where Smith left off, advocating first for the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York.  The legislature promptly said no.  Roosevelt refused to let go and expanded his proposal to also include the possibility of municipally-owned local power companies, delivering needed power without a profit incentive.

In upstate and western New York, firmly Republican territory, local newspapers blasted Roosevelt’s proposal, occasionally calling him a socialist conniver, an enemy of free enterprise, and dragging big state government into the lives of ordinary citizens.

Electric companies across the state joined the chorus of upstate opposition, but also quietly made preparations to counter Roosevelt’s proposal, just in case it began to catch on.

Roosevelt’s initial efforts to argue his position did not make much headway upstate, because he had to rely on newspapers to deliver his message — the same newspapers that rebutted him at every turn.  Direct mailing letters to voters was expensive and took a long time to create and distribute.  Roosevelt instead turned to the new medium of radio, speaking to residents statewide about issues like electrification.  Radio directly reached listeners and bypassed the newspaper filter, and it allowed the governor to deliver a populist message in terms every consumer could understand — high rates.

Roosevelt lit a fire for reform when he compared what state residents were paying for electricity compared to those on the other side of Lake Ontario, in Canada.  Canada had provincial power, owned and operated by the government.

Roosevelt told listeners that in a “modernized house” (one served by higher voltage lines capable of supporting large electric appliances), residents of Ontario paid just $3.40 a month in electric bills.  But in Westchester County, the same service cost $25.63.  It was $19.95 in New York City and $13.50 in Rochester.

Double-crossing Roosevelt With the Help of ‘The House of Morgan’

The electric companies soon saw the results of those price comparisons as voters demanded better prices.  Republicans began shifting toward Roosevelt’s plan.  For the power companies, it was time for “Plan B.”  Quietly meeting with J.P. Morgan Bank in the summer of 1929, three major upstate New York power companies planned to merge into one giant company: Mohawk Hudson Power Corporation.

The modern day Mohawk Hudson Power Company was Niagara-Mohawk, which has since been purchased by National Grid.

Mohawk Hudson Power Corporation incorporated:

• Buffalo, Niagara & Eastern Power Corp.: Served 500 cities and towns including Buffalo.  Niagara Falls supplied most of its power;
• Northeastern Power Corp.: Served communities along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence;
• Mohawk Hudson Power Corp.: Served Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, and many other communities.

With such a merger, Roosevelt’s original plan to let upstate power companies compete to offer the best possible rates for hydro power were dashed.  In fact, the power companies loved Roosevelt’s plan because as a combined entity, they’d profit handsomely from state taxpayers paying to construct hydro generating stations, saving them the trouble.  Then as a monopoly cartel, they’d set rates artificially high, pocketing the proceeds. J.P. Morgan Bank would also get paid handsomely for helping make it all possible.

To add insult to injury, just two months later, Mohawk Hudson acquired another state giant — Frontier Power Corporation, which in the words of Time magazine, “set Roosevelt agog.”

Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York (Democrat) declared that the fact that 80% of New York State is now served by one hydro-electric corporation made it necessary for him once again to urge the Legislature (Republican) to create a body of public trustees to develop St. Lawrence water power for the people.

Roosevelt’s experience with the House of Morgan and the power utility trusts would be a lesson he would never forgive or forget.  In fact, it culminated in his broadened vision to consider power an integral part of economic redevelopment after the start of the Great Depression later that year.

Roosevelt’s New Deal

Americans only came to terms with the impact of the Great Depression in 1930, months after the stock market crashed.  What initially hurt Wall Street soon spread across the country in waves of bank failures, massive unemployment, a credit crunch, and rampant homelessness, poverty, and despair.  What was bad in the city could be much worse in rural America.

Services for rural Americans were few and far between, and electric power was absolutely not one of them.  The economic benefits of the boom years usually never made it to rural communities in the first place.  Banks did manage to turn an excellent business convincing rural farmers to mortgage their farms in return for ready cash to acquire farm equipment, pay transportation costs to bring crops to market, and obtain other necessities.  When the bust years arrived, more than a few farmers found themselves foreclosed and evicted from their own farms, seized by lenders to recoup their loans.

After witnessing thousands of farmers and other rural Americans displaced from their homes, Roosevelt embarked on wide-ranging reforms for rural America.  One of the most important was rural electrification, designed to guarantee electricity to any rural American that wanted it.  Through the New Deal, rural Americans would experience the benefits of modernization first-hand — bolstering farm production and development, increasing economic development, improving health and safety, and most importantly, make rural living economically self-sustainable.

After learning from his years as governor of New York, Roosevelt established some core principles for his rural-focused New Deal electrification program:

• Full electrical modernization of households defined the standard for quality of life, no matter where the households resided.
• Electrical modernization of farm productive processes, within the framework of planned production and marketing, would lower farm costs and return farms to prosperity.
• Electricity must be affordable to all households in quantities required for electrical modernization. Publicly owned and private utilities, lightened of their false capitalization by public regulation and the breakup of holding companies, would provide inexpensive electricity.
• Cheap electricity would make the redistribution of population and industry possible, because it could be transmitted long distances and sold at near cost to rural consumers.

President Roosevelt speaks to residents in Tupelo, Mississippi, the first city to benefit from the Tennessee Valley Authority

The mostly rural and poor Tennessee Valley region, covering 80,000 square miles in the southeastern United States, including almost all of Tennessee and parts of Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia was an obvious first choice for rural electrification.  Tupelo, Mississippi was the first community to sign onto Roosevelt’s ambitious Tennessee Valley Authority plan to bring cheap power to a deprived region.

The results of electrification at reasonable prices were… electric.  Widespread poverty wasn’t solved overnight, but evidence of social transformation was at hand.  Americans from coast to coast were modernizing their homes, bringing in new electric appliances which fueled pre-war manufacturing, retail sales, and helped bring down unemployment.  Many businesses were thrilled to participate in New Deal programs, which included stimulus spending to help Americans improve their homes.

The impact of New Deal programs for electricity development exist in every American home.  The refrigerator replaced an ice-block powered icebox.  Hand scrubbed laundry in a sink now agitated in a washing machine.  The radio was made commonplace where electricity to power it was available.  Mixers, blenders, toasters, and other small appliances made their entrance with the advent of widespread electric power.  But the impacts go even further.  Technology as Freedom, by Ronald Tobey, notes:

The New Deal in domestic electrical modernization worked an invisible revolution. The New Deal shifted the majority of American families to an asset strategy for economic security through state-enframed home ownership of electrically modern dwellings. Geographic mobility declined. Unrestrained domination of local politics by a locally resident real estate elite ended. Material accumulation based in the owner-occupied home created unprecedented material affluence. The dwellings modernized their occupants, as households rebuilt their social and labor relations around new technologies. Minority groups previously locked out of affluence gained the keys to their future. The New Deal created the 1950s.

Is ubiquitous broadband the electrification challenge of our age?  Naysayers claim fast broadband is only useful for downloading entertainment products, often illegally.  They suggest economic development doesn’t require fast broadband — any version of broadband is good enough.  Worse yet, government involvement in it is suspect, according to these critics.

But after weeks of witnessing countless communities compete for Google’s Think Big With a Gig broadband project, it’s clear the clamor for affordable, fast broadband service is far more important than the naysayers would suggest.

American Salt Company's salt pile in Hampton Corners, just south of Rochester, N.Y.

Faithful Stop the Cap! reader Lance dropped us a note this afternoon alerting us that Syracuse is the latest Time Warner Cable city getting the benefits of increased speed from Time Warner Cable’s DOCSIS 3 Wideband upgrade.

While those in the Salt City can now sign up for 50Mbps broadband service, Time Warner Cable tells residents of the Flower City to go pound salt — there are no upgrades for you!

Why?

Thank Frontier Communications anemic (read that barely-existent) competition against Time Warner Cable in Rochester.  While the rest of upstate New York is being wired for fiber-to-the-home service from Verizon, Frontier Communications is relying on decade-old DSL service… indefinitely.  For residents like myself, that topped out at a whopping 3.1Mbps. That fails the FCC’s newly-proposed minimum speed to even be considered “broadband.”

Buffalo has been Wideband ready since early this month, and New York City launched service last year.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle must have noticed nearby cities were getting speed increases, but Rochester was not, so they contacted Time Warner Cable to find out why:

While those DOCSIS 3.0 products — called Wideband and Road Runner Extreme — are being made available in Buffalo and Syracuse, the company “has just begun its national launch of this product across its entire footprint, but with no additional locations determined at this time,” said spokesman Jeff Unaitis.

The company, however, does plan to roll out a wireless broadband product for the Rochester market before the end of 2010, he said.

(*) - As long as you don't live in Rochester, N.Y.

That’s the nice way of saying Rochester isn’t getting the speed increases because there is no competitive reason to provide it.  With Rochester left off the upgrade list, and no real incentive to run to Frontier (which can’t beat Road Runner’s existing speeds), this community falls behind the rest of the state in broadband speed.

To think last April Time Warner Cable was promising dramatically upgraded service, if the community agreed to accept their Internet Overcharging usage-based billing scheme.  Apparently no other upstate city was required to commit to ripoff pricing, and speed upgrades came anyway.  The fact Rochester is bypassed this year proves our contention their pricing experiment came to Rochester only because they faced no real competitive threat from Frontier then, and they still do not today.

As for the wireless product coming to Rochester, that will come courtesy of rebranded Clearwire service, which has had very mixed reviews.  Time Warner Cable and Comcast are both major investors in Clearwire, and are using their service to provide a wireless add-on.  It won’t come cheap, however, if North Carolina’s pricing also applies here:

• Road Runner Mobile 4G National Elite gives unlimited access to both Time Warner Cable’s 4G Mobile Network and a national 3G network (Sprint, presumably), for use when traveling.
  o $79.95 per month for Road Runner Standard or Turbo customers.
• Road Runner Mobile 4G Elite gives customers unlimited access to the Time Warner Cable 4G Mobile Network.
  o $49.95 per month for Road Runner Standard or Turbo customers.
• Road Runner Mobile 4G Choice gives light users 2GB of service on the Time Warner Cable 4G network each month.
  o Available for $39.95 per month to customers of at least one other Time Warner Cable service.  Additional $5 off if you have a  bundled service package.

As for Wideband pricing, Syracuse residents should expect to pay:

• 30/5Mbps: $25 more than standard Road Runner service;
• 50/5Mbps: $99 per month, but ask about promotional pricing, which may be available.

In Syracuse, Road Runner speed now matches Verizon FiOS on the downstream side, although Verizon can deliver better upload speed at 20Mbps.  Formerly, Road Runner maxed out at 15Mbps in central New York.

About 30 percent of the central New York division of Time Warner Cable is now Wideband-ready, including the entire city of Syracuse.  By October, the company expects to have the faster service available in 70 percent of the central New York area.

The Federal Communications Commission wants to know how fast your broadband connection is.  The federal agency is now offering consumers and businesses a chance to test broadband speeds to raise awareness about broadband.  But the test results also help illustrate the wide variation between speeds promised by providers and those actually experienced by customers.

The FCC wants to collect this information because broadband providers have often refused to provide it themselves, citing customer privacy or an unwillingness to release potentially useful information to competitors.  By asking visitors to supply their street address and general location, the agency can at least develop anecdotal information about the range of speeds Americans experience.

However, the agency is likely to discover wide variations in the accuracy of the results based not on what service providers deliver, but instead what the speed test itself reports.

The FCC is relying on two speed test providers, randomly assigned to those taking the test.

• Measurement Lab (M-Lab), which provides researchers with Internet measurement tools on a collaborative basis, and
• Ookla, a private company that provides web-based network diagnostic applications.

Stop the Cap! used both providers to conduct three individual speed tests from Broadband.gov.  There were dramatic differences in results.  M-Lab consistently reported far slower speeds than Ookla.  Ookla’s results were closest to the advertised speeds from our broadband provider — Time Warner Cable.

This speed test result from M-Lab was the closest to the average of all three speed tests conducted with this service

Ookla's speed test came closest to achieving the marketed speeds for Rochester, New York Time Warner Cable Road Runner Turbo customers. The download speeds reported also include the effects of "PowerBoost," a temporary burst of additional downstream speed.

Both speed test providers rely on different regional servers to deliver potentially more accurate speed test results, less impacted by the additional “hops” traffic must take when traveling outside of a nearby region.  But considering the enormous disparity between the two tests, these real-world results may not actually represent reality.

Which test comes closest to the actual speeds available here?  Ookla.  But even then, your results may vary.  Ookla provides speed tests for both Time Warner Cable and Frontier Communications, our local phone company.  The downstream speeds reported were widely different, despite both test servers being located within a 50 mile radius.

Time Warner Cable's speed test application is also provided by Ookla. (This result comes from a server in nearby Syracuse -- the Rochester location was not working properly)

Ookla's speed test for Frontier Communications delivered dramatically different results for downstream speeds

The FCC seems to acknowledge the potential disparity in results on their disclaimer page:

Please note that the Consumer Broadband Test in its current software based form may not be an accurate representation of connection quality provided by your broadband provider. The results can be impacted by a range of factors — for instance, the test can vary based on the geographical distance of the user from the testing server, end-user hardware, network congestion, and time of day. However, this application can provide a helpful indicator in comparing consumers’ relative broadband connection quality and in understanding the performance metrics of broadband connections.

What results do you get from Broadband.gov’s provided speed tests?  Share your findings in our comment section.