Time Warner Cable’s annual rate increases have now reached the Carolinas.

The company is mailing letters to customers that announce rate hikes for off-contract clients in the $2-4 a month range, including price increases for Road Runner broadband that will now cost between $49.45-$57.95 a month.

“Our new prices reflect dramatically higher programming costs, additional programming and features, and continued investment in our network and customer service,” said Time Warner spokesman Scott Pryzwansky. “Time Warner Cable invested more than $350 million in capital in the Carolinas over the past year to make our network even more robust and to enable our customers to get the services and features they want.”

The company also invested heavily in lobbying lawmakers to keep community-owned broadband competition at bay, helping pass a measure through the Republican-controlled legislature that makes municipal broadband competition much more unlikely.

The result is another year of unfettered rate increases for customers in cities like Winston-Salem:

• Cable TV increases from $10.23 to $11.49 for broadcast basic, $64.99-$69.49 for standard analog service, $80.99-$85.49 for digital cable;
• Broadband increases from $47.95 to $49.45 for customers who also have digital cable, $52.95 to $55.95 for customers with any other tier of cable TV, $57.95 for standalone broadband service;
• Telephone rates are unchanged.

Customers can avoid some of the price increases through creative bundling, threatening to take your business elsewhere, or by signing up for alternative providers:

1. Customers on discounted promotional packages, retention deals, and term contracts will not face the rate increases until their promotional rates or contract expires;
2. If you are unhappy with the rate increase, consider calling Time Warner and telling them to cancel your service 1-2 weeks from today’s date.  Then wait for them to start calling you with promotional “win-back” offers that deliver at least a year of substantial savings off regular rates;
3. If you are a broadband standalone customer, consider signing up for Earthlink under their six-month promotion for just under $30 a month.  You will continue to be billed by Time Warner Cable and receive the same speeds and service with two exceptions: no PowerBoost (a temporary speed increase during the first few seconds of downloading), and you lose your Road Runner e-mail address (which you are not actually still using, are you?)  Get a Gmail account, don’t worry about speed gimmicks, and save $28 a month.  At the end of six months, sign up for Time Warner’s Road Runner service under their promotional rate, which is around $30 a month for a year.  Total savings over the 18 month combined promotional rate term: $504!

More than two years after Time Warner introduced DOCSIS 3 speed upgrades in New York, Time Warner is finally completing broadband upgrades for their customers in the Carolinas.  The latest cities scheduled to get the company’s Wideband (50/5Mbps) and Road Runner Extreme (30/5Mbps) services are Wilmington, Jacksonville and Morehead City. The new services will be available by early 2012.

Most customers in eastern North Carolina and parts of South Carolina still get Standard service speeds of 10Mbps download, 512kbps upload.  After the upgrade, a boost in upstream speeds to 1Mbps for Standard service customers is expected.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission late Tuesday ruled against a revised proposal from Bell that could have effectively ended flat rate Internet service across the country, but also allows the phone company to raise wholesale prices for independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The Commission ruled Bell and cable companies like Rogers must sell access to third party providers at a flat rate or priced on speed and the number of users sharing the connection.  The CRTC rejected a Bell-proposed usage-based pricing scheme that would have charged independent ISPs $0.178/GB.

Ultimately, the CRTC came down closest to adopting a proposal from Manitoba-based MTS Allstream, which suggested a variant on speed-based pricing, steering clear of charging based on usage.  Under the CRTC ruling, independent ISPs can purchase unlimited wholesale access based on different speed tiers.  The new pricing formula requires independent providers to carefully gauge their usage when choosing an appropriate amount of bandwidth.  If an independent ISP misjudges how much usage their collective customer base consumes during the month, they could overpay for unused capacity or underestimate usage, leaving customers with congested-related slowdowns.  ISPs will be able to purchase regular capacity upgrades in 100Mbps increments to keep up with demand.  They can also implement network management techniques which may discourage heavy use during peak usage.

The CRTC decision underscores that Internet pricing should be based on speed, not on the volume of data consumed by customers.  That’s a model Stop the Cap! strongly approves because it does not allow providers to monetize broadband usage.

But that is where the good news ends.  Nothing in the CRTC ruling changes the Internet Overcharging regime already in place at the country’s leading service providers.  Companies like Bell and Rogers are free to continue setting arbitrary limits on usage and charging overlimit fees for those who exceed them.

Konrad von Finckenstein, chair of the CRTC, says the regulator made a mistake in deciding last year to allow Bell to raise its prices for independent service providers.

“Our original decision was clearly not the best one. It was wrong and it was pointed out by a lot of people, including Minister Clement. He was right. We have today fixed it, we have made this new decision,” von Finckenstein said. “The bottom line is that you as a consumer will not face a cap or limitation of use because of anything mandated by the CRTC. Any kind of cap or limit, payment per use, that you will have to pay is because your ISP decides to charge you, not because we mandate it.”

But many independent providers are unhappy with the CRTC ruling because it also allows wholesale providers like Bell to raise prices, sometimes substantially, on the bandwidth they sell.

One independent ISP — TekSavvy, said it faced increased connectivity costs in eastern Canada.

“The CRTC decision is a step back for consumers. The rates approved by the Commission today will make it much harder for independent ISPs to compete”, said TekSavvy CEO Marc Gaudrault. “This is an unfortunate development for telecommunications competition in Canada,” he added.

“Rates are going up,” added Bill Sandiford, president of Telnet Communications and of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium, an independent ISP association.

In addition to whatever rate increases eventually make their way to consumers, some independent providers may end up adopting network management and usage cap policies that attempt to slow down the rate at which they are forced to commit to bandwidth upgrades.  That’s because providers purchase capacity based on what they believe their peak usage rate is likely to be.  Providers will be free to upgrade service in 100Mbps increments.  But with the new, higher prices, providers could overspend on capacity that goes unused or find themselves underestimating usage, creating congestion-related slowdowns for all of their customers.

Some network management techniques that could reduce peak usage — and the need for upgrades — include speed throttles for heavy users during peak usage times or usage caps that fall away during off-peak hours when network traffic is lower.

Yesterday’s decision will provide some small relief to wholesale buyers of bandwidth in Quebec, where’s Videotron’s sky-high wholesale prices are set to be reduced.  But the unusual divide in Internet pricing between eastern and western Canada will remain.  Western Canadians will continue to enjoy much larger usage allowances, and lower wholesale pricing, than their eastern neighbors in Ontario and Quebec.

The CRTC’s ruling did not go far enough for NDP Digital Issues critic Charlie Angus. Angus notes only 6 percent of Canadians purchase Internet service from independent providers.  The rest will still be stuck with what he calls “unfair billing practices and bandwidth caps.”

Angus is convinced the CRTC just gave the green light to force rate hikes for the minority of consumers who found a way around companies like Bell, Shaw, Videotron, and Rogers.

“Allowing big telecom companies to reach into the pockets of struggling families and ask for even more money is just plain wrong,” Angus said.

Bell’s senior vice-president for regulatory and government affairs, Mirko Bibic, still believes the company’s proposal to charge just under 20c per gigabyte to wholesale users was appropriate, but the CRTC’s permission to allow Bell to increase wholesale rates was a nice consolation prize.  Bibic tried to frame the decision as forcing ‘independent ISPs to pay their fair share.’

Independent ISPs “are going to have to lease more traffic lanes,” he told CTV News. “I think the philosophy is [to] put the independent ISP in a position of responsibility. If usage goes up, you’re going to have to buy more lanes – it’s the same decision that we have to make.”

Canadians will learn at 4PM whether their Internet future will be unlimited or rationed with usage-based-billing (UBB) plans that could potentially charge consumers for every website they visit.

The much-anticipated decision from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) comes months after last winter’s hearings on how Internet service is priced in Canada.  It pits the largest phone company in the country — Bell — against small independent providers that are fighting to stay in business offering customers unlimited usage plans.

Most independent Internet Service Providers in Canada ironically buy wholesale access directly from Bell.  These upstart competitors like Primus and TekSavvy deliver unlimited DSL service at attractive prices.  In fact, some Bell customers have found them attractive enough to switch providers.  Bell’s wholesale division indirectly competing with its own retail business has proved unsatisfactory to Bell management, who proposed repricing wholesale access to resemble what Bell charges its retail customers.  But more importantly, Bell would demand that their competitors impose usage-based billing themselves, which would make unlimited Internet service in Canada a thing of the past.  The CRTC initially agreed with Bell, which sparked outrage among independent providers and consumers who faced the prospect of paying inflated prices for Internet service with no unlimited usage options in sight.

The backlash brought a half-million Canadians together to demand an end to unfair Internet pricing through a petition from Openmedia.ca.  That in turn attracted the attention of Canadian politicians, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government’s Industry Minister Tony Clement.  Clement told reporters on Feb. 3 if the CRTC didn’t reverse its approval, and fast, the government would probably overrule the commission.

A day later, outgoing CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said the commission would review its decision, the first in a series of backpedals in response to government pressure.

Even Bell, accustomed to having its way with the CRTC, has backtracked, now offering a compromise proposal that would charge independent ISPs 17.8c per gigabyte.  Many providers consider that excessive, too.

Since the hearings, several marketplace changes have deflated some of Bell’s arguments that UBB was necessary to control over-eager users congesting their network.  Providers in western Canada — Shaw Cable and Telus, have dramatically boosted their respective usage caps, which call into question just how much of a congestion problem exists on Canada’s Internet networks.  The Canadian Network Operators Consortium, the voice of independent service providers, has offered its own proposal to charge wholesale customers based on peak network traffic.  MTS Allstream, itself a smaller player in Canadian telecom, proposed wholesale service be sold much like retail Internet in the United States — based on the speed/capacity of the service level selected.  If an ISP underpredicted usage, traffic would slow for everyone until the line was upgraded.

What ultimately gets approved by the CRTC may still be subject to government review, especially if the decision proves unpopular with consumers.  In a CBC online poll being conducted this afternoon, consumer sentiment is clear.  More than 91 percent of voters want the option of unlimited Internet access.

Whatever the CRTC decides will be reviewed by new Industry Minister Christian Paradis, who has managed to keep his head down and views to himself since he replaced Clement.  He may be hoping more than most that the CRTC will ultimately placate everyone, just so he doesn’t have to weigh in on the thorny issue.  But the CRTC’s track record representing consumers has been pretty dismal over the last few years, so we will not be surprised if the commission ultimately acquiesces to Bell’s substitute plan unaffectionately dubbed ‘GougeLite’ by Bell critics.

[flv width=”640″ height=”388″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC Internet pricing ruling expected from CRTC 11-14-11.flv[/flv]

The CBC reports on today’s expected ruling from the CRTC and what it means for Canadian Internet consumers.  (3 minutes)

Verizon Communications and AT&T together represent the largest providers of legacy copper wire landline phone service in the United States.  Over the past ten years, the traditional landline business has taken a beating as consumers increasingly turn their backs on the technology Alexander Graham Bell helped invent more than 100 years ago.  No utility service faces more customer defections than the phone company, and providers are increasingly rewriting their business models or lobbying to abandon unprofitable service areas altogether.

For some customers, investments in network improvements have brought advanced fiber optics straight to the home.  But in smaller communities, customers are making due with a deteriorating network phone companies no longer want to maintain.

The Glorious Growth Years

Back in the late 1980s, before most of us realized there was an Internet (or that you might be able to access it from home), the concept of connecting computers together to share information meant buying a 300-1200bps modem and using your home phone line to dial up hobbyist computer bulletin boards, CompuServe, PeopleLink, Delphi, GEnie, and QuantumLink.

Landline service was never perfect, but it worked reliably enough to make and receive phone calls and connect to low speed data networks.  As the 1990s arrived, an explosion in data and wireless services would bring both growth and unprecedented challenges for traditional telephone companies. Businesses demanded access to additional phone lines to power dedicated data lines and fax machines.  Residential customers wanted extra phone lines as well, mostly to keep data traffic off the primary house line. It was the era of frenzied area code splits, cell phones for all, and talk America could even run out of seven digit phone numbers to assign to all of the new lines.

As revenue and earnings exploded with the installation of new voice, data, and fax lines, Wall Street investors soon took notice.  Sleepy and safe phone company stocks were suddenly hot, and a deregulation-fueled consolidation frenzy soon resulted as phone companies merged and acquired one another.  Among the Bell System operating companies, familiar names like NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, and US West were gone, replaced by AT&T, Qwest, and Verizon.  Independent phone companies were not immune to the merger and acquisition game.  Today’s largest independent phone companies including Frontier Communications, CenturyLink, FairPoint, and Windstream have all grown mostly through buyouts of other providers.

The Bottom Drops Out

The rapid growth years of the traditional wired phone line came to an end around the same time as the dot.com crash and accompanying recession from 2000-2002.  While cell phone growth would continue, new competitors — especially cable-delivered “digital phone” service and other Voice Over IP providers like Vonage seriously cut into market share and revenue.  The need for additional phone lines to access the Internet subsided with the growth of DSL and cable broadband.  As household income stagnated, choices began to be made about where to cut back, and the traditional landline was a popular favorite.  Why pay for both a landline and a cell phone?  The cell phone stayed, the landline went.  Even dedicated fax machines are increasingly deemed unnecessary in an e-mail world.

The growing realization that the traditional copper wire telephone line was at risk of being the next “horse and buggy business” forced companies to consider a handful of options: ride out the landline declines and lower shareholder expectations, transform their existing networks to sustain new products like faster broadband and television service to give customers reasons to stay, or transition focus on business customers who bring more revenue.

AT&T and Verizon have adopted all three strategies, depending on where customers happen to live.

AT&T: If You are Still Waiting for DSL From Us, Forget It

In October, John J. Stephens, chief financial officer and executive vice-president at AT&T made it clear to investors the company’s interest in growing its legacy wired business had come to an end.  The company had lost landline customers for years, most switching to cell phone alternatives, sometimes sold by AT&T itself.  Spending enormous sums to upgrade AT&T’s copper landline network just didn’t make financial sense in every area.  Instead, AT&T split its operating territories in two: those suitable for upgrades to the company’s U-verse/IP platform, and those in smaller communities who will soon find themselves pushed to switch to AT&T wireless service instead.  That makes the prospects for customers still waiting for wired DSL service from AT&T pretty dim.

“We’ll continue to focus on transforming [existing] DSL lines into high speed [U-verse].” Stephens said. “In those areas where we don’t have U-verse, I think our plans have been fairly clear. We expect to have an LTE [wireless mobile broadband] rollout to 97% of the country. […] We believe that’s going to be able to provide a wireless solution at a high speed, good quality, good cost on a profitable basis for us. That’s the long-term solution to the non-U-verse areas.”

AT&T’s lobbyists have signaled this agenda for years, pressing state and federal lawmakers to get rid of “universal service” requirements that mandate reliable, basic landline telephone service to any customer in their service area who requests it.  AT&T wants the definition of “basic telephone service” expanded to allow the company the option of discontinuing its landline network and selling rural residents cell phone service instead.  The expense associated with maintaining AT&T’s degrading copper wire network is always cause for grumbling on Wall Street, most recently after this year’s repair costs from storms that impacted some of AT&T’s service areas.  Storm damages brought outages in the southern United States, flooded regions along the Mississippi, and rained-out areas of California.

Those problems were exacerbated when AT&T’s repairs don’t always correct the problems.  Repeated outages blamed on inadequate repairs and investment brought negative publicity for the phone company, as well as a number of requests to disconnect service as customers find other providers.

In places where AT&T will never deploy U-verse, AT&T has been content asking lawmakers to ease up on the phone company, urging that minimum service standards and oversight be abolished, along with the power of regulators to fine the company for repeated transgressions.  AT&T argues increased competition makes regulation unnecessary.

AT&T’s bean counters have calculated investment in U-verse only makes sense in urban-suburban areas.  In more distant suburbs and rural areas, the return on investment isn’t fast enough to justify spending money up-front on service improvements.  Maintaining the decades-old landline network doesn’t make much sense to AT&T either.  Instead, the company sees wireless service as the best prospect to serve its rural customers (and deliver the company higher profits from the more expensive service plans that come with the phones).

“What I see happening with LTE and data is just a huge growth opportunity,” said Ralph de la Vega, CEO and president of AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets. “We mentioned today that our smartphones now make up 52% of our postpaid base. But I think the way we need to think about smartphones in the future is the smartphone is going to equal the phone in the future. It will be 100% in the next 2 or 3 years. These devices are so good and the costs are coming down so much that I think in the future, you could look at close to 100% penetration.”

Some customers may find AT&T penetrating their wallets, but for the phone company, better days may be ahead:

• Moving customers to the wireless platform exposes them to higher revenue, higher-priced wireless service plans;
• Basic cell phones, which come with lower-priced voice plans are being increasingly replaced with smartphones which come with required, extra-cost data plans;
• Getting rid of the rural landline network slashes AT&T’s upkeep costs and holds customers in place with two-year service contracts common with wireless phones.

Consumers happy with their existing landline service may be less than impressed with AT&T’s cellular network coverage, its dropped call-problem, and the company’s alternative for rural broadband – heavily usage-capped and expensive LTE network access.  AT&T sells wired DSL plans for as little as $14.95 a month with a 150GB usage limit.  AT&T’s wireless LTE network will cost considerably more and is accompanied with usage limits a fraction of that amount.

Verizon: A Tale of Two Networks

Big Red has two wired landline networks: screaming fast FiOS fiber to the home for some, slow speed DSL over a decrepit copper wire network for everyone else.

Verizon is less opaque than AT&T regarding which service areas it treats as valued assets and which aren’t worth the time of day.  The company began selling off its undesirable customers several years ago, starting with Hawaii.  Northern New England was next, followed by several former GTE territories Verizon acquired in 2000.

While Verizon enjoyed the proceeds of the tax-free transactions, most of the impacted customers did not.  Hawaiian Telcom floundered for a few years with bad service and an outrageous debt load before declaring bankruptcy.  Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont suffered through a year-long transition to buyer FairPoint Communications, complete with poor service and notoriously inaccurate billing before that company also declared bankruptcy.  Former Verizon customers in the Pacific Northwest, Indiana, and West Virginia (among others) are coping with Frontier Communications own billing and service problems.

The FairPoint Trust called the $2.3 billion acquisition of Verizon’s New England operations “disastrous.”  It also echoed what Verizon obviously understood itself: its landline operation in New England had been allowed to deteriorate into “inferior assets that had no future.”

Frontier Communications itself judged the network it purchased from Verizon in West Virginia in need of serious upgrades and repairs.  Critics of the deal called Verizon’s West Virginia network “a technical disaster area.”

But while Verizon is capable of landline neglect, it is also the only major phone company delivering true fiber-to-the-home service over its award winning (and expensive to build) FiOS network.

The feast or famine approach Verizon has used for capital investments has resulted in amazing service for some, a loss of reliable service to many others.

FiOS has allowed Verizon to remain a serious player, particularly in the northeast, despite the onslaught of competition from Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable.  Average revenues earned from FiOS customers are much higher than what the company earns from customers on its copper wire telephone network.

Some Verizon shareholders have never liked the price for the company’s fiber future.  When the economy tanked in late 2008, an indefinite suspension of FiOS expansion soon followed, leaving Verizon’s network expansion plans in limbo.  The company is still slowly completing the portion of its fiber network promised under existing agreements, but has avoided introducing the service in new cities and towns.  At the same time, Verizon is loathe to maintain investment in its antiquated copper wire landline network, which in some areas was supposed to be retired in favor of FiOS.

As long as Verizon’s older network can be held together, with fingers crossed, customers still have a dial tone.  But when things start to fail, customers are in for serious headaches.  They are popping aspirin almost daily at Bistro Chat Noir, a prestigious French restaurant along Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  If you plan to dine there, it is best to bring cash.  Even if the management wanted to take your Visa or Mastercard, the restaurant’s phone lines are out so often, they can’t easily process your payment.

These days, the resourceful owners rely on a neighbor’s graciously shared Wi-Fi connection (presumably powered by competitor Time Warner Cable) to process credit card transactions manually.

The New York Times wrote Verizon’s atrocious level of service isn’t isolated to one bistro:

“Obviously, this is not the way we want to do business,” said Ms. Latapie, who has started giving clients her personal cellphone number to avoid missing reservations when the restaurant’s phone is not performing properly. “When people can’t get through, I tell them it’s Verizon. And if they live in this area, they know — because they have the same problem.”

However irritating, sporadic utility failures are not uncommon. But along a a stretch of Madison Avenue in what is arguably the city’s most expensive shopping and eating district, phone and Internet blackouts have become a nightmarish routine of life for many expensive restaurants, stores and hotels.

For weeks now, mundane tasks — making dinner reservations and paying for purchases by credit card — have become a frustrating challenge.

“We are in the highest rent district in North America and we don’t have communication,” said Jillian Wright, whose spa on East 66th Street is on the second floor of a brownstone building and not ideal for walk-ins. Ms. Wright said she was losing clients daily, and her spa’s phone number goes straight to a voicemail message apologizing to clients for Verizon’s service.

The service failures have affected dozens of businesses, primarily in the East 60s along Madison Avenue. The scope of the problem varies, with some businesses having no phone or Internet service at all for the past several weeks and others experiencing blackouts that last days or a few hours.

Meetings with Verizon officials have deteriorated into spin-and-excuse sessions where company officials promise results but continue to deliver lousy service.  It turns out the problem is Verizon’s ancient copper wiring found underneath the streets in the area.  Just two feet away from Verizon’s cables are steam heating pipes, which warm the tunnels and create major condensation problems.  Couple that with water runoff from the streets above — salt-laden in the winter time — and you have a recipe for corrosion that destroys reliable phone service.

Eventually, Verizon plans to wire FiOS fiber across a large section of Madison Avenue, but with the company’s unwillingness to invest appropriate sums to get the job done, business and residential customers are simply kept waiting.

Or they can switch to Time Warner Cable, and many are.

Your Telephone Is Temporarily Out of Service…

Verizon’s service woes are not just for big city dwellers.  Residents in Virginia are coping with Verizon landline problems in suburban neighborhoods, too.  Verizon employees openly admit they are fighting a losing battle with management to replace defective cables and equipment that should have been replaced years ago.  Management keeps winning and customers keep losing.

“When we come to this area, we dread it,” admits Alex Long, a cable splicer at Verizon for 22 years.

Long just pulled up to a pole off Burksdale Road in Norfolk and found nothing he had not seen many times before  — untrimmed tree branches overgrown into the overhead wires.  The branches had managed to rub the phone cable’s insulation down to bare copper wire.

As a result, whenever it rains, telephone service in the neighborhood becomes sporadic.  If tree branches don’t knock service out, cable-chewing squirrels do.  The lines, the equipment, and the technology is well past its prime, but Verizon management insists repair crews fix what is already there instead of replacing it with something better.  It’s all a matter of money, and Verizon wants to spend as little as possible on its copper landline network.

Long’s experiences were the highlight of a piece published by the Virginian-Pilot, which has heard complaints from readers about dreadful Verizon phone service across the region.

The repairman discloses Verizon technicians have known about the bad cable for at least five years, but requests to replace it have been repeatedly rejected.

“The cable’s totally shot,” Long told the newspaper. “It needs to be replaced, and the company’s budget doesn’t allow for it. That’s what engineering keeps telling us.”

In Hampton Roads, Va., it is a case of the fiber haves and have nots.  The parts of Hampton Roads that have been upgraded to Verizon’s fiber to the home network are virtually trouble-free in comparison to neighborhoods where copper cables still deliver service.  Verizon’s legacy network is of such concern, the Virginia State Corporation Commission has increasingly taken a close look at the level of service Verizon is providing in non-FiOS areas.

William Irby, director of the commission’s Division of Communications, has heard plenty of concerns that Verizon is neglecting their copper network in favor of FiOS fiber.

Verizon’s copper wire neglect might not be such a big problem had the company provided a date certain for upgrade relief.  But with FiOS expansion also stalled, some cities are now wondering if Verizon is abandoning them.

Boston is one of them.

Left Behind: The Cities Without FiOS

Verizon FiOS is well-known in eastern Massachusetts.  There are those who have it and those who want it.  Verizon had been aggressively pursuing franchise agreements with 111 communities across the state until the company announced it was putting on the brakes and ceasing further expansion efforts in new areas.  That leaves Boston and other communities like Quincy behind because they didn’t sign agreements with the company fast enough.

“If you’ve got FiOS, lucky you,” shares Quincy resident Roger Jones. “If you don’t, good luck.”

Jones says Verizon has left Quincy with a neglected landline network the company doesn’t seem interested in maintaining, much less replacing with fiber optics.

“The company believed in fiber optics because they saw the opportunities fiber could deliver, like additional revenue from selling TV channels,” Jones says. “But then Wall Street caught up to them and said it was all too much.  I might even understand that, except they won’t spend a nickle maintaining what they already have either, unless the regulators twist their arms and threaten fines over the bad service.”

Jones says his Verizon phone line was out three times earlier this year.

“Three strikes and they were out — I switched to Comcast,” Jones says. “A Verizon repair guy that came to my house the third time said all of his relatives switched to Comcast because service got to be so unreliable with Verizon’s old network.”

Back on Burksdale Road in Norfolk, Long was trying to track down another customer’s phone troubles — a loud hum on their line.  Hours later, Long decided it was a futile effort and began looking for an unused replacement pair of good wires he could switch to for the customer.  With the growing number of Verizon customers disconnecting their landline service permanently, that task gets easier every day.

Long told the newspaper it was no surprise Burksdale Road customers were experiencing problems.  Closures which were designed to protect the cable where it splits off individual phone lines were supposed to be water and air-tight.  Instead, he was working with a deteriorating rubber enclosure that showed its age after years of service.  Unfortunately, he explains, Burksdale Road customers will simply have to make due.

Not only won’t Long be able to replace the deteriorating infrastructure he finds, he’ll be forced to improvise with Verizon’s latest cost-cutting solution for wet cables — covering them with sheeting that resembles a plastic garbage bag.  Even that is nothing new for Burksdale Road.  Several houses down, a cable “rain-slicker” was already tightly wrapped around a section of cable where the rubber closure had gone missing altogether.

After getting the dial tone back, Long handed the customer his business card with his direct number and apologized.

“You may have problems again,” he said, advising the customer to call him directly the next time his phone line stops working.

Verizon better hope the customer doesn’t call the local cable company to switch providers or disconnect his landline altogether.

Republicans in the Senate are falling in line behind their colleagues in the House in voting to repeal the Federal Communications Commission’s anemic Net Neutrality rules.

Virtually every Republican in the Senate is expected to vote in support of a resolution introduced by outgoing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) that would strip the FCC of its authority to impose the new rules, which would prohibit Internet Service Providers from interfering in the free flow of Internet content across their networks.  Nearly every Democrat in the Senate is expected to oppose the Republican-backed measure in a vote expected later today.

Republicans serving at the FCC and in Congress claim the federal agency has no congressional mandate to oversee the Internet.  The agency itself under Chairman Julius Genachowski has refused to fully enable its authority by reclassifying the Internet as a telecommunications service.  Because the agency’s role to oversee the conduct of the country’s service providers is at issue, it has left the FCC in a grey area, with its authority challenged both politically and in the courts.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) claims Net Neutrality rules are completely unnecessary because providers have already promised they will not tamper with traffic and, in his words, “This is a another big government solution in search of a problem.”

Hutchison said enforcement of Net Neutrality would stall broadband Internet development.

“It will increase costs and freeze many of the innovations that have already occurred under our open Internet system,” she said in a statement.

Democrats like Sen. Maria Cantwell from Washington State think otherwise.

Cantwell pointed to Comcast’s secretive effort in 2007 to throttle the speeds of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic.  Comcast initially denied it was interfering with torrent traffic, until eventually admitting it was.  The FCC sought to fine Comcast for the practice, but the cable giant sued the FCC and won in federal court.  The judge in the case ruled the FCC didn’t appear to have the authority to regulate Internet traffic or impose the associated fine.

Cantwell believes sensible Net Neutrality policies will prevent further instances of provider interference.

“These providers think if [they] can control the pipe [they] can also control the flow,” Cantwell said. “Why allow telcos to run wild on the Internet charging consumers anything they want based on the fact that they have control of the switch?”

Reporters questioned Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller about Net Neutrality, noting the measure opposing FCC involvement won support from several House Democrats.

Rockefeller pointed to the universal support for the anti-Net Neutrality measure on the Republican side as evidence this has become a partisan political issue.  Rockefeller hopes his Democratic colleagues in the Senate will see it the same way.

“There’s still 53 of us [Democrats], and if we stay together we’ll win,” Rockefeller said. “I think we’re going to prevail.”

Should the measure pass, President Barack Obama indicated he will veto it.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/C-SPAN Net Neutrality 11-9-11.flv[/flv]

C-SPAN talks with National Journal reporter Josh Smith about Net Neutrality’s prospects and the background issues surrounding Net Neutrality.  (3 minutes)