With FairPoint Communications, customers often have to take the good with the bad.  The formerly bankrupt telephone company providing service in northern New England announced last week it had met its obligation to provide at least 90 percent of Vermont residents with a broadband option — typically 1-3Mbps DSL — and has trumpeted results showing 83 percent of Maine and 85 percent of New Hampshire is now served by FairPoint DSL, an improvement over former owner Verizon Communications, which routinely ignored rural areas in all three states.

But while winning the option to buy DSL service, thousands of customers found service lacking last week when a power cable in the Manchester Millyard area brought down both broadband and voicemail service across all three states.

In such circumstances, FairPoint’s backup generators are supposed to maintain service, but not in this case.

“I’m on dialup and went down for 10 (hours),” Wolfgang Milbrandt of Mason wrote in an e-mail to the Nashua Telegraph. “So why does FairPoint have so many eggs in the Manchester basket and is the backup power system that feeble?”

In Milford, Tom Schmidt lost his DSL broadband for about five hours last Monday, with it returning “around 6-ish.”

Company officials admitted they didn’t switch to the generator after the power failed, and customers noticed as voicemail and DSL service began to fail.  Service problems were ongoing even after power was restored after about 90 minutes, with some FairPoint customers reporting problems through the early part of last week.

FairPoint plans to press forward with DSL broadband expansion and has also prioritized build-out of its Ethernet-Over-Fiber service for cell phone towers, delivering fiber-fast connections to more than 800 tower sites to support 4G wireless broadband from major wireless carriers.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WGME Portland FairPoint customers lose service 7-11-11.flv[/flv]
WGME-TV in Portland, Maine covers FairPoint’s substantial broadband outage last week. (1 minute)

Virgin Mobile, which last year excited a number of our readers with the introduction of its Broadband2Go unlimited mobile broadband plan, has continued to evolve the meaning of “unlimited,” to now mean just 2.5GB of usage per month before speeds are reduced to the very un-broadband level of 256kbps.

It’s just another in a series of limits Virgin Mobile has placed on its 3G “unlimited” pay-as-you-go service since last August.

Last summer, customers paid up to $100 to purchase the mobile broadband device used with the service, and promptly discovered a lot of people were doing the same thing, which promptly overloaded the network and drove speeds downward.  Within months, our readers reported Virgin had quietly implemented a “fair access policy” that began reducing customers’ speeds after as little as 200MB of use daily, usually to 256kbps or less.  By February 2011, Virgin announced a 5GB usage cap, after which speeds would be permanently throttled until customers either paid an additional $40 or waited out the end of their billing cycle.

Apparently, even 5GB of usage per month is considered too much, so now Virgin Mobile is slashing that in half to 2.5GB.  Despite the ongoing decreases, company officials insist whatever level they are, they are still generous.  The company said less than 3 percent of its customer base will be impacted by a 2.5GB limit on their supposedly “unlimited” plan.  Virgin Mobile, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sprint, gets around that pesky contradiction by calling their plan “unlimited access,” which means you can access it day or night at speeds that either might be fast, or heavily throttled.

What used to cost $40 a month for truly unlimited service today costs $50 for 2.5GB.

Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go "Before" Pricing from August, 2010

Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go "New and 'Improved'" Pricing

The days of "Sugar Mama" are long gone.

Virgin Mobile is also hiking rates for two budget handset plans that include data:

• 300 minutes, including unlimited texting and data up $10 to $35 a month
• 1,200 minutes, including unlimited texting and data up $5 to $45 a month

But competition does occasionally deliver some benefits to consumers as Virgin recognizes it is being killed by cheaper unlimited smartphone plans from MetroPCS and Cricket, so it has cut the price on its own unlimited calling, texting, and data smartphone plan by $5 to match its competitors’ $55 monthly price.

Virgin Mobile is in the process or repositioning itself away from being a prepaid budget-priced carrier towards a smartphone-oriented provider for customers who do not want to sign lengthy service contracts with Verizon, AT&T, or even parent company Sprint.

This certainly means the days of Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama are long gone. 

Thanks to Bones and several other Stop the Cap! readers for sharing this news with us.

Leap Wireless’ Cricket is raising prices $5 a month on its prepaid 3G mobile broadband service for the second time in nearly a year, with the announcement the company will offer limited data roaming on Sprint’s 3G network.

In return for being able to access Cricket mobile broadband outside of the company’s highly limited network of cell towers, the price has to increase, according to statements made on Cricket’s website.  Cricket will now sell three different broadband plans, all without a contract:

$45/month for 2.5GB, $55/month for 5GB, or $65/month for 7.5GB

But there are a number of catches.

First, your service will be terminated if you do not live in a zip code where Cricket provides its own cellular service.  The company is only interested in selling service to customers who will primarily use it inside of its own coverage areas.  Second, if you are caught data roaming on Sprint’s network for more than 50 percent of your monthly usage, the company can throttle your speed to dial-up for at least one month or terminate your account.

These pricing changes could also impact certain grandfathered Cricket mobile broadband customers, some of whom are still paying Cricket’s rate of $40 a month for up to 5GB of usage that was being sold until last summer.  Who will pay the added $5 bite depends on when and where you activated your account:

Customers activated prior to August 2, 2010: You are likely grandfathered on Cricket’s $40 a month plan, good for up to 5GB of usage per month.  Most of these customers never activated last year’s newly introduced limited 3G mobile data roaming, so they will not be able to use their service outside of a Cricket service area.  They will not see a rate increase unless they opt-in to “roaming” service from a menu on their wireless device’s configuration panel.  If you opt in, you cannot opt back out.

Customers who purchased their device at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Radio Shack at any time: You are not eligible for 3G data roaming service at this time.  You will not see a rate change unless and until that changes.

Customers activated after August 3, 2010: Your device was activated with 3G roaming capability and you will be impacted by the price change.  Existing customers on an impacted account will receive Nationwide 3G coverage beginning July 12.  The first bill with increased pricing will be for customers with a bill due on August 11.  Your bill will see an increase on or after this date.  Technically that equals one month of free roaming coverage.

Cricket's new data coverage map, with Sprint roaming included.

For some customers, this is quite a price increase from two years ago when the company claimed to provide “unlimited” 3G wireless broadband service for $40 a month.  Customers soon learned Cricket’s definition of “unlimited” meant around 5GB of usage before the company throttled broadband speeds to near dial-up for the remainder of the billing month.  By last summer, “unlimited” was gone, replaced with usage allowances enforced by the aforementioned “fair access policy” speed throttles.

Although the company touts the service will run at speeds up to 1.4Mbps, in reality, most will see speeds much lower than that.  From Stop the Cap! headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., we routinely see speeds on Cricket’s 3G network operating at between 300-600kbps.

Cricket still delivers a cheaper plan over Sprint-owned Virgin Mobile, which charges $50 for 2.5GB.  For those who want more, Clearwire is still pitching 5GB of usage on Sprint’s 3G network and “unlimited” use on its 4G network, although “unlimited” really isn’t when the provider deems you a heavy user and throttles your speeds.  T-Mobile offers a data pass for some of their customers allowing 1GB of data for $30, 3GB of data for $50 — all prepaid.

If this is a new way to attract customers, it’s sure stumping marketing experts who are questioning Hawaiian Telcom’s launch of its new cable TV service to compete with Time Warner Cable’s Oceanic Cable.  Nobody knows where exactly the service is available for sale, or for how much, and HawTel officials are not saying.

“If you call Hawaiian Telcom and ask them about the service, they essentially say ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ and they are the phone company!” says Oahu resident and Stop the Cap! reader Dan Ho, who first discovered HawTel was getting into the cable business from Stop the Cap!  “I realize we’re talking about another form of U-verse here, but that could still be a good thing for Hawaiians who cannot get Oceanic Cable and are stuck with HawTel’s awful DSL service.”

HawTel’s new fiber-copper hybrid network tested successfully for 250 mystery families who participated in a secretive beta-test.  The new service is expected to be sold mostly in a packaged bundle with extra high speed DSL (presumably up to 25Mbps), a central DVR terminal that can record up to four shows off the company’s digital cable TV package concurrently, and unlimited phone service.

Lester Chu, a HawTel spokesman, wouldn’t tell reporters the prices for the new service, instead offering to accept bills from competing providers and allowing HawTel to competitively bid for your business.  The company also wouldn’t say where the service was for sale, “for competitive reasons,” added Chu.

But HawTel has been licensed to provide service on the island of Oahu, and intends to rollout the service in contiguous service areas, so once the first new customers do go public, we’ll be able to ascertain where the service is slated to be delivered next.

HawTel says they will begin targeted advertising to alert residents when the service will be available.  That traditionally means direct mailers, door hanger tags, and door-to-door visits from sales teams hired by HawTel.

“It’s a crazy way to build excitement for the product, by keeping it a secret,” Ho believes. “More important, I suspect their pricing is not going to be very good if they require customers to bring in a current bill from a cable competitor in order to get a quote.”

Ho should know, he’s a marketing professional himself.

“I suspect the company wants face time with a customer to explain away the lack of visible savings by instead talking up the features they will offer that Oceanic Cable does not,” Ho suggests.

Among those features – the four-recordings-at-a-time DVR, the 250-channel all digital lineup, and the presence of NFL Network, a network Time Warner Cable systems have perennially refused to carry on their basic digital tier because of its cost.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KITV Honolulu Hawaiian Telecom Bring Cable Competition To The Islands 7-7-11.mp4[/flv]

KITV-TV in Honolulu opened their newscast with the mysterious launch of Hawaiian Telcom’s new TV service.  (2 minutes)

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KHON Honolulu Hawaiian Telcom launches cable TV service in select location 7-7-11.mp4[/flv]

KHON-TV in Honolulu covers HawTel’s introduction of cable competition on the island of Oahu, even though company officials won’t say where it’s available or for how much.  (Loud Volume Warning!) (1 minute)

We have received dozens of e-mails from readers trying to add Verizon Wireless’ coveted 4G $30 unlimited-use Mobile Hotspot feature to their accounts, with varying results.  We’ve compiled, with the help of our readers, a guide to assist you in scoring the only good thing to come from Verizon’s recent changes in data pricing.  If you follow these steps, you should be good to go.

Q&A

1. What is a Mobile Hotspot and What Is Verizon offering? — Verizon Wireless offers customers a service to turn their 3G or 4G phones into a Wi-Fi provider, letting you connect your other portable devices, like a tablet or laptop, to your Verizon Wireless data connection to access the Internet over Wi-Fi.  Technically, this feature is built-in to most smartphones, but cell phone companies monetize it by charging you an extra monthly fee to use the service.  Traditionally, Verizon charges $20 extra a month (on top of your data plan) to enable this feature, and has limited it to 2GB of use per month.  Each additional gigabyte will cost you $10.  But when Verizon introduced its new 4G LTE network, early adopters to 4G phones got access to this feature for free, for a limited time.  On 7/7, Verizon’s new limited-use data plans took effect, and Verizon expired the free 4G Mobile Hotspot feature.  To placate 4G owners, it offered them the chance to continue getting unlimited use of this feature, for an extra $30 a month.

That’s a stiff price to pay on top of your monthly data plan, but because Verizon’s LTE network is currently fast enough to serve as a home broadband backup (we consistently get speeds of 11/3Mbps on LTE from our headquarters), $60 total for unlimited wireless Internet isn’t completely outrageous at those speeds.  Yes, it’s ridiculous Verizon disabled a feature built in and functional on phones in other countries, but it is the same story with other carriers as well.  We even agree with the proposition you should be able to use your unlimited data plan for anything you want, but that’s just not a reality at the moment.

2. Who exactly qualifies for the $30 unlimited Mobile Hotspot? — We have been able to confirm for sure that anyone who activated or at least ordered a 4G phone before midnight on 7/7 is qualified to upgrade to this plan.  You cannot, however, activate the plan on a 3G phone.  Only 4G models qualify.  Where things get murky is whether or not customers who currently have 3G phones can still upgrade to a 4G model after 7/7 and get this plan.  Droid Life believes the answer to this question may be “yes” based on two tweets sent from Verizon Support:

We are more skeptical, however, based on the accumulated responses we’ve collected from Verizon Wireless from our readers, which admittedly are all over the map.  Verizon reps have not been offering consistent information about the Mobile Hotspot plan since it was first announced more than a week ago.  The company is preoccupied with reassuring existing customers they were not at risk of imminently losing their unlimited data plans, an entirely different subject.

I would not upgrade to a 4G phone today in hopes of scoring this Mobile Hotspot plan unless you have the name of an employee you can use if you complete the order, try to activate the feature, and encounter resistance.  In truth, Verizon can do anything they want for any customer, new or otherwise.  The trick is finding an employee with the authority to make things happen.  Be prepared to escalate or call back if you encounter a roadblock.

3. What happens if I have a 4G phone and start a Hotspot session with a 3G signal, is it still unlimited? — Yes.  Any Mobile Hotspot session originated on this plan on a 4G phone is unlimited regardless of what network conditions you encounter, as long as you are on Verizon’s network.

4. Does this apply to mobile broadband, provided by a dongle or a MiFi device?  — No.  Only 4G smartphones qualify for this plan.

5. How many people can share my Mobile Hotspot connection at the same time? — Verizon traditionally says five, but my phone (Samsung Charge) supports up to 10 concurrent Hotspot connections.  That’s a lot, so if everyone piles on, expect some slowdowns from the shared connection.

6. Can you add and drop the featured plan and get it back later? — Verizon has not said.  The company has not responded to questions about the longevity of this plan, whether it could be withdrawn, or whether customers can add and drop it (and add it back) at will.  We see that as evidence this is a promotional add-on that is likely to be withdrawn for new customers at some point in the future.  Verizon traditionally grandfathers customers already on a plan indefinitely, which means if you have it, you can keep it.  If this feature is important to you, we recommend you add it and keep it active.  When it’s gone for new sign-ups, it’s gone.

7. I do not see the plan under Verizon’s My Services on their website.  Should I be concerned? — No.  The plan was being offered to customers initiating new Mobile Hotspot sessions on their 4G phones, but not to all.  We never found it on Verizon’s website.  The only indication it is active on your account is finding this: “4G SMARTPHONE HOTSPOT” listed on this page (to access, you must first login to your Verizon Wireless account and select the line on which the feature was ordered.)

Ordering Advice

We have found multiple methods of securing this plan, and with the thanks of Stop the Cap! reader DJ, we have even located the all-important plan number, which you can reference when contacting Verizon.  If you run into a roadblock calling Verizon customer service, or can’t get the plan added while visiting a Verizon Wireless corporate store, we have some other suggestions.

1. Customers who already had a 4G phone before 7/7 can call Verizon Wireless from your phone at 611 or 1-800-922-0204 Monday-Sunday 6am-11pm ET.  Tell them you wish to add plan code #76153 — $30 Unlimited 4G Mobile Hotspot.

2. If you activated a new 4G phone after 7/7, call VZW’s Orders & Activations Hotline at 1-877-807-4646.  Work through the prompts.  You may be prompted to accept a customer agreement and get “trapped” in a menu asking you to press “1” or “2” after accepting the customer agreement.  Press “0” and wait to be transferred to a live agent.  Tell them you wish to add plan code #76153 — $30 Unlimited 4G Mobile Hotspot.

3. If rebuffed by either, try calling 1-316-681-9940, the number to a Verizon store in Kansas that has employees active in several phone forums helping people trying to get on this plan.  They should be able to add the plan to any 4G phone account, whether you are in Kansas or not.  Again, reference plan code #76153 — $30 Unlimited 4G Mobile Hotspot.

Let us know if you still have any problems in our comments section!