Despite a soft launch weeks earlier, Time Warner Cable officially began selling faster broadband packages in San Antonio Tuesday.

Made possible by DOCSIS 3 upgrades (and not by “Time Warner’s fiber optic network” to quote one San Antonio news outlet), the cable company will now sell 30/5Mbps service for $20 above the current price of Standard Service.  Customers looking for more speed can spend a lot more to get it — $99.95 a month buys you 50/5Mbps service, although the sting seems less if you bundle all of your Time Warner services through their $199 Signature Home package, which includes digital cable, broadband, and phone service.  Signature Home includes 50/5Mbps as part of the package.

About 70 percent of the San Antonio market can get the new speeds immediately.  The rest will be upgraded by September.

The upgrades are seen with some amusement by customers of GVTC, a former telephone cooperative that today provides fiber to the home service in parts of the Texas Hill Country and other rural areas to the north of San Antonio.  They recently received speed upgrades from 40Mbps to 80Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream as part of a comparably-priced triple play package.  GVTC’s truly fiber optic system was built to accommodate broadband usage growth.

“Consumers obviously enjoy streaming video and downloading HD movies, but these applications use a lot of bandwidth and can slow down other Internet devices in your household,” CEO Ritchie Sorrells said. “The reality is bandwidth consumption will continue to increase. We’re once again ahead of the curve with our 80 Mbps connection, and this tier will be popular with the growing number of households that realize they have a need for speed.”

One thing GVTC customers don’t need and won’t get is the kind of consumption billing Time Warner Cable is reconsidering for their customers in San Antonio and the rest of the country.

Australia’s march towards an all-fiber future took an important step last week when the government announced a wide-ranging agreement with Telstra, the country’s largest phone company, to use Telstra’s existing infrastructure to help construct a national fiber network.

After two years of negotiations, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Thursday announced an $11 billion deal between Telstra and NBN Co to allow NBN to use Telstra’s existing conduits, poles, and network facilities to provide a foundation for the construction of the all-fiber network and the removal of existing copper wiring.

The deal is expected to save the government millions by not having to construct redundant facilities.

The network is expected to take a decade to complete, and will provide optical fiber broadband to at least nine out of ten Australian households.  The project will make Australia a global broadband leader, far ahead of the United States and Canada and most of western Europe.

As part of the deal, Telstra agreed to pay $2 billion for upgrades to its own infrastructure in preparation of migrating customers to the NBN.  Telstra’s CEO, David Thodey, said the agreement ended the uncertainty surrounding Telstra’s possible association with NBN and will allow his company to focus on customer service.

Gillard and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy turned on Australia’s first connection to the NBN in May at the Presbyterian Ladies College in Armidale in the east Australian state of New South Wales.

The town is one of five test markets where the NBN will first operate.  Areas in Melbourne, Townsville, coastal New South Wales and South Australia will also be switched on in coming months.

[flv width=”512″ height=”308″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Nine Network NBN Switched On 5-11.flv[/flv]

Nine Network in Australia covered the opening of the country’s National Broadband Network in Armidale earlier this year, and what it means for Australians as fiber broadband replaces older technology.  The opposition gripes the government is spending too much on the network.  (7 minutes)

He prefers a “fiber to the neighborhood” approach, similar to AT&T U-verse, which he says will bring good enough speeds to Australians faster and cheaper than an entirely fiber based network would.  But fiber proponents claim the costs will come down as the network construction ramps up, delivering economy of scale.  The government also believes fiber to the home is more upgradable and more reliable than a hybrid fiber-copper network.

Most of all, Australians are celebrating the imminent end of usage-based pricing, fair access policies that reduce speeds of heavy users to near-dial-up, and the fact they are likely to be among the top-five ranked broadband nations globally when the network is complete.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Sky News ABC NBN and Telstra Achieve Deal 6-23-11.flv[/flv]

Sky News and ABC report on the government’s deal with Telstra to retire the nation’s copper wire network and work together to build fiber to the home to virtually every Australian. (7 minutes)

Bright House Networks, a cable company primarily serving Florida and other southeastern states says it has no plans to implement Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps or consumption billing.  But a company spokesperson went even farther, telling Tampa Bay Online the cable company was not even considering them.

Bright House, which relies on Time Warner Cable’s programming negotiators and sells broadband under the Road Runner brand, was among the only companies in Florida that was willing to go on record stating they were not considering limiting broadband customers.

Other providers were unwilling to follow Bright House’s lead:

• AT&T: “2 percent of our customers were using 20 percent of our bandwidth,” said an AT&T spokesman, so the company slapped 150GB usage limits on DSL customers, 250GB on U-verse customers.  The overlimit fee is $10 for every 50GB extra.
• Verizon Florida: “At this point, we’ve not implemented any usage controls or broadband caps.  We’ll continue to evaluate what’s best to ensure our customers get the highest quality broadband service for the best value,” the company said.  But it also added: “We’re continuing to evaluate usage-based pricing for our wireline broadband customers.”

“Bandwidth caps stifle consumer choice,” said Parul Desai, public policy counsel for Consumer’s Union.  Desai notes customers do not sign up for pricey high-speed FiOS broadband service from companies like Verizon just to read e-mail.  Customers who are willing to pay premium prices for super high speeds certainly don’t want a usage cap devaluing their broadband package.

Comcast, for example, uniformly limits consumption to 250GB per month, even on high speed plans delivering over 50Mbps service.

“It’s like building a rocket that you blow up after it reaches 250 feet into the air,” says Stop the Cap! reader Will in Tampa, who shared the article with us.  “What is the point of having 50 or 100Mbps service from any provider if they slap a limit on it like that.”

Will thinks customers will abandon higher speed packages in droves once they realize they really can’t use them.

“With some of these companies talking about caps around 40GB per month, you can’t even take your connection for a test drive,” he says.  “You might as well stick with basic speeds, just to remind and discourage you from putting yourself over their stupid limits.”

Desai suspects broadband companies will try limiting their customers, if only because they face few competitors consumers can use instead and they have video services to protect.  But she suspects some consumers will either abandon or seriously downgrade their broadband service and find other ways to trade large files and content.

“It’s not inevitable they’re going to succeed,” she told TBO. “People only find value in broadband because of what they can access with it. If more people feel constrained, they’ll start looking for another way.”

Cerf

Vint Cerf understands the Internet.  Widely recognized as one of the two “fathers” of what eventually grew into today’s Internet, Cerf has watched a network launched by the United States Department of Defense grow into an economic powerhouse driving a knowledge-based economy.

Today, Cerf works as an Internet evangelist for Google, promoting the company’s innovation in the next generation of the broadband experience.  He brings decades of advice to Internet Service Providers the world over: upgrade your networks.  But more importantly, he told attendees of Juniper Network’s Nextwork conference, upgrade exponentially, not incrementally.

Cerf’s remarks Wednesday targeted the conundrum of coping with increasing video traffic on the Internet.  Cerf pointed to his employer’s construction of a gigabit fiber to the home network in Kansas City as the best antidote to traffic congestion.

Simply put, Cerf believes bandwidth must be increased exponentially and not through incremental upgrades that try and stay one step ahead of demand.  Google intends to prove gigabit fiber broadband is cost-effective and within reach of providers.  A side benefit of building next generation networks is the opportunity for innovating new online applications.  Many of tomorrow’s online innovations are simply impossible on a constrained, incrementally upgraded network that often requires accompanying traffic limiting schemes.

“When you are watching video today, streaming is a very common practice. At gigabit speeds, a video file [can be transferred] faster than you can watch it,” Cerf said. “So rather than [receiving] the bits out in a synchronous way, instead you could download the hour’s worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure. It actually puts less stress on the network to have the higher speed of operation,” he said. 

Wu

So far, many providers are considering Netflix and other video traffic a threat to their networks, and are attempting to collect tolls to allow Netflix content to reach subscribers (Comcast), or are considering Internet Overcharging schemes that combine usage caps with overlimit fees to discourage customers from watching too much (AT&T, Time Warner Cable).

At another session held Tuesday, Tim Wu, Columbia University law professor noted efforts by several U.S. providers to do away with all-you-can-use broadband.

Wu said phone companies like AT&T are ideally looking towards replicating the cell phone model on broadband — leaving users to guess how much usage they will rack up over a month, knowing most will be wrong.  As the consumer, he noted, you end up buying too much or you face steep overlimit fees for underestimating usage — either way “you are screwed.”  Wu called consumption-oriented pricing “abusive.”

Wu also said wireless carriers in particular are uneasy with the open, “ownerless” concept of the Internet.  Their instinct is to own, control, and manage networks.  Their only success so far is trying to advocate for fast, premium-priced traffic lanes, and slow “free lanes” for everything else — a key reason why many consumers advocate to preserve the open model of the Internet through enforced Net Neutrality.

Wu called these efforts by phone companies to control traffic “dangerous.”

Get government subsidized satellite "broadband" at speeds up to 1Mbps, as long as you honor strict usage limitations.

With much fanfare, ViaSat’s WildBlue has unveiled a special discounted satellite “broadband” offer that comes courtesy of United States government taxpayer funding:

WildBlue’s same great service at an ultra-low price, courtesy of the U.S. government.

WildBlue, through the U.S. Recovery Act brings a special offer for high-speed Internet to areas unserved by wireline providers. It’s the most affordable deal we’ve ever offered, and the monthly price for this special package is guaranteed for as long as you remain a WildBlue customer. Take advantage of government funds to get High Speed Internet at discounted rates.

For $39.95 per month, WildBlue will provide the satellite equipment to deliver qualified subscribers up to 1Mbps service, subject to a monthly download limit as low as 7.5GB per month for downloads, 2.3GB per month for uploads.  Customers who exceed the limits will have their 1Mbps service throttled to near-dial-up speed until usage falls below the company’s “fair access policy.”

WildBlue explains the limited-time offer is made possible by funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Through a grant from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS), certain rural customers might qualify for the discounted pricing.

WildBlue only received authorization to deliver the discounted service to locations west of the Mississippi — specifically those not within an existing RUS project zone, are located in a defined rural area, and cannot receive service from a telephone, cable, or fiber provider.  Current WildBlue customers also do not qualify.

The grant funding covers installation and equipment charges, the client only pays for the service itself.  But would-be customers are required to commit to at least one year of service or face an early termination penalty and must pass a credit check.

WildBlue customers, as well as those of other satellite providers, have given satellite Internet access low satisfaction scores, primarily because of speed and usage limitation issues.  But for some without any other choice, it is a service they live with for basic web access.