Prices are in Singapore dollars.

One gigabit broadband is apparently too slow for Singapore consumers, so one ISP has introduced the world’s fastest home broadband plan, bundling 2000Mbps Internet access with an Android-based video streaming box and residential phone service for around $65US a month with a 2-year commitment, about the same price Comcast charges for 50Mbps broadband alone.

Singapore’s ViewQwest is the first provider outside of Japan offering residential speeds higher than 1000Mbps, despite the fact few home users have computers equipped to handle the service at its fastest speed.

“We want to offer them the fastest residential Internet connectivity available in the world,” said CEO Vignesa Moorthy. “Our current 1Gbps customers can re-contract for 2Gbps for free. This, coupled with the usual high rate of sign-ups that occurs during events such as IT Show, makes us very confident that we’ll be able to sustain this plan.”

Usage caps, speed throttles, and expensive Internet plans common in the United States and Canada are not an issue in Singapore as fierce competition has created a consumer-friendly price war among the city’s competing fiber to the home providers.

One challenge users will discover is finding a router capable of supporting 2000Mbps speeds. For now, the ISP recommends a $600 enterprise-grade network card if a customer insists on getting 2Gbps on a single machine. But ViewQwest expects most customers will aggregate their 2Gbps connection through multiple consumer-grade routers to give each family member concurrent gigabit speeds that will sustain at least 1Gbps for each user.

Customers will also discover their speeds will only be as fast as the connection to the website they want to reach. For now, that means international content traveling across undersea cables or distant servers will arrive at considerably slower speeds, but as the Internet grows faster, ViewQwest customers won’t have to wait for their ISP to catch up.

Greenlight Networks, a fiber overbuilder serving select neighborhoods in the greater Rochester, N.Y. area, today announced it was cutting the price of its gigabit broadband offering by 60 percent.

The new $100/mo price takes effect immediately and will increase competition for local incumbents Time Warner Cable and Frontier Communications. Time Warner currently sells up to 50/5Mbps service and most Frontier Communications customers qualify for DSL at speeds of 10Mbps or less.

Greenlight also announced it is waiving its usual $100 installation fee for customers signing up for gigabit service.

Greenlight president Mark Murphy said he wants Rochester to be considered America’s next “Gig City,” and emphasized Greenlight does not charge hidden fees or surcharges and has no usage caps. The company also sells a less expensive 100/20Mbps tier for $50 a month and recently introduced a 500/50Mbps tier for $75 a month. The upload speed for the gigabit tier is 100Mbps.

Greenlight currently offers service in a few neighborhoods in Brighton, East Rochester, Henrietta, Irondequoit, Pittsford and Rochester where enough customer demand can be demonstrated. Potential customers sign up on the company’s website (temporarily disabled) and are notified when service becomes available.

Greenlight now only sells broadband service and has stayed out of the cable television and telephone business.

Suddenlink customers are unhappy with the cable company’s usage caps that go with “free speed upgrades.”

Suddenlink subscribers promised “free” speed upgrades are calling them Suddenlink’s Trojan Horse because they are accompanied by dramatically higher cable programming surcharges and usage caps.

St. Augustine, Tex. subscribers got a smaller bite in the mail than some other communities:

Effective with the March 2015 billing cycle, Suddenlink customers will experience no change to the price of telephone service and no change to the price of Basic TV service. There will also be no change to the price of Expanded Basic TV service; however, a $3.00 sports programming surcharge will be added to the bills of customers subscribing to this service to cover a portion of the skyrocketing cost of dedicated sports channels and general entertainment networks with sports programming. The broadcast station surcharge will increase $2.88 per month to cover the escalating fees charged by broadcast TV station owners. Optional tiers of digital TV channels will increase $1.25 per month per tier. High-speed Internet services will increase $3.00 per month.

Over in Chandler, Tex., fees went even higher, with one customer reporting his broadcast station surcharge now exceeded $8 a month. Another customer counting up all the extra fees added to his bill found them coming close to an extra $25 a month.

But the state that gets the worst from broadband providers remains West Virginia, where Suddenlink faces only token DSL competition from Frontier Communications. Suddenlink retention representatives dealing with customers threatening to cancel service in West Virginia are well aware customers have nowhere else to go and don’t break a sweat trying to rescue business.

“We are a business and our goal is to make a profit,” one retention representative told a Suddenlink customer dropping service in favor of DirecTV.

Customers tell Stop the Cap! they were first excited Suddenlink was dramatically boosting Internet speeds — good news for the small and medium-sized cities Suddenlink favors over larger cable operators. The bad news is Suddenlink is bringing back strict enforcement of usage caps, temporarily suspended when its usage measurement tool was proven inaccurate.

Suddenlink has been upgrading its cable systems since 2014 and has gradually rolled out new speeds. Most customers can now choose speed tiers of 50, 75, 100, or 150Mbps, but some larger systems are getting more robust upgrades:

• Current speed 15Mbps increases to 50Mbps (250GB usage cap)
• Current speed 30Mbps increases to 50Mbps (250GB usage cap)
• Current speed 50Mbps increases to 75Mbps (350GB usage cap)
• Current speed 100Mbps increases to 300Mbps (500GB usage cap)

Suddenlink’s sales website makes no reference to the company’s broadband usage caps.

Suddenlink is also enforcing usage caps again, which most customers only learn about after signing up for service. Suddenlink makes no references to usage allowances on their sales or general support pages and information is difficult to find unless a customer uses a search engine to find specific information.

Suddenlink’s explanation for its usage caps is among the most cryptic we have ever seen from an ISP:

Consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy and Residential Services Agreement, Suddenlink has applied monthly usage allowances to residential Internet accounts in most of its service areas. To determine if there is a monthly allowance associated with your account – and what that allowance is – please set up or log in to an existing online account. See the related instructions under question #8.

While existing residential customers will quickly learn their usage allowance and find a usage measurement tool on Suddenlink’s website, that is not much help to a new or prospective customer. The overlimit fee, also difficult to find, is $10 for each allotment of 50GB.

Some customers have found a way around the usage cap by signing up for Suddenlink’s business broadband service, typically 50/8Mbps for around $75 a month. Business accounts are exempt from Suddenlink’s caps.

Speed costs.

At least in central Florida where Bright House Networks provides cable service.

The company’s entire Florida service area will be able to sign up for 300/15Mbps broadband beginning later this month. The cost ranges from $95 a month for customers with a deluxe bundle of services all the way up to $199.95 a month for Internet-only customers.

“We continually look for ways to provide the best available choices to our customers. Just a few months ago, we increased our maximum bandwidth offering to 150Mbps, and now we are making available an additional product at 300Mbps,” said Kevin Hyman, executive vice president, Cable Operations, Bright House Networks. “We’ve opted to make this product available to our entire Florida footprint meaning millions of Floridians will have this choice available to them.”

Bright House will support the speeds on its existing DOCSIS 3 network, which means some customers with older modems and slower speeds may need new equipment to take full advantage of the speed tier. Upload speeds drag behind download speeds because of existing network architecture, although other cable companies are managing to offer higher upload speeds than Bright House. When DOCSIS 3.1 arrives, expect upstream speeds to get a boost.

Verizon reminds us its customers can already get faster upload speeds (300/300Mbps) for around the same price Bright House charges for broadband-only service.

The newest tier joins Bright House’s other tiers, which were upgraded late last year:

Charter Communications has quietly dropped usage caps and allowances from the company’s terms and conditions, once again giving Charter broadband customers unlimited access to the Internet.

Like Cox Cable, Charter almost never enforced their usage caps, which were specified as 100GB for its “base” service, 250GB for “Plus” and “Max” tiers and 500GB for “Ultra” service. Customers threatening to cancel service over usage cap matters were assuaged with a commitment by retention specialists that the caps were just a “guideline” and would not be enforced except in the most egregious instances of customer “overuse” of the Internet.

In place of the caps, Charter has returned to boilerplate language found in almost every ISP’s Acceptable Use Policy:

Excessive use of bandwidth that in Charter’s sole opinion, places an unusually large burden on the network or goes above normal usage [is prohibited]. Charter has the right to impose limits on excessive bandwidth consumption via any means available to Charter.

Customers routinely exceeding a terabyte of usage a month have never been contacted by Charter, so such usage apparently does not place a burden on their network. However, Charter also reserves the right to cut your speeds through “reasonable network management tools,” some that may now be forbidden by the FCC’s Net Neutrality policy:

Charter uses a variety of reasonable network management tools and practices consistent with industry standards. In the event the periods of congestion necessitate such management, Charter has available the following tools and practices (without limitation and as may be adjusted over time): (i) use of an upper limit of bandwidth allocated for uploading of files during congested periods; (ii) Subscriber Traffic Management (STM) technology to temporarily lower the priority of traffic with the greatest impact on peak congestion; (iii) spam filtering and detection techniques; and (iv) measures to protect the security and integrity of its network, resources and subscribers. In limited instances if employed, these techniques may affect the throughput rate at which subscribers may send and receive data, the ability of users to establish session connections within the network, or result in the delay of certain traffic during times of peak congestion.

Charter has “simplified” their Internet offers down to two for most customers: 60/4Mbps for Spectrum Internet ($59.99) and 100/5Mbps for Internet Ultra ($109.99). A source at Charter tells Stop the Cap! the company is conducting very limited trials raising speeds to 100/25Mbps for its base package and boosting its Ultra tier to 300/50Mbps, in case fiber competitors arrive. Those tests are not expected to become widespread however as the prevailing view at Charter is to wait until it deploys DOCSIS 3.1 and then raise speeds to 300/50Mbps for its entry-level package and 500/300Mbps for Ultra.

Starting in January, Charter began notifying its broadband-only customers it was raising prices $5 a month (from $54.99 to $59.99).