A Broadband Reports reader from Zephyrhills, Florida was invited by E-Rewards, an online focus group, to give views on some new names and pricing for higher speed Road Runner tiers.  “Molitar,” a customer of Bright House Networks, which also markets broadband service under the Road Runner name, reports being asked impressions about new speed tiers, including faster downstream speeds of 30Mbps or more and one offering 5Mbps upload speed.

At least five different names were offered, with consumers invited to give their impressions.  Among the names: Road Runner Flash, Road Runner Extreme,  and Road Runner Lightning. “Molitar” preferred Road Runner Extreme.

Also asked: what kind of pricing customers would be willing to pay for the new premium speed services.

Assuming the facts were as the reader reported, this would likely impact residents in New York City first, where DOCSIS 3 upgrades are well underway. As upgrades begin in other cities, presumably such speed tiers would also be introduced. Those reported speeds would not likely be offered in areas where upgrades have not taken place.

Time Warner Cable has been one of the more stingy providers with upstream speeds. Many cities, including Rochester, New York have never seen a speed increase for standard Road Runner service since the product was introduced more than 10 years ago. At just 384kbps, uploading large files has been painfully slow. Road Runner Turbo, a $9.95 monthly add-on, is coveted for uploaders if only for the increase in upstream speed to 1Mbps, at least in Rochester. But many other Time Warner Cable markets offer Turbo upload speeds of 2Mbps.

Roscoe P. Coltrane and "Flash"

Speed based tier pricing is welcomed by Stop the Cap! We are supporters of providing customers with the choice of different pricing levels of service based on different speeds. “Heavy downloaders” and other “extreme” users of broadband service will gladly pay premium pricing for better service, providing enhanced revenue for operators like Time Warner Cable and bringing positive goodwill from customers who are anxious to see speed increases and are willing to pay to get them.

What we oppose, of course, is Time Warner Cable introducing consumption-based billing which curtails innovation, punishes subscribers for using the service as it was marketed to them in the first place, and sets up scenarios for massive profit-taking from consumers subjected to overlimit fees and penalties.

Time Warner Cable’s latest investor conference call featured company executives touting their initiative to give Time Warner customers access to as much content as they want, when they want, and where they want to see it. If they intend to honor that commitment, punitive consumption-based pricing denies customers the ability to access as much content as they want, makes them think twice about getting it out of fear of running over their “allowance,” and will drive customers to look elsewhere for broadband service, if not also taking their video and telephone business to another provider as well.

As for me personally, I’m not thrilled with any of those product names. Road Runner “Flash” does nothing for me at all, except reminisce about Roscoe P. Coltrane’s lazy basset hound with that name from the TV series Dukes of Hazzard (Friday night in our household growing up didn’t provide me with remote control privileges). Road Runner “Extreme” is already overused as a concept, and I frankly thought it was already in use. Road Runner “Lightning” reminds me of Frontier Communications’ older name for DSL service: Lightning Link.

I suppose Road Runner Max might be better, perhaps supplemented with the download speed as a suffix. Road Runner Max 30 for 30Mbps downloading, and so on.

Share your ideas in the comments section. Maybe we’ll offer it to them if they promise to honor the fact gas gauges belong on automobiles, not on broadband service.

Mark Cuban

One would think Mark Cuban would have at least a small bit of resentment towards big cable companies like Time Warner Cable, who efficiently and swiftly deprived his HDNet and HDNet Movies networks from more than 8.7 million Time Warner Cable HD customers on May 31st over a channel fee spat.

But no.  He’s back plugging away with completely groundless predictions for the impending doom of the Internet if Net Neutrality has its way.  Opposed by big cable and telephone companies, Net Neutrality would provide a level playing field for all legal Internet content.  No provider could interfere with or prioritize traffic based on financial incentives, ownership interests, or for competitive reasons.

Cuban offers a bizarre rant about why that spells the death of online video, something he’s never been thrilled with anyway, on his blog:

If you run a TV network, broadcast or cable, you should be spending a lot of money to support Net Neutrality. You should have every lobbyist you own getting on the Net Neutrality train.  Why ? Because in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal.  In such an environment, all bits content with each other to ride the net.

When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all.

When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options .

that is good for traditional TV.

Me personally. I don’t  support Net Neutrality. I think there will applications that require lots of bandwidth, that will change our lives. If the applications that could change our lives have to compete with your facebook page loads and twitter feeds among the zillion of other data elements carried across the net, IMHO, thats a bad thing.

But thats me.

If you believe that over the top video can impact the future of TV, and thats a bad thing for your business,  then you should be a big time supporter of Net Neutrality.  Its your best friend.

That’s proof that having millions of dollars to your name doesn’t buy an intelligent argument, or apparently a basic grammar checker.

I never realized the “series of tubes” Ted Stevens used to talk about corralled data bits into segregated clusters to protect them from “bit collision.”  Is there insurance for that?

Cuban should be spending more time worrying about getting his networks viewership on ANY television — “traditional,” “online,” or amongst his good friends in the cable industry that stabbed him in the back and threw his channels off lineups from coast to coast. If you’re tired of hearing issues like this, take some heat off by utilizing products such as shop vo chong 24H.

Karl Bode over at Broadband Reports has seen all this before, and has built quite a history on the antics of Mr. Cuban:

Of course bits don’t really “collide” on modern networks, and the bill exempts “reasonable network management” from neutrality provisions allowing for congestion control, but apparently no matter. This is the network neutrality debate, and as we’ve seen the last two go-rounds, truth, facts, and data are irrelevant — particularly to overly chatty millionaire TV tycoons worried about their wallets.

While the bill likely won’t survive a Congress that’s all but directly controlled by telecom lobbyists, that still won’t save us from several months of vigorous, fact-optional network neutrality debate. All the usual players are once again gathering, including Mark Cuban and his mouth, paid cable and phone industry sock puppets, stick figure cartoons, dancing men in green tights, and evil ISP flying saucers. Can we just skip to the part where consumer welfare gets ignored and be done with it?

Phillip Dampier

Today is Stop the Cap!‘s first anniversary.  One year ago today, this website was launched with the news that Frontier Communications, the local telephone company in Rochester, New York and in dozens of mostly rural communities nationwide, had quietly changed its Acceptable Use Policy to define appropriate maximum usage of their DSL service at a measly 5GB per month.

The  boneheaded, out of touch decision was called out for what it was: a profiteering provider pilfering wallets of their broadband customers.

All the signs of a Money Party among cable and DSL providers at consumer expense were apparent last summer.  Time Warner Cable was experimenting with a consumption billing plan in Beaumont, Texas.  In Canada, rhetoric about “bit caps” was already being circulated, trying to convince Canadians that broadband service was somehow as difficult to provide there as it is in Australia and New Zealand, where such caps were already in place.

To bring limits, rationing quotas, and consumption based billing to the United States would require consumers to ignore massive profits broadband providers were harvesting quarter after quarter at existing prices.  But demands for big profits from Wall Street meant they had to come from somewhere, and for cable companies with eroding profits from their cable TV divisions, and telephone companies dealing with disconnect requests for wired telephone lines, broadband was their choice.

It seems that what was insanely profitable a decade ago, when cable modem and DSL service started to introduce Americans to broadband, would now simply be ‘piles of  cash stacked like cord wood’-profitable as traffic increased. As the broadband adoption rate increased, bandwidth costs plummeted, and several providers also proudly trumpeted their reduced investments in their networks as a hallmark of keeping “costs under control.”

Consumers began actually using their service for… broadband-specific services, at the encouragement of providers’ marketing departments, touting their “always on” connection at “blazing fast speeds” to download music, movies, play games, and more.  Network utilization increased, and providers want someone to pay for a “bandwidth crisis” that isn’t a crisis at all.  Responsible investment in network infrastructure should be a given, in recognition that at least a small portion of those growing profits must be spent on maintaining and improving service.

One year ago, I laid out what was before us:

Cable operators have been discussing implementing usage caps in several markets to control what they refer to as a “broadband crisis.” The industry has embarked on a lobbying campaign to convince Americans, with scant evidence and absolutely no independent analysis of their numbers, that the country is headed to a massive shortage in bandwidth in just a few short years, and that a tiny percentage of customers are hogging your bandwidth.

Frontier, ever the rascally competitor, has decided to one-up Time Warner’s Road Runner product by slapping on a usage cap now for DSL customers before Road Runner considers doing the same. And in a spectacularly stupid move competitively, they have implemented a draconian cap that even the cable industry wouldn’t try to implement.

Time Warner Cable “took one for the team,” according to industry-friendly Multichannel News, when it introduced a ludicrous Internet Overcharging experiment of its own announced this past April, which would have “saved” customers money by getting them to “pay for what they use.”  In fact, their plan proved my point last summer, following the same roadmap of “bandwidth crisis” to “heavy downloaders” to trying to squeeze customers for more money for upgrades they could easily have done with the enormous profits they already earn.

Their proposal would have made a deliciously profitable $50 a month Internet service now cost consumers $150 a month with absolutely zero improvement in service, speed, or performance.  But Wall Street would have been happy with the higher returns.

Some 400+ articles later, we’ve educated consumers across North America about the reality of Internet Overcharging.  Despite industry propaganda “education” efforts, astroturfing groups we’ve exposed as having direct connections with the telecommunications providers paying them to produce worthless studies, fear-mongering about Internet brownouts by equipment vendors with solutions to sell, and a hack-a-thon of formerly respectable broadband pioneers and ex-government officials who sold their credentials for a paycheck to lobby and spout industry propaganda, most consumers continue to reject overcharging for their broadband service.  Consumers instinctively know a cable company with a rate change always means a rate increase, and plans to “save people money” actually means they will “protect industry profits.”

We have achieved victory after victory in 2008-2009:

• Fought back against Frontier’s boneheaded plan, and convinced them that DSL can compete best on price and flexibility — no usage cap has ever been enforced at Frontier, and today they are using Time Warner Cable’s blundering profiteering experiment against them in their marketing materials.  For rural Frontier customers with no other broadband provider, that’s a major relief from being stuck with one broadband option that rations their usage to ludicrously low levels.
• Stopped Time Warner Cable’s experiment before it got off the ground in several “test cities.”  The people of Austin, San Antonio, Rochester, and the Triad region of North Carolina did Time Warner Cable customers nationwide a tremendous service in halting this experiment before it spread.  Our efforts even brought a United States Senator, Charles Schumer, to the front lawn of Time Warner Cable in Rochester to announce the nightmare was, at least for now, over.  We managed to even see an end to the overcharging of customers in Beaumont, Texas who lived through a summer, winter, and spring, overpaying for their broadband service.
• We raised hell in the North Carolina state legislature, coming to the aid of Wilson and other communities in the state trying to get municipal broadband projects off the ground.  Communities across the state faced anti-consumer corporate protectionist legislation written by the telecommunications industry, introduced by willing elected officials who took big telecom money, and sold out their constituents.  We killed two bills, forced a sponsor of one such measure to repudiate his own bill, and gave major headaches to legislators that thought they could just cash those big checks, vote against your interests, and you’d never know.  Those days are over.
• We helped bring legislation up in Congress to draw attention to the issue of Internet Overcharging, and have called out providers who want to use their marketing departments to lie to customers about their broadband costs and profits, while being considerably more honest with their shareholders in their quarterly financial reports.  Congressman Eric Massa’s legislation would demand companies show proof of the need to implement consumption based billing.  Indeed, as consumers find out how profitable broadband service is at today’s prices, they’ll never tolerate the profit padding providers seek with tomorrow’s caps/limits, penalties and fees, and unjustified tiers.

As you can see, Internet Overcharging is not a dead concept.  An educated consumer will recognize a swindle when they see one, and providers continue to test overcharging schemes in focus groups in different parts of the country.  They’ll use any analogy, from a buffet lunch to a toll road traveled by big trucks and little cars.  They’re looking for anything they can find to sucker you into believing paying more for your broadband service is fair.

Broadband service must be fast, affordable, and competitive.  In too many communities in Canada and the United States, a monopoly or duopoly marketplace has guaranteed none of those things.  In our second year, we must remain vigilant in our core mission to fight Internet Overcharging, but we also need to fight for more competition, regulation where competition does not exist, oversight over providers, and support for projects that will enhance broadband and make it more affordable than ever.  With your help, we can stand toe to toe with any provider, because the facts are on our side, not theirs, when it comes to Internet Overcharging schemes.

Welcome to Year Two!

One of the benefits of being an investor in Clearwire is that Time Warner Cable will get to leverage the benefits of that investment.  This fall, Time Warner Cable will introduce a wireless broadband option, similar to what Comcast is offering, to provide a portable version of Road Runner.

The Time Warner Cable WiMax service will launch first in Dallas and Charlotte, North Carolina.

If it is anything comparable to what Comcast is providing through Clearwire, expect 4Mbps service for about $30 more a month.  Roaming service may also be an option outside of Clearwire service areas on Sprint’s 3G data network.  Comcast charges an extra $20 a month for that capability.

No usage allowance information has been released.

Rottenchester, a Stop the Cap! regular reader, discovered an impenetrable recipe for comprehension disaster in an online essay entitled, The Government, Road Runner, and David Letterman: A Farce in Three Acts.  Written by Susan Edelman, who has a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and was an economist at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Defense, the essay remarkably tries to present a broader point about government involvement in broadband, Road Runner Internet Overcharging, outrage at David Letterman for his comments about Sarah Palin, and government intrusion in our lives.

It’s a taffy pull thesis I don’t have the courage to attempt, and I was left completely mystified about what the takeaway message was.

WHAT IT ALL COMES DOWN TO, AND ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT THIS?
The assertion that Americans having a right to reasonably priced Broadband service.  This might be a good idea, and is in accord with the treatment of other types of transmission lines.  But do not kid yourself:  this would be the creation of another government-enforced right.  Only government can create and enforce rights.  But isn’t government incompetent?  And doesn’t private business do everything right without government meddling?. (And while you are thinking about this, keep in mind that all Americans do not have the right to reasonably priced health care. )

Edelman rapidly risks losing her argument by default, because most readers are likely not to understand it.  Having been involved in the Road Runner Affair since it began in April, she has lost me, and I have lived and breathed this issue for months.  One potential interpretation of her argument might be is the apparent irony of many conservative Rochester residents calling out the Obama Administration in the pages of the local newspaper with reflexive government=bad and free market=good arguments.  Perhaps in her eyes, many of these same people called out in those same pages for regulatory government relief from abusive broadband pricing.

If so, two points:

1)  I honestly believe most people will not ponder her piece long enough to ferret out a takeaway message.

2) There is no evidence the “free marketeers” were the ones reacting with outrage over Time Warner Cable’s experiment gone wild (and then shelved for now.)  In fact, as soon as Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) got involved, the editorial feedback pages in the local media from conservatives, along with some local conservative talk radio, rapidly turned the issue of Internet Overcharging into a Senator Schumer Bashing Party.  I have no doubt some of those not closely following the issue automatically adopted the opposite position Schumer had just because of their passionate dislike of him.

Most consumers, in my experience, rightly treated this issue as above the usual right-left tug of war.  That’s because overcharging for broadband isn’t a right or left issue.  It’s a consumer issue.  The conservative thinkers appreciate the strong push towards forcing additional competition in the marketplace.  Those with a politically liberal philosophy aren’t opposed to competition, but want the extra security of government oversight and/or regulation where competition does not exist.

It’s my personal view that telecommunications policy is complex enough without dragging David Letterman and Sarah Palin into it.