[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Cox Ads 5-2012.flv[/flv]

Cox Cable has slammed its phone company competition in a series of new TV commercials that call out antiquated and slow DSL. But customers switching to Cox have to endure that company’s unjustified Internet Overcharging schemes.  Cox arbitrarily limits your Internet usage in an effort to maximize profits and reduce costs.  Watching the online video Cox advertises could put you perilously close to your monthly allowance. Exceed it once too often and you may find your account shut off.

Cox executives promise they’ll listen to customers and what they want. Stop the Cap! urges you to participate in our pushback against Cox usage caps. Tell the cable company it does no good selling their broadband service for online video when the company threatens to shut it down if you watch “too much.”  (2 minutes)

After intense lobbying, wireless phone companies won a significant reprieve from the watered-down 2010 Net Neutrality policies introduced by Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski.

Now some of America’s largest cell phone companies are considering plans that would offer special “toll-free” access to favored partners’ content, while leaving everyone else subject to the companies’ usage capped data plans.

Much of the discussion about exempting certain content from data allowances is taking place at this week’s CTIA Wireless trade show in New Orleans.

Some highlights:

• T-Mobile USA is planning to expand video streaming services offered to subscribers, but with a twist. Content creators could pay to have their shows streamed to customers, and in turn, T-Mobile would not charge that traffic against the customer’s monthly usage allowance. Whether T-Mobile would maintain an ownership interest in the content is unknown, but “preferred partners” would receive exceptional visibility through aggressive promotional campaigns T-Mobile would launch.  So would T-Mobile, which plans advertising and promotional messages inside that content;
• Verizon Wireless said it was looking to create “toll-free” data services that would be subsidized by content providers. Video, games, and even apps could be promoted to consumers as “data usage”-free, meaning it won’t count against your monthly usage allowance. But Verizon recognizes the concept would be controversial and run afoul of Net Neutrality concerns.
• AT&T has already signaled its interest in creating a “content-provider-pays” model where users get free access to content if content providers pay AT&T’s traffic charges.

All three carriers earlier abandoned all-you-can-eat flat rate data plans, and Net Neutrality proponents claim these latest moves are attempts by wireless phone companies to further monetize data traffic.

The Wall Street Journal reports the plans, in some cases, fly in the face of rhetoric about spectrum shortages and a wireless data traffic crisis (underlining ours):

T-Mobile’s Mr. Duea said the goal of new video offerings that don’t count against data plans would be to get customers interested in consuming more data, and set T-Mobile’s plans apart from those of other carriers.

"Data floods" and "spectrum shortages" don't stop T-Mobile.

Current FCC Net Neutrality rules require wireless carriers to not block competing services from companies like Skype and Google, nor censor content. Both Verizon and MetroPCS are challenging those rules in federal court. But wireless carriers are already exempt from giving preferential treatment to certain types of data or traffic, which opens the door to “toll-free” data services.

Net Neutrality supporters believe these practices will uneven the playing field for content creators and innovative new online start-ups, who may not be able to afford the prices carriers charge for first class treatment. It also influences consumer decision-making by encouraging customers to use the “toll-free” services to preserve their monthly data allowance.

Companies like Ericsson and Cisco have plans to market technology that will allow carriers to divide up data traffic into different traffic lanes, some fast and free to use, others subject to a customer’s monthly data allowance, and certain undesirable traffic shunted to low priority slow lanes.

A Verizon Wireless executive ironically blamed the need for “toll-free” pricing partly on the wireless industry itself, which has almost universally abandoned unlimited data plans.

“As we move away from flat rate pricing, there is room for an 1-800-type of service where certain destinations could offset the cost of the network to get customers to those destinations,” said Verizon’s chief technology officer Tony Melone. “There are Net Neutrality issues that have to be addressed, too.”

Melone added the company wasn’t quite ready to launch the “toll-free” traffic lanes just yet, but claimed certain content providers were discussing deals with the company to participate if and when the new toll booths are opened for traffic.

Bell Canada has boosted speeds of its fiber-to-the-neighborhood and fiber-to-the-home Fibe Internet services in Ontario.  But our regular reader Alex notes Bell’s Internet Overcharging usage cap scheme remains firmly in place, which leaves customers taking the company’s fastest offerings out for little more than a test drive before the overlimit fees kick in.

But no worries, Bell says.  The company has invented the concept of Internet Usage Insurance, selling you extra usage allotments ranging from 20GB ($5) to 125GB ($25) per month for usage that costs Bell just pennies per gigabyte.

The new speeds are admittedly very fast, but their value is well-tempered by the usage allowances that accompany them.

Can we have 90 seconds of your time, please?

Christopher Mitchell at Community Broadband Networks has put together some compelling evidence about how some of the most advanced broadband networks in the country are being built by and for the communities they ultimately serve.

You may think the best broadband around can be found in the biggest cities in America, but you’d be wrong.

“It may surprise people that these cities in Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana have faster and lower cost access to the Internet than anyone in San Francisco, Seattle, or any other major city,” says Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Telecommunications as Commons Initiative. “These publicly owned networks have each created hundreds of jobs and saved millions of dollars.”

The fact is, public broadband is convincing some of the country’s biggest tech companies, including Amazon.com, to locate enormous distribution centers right in the middle of fiber-plentiful cities like Chattanooga, and that means job growth — a lot of it.

Unfortunately, too often today’s “broadband innovation” comes only from how to extract more money for less service from some of America’s top providers. Usage caps, overcrowded networks, and speed constraints conspire to help America lose the global speed race.  But some communities are fighting the good fight themselves, even as big phone and cable companies like AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and CenturyLink are trying to smash those networks through special interest corporate welfare legislation.

Mitchell and his team have assembled the facts: BVU Authority’s OptiNet in Bristol, Virginia; EPB Fiber in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and LUS Fiber in Lafayette, Louisiana — all built by publicly-owned utilities, demonstrate the public sector can deliver effective, innovative service at prices consumers can afford.  Better yet, they’re doing it in places big telecommunications companies decided were unworthy of getting world-class service.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Community Broadband.flv[/flv]

Watch this video and learn why community broadband networks represent America’s most innovative broadband, and then learn more about how you can get involved and support better broadband in your community.  (2 minutes)

Hastings vents on his Facebook page.

As Stop the Cap! has warned Netflix for years, Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps, usage-based billing, and speed throttles represent an end run around Net Neutrality. If a provider cannot openly discriminate against the competition, slapping usage limits on them (while exempting favored services from that cap) can eventually accomplish the same thing.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings is finally getting the message after a frustrating weekend watching his Comcast usage allowance bleed away while streaming video.  He shared his views on his Facebook page:

Comcast [is] no longer following net neutrality principles.

Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.

I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.

When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.

For example, if I watch last night’s SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all.

The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment.

In what way is this neutral?

Comcast says it is “neutral” by framing its own Xbox-streamed video as a “set top box replacement,” even though the video that flows to the Xbox console travels down the same last-mile network Comcast says it needs to “protect” with its 250GB monthly usage cap.

Comcast doesn’t actually need a 250GB usage cap, particularly after the company upgraded its broadband facilities to DOCSIS 3 technology.  That vast improvement in capacity at a comparatively low cost (easily recouped by the company’s latest round of rate increases) should be shared with customers.  Instead of “applying caps equally,” Comcast should abandon them altogether.

[Thanks to Earl, one of our regular readers, for sharing the story.]