Stop the Cap! will formally participate in New York State’s regulator review of the proposed merger of Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable.

“We will be submitting documents and testimony to the New York State Department of Public Service on behalf of consumers across the state that need a better deal from their cable company,” said Phillip Dampier, the group’s president. “A review of the current proposal from Charter is inadequate for New York ratepayers and most of Charter’s commitments for better service and lower prices expire after just three short years.”

Stop the Cap! will urge regulators to insist on significant changes to Charter’s proposal that will permanently guarantee a broadband future with no compulsory usage caps/usage-based billing, Net Neutrality adherence, affordable broadband to combat the digital divide, and upgrades that deliver faster broadband than what Charter currently proposes outside of New York City.

Dampier

“Upstate New York is at serious risk of falling dramatically behind other areas where Google Fiber and other providers are moving towards a gigabit broadband future,” Dampier said. “In most of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, and Albany buying the FCC’s definition of broadband means calling a cable company that now delivers no better than 50Mbps to residential customers. Verizon FiOS expansion is dead and obsolete/slow DSL from Frontier and Verizon should have been scrapped years ago.”

Stop the Cap! worries that with limited prospects for a major new competitor like Google in Upstate New York, broadband speeds and service will not keep up with other states. Verizon has devoted most of its financial resources to expanding its wireless mobile network, which is too expensive to use as a home broadband replacement. Frontier claims to be investing millions in its networks, but has delivered only incremental improvements to their DSL service, which in most areas is still too slow to qualify as broadband.

“Frontier is more interested in acquisitions these days, not upgrades,” Dampier argued.

“Although we have some entrepreneurs managing to deliver competitive fiber service in limited areas, it will likely take years before they will reach most customers,” Dampier added. “Upstate New York cannot wait that long.”

More than two dozen independent broadband providers are busily wiring parts of the Republic of South Africa with fiber to the home service in a rush to relegate telephone company giant Telkom’s DSL offerings into the dustbin of irrelevance.

The pace of fiber broadband expansion is happening so rapidly, Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko has had to warn investors the phone company’s continued dependence on its copper infrastructure could threaten the company’s future. Consumers and businesses are demanding better broadband in a country that has languished under Telkom’s insistence on sticking with copper infrastructure that has delivered slow Internet speeds and stingy data caps for more than a decade.

The Sunday Times notes South Africa’s fiber revolution is delivering speeds up to 1,000Mbps on a network that literally sells itself. Fiber providers deliver speeds 250 times faster than ADSL and are helping make usage caps and usage-based billing a part of South Africa’s past. New fiber builds are announced in neighborhoods, towns, and cities almost weekly, many driven by residents in neighborhoods pooling together to attract competition. Independent contractors are winning a large share of the broadband deployment business, able to string fiber cables less expensively than Telkom and its bureaucracy.

VUMA is a fiber service provider in South Africa, following Google Fiber’s “fiberhood” example to expand service.

“The rate at which con­sumers are turn­ing to al­ter­na­tives to Telkom to build these net­works is re­mark­able,” the Times editorial states. “Un­til a year ago, [Telkom’s] ab­so­lute dom­i­nance over the ‘last mile’ into homes and busi­nesses seemed set to last for years. No more. Telkom’s core busi­ness is sud­denly threat­ened.”

Maseko

The projects are large and small. Sea Point in Capetown, Blair­gowrie in Jo­han­nes­burg, Kloof and Hill­crest in Dur­ban are all working with start-up providers instead of Telkom. Many are convinced Telkom management is either incompetent or has been more interested in the welfare of its executives than its customers, and more than a few are voting with their feet.

The most aggressive stampede to fiber broadband is occurring in rich suburbs and gated communities prevalent in affluent areas. These are the customers Telkom cannot afford to lose and many are unlikely to ever return to what used to be the state-owned telephone company. The Times argues the longer Telkom pretends it still has a monopoly, the worse things are going to be for a company in for a rude shock.

“For the first time, the lum­ber­ing in­cum­bent, which once held an ab­so­lute mo­nop­oly over fixed lines, is hav­ing to com­pete for con­sumers’ at­ten­tion with a range of nim­ble start-ups that prom­ise su­perb broad­band at de­cent prices, and of­ten on an ‘open ac­cess’ ba­sis — mean­ing con­sumers are free to choose Internet Service Providers, and ser­vice providers can get di­rect ac­cess to the infrastructure,” the newspaper writes.

The newspaper scoffed at Telkom’s wasted opportunities and poor management decisions that now threaten its future viability.

Among Telkom’s biggest failures was a $815 million investment beginning in 2007 on an “ill-fated adventure” in the Nigerian wireless marketplace. Telkom said it was “misled” by several Nigerian businessmen into bleeding billions of South African Rand into a wireless company that used CDMA technology in a country dominated by cheap GSM providers. A shaky network of cellular dealers incapable of attracting new customers only made things worse. The venture’s losses were so huge, it attracted the attention of South African legislators who questioned the wisdom of Telkom investing in Nigeria while allowing South African broadband to stagnate from inadequate investment.

When two dozen fiber to the home competitors began installing fiber to the home service in South Africa, Telkom grudgingly has started to compete with fiber builds of their own. They are likely to face two new national fiber competitors, in addition to the independents, within months.

A year earlier, Telkom also proved less than competent when it entered South Africa’s pay television business. In 2006, Telkom earmarked more than $600 million to be spent on a venture unlikely to win enough customers from dominant MultiChoice to be sustainable. By 2009, Telkom decided to sell most of its stake in the venture at fire sale prices and still found few interested buyers.

Telkom’s management has been accused of gross incompetence, particularly for spending resources on poorly researched business ventures where it lacked experience. The Times asked readers to ponder what South African telecommunications would look like today if Telkom instead spent its almost $2 billion dollars in Nigerian and pay television losses on fiber broadband upgrades inside the country. Since 2006, Telkom preferred to spend as little as possible on network upgrades while trying to convince South Africans to stick with copper-delivered DSL and its variant VDSL, available only in very limited areas. Telkom’s business decisions today still leave most of its customers with no better than 4Mbps DSL.

The question South African business observers are asking is whether Telkom’s new interest in fiber is too little, too late. Mobile operators Vodacom and MTN are planning to build their own competing national fiber to the home networks to compete with Telkom as well.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Net Neutrality rules took full effect Friday, after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied petitions for a temporary stay of the rules made in separate lawsuits by AT&T and other telecom industry opponents.

“This is a huge victory for Internet consumers and innovators!,” FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler exclaimed in a written statement. “There will be a referee on the field to keep the Internet fast, fair and open. Blocking, throttling, pay-for-priority fast lanes and other efforts to come between consumers and the Internet are now things of the past. The rules also give broadband providers the certainty and economic incentive to build fast and competitive broadband networks.”

The Net Neutrality rules govern both wired and wireless Internet services, and most observers predict the biggest impact will be felt by wireless customers. Wireless providers have experimented with speed throttling, priority access, data caps, and so-called “sponsored data” exempt from usage caps or usage billing. Some of these practices are now illegal under Net Neutrality rules and others are subject to increased scrutiny by the FCC.

Providers generally have not opposed rules blocking online censorship, paid prioritization, and selective speed throttling, but they are vehemently against the FCC’s catch-all “Internet general conduct rule,” that effectively allows the agency to oversee issues like interconnection agreements that connect content producers with each ISP, data caps/usage billing, and issues like zero-rating — providing an exemption from an ISP’s usage allowance for preferred content partners.

Providers argue the FCC could block innovative pricing and usage-based billing they argue customers would like to have.

Other industry groups claim Net Neutrality will lead to a significant decline in investments towards broadband upgrades and expansion. But Charter Communications CEO Thomas Rutledge, now in the middle of a multi-billion dollar merger deal with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, disagreed, noting it will have no effect on Charter’s investment plans for its own cable systems or those it may acquire.

“The big news today is that there is no news,” said Timothy Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press. “With Net Neutrality protections in place, there are no dramatic changes to the way the Internet works. Internet users are logging onto a network that’s open, as they’ve long expected it to be.”

It’s an acute case of broadband envy.

Residents of Fort Collins, Colo., that have an excuse to take an hour’s drive south on U.S. Route 87 to visit Longmont and experience the Internet over the community’s public broadband service can’t believe their eyes. It’s so fast… and cheap. Back home it is a choice between Comcast and CenturyLink, and neither will win any popularity contests. While large parts of Colorado have gotten some upgrades out of Comcast, Fort Collins is one of the communities that typically gets the cable company’s attention last.

The city of Longmont took control of its digital destiny after years of anemic and expensive service from Comcast and CenturyLink. Longmont Power & Communications’ NextLight Internet service delivers gigabit fiber to the home service to the community of 90,000. The service was funded with a $40.3 million bond the city issued in 2014, to be paid back by NextLight customers, not taxpayers, over time. It remains a work in progress, but is expected to start construction to reach the last parts of Longmont by next spring.

NextLight delivers a mortal blow to competitors by charging a fair price for fast service. Instead of spending to upgrade their networks to compete, the incumbents demagogued the public project and Comcast spent $300,000 of its subscribers’ money in a campaign to kill the service before it even got started. Perhaps they had a right to be worried considering NextLight customers pay $49.95 a month for unlimited 1,000/1,000Mbps service. NextLight offers 20 times the download speed and 100 times the upload speed of Comcast’s Blast! package for nearly $30 less a month.

After NextLight was rated America’s fastest performing Internet service by Ookla in May, residents in Fort Collins began to wonder why they were still putting up with poor service from Comcast and lousy DSL from CenturyLink.

Fort Collins is about a one hour, fifteen minute drive north of Denver.

At the same time, city officials were doing their best to leverage some modest improvements from Comcast in return for a renewed franchise agreement. All they got was a vague commitment permitting the city to monitor Comcast’s notorious customer service and two HD channels set aside for Public, Educational, and Government use, along with a $20,000 grant to help the public access channel with online streaming.

The Coloradoan urged Fort Collins officials to think big and establish public fiber optic broadband in the city.

To manage this, they will have to overcome a 2005 state law backed by Comcast and Qwest (now CenturyLink) that bans municipal telecommunications services. A local vote or federal waiver can sidestep a law that was always designed to restrict competition and make life easier for the two telecom giants.

The newspaper opines that Fort Collins is in no way ready for the digital economy of the 21st century relying on Comcast and CenturyLink.

The cable company’s attention is focused on bigger cities in the state and CenturyLink remains hobbled by its copper legacy infrastructure. While some upgrades have been forthcoming, both Comcast and CenturyLink are also testing usage caps or usage-based billing — just another way to raise the price of the service. And speaking of service, neither Comcast or CenturyLink are answerable to the communities they serve – a community owned broadband alternative would be.

As the Coloradoan writes:

We’ve got to lay the groundwork now. Society took huge steps forward when automobiles replaced the horse and carriage. And no, installing municipal broadband isn’t adopting a new mode of transportation, but it is symbolic of laying an entirely new road.

Look at it another way. The city provides needed services such as water and electricity. Internet access is a needed service.

One thing Fort Collins doesn’t absolutely need Comcast or CenturyLink. But nobody is asking them to leave. They have a choice to use their massive buying power and resources to upgrade their networks to compete. But Fort Collins residents should not have to wait for that day to come when there is a better alternative in their grasp today: public broadband.

While consumer groups were busy fighting the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, AT&T’s $49 billion purchase of DirecTV has largely flown under the radar, with no comparable organized consumer opposition to the deal. But that does not mean the FCC will approve it as-is.

Negotiations with federal regulators and an exchange of regulatory filings and comments between AT&T, the FCC, and deal critics have apparently forced AT&T to agree to several concessions to make regulators amenable to approving the transaction.

The Washington Post reports that chief among those concessions is AT&T’s willingness to voluntarily abide by certain Net Neutrality rules regardless of any court challenges, including banning the slowing or blocking of websites and agreeing not to accept payments from website operators to speed up their content. AT&T has not said how long it intends to keep that commitment.

Deal opponents are also seeking other concessions from AT&T:

No paid interconnection deals: AT&T must route incoming content to customers without any fees charged to the companies originating the traffic. This became a hot button issue when Netflix felt it was forced to pay Comcast a fee to assure its streamed video content would reach Comcast customers without buffering or other errors. AT&T is expected to fiercely oppose this condition and says it should have the right to make private deals with content delivery firms.

AT&T must offer standalone broadband: With AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV, more than ever it will have an incentive to sell customers a television bundle with Internet service. Regulators want AT&T to assure broadband-only service remains readily available. AT&T has offered 6Mbps DSL for $34.95 a month as its standalone option. Content delivery firms like Cogent want AT&T to offer 25Mbps service in all of AT&T’s markets for $29.95 a month for at least seven years. The FCC recently defined 25Mbps the minimum speed to qualify as broadband.

No end runs around Net Neutrality with data caps and exemptions: AT&T wants the right to exempt its preferred partners from its usage caps and claims that is beneficial to consumers. But cap opponents claim that is simply another way to collect money from content companies for preferential treatment — an end run around Net Neutrality rules. Opponents of these cap exemptions, known as “zero-rating” claim all content should be treated the same. AT&T could resolve this by removing data caps from its DSL and U-verse services altogether.