Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt told Wall Street the company is backing AT&T’s decision to cease unlimited access to its wireless data services.
“In most businesses when usage goes up, that’s a good thing because people pay more,” Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s chief executive officer, said at a Sanford C. Bernstein Wall Street investor conference Friday in New York. “It’s going to get the industry better aligned with consumer behavior.”
But Britt also said AT&T’s decision was “more sensible than when we did it,” referring to the company’s April 2009 aborted experiment to charge customers up to three times as much for broadband service with a consumption billing scheme that got a hostile response from consumers.
Britt was speaking about the network capacity constraints that wireless data networks have that do not compare with the much wider pipeline available to wired provides like Time Warner Cable. Britt cited AT&T’s still-exclusive iPhone as being the single most significant factor in AT&T’s decision.
Britt told Business Week that “at the time” consumption “pricing was needed to maintain the expense and expansion of the network.”
But consumer advocates suggested the company targeted its overcharging experiment in cities where customers didn’t have strong competitive alternatives. That was particularly the case in Rochester, N.Y. and Greensboro, N.C., where alternative broadband meant significantly slower telephone company DSL service. In the case of Rochester, that service included a monthly 5GB usage allowance in Frontier Communications’ Acceptable Use Policy.
Without equivalent competing alternatives, broadband consumers would be trapped in a broadband backwater with significantly worse service than neighboring cities.
Despite Britt’s acknowledgment that his company backed off because of strong consumer opposition, he’s still willing to talk about bringing the overcharging scheme back, telling Business Week, “Exactly how it works and what the PR around it will be is something we can talk about.”
DataPlus $15 a month and limited to 200 megabytes of data. If you exceed it, your overlimit penalty is $15, good for an additional 200 megabytes.
DataPro $25 a month gets you just 2 gigabytes of data. The overlimit penalty for those exceeding it is $10 which buys an additional 1 gigabyte of usage.
AT&T Smartphone customers will also be able to add tethering under the $25 DataPro plan for an extra $20 per month, with DataPro’s usage allowance applied.
Current AT&T customers can remain on their current unlimited Smartphone data plan indefinitely, even if they change or upgrade phones according to AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel. That concession probably helps AT&T preserve anticipated demand for next week’s new iPhone launch. Without it, customer demand could be tempered by the realization a phone upgrade could cost you your $29.99 unlimited usage plan. If you were considering getting an AT&T phone with unlimited data, you have until June 6th to sign up for service under that plan. After that date, you’re out of luck indefinitely.
AT&T is promoting the end of unlimited wireless broadband as a benefit to customers, claiming that 98 percent of its Smartphone customers use on average less than 2GB of data per month. But that represents today’s usage. AT&T’s decision to eliminate an unlimited option they claim 98 percent of their customers never exceeded would be curious without understanding the next generation of Smartphones will provide dramatic improvements in high bandwidth video streaming that will dramatically start eating into those low usage allowances. The company’s next generation of faster wireless broadband will also include low limit plans, which makes them untenable as a home broadband replacement for all but the most casual users.
For new iPad customers, the $25 per month 2 GB plan will replace the existing $29.99 unlimited plan. iPad customers will continue to pre-pay for their wireless data plan and no contract is required. Existing iPad customers who have the $29.99 per month unlimited plan can keep that plan or switch to the new $25 per month plan with 2 GB of data.
AT&T offers up the common practice of boasting about how much you can do with a usage-limited account, based on the thousands of e-mails you'll never send, the 500 pictures you'll never take, or the 20 - one minute YouTube clips you'll never watch. Notice they never seem to include figures for streaming multimedia applications like music, movies, and TV shows or playing more bandwidth-intensive games. To do so would only upset customers further.
AT&T says customers can continue to use unlimited amounts of data when they access it over the company’s Wi-Fi network hotspots.
Wall Street is happy with AT&T’s elimination of unlimited plans, sensing higher profits and reduced costs will follow.
“The new plans appear well designed to reduce undue network stresses,” Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein toldThe Wall Street Journal.
Analyst Philip Cusick at Macquarie Securities also told the Journal AT&T may see lower growth in data revenue in the short term as a result of the new changes, but will gain leverage over the heaviest data users, improving its ability to manage its network and charge for capacity. Tiered plans may also pull more customers into data plans, he said.
But because current customers can choose to remain on the grandfathered unlimited plan, existing heavy data users accused of chewing up AT&T’s wireless network can continue to do so as long as they remain customers. AT&T will only be capping future customers who sign up on or after June 7th.
For those outraged by AT&T’s decision, fleeing to Verizon Wireless for unlimited data may not be an option for too much longer either.
Verizon Wireless Chief Executive Lowell McAdam indicated in an interview with the Journal last month that he, too, is looking at pricing based on use.
“The old model of one price plan per device is going to fall away,” McAdam told the newspaper, adding that he expects carriers to take an approach that targets a “bucket of megabytes.”
One company that doesn’t plan to end an all-you-can-eat wireless data buffet is Sprint, which now sees its unlimited data plan as a potential marketing asset.
A Sprint spokesperson spoke the words you were already thinking:
“We’re giving customers a better value. With data usage growing, customers don’t want to worry about going over their limits.”
Some customers upset that AT&T only sold an unlimited plan welcomed the lower cost options because they didn’t spend a lot of time using the data features of their phones, but several wondered why the company didn’t simply introduce lower cost options -and- leave the unlimited plan in place for those who wanted it.
Overall, AT&T is getting an earful from angry customers over the announcement — even those who don’t exceed 2GB per month. They sense greed and overcharging. A sampling:
If 3% are using data “a lot” now, then in another two years, it’ll be 15% and then 60%. Simply put, this is gouging customers, where pricing is decided by dudes in a board room looking at charts and graphs and sales numbers, figuring out how to gouge people for maximum profit.
Obviously AT&T is killing the unlimited plan to cut down on usage and to raise their profits. I also believe it is heavy handed to eliminate the unlimited access plan. If anything, offer other plans and raise the price of the unlimited plan. It will be interesting to see of the other players follow suit and also kill their unlimited plans (can you say “price fixing”? Sure you can!).
AT&T is always full of good ideas, like that Microcell thing. Hey, we can’t give you good service you paid for, so we are going to ask you for more money for this piece of equipment to supplement the service you are not getting.
Just another greedy ploy to make more money. They are selling air. The charges are ridiculous and this is one industry that should be under government control.
My spouse and I pay half of what AT&T would charge us for excellent Palm smartphones on Sprint. We also get turn-by-turn GPS included–something AT&T AND Verizon both charge extra for. Sprint’s network is top-notch. I can’t fathom why people continue to waste money on Verizon and AT&T.
If you’ve got a smartphone or you tether your computer, you really have no idea how much bandwidth your device is consuming. Even worse (or better if you are the phone company) customers can’t control the bandwidth that their devices consume. How often does your email client check for new messages? Can you even stop your computer from downloading a security update? What about that last application you installed, can you stop it from calling home every time you launch it? Do you even know that it does track and report your usage? That’s a huge difference between phone services and data services. You KNOW when you’ve dialed a number and talked for 10 minutes. You can’t control all the data consuming applications and services on your devices… and trying to bill customers for something that they can’t control the usage or cost must be illegal. Surely someone will address this problem soon. Surely.
[flv width=”576″ height=”344″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNN ATT Goodbye to unlimited data 6-2-10.flv[/flv]
CNN Money reports on AT&T saying goodbye to unlimited data plans for iPhones and iPads. (1 minute)
The Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Frontier’s takeover of 4.8 million Verizon landline customers in 14 states comes a year after the company announced the deal. Frontier joins three other independent phone companies — FairPoint Communications, Windstream Communications, and CenturyLink zealously trying to grow their companies with additional mergers and acquisitions to avoid being swallowed up themselves.
What is common among all four companies is they rely heavily on dividend payouts to keep their stock price as high as possible. That was a formula for disaster for FairPoint, the first of the four to end up in bankruptcy after a similar deal with Verizon in northern New England caused the company to falter. Service and billing deteriorated, customers fled, and promises for better broadband were broken. Now Frontier is following in FairPoint’s footsteps with more than 4.8 million new customers Frontier hopes they can swallow.
The FCC’s statement approving the merger reads like a press release for all involved, and delighted FCC Chairman Genachowski, who called these meager requirements “robust”:
Coming one week after the final state approval for the transaction, the FCC’s Order holds the applicants, Verizon and Frontier, to enforceable voluntary commitments, including:
Extend faster broadband to more Americans: Frontier will significantly increase broadband deployment for the lines involved in this transaction, only 62 percent of which are broadband-capable today. Specifically, Frontier will deploy broadband with actual speeds of at least 3 Mbps downstream to at least 85 percent of transferred lines by the end of 2013, and actual speeds of at least 4 Mbps downstream to at least 85 percent of the transferred lines by the end of 2015, with all new broadband deployment offering actual speeds of at least 1 Mbps upstream.
Frontier's Fast One: 3 Mbps DSL Service with a 5GB Monthly Usage Allowance
Frontier’s broadband commitment gives the company a full five years to meet the bare minimum speed considered to constitute broadband in the National Broadband Plan. One hopes Frontier doesn’t break into a sweat offering a piddly 3 Mbps service to homes using yesterday’s DSL service until then. While Verizon’s rural castoffs get stuck eventually with 4 Mbps DSL, many of the company’s remaining customers are enjoying 50Mbps service over an all fiber network. The FCC is accepting an urban-rural divide for broadband which will benefit the phone companies while leaving rural customers in the dirt.
Deploy fiber to libraries, hospitals, and other anchor institutions: Frontier will launch an anchor institution initiative to deploy fiber to libraries, hospitals, and government buildings, particularly in unserved and underserved communities.
Fiber for these locations sure, but no fiber for you or I. Frontier, like most other telecom companies, loves to promote the benefits of fiber without actually deploying it to homes.
Promote competition: Frontier and Verizon have made a series of commitments to protect wholesale customers, including honoring all obligations under Verizon’s current wholesale arrangements that are in effect at closing.
Since wholesale customers often depend on the same network other customers do, if a company doesn’t deliver robust broadband into a state like West Virginia, there isn’t a robust service to sell to those wholesalers.
Improve data quality and collection: Frontier will make available to the Commission data on its broadband deployment progress at an unprecedented level of detail to enable effective monitoring of Frontier’s compliance with its commitments.
The Commission concluded that the commitments that applicants have offered, coupled with monitoring and enforcement by the Commission, will minimize the risks of harm and ensure that this transaction is in the public interest.
Phillip "Living on the Frontier" Dampier
Considering how weakly the FCC is committing itself to protecting rural customers from being dumped into the broadband backwater Frontier has on offer (complete with the 5GB monthly usage allowance), does collecting statistics help when things go sour? Regulators collected statistics in New England when FairPoint failed, but that didn’t get service levels back until Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont threatened to toss FairPoint out. Now the company is in bankruptcy and regulators are negotiating which of the promises FairPoint made can be let go ‘for the sake of the company.’
That’s why it’s so ironic to read editorials that proclaim the FCC is on some sort of power grab when they seek to restore what meager authority they exercised over broadband before a DC Court effectively excluded broadband oversight from their portfolio.
It will be a good day when federal agencies like the FCC start worrying first and foremost about consumers instead of how to make a parade of overpriced mergers and acquisitions succeed for the companies involved.
[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WANE Ft Wayne Verizon hanging up on local landlines 5-24-10.flv[/flv]
WANE-TV in Fort Wayne warns viewers their landline company is about to change asVerizon vacates the area by July 1st. (1 minute)
[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CWA Verizon Dont Take the Money and Run in WV.flv[/flv]
Too late. The Communications Workers of America ran this ad spot asking the West Virginia governor to intervene and stop the sale. (1 minute)
Rep. Dan Maffei (D-New York) has begun to worry broadband consumers in his western and central New York district.
In April 2009, when Time Warner Cable’s announced Internet Overcharging experiment was upsetting customers in Rochester, Maffei claimed he was concerned about limiting broadband usage for customers in the area. But when former Rep. Eric Massa introduced legislation to ban unjustified usage caps and consumption billing, Maffei told his constituents he wasn’t interested in Massa’s approach:
Thank you for contacting me regarding H.R. 2902, the Broadband Internet Fairness Act. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act was introduced by Representative Eric Massa (NY-29) on June 16, 2009, and was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The bill would authorize the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to review volume usage service plans of major broadband internet service providers to ensure that such plans are fairly based on cost.
When Time Warner Cable announced in April that Rochester would be used as a test market for charging Internet users based upon consumption usage, I, along with Representative Massa, opposed this policy. We helped persuade Time Warner to abandon the plan in the area. At that time, Representative Massa also introduced the Broadband Internet Fairness Act.
Other utilities, like water or electricity, charge customers based on usage, but Internet users have traditionally been charged a flat fee for unlimited access to the web. The Broadband Internet Fairness Act would require Internet Service Providers that want to implement usage-based pricing plans to go through several traditional regulatory hurdles. While I share many of the goals of Representative Massa’s legislation, I do not believe passing this stand-alone bill is the right approach at this time.
Of course broadband is nothing like water or electric utilities. In fact, Maffei’s inclusion of that reference is a classic talking point of the telecom industry. Notice they, and Maffei, didn’t mention telephone service — the one utility that provides flat rate calling for most Americans. It also happens to be the utility most comparable to broadband service!
New York's 25th Congressional District
But Maffei made a bad situation worse when he joined 72 other House Democrats co-signing a letter from Rep. Gene Green (D-AT&T), urging FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski not to fight a court decision overturning the agency’s ability to conduct broadband oversight.
The letter represented one giant talking point — the false premise that enforcing a fair, free, and open Internet with Net Neutrality would somehow stifle investment in broadband expansion. Yet AT&T was required to honor the very same principles when it merged with SBC, and managed to remain a multi-billion dollar powerhouse well positioned to expand broadband service to additional customers in its ever-growing service areas.
The fact the broadband industry is a duopoly for most Americans — one that can threaten to pull back on service if it doesn’t get its way in Washington — is just one more reason the industry requires more oversight, not less.
Yet Rep. Maffei stood alone as the only member of the western New York Congressional delegation to sign his name to the agenda of big cable and phone companies.
Perhaps the congressman has forgotten these facts which trouble broadband consumers across western and central New York:
Rochester, NY was the only city in the northeast where Time Warner sought to conduct an Internet Overcharging experiment, made possible because of limited competition in the Rochester market;
Rochester’s other broadband provider, Frontier Communications, insists on a monthly usage allowance of just 5GB per month in its Acceptable Use Policy;
Verizon FiOS has suspended expansion indefinitely and the service will never be available in most of the 585 area code where Frontier operates, and it will take years for most of the rest of his Syracuse district to see the service reach those areas;
Time Warner Cable increased its broadband rates in 2010, as did Verizon;
Green’s letter dances around the real issue — telecommunications companies are spending millions to oppose pro-consumer reforms and stop a return of oversight authority the FCC lost after a recent court decision. Without this authority, the FCC cannot implement the National Broadband Plan’s insistence that American providers not block or impede network traffic. These Net Neutral policies preserve net freedom. The FCC cannot even require that providers tell the truth about broadband speeds and include the company’s terms of service in plain English.
Western New York is a hotbed of consumer activism on broadband issues, particularly because we are actual victims of provider abuse. No one knows more than we how critical 21st century broadband is to the transformation of this region’s perennially challenged economy.
Rep. Maffei needs a reminder this is a hot button issue for consumers from Irondequoit to Manlius. Perhaps he just doesn’t fully understand what’s at stake here. You need to remind him.
We’ve included a suggested letter you can use to help write your own. For maximum effectiveness, include some of your own personal stories, challenges, and frustrations with your local broadband provider. Feel free to share yours in the Comments section.
Dear Rep. Maffei:
I was extremely disappointed to discover you signed your name on a letter written by Rep. Gene Green urging FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski not to restore oversight authority over broadband. While Rep. Green’s letter illustrates he’s mostly concerned about the well being of AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Comcast, as a consumer I am more concerned about the broadband duopoly that exists in Rochester & Syracuse.
If the FCC does not regain its ability to oversee broadband by reclassifying it under Title II — as a telecommunications service (which it very clearly is), the FCC can effectively do nothing to stop broadband provider abuses, such as Comcast’s notorious speed throttle on customers using certain Internet websites and services. It took an FCC investigation to finally get the cable company to admit the truth — it was interfering with customers’ broadband speeds. The oversight power the agency had was just what was needed to convince Comcast to stop.
Unfortunately, a DC Circuit Court recently disagreed it had that authority and effectively stripped it away. Chairman Genachowski is simply seeking a return to the status quo before that court decision was handed down. He’s not asking to regulate broadband anything like telephone service. In fact, he’s insisted on a “light touch.” That’s better than today’s court-imposed total-hands-off reality.
By signing Rep. Green’s letter, you effectively tell us you don’t support Net Neutrality protections that guarantee providers cannot censor or impede web traffic. You also do nothing to protect consumers from other provider abuses. Considering what residents of Rochester went through last year fighting a Time Warner Cable scheme that would have tripled broadband prices for the same level of service, I’m shocked you of all people would be a supporter of big telecom’s agenda.
Telecom companies are claiming that if regulations enforcing Net Neutrality are enacted, investment will suffer and broadband expansion will be slowed. Yet AT&T was required, as part of its merger with SBC, to respect Net Neutrality for several years. The company flourished, broadband was offered to more customers than ever, and investors liked what they saw.
The record in western New York is clear — Time Warner Cable was willing to limit its customers access to broadband service, Frontier already does in its terms and conditions, and Verizon FiOS deployment has been suspended indefinitely. For too many of us, there are too few choices. In fact, the only thing we can be assured of is higher pricing and a strengthened duopoly.
I strongly urge you to remove your signature from Rep. Green’s letter and get on board with consumers like myself in your district who believe deregulation and oversight failures have given us nothing but nightmares — from Wall Street to BP’s oil spill. Let’s not make another mistake in handing cable and phone companies unfettered permission to abuse their customers.
Please get back in touch with me as soon as possible on this important matter.
Rep. Dan Maffei told constituents he was concerned about Time Warner Cable’s Internet Overcharging scheme proposed in April 2009. At a town hall meeting in Irondequoit, New York, he admitted Time Warner Cable held near-monopoly power over consumers in Rochester. What changed his tune when he signed on to Rep. Gene Green’s anti-consumer letter to the FCC?(April 9, 2009 — 2 minutes)
In one of the biggest ironies thus far this year, a British broadband provider trying to one-up the competition has started running ads with Dr. Seuss-like characters that represent marketing exaggerations, traps, and bad customer service, all while forgetting to disclose it engages in some tricks of its own.
O2’s Niggles & Narks campaign features animated creatures that represent where broadband has gone all-wrong:
[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/O2 Niggles and Narks Ad 5-2010.flv[/flv]
Once upon a time, when broadband was made, we browsed and surfed and chatted — everybody played.
But for some, the magic faded. Some things started to go wrong.
Without any warning, the niggles and nobs came along.
With the No Support-a-Saurus — spouting twaddle was his game. His impossible instructions would slowly knot your brain.
The Crafty-Cost Nark took pleasure in his work, delivering line rental bills that drove us all berserk.
And with the Mystery-Speed Mook, you never really know. You thought you’d get mega-fast but got stuck with dead slow.
But this is where we draw the line and try to right what’s wrong. Wouldn’t broadband be a better place, with narks and niggles gone?
But accusing the others of broadband narks and niggles -you- see, without confessing your own is little more than hypocrisy.
In a land of broadband O2 promises is not a dream, it brings to the table its own Internet Overcharging scheme.
No nobble or niggle could ever believe, selling unlimited broadband -that wasn’t- was something they could achieve.
But O2 managed — somehow, we don’t know, to define “unlimited” as 10GB per month — exceeding it brings woe.
Maybe it's a typo that should have read, "download as much as WE like."
O2 sells its broadband packages across the United Kingdom, either bundled under a BTWholesale-based package or unbundled direct from O2 or BeBroadband. Only the BTWholesale accounts, common in rural areas where O2 doesn’t have its own equipment installed in the exchange offices, are impacted by the limit on unlimited. BT apparently charges them some form of consumption billing, and they aren’t willing to eat the costs.
Starting in March, many customers started receiving letters stating they were using the service too much, and if they didn’t back off, they’d be disconnected. One customer received a disconnect warning after using 40.1GB, primarily from watching BBC’s iPlayer, which delivers on demand television programming.
What represented “too much” for an “unlimited service?”
“Most O2 customers use less than 10GB a month. Aim for that and you’ll be okay,” says one of O2’s support pages on the topic.
Outraged consumers arguing that “unlimited” should mean “unlimited” and didn’t comply were promptly disconnected.
With the introduction of O2’s new high-priced Niggles & Narks advertising campaign, the hilarity ensued as customers began calling out O2’s hypocrisy, leading to clarifications from O2 that were anything but:
As some of you have been discussing, we’ve started to disconnect some of the very highest usage customers whose download patterns have detrimentally affected other customers’ experience, even after we have requested them to reduce their usage and explained the effect it’s having. We will continue this in order to improve the experience for the majority of the customers on the service.
We are also making the service run more efficiently by updating the hardware and software that runs the Access service. This will improve the prioritization of the real-time activity, such as streaming, over less time-sensitive activities such as P2P. — O2 Statement from March 26th 2010
O2's "Unlimited Broadband" Price Chart
Then there is this fine print on the question of “unlimited service” that only a credit card company or bank could love (the underlining is ours):
How much should I cut my broadband use?
Most O2 customers use less than 10GB a month. Aim for that and you’ll be okay.
Your product is unlimited, so why are you telling me to use less?
There aren’t any usage limits on any of our O2 Home Broadband packages. That means you can download and upload as much as you like each month, within reason.
Our network’s been designed to cope with people downloading large files (like music or films) and watching video online. But if you’re using the service excessively – like continually downloading large files at peak times – then we do reserve the right to warn you to lower your usage. In exceptional circumstances, we can even terminate your account.
This is because excessive use by a few people can reduce the speed that other customers in the same area can get. We just want to provide everyone with an excellent level of service.
Then company officials unofficially increased the limit to 40GB per month, as this note on an official company forum disclosed:
We’re contacting less than 10% of our heaviest users at the moment and you fell into this top tier. The majority use less than 10GB and at present if you use less than 40GB, you wouldn’t hear from us.”
This isn’t the first time O2 has confused its customers. ThinkBroadband reminds us of 2007’s mess over the same issue:
O2 have never been good at defining the term ‘unlimited’ as can be seen in 2007 when they had three different definitions for the word. Back then they did recognize that customers were confused by the term and the marketing director Sally Cowdry was quoted as saying “customer feedback has been that if we say unlimited, it should be unlimited.” We wonder why two and half years on, O2 still have not ‘nobbled this broadband niggle.’
Unfortunately for O2 customers, the company has not righted any broadband wrongs. They’ve added to them. O2 has an chronic problem with their own Niggles and Narks. Perhaps British regulators can do a better job exterminating them.
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to […]
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to […]
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of Hong […]
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be […]
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw […]
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] proposal – to codify and enforce some […]
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario […]
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment […]
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by […]
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good Alberta […]
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling […]
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking […]
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Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt told Wall Street the company is backing AT&T’s decision to cease unlimited access to its wireless data services.
Britt was speaking about the network capacity constraints that wireless data networks have that do not compare with the much wider pipeline available to wired provides like Time Warner Cable. Britt cited AT&T’s still-exclusive iPhone as being the single most significant factor in AT&T’s decision.
