Viewers may have to stick with TV to watch the Olympics for free.

While the rest of the wired world gets ready to sit back and enjoy Olympics coverage from China, Americans are being told you can have the Olympics online, but you better not have metered broadband access.

When NBC partnered with TVTonic to provide NBC Olympics On The Go,  it had to specifically warn viewers with metered broadband access not to bother.   Streaming high quality video feeds can consume a significant amount of bandwidth, and can easily allow unassuming viewers to win the the gold in the Biggest Bandwidth Overlimit Fee competition.

TVTonic's warning to broadband users to not use the service if they are using a broadband provider with usage caps.

Content providers are starting to wake up to the real threat of the imposition of usage caps across the United States, limiting cable and DSL broadband customers from accessing content that was developed specifically for the broadband platform.

TVTonic is just one of several online services that could effectively be shut out of doing business in the United States because of broadband usage caps.   The company provides access to over 100 broadband Internet TV feeds, many transmitted in “high definition” quality, all of which would bring viewers ever closer to hitting their monthly limit.

Other providers such as Hulu and Joost provide legal access to hundreds of TV series, movies and specials at no charge to viewers.   But with bandwidth usage caps, will you be willing to spend your limited bandwidth watching?

Suspiciously, the “bandwidth crisis” that the industry continues to blame for the imposition of unreasonable usage caps stops at the water’s edge.   Customers in Japan and Korea enjoy broadband connections often a hundred times faster than what is available in the United States, at much lower prices and no restrictive caps.   In fact, outside of North America, nobody has heard of a bandwidth crisis.

While many broadband providers continue to reap handsome profits from their broadband services, demands for higher shareholder returns and struggling quarterly results from their other product lines in a stagnant economy have led many to decide investing in a lobbying scare campaign is a better use of their money.   It’s easier to try and convince Americans they are the problem, and limit service accordingly.

Robb from Hillsboro, Oregon graciously gave permission to share his own research on what a 5GB cap means in the real world.   Some upset about the usage cap announced by Frontier have suggested that’s almost as bad as going back to dial-up.   But as Robb discovered, you would be better off with 56k dialup! That’s because an unlimited Frontier dial-up account can deliver more to you in a month than a crippled DSL account with a 5GB usage cap on it.

See the numbers for yourself:

Courtesy: Robb (a/k/a 'funchords'), Hillsboro, Oregon

A well placed source at Frontier told Stop the Cap! that the response to the quietly introduced 5GB monthly usage cap has not been positive among some of the more online aware employees at the company, who have expressed concern to management about how exactly they can explain and justify a monthly cap which is as low, if not lower, than many cell phone companies charge for their wireless plans.

The source told us that the impetus for the cap wasn’t just a concern about a few bad apples “overusing” their resources, but individuals in some markets purchasing multiple commercial or residential accounts and attempting to resell that bandwidth as part of some home-grown ISP business. The legal department quickly assembled some changes which were quietly introduced, without any fanfare, as part of Frontier’s residential acceptable use policy.

Our take? The logic train derailed on this one. Assuming for a moment that resellers were the driving force behind this action, Frontier’s response fails on several counts:

• Commercial DSL customers are not currently subject to any usage caps so a reseller need only configure multiple commercial accounts and go right on reselling without any fear of breaking a usage cap.
• Existing provisions in Frontier’s policies forbid the resale or repurposing of their product already. Resellers can be turned off today without any punitive measures taken against their entire residential customer base.
• The imposition of this change in terms buried in fine print is a sneaky way to attempt to force customers under multi-year contract to agree to the changes by default. Under the provisions of Frontier’s contract, customers automatically agree to any changes in terms published on their website unless they opt out in writing within 30 days. Frontier assumes most people will never notice, and considering the lousy quality of their website, where finding definitive information about anything is an all-day affair, that would not be a surprising outcome.

Those who are aware of the local broadband market who are also working at Frontier have every right to be worried. Their careers may evaporate along with Frontier’s customer base who will almost certainly flee the service the moment they become aware of the outrageous limitations Frontier seeks to impose on their customers. It’s a boneheaded move by Frontier, but just another in a long line of foolish mistakes on the part of this company, which is frittering away their core business with rate increases, a deteriorating network, and now this.

On a side note, we are also told that Frontier is no longer actually providing anything close to the 10mbps download/1mbps upload service they are now advertising. Our source tells us the network could not sustain anything close to those speeds, so they have quietly cut back to speeds closer to 7mbps/450kbps. Aging infrastructure and lack of investment will do that to you.