Charter Communications this week reduced prices on multi-line unlimited data plans.
A customer with one line of unlimited data service will continue to pay $45 a month for the plan, but each additional line of unlimited data will now cost $29.99 a month — a $15 reduction from Spectrum’s old pricing.
Xfinity Mobile, Comcast’s similar wireless service, already cut multi-line unlimited pricing to $30 a month back in April 2021.
Rutledge
Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge told investors last spring that he wanted to drive customer growth in Charter’s mobile phone offering by slashing mobile service pricing.
“Our goal is to do the same with mobile in our service area as we did with wireline voice, where we made Charter the predominant wireline phone carrier by reducing consumer telephone bills by over 70%, meaning Charter can grow for a long time because we remain under-penetrated and our growth will reduce customer costs,” Rutledge said.
For several years, Charter charged most bundled customers $10 a month for a flat-rate, unlimited long distance home phone line. The company raised prices $3 a month for landline service earlier this year, but claims it still delivers significant savings over traditional landline service.
Both Charter and Xfinity Mobile operate their wireless mobile services using a combination of Wi-Fi calling and roaming on Verizon’s 4G and 5G networks. Customers must agree to bundle home broadband service to get the lowest mobile pricing. If a customer drops internet service, mobile pricing increases $20/mo per line.
Charter’s new pricing undercuts T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon:
A public-private partnership between the city of San Jose, Helium, and the California Emerging Technology Fund will install 20 Helium-compatible IoT Hotspots that will deliver limited internet connectivity, mine cryptocurrency, and convert the proceeds into prepaid debit cards for low-income residents to subsidize the cost of home internet service.
The program, currently in a six-month trial, is expected to return enough cryptocurrency proceeds to provide a $120 one-time debit card to each of over 1,300 low income residents in the city.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said the program was “one of many innovative public-private partnership models that we’re advancing to bridge the digital divide for residents.”
Unlike traditional Wi-Fi hotspots that provide wireless internet connectivity, the Helium Hotspot uses a “Long-Fi” radio signal and routes packets from low-power devices in an area that use LoRaWAN and have been deployed to the Helium Network. Typically these are devices such as GPS trackers, environmental sensors, weather meters, etc., that only need to transmit and share small bits of information. The Hotspot uses an existing internet connection (via Wi-Fi or Ethernet) to deliver the data packets sent by devices. It does not replace internet or cellular service for regular devices like computers and smartphones.
Unlike traditional cryptocurrency mining computers, Helium’s hotspots do not consume large amounts of electricity. Each hotspot on the network uses approximately 5 watts and transmits and receives an average of less than two megabytes of data per month. The city of San Jose expects to utilize the network for certain city “Internet of Things” low data traffic applications such as air quality monitoring, fire detection, water leakage, and climate-related data.
There are tens of thousands of consumers who also own and deploy Helium-compatible hotspots to mine cryptocurrency as part of a passive income strategy.
Although San Jose’s partnership with Helium will not directly provide internet service, the proceeds earned from mining cryptocurrency will help reduce the cost of internet service for some city residents. Helium has a network of approximately 200,000 active hotspots supporting a myriad of IoT applications, from agricultural monitoring, weather and buoy data, and even one application that returns information about the amount of dryer lint accumulating in an apartment complex’s laundry room.
T-Mobile is widening its wireless home broadband pilot program to cover more than 20 million additional underserved and unserved households in 130 communities in parts of nine states.
“Home broadband has been broken for far too long, especially for those in rural areas, and it’s time that cable and telco ISPs have some competition,” said Dow Draper, T-Mobile executive vice president of Emerging Products. “We’ve already brought T-Mobile Home Internet access to millions of customers who have been underserved by the competition. But we’re just getting started. As we’ve seen in our first few months together with Sprint, our combined network will continue to unlock benefits for our customers, laying the groundwork to bring 5G to Home Internet soon.”
T-Mobile Home Internet customers currently pay $50 a month for unlimited wireless internet for their home or business, using T-Mobile’s existing 4G LTE network. To prevent cell tower saturation, T-Mobile is making the service available on a first-come, first-served basis, where coverage is eligible, based on equipment inventory and local network capacity. T-Mobile is also protecting its high-value mobile customer base by prioritizing mobile network traffic, so speeds may slow for home internet customers during times of peak cell tower usage.
The company adds that its 4G service will soon be joined by a 5G home internet service, which should increase speeds and capacity. The company claims:
The service is self-installed, so no installation visits or charges.
Taxes and fees included.
No annual service contracts.
No “introductory” price offers.
No hardware rental or sign-up fees.
No data caps, but network prioritization may affect speed during peak usage periods, and video streaming resolution may be limited based on available speed in your location.
Other Details:
Pricing: $50/month with AutoPay (price includes sales tax and regulatory fees “for qualifying accounts” whatever that means, and if you don’t AutoPay, the price is $5 higher.)
Credit approval required.
T-Mobile will supply an LTE Wi-Fi Gateway with the service, for in-home use only at the address on the account. The gateway must be returned if you cancel service or pay $207.
List of New Cities & Towns:
Michigan
Adrian
Alma
Alpena
Ann Arbor
Battle Creek
Bay City
Big Rapids
Cadillac
Coldwater
Detroit-Warren-Dearborn
Flint
Grand Rapids-Kentwood
Hillsdale
Holland
Jackson
Kalamazoo-Portage
Lansing-East Lansing
Ludington
Midland
Monroe
Mount Pleasant
Muskegon
Niles
Saginaw
Sault Ste. Marie
South Bend-Mishawaka
Sturgis
Traverse City
Minnesota
Albert Lea
Alexandria
Austin
Bemidji
Brainerd
Duluth
Fairmont
Faribault-Northfield
Fergus Falls
Grand Rapids
Hutchinson
Mankato
Marshall
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington
New Ulm
Owatonna
Red Wing
Rochester
St. Cloud
Willmar
Winona
Worthington
New York
Binghamton
Corning
North Dakota
Bismarck
Dickinson
Jamestown
Minot
Williston
Fargo
Grand Forks
Wahpeton
Ohio
Akron
Ashland
Ashtabula
Bucyrus-Galion
Cambridge
Canton-Massillon
Cleveland-Elyria
Coshocton
Defiance
Findlay
Fremont
Lima
Mansfield
Marion
New Philadelphia-Dover
Norwalk
Salem
Sandusky
Tiffin
Toledo
Wooster
Youngstown-Warren-Boardman
Pennsylvania
Altoona
Bloomsburg-Berwick
Chambersburg-Waynesboro
DuBois
East Stroudsburg
Erie
Gettysburg
Harrisburg-Carlisle
Huntingdon
Indiana
Johnstown
Lancaster
Lebanon
Lewisburg
Lewistown
Lock Haven
Meadville
New Castle
Oil City
Pittsburgh
Pottsville
Reading
Sayre
Scranton–Wilkes-Barre
Selinsgrove
Somerset
St. Marys
State College
Sunbury
Williamsport
York-Hanover
Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton
South Dakota
Aberdeen
Brookings
Huron
Mitchell
Pierre
Rapid City
Sioux Falls
Watertown
Yankton
West Virginia
Clarksburg
Cumberland
Elkins
Morgantown
Weirton-Steubenville
Wheeling
Wisconsin
Eau Claire
La Crosse-Onalaska
Menomonie
Wisconsin Rapids-Marshfield
T-Mobile Home Internet: This company supplied video explains how the service works. (1:15)
Cox was planning to get into the wireless business back in 2010 until T-Mobile started slashing prices after a failed merger with AT&T a year later. Cox canceled its mobile ambitions in 2012. Now they are interested once again.
Cox Communications is in advanced stages of launching a new mobile service for customers that subscribe to at least one Cox cable service, according to sources speaking to multiple media outlets.
“We believe the market is becoming more attractive for us to enter the wireless space and we are exploring it more aggressively now, but have not announced any specific plans,” company spokesperson Todd Smith wrote in response to questions from Light Reading. “We have not entered into any MVNO agreements yet.”
Stop the Cap! has learned Cox has spoken to at least two major wireless carriers about signing an agreement that would allow customers to roam on a carrier’s pre-existing wireless network. AT&T is reportedly aggressively pursuing Cox and other cable operators to resell access to its network, after watching Charter’s Spectrum Mobile and Comcast’s Xfinity Mobile partner with Verizon Wireless.
A source tells us Cox would offer pricing and packages comparable to what Charter and Comcast offer customers — at least two plans, one flat rate unlimited, selling for around $45 a month, and a second “By the Gig” plan that would include 1 GB of data, unlimited voice and texting for between $14-16. Customers would be billed an additional $14-16 for each additional gigabyte consumed during the month.
Cox will market its wireless service to current customers that subscribe to at least one Cox product. If a customer switches to a competitor, Cox would charge an additional non-customer wireless fee, likely $20 a month.
If Cox closely follows Comcast and Charter, it will debut with a very limited selection of premium devices available for purchase or 0% financing, with Bring Your Own Device plans likely to follow. Devices will be programmed to favor cable industry or home Wi-Fi where available and automatically switch to 4G LTE service from an unspecified carrier once traveling outside of a Wi-Fi signal area. A soft cap of around 20 GB of usage per month will also likely be attached to the unlimited plan, with speed throttling applied once customers exceed that amount.
Cox had aborted attempts to enter the wireless business earlier. In 2012, Cox was months away from launching wireless service over its own 3G CDMA network over favorable 700 MHz spectrum it acquired earlier. It suddenly dropped the effort after AT&T failed to acquire T-Mobile in 2011 and T-Mobile began cutting prices to shake up the wireless industry.
Cable operators have attempted to keep wireless costs as low as possible, combining the use of cable companies’ pre-existing Wi-Fi hotspot networks with agreements with third party wireless carriers to handle data traffic and calls. Cable operators have so far chosen not to construct their own wireless mobile networks, although there are indications Charter will probably be the first to build some of its own wireless capacity using 3.5 GHz CBRS spectrum, which will likely work better outdoors than indoors. The more traffic wireless companies can offload to their own networks, the lower their costs.
Cox would likely launch its mobile offering by the fourth quarter of this year, in time for the holiday season.
Canadians are opening cell phone bills that have skyrocketed as a result of usage from work-at-home initiatives to stop the spread of COVID-19, a health crisis that is also fattening profits at some of the country’s biggest mobile operators.
Rosette Okala of Pickering, a suburb of Toronto, was stunned to receive her Rogers Mobile bill this month for $540, up from the usual $160 she is used to paying.
“I almost dropped,” Okala told CBC News. She is a pharmaceutical employee whose job requires being online. Her 12-year-old son has been online more too, doing schoolwork.
The part of Pickering where Okala lives does not have wired internet service available, so she relies on internet service from her mobile provider, like hundreds of thousands of other Canadians do. Pickering is hardly a tiny town either. With a population of 92,000, the city is immediately east of Toronto in the Durham Region. Despite that, there are sections of the city still waiting to get wired internet service.
Using the internet in areas considered to be “rural Canada” by providers is not cheap. Rogers offers customers a $145/mo wireless internet plan that includes 100 GB of usage. Customers that exceed that do so at their peril, facing overlimit fees of $5/GB.
“This is just a slap in our face,” said Okala. “We [rural customers] pay huge bills just to be able to do something basic that most people take for granted.”
Okala hoped her employer would help cover her phone bill. Rogers has been reluctant to help, despite a showy ad campaign from the cable and wireless giant promising customers “we are in this together and are here to help.” When it comes to billing matters, talk is cheap and help is hard to find.
Pickering, Ont.
Okala said she spent hours on the phone with a Rogers representative trying to negotiate a lower bill. Rogers eventually offered a paltry $30 credit and a payment plan to pay off her balance. A second attempt resulted in an improved offer of $100 credit, an upgrade to a different service plan, and 50% off monthly service fees for 24 months. But Rogers still wanted to be paid at least $440, at least until the CBC pointed out it would share Okala’s story with the rest of Canada for free. Rogers suddenly offered to take another $230 off Okala’s March bill and give her the mobile hotspot hub she was leasing for free.
John Burbidge, a University of Waterloo economics professor in North Dumfries living in a town of 10,000 near Cambridge, Ont., got schooled in the mobile broadband business by Bell Mobility, which sent him a bill for $650, including nearly $400 in usage charges. Burbidge was confused by an email from Bell, Canada’s largest phone company, which claimed it was waiving overlimit usage fees for customers during the pandemic. He missed the fine print advising that fee waiver only applied to Bell’s DSL and fiber wired customers, not wireless data plans. Burbidge argued it was unfair to exempt some customers from usage fees, while continuing to charge them to others.
“If rural Canadians are expected to work and do school work from home, decent and reasonably priced access to the internet is a basic right. Bell should not be allowed to gouge rural customers,” Burbidge told Canada’s public broadcaster.
Bell told the CBC the company was offering customers an extra 10 GB on customer data allowances and a $10 credit off the cost of using a mobile hotspot connected to Bell’s mobile network. As a courtesy, Bell agreed to credit Burbidge’s account $350 for March and take 60% off overlimit fees in April, but he is on his own after that. Burbidge’s current plan charges $180 a month for up to 100 GB a month, with a $5/GB overlimit fee.
“It’s really sad to hear,” Laura Tribe, executive director of consumer group OpenMedia told the CBC. “Data caps are definitely unnecessary. We see them as a punitive mechanism to make sure that people suppress the amount of data that they use and overpay when they go over what they want.”
The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), an industry lobbying group representing the country’s wireless companies, claims data caps are necessary to prevent overwhelming Canada’s wireless networks, which could make calling 911 impossible. But voice calls can travel over different spectrum than data traffic, and no wireless company or the CWTA would admit if their networks were close to being overhwhelmed by traffic as a result of millions of Canadians working from home.
Tribe says the traffic spikes that have come from the coronavirus crisis prove her point. Even with data usage at all-time highs, no provider is claiming their network is close to capacity. That should call into question whether there is any need at all for mobile data caps.
“They’re a way to increase profits and suppress the usage of the networks,” said Tribe.
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 […]