Archive for Broadband

The most important article you may read this year

May 6, 2009 at 8:14 pm · Filed under Broadband, DSL, Internet, Regulation, business ethics, cable, consumer, corporation

If you care anything at all about the future of the Internet (and all the services provided via the Internet), drop everything and go read this article:

If ISPs Meter, Who Verifies Meter Accuracy?

I get a sense of Déjà vu here – I was making these same arguments over a decade ago when telling people why you could not trust the phone company to accurately bill for local measured service.  There was actually one verified case where every call made from a particular telephone exchange was being counted twice, effectively resulting in double billing for measured service customers – it took a city hall auditor to finally figure out what was happening. At least in that situation, someone could put a notepad next to a phone and make a check mark every time a local call was placed, to try and get some idea of whether the billing was accurate.

Let me make it perfectly clear – given the current trend for large corporations to shaft the consumer any way they possibly can, particularly when they think there is very little chance that the consumer will discover that they are being conned, there is no doubt in my mind that some broadband companies will deliberately overbill customers if given the opportunity. I don’t know which company will be the first, and I don’t know exactly how they’ll attempt it, but the very first time a customer gets a bill for excess usage you should at least be suspicious.  Look at how the cell phone companies deliberately mislead their customers about things like international data charges and you may begin to understand why, if metered billing ever takes hold, customers will have a very real problem.

Seriously, metered billing is a VERY bad idea from the customer’s standpoint, especially if there are additional charges for “excessive” use (as opposed to bandwidth throttling when the customer passes a certain usage plateau, which while still objectionable, at least limits the damage by making sure the customer never pays more than the monthly rate he or she agreed to pay).

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The Unintended Consequence of Broadband Usage Caps

May 5, 2009 at 5:37 am · Filed under Broadband, Internet, cable, consumer, corporation, networking

I think broadband providers had better be very careful. I’m old enough to remember a time when it seemed like almost everybody hated the phone company, with the type of hatred that today might be reserved for certain four-letter organizations that end in “AA.” Those of you old enough to remember Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh In” may remember Lily Tomlin’s famous line (while playing the part of Ernestine the Operator): “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the telephone company!”

Well, substitute “cable company” for “telephone company”, and you’d have a phrase that one could easily imagine falling from the lips of a big cable representative. They don’t care that people don’t want usage caps, that this is not the Internet you signed up for. They figure they’ll just re-educate you so that, like a bunch of stupid sheep, you’ll accept the caps.

The trouble with this, however, is it only works until a significant number of people find an alternative. International telephone rates were totally outrageous until VoIP (and especially Skype) came along.

Now here is the problem I see for the cable companies (and the phone companies that offer cable TV type service) that want to impose usage caps. The thing they are trying to block – the whole reason they are trying to limit usage in the first place – is video over the Internet, especially the high quality variety. They want you to buy their expensive cable service and more expensive video on demand. They will, of course, lie through their teeth and give you any other plausible-sounding reason they can think of, but the thing they are scared to death of is the day you can download any TV show, any movie, or any other kind of video you might want to see via the Internet, and they’re not getting a cut. The day you say, “I don’t need cable TV, I don’t need traditional telephone service, I just want unlimited broadband, thank you very much.”

Just for a moment, think about how your life might change if you could go to a web site at any time on or after the day a new episode of a TV show was released, and click on a button and almost immediately have it start streaming to your computer monitor or nearby HDTV set. You’d never worry about missing an episode again. No presidential speech, no sports event, no local weather or news bulletin would interrupt your program. You wouldn’t be in the only television market in the country to not see some network show because the local affiliate decided you’d rather see a local special on the city hospital, or the West Bumfart High School football game. We are, for all practical purposes, almost at that point (some would say already there), at least for some shows.

Thing is, the cable companies probably don’t mind if you go to Hulu and catch a missed show every now and then. But what they really don’t want is you deciding you don’t need cable television, and can just watch everything you want to watch online.

But what they are forgetting is that even where they are the only game in town, computer storage is getting much smaller and cheaper. And look what’s coming down the road: Store 250 DVDs on One Coin-Sized Surface (via Discover Magazine)

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but it wasn’t so long ago when modems ran at paltry speeds like 300 or 1200 bps.  There was no commercial Internet – if you were lucky you might connect to a local Bulletin Board Service, but to exchange data with anyone else online could be a very expensive long distance call. So how did large programs get transferred from one user to another? Via floppy disk, sent via U.S. mail.  For the price of a couple postage stamps, you could send several hundred kilobytes anywhere it needed to be.  Even if you figured in the cost of the floppy disk and the cardboard mailer, you still came out ahead over a long distance phone call in most cases.

So what happens when your local ISP starts charging a buck or two per gigabyte over their paltry cap, and you get fed up and decide that if you want to trade a significant chunk of data with anybody you’ll just put it in the mail? By the time it gets to that point, people will be really pissed off at the cable company.  What I envision happening is they will use their cell phones (with unlimited texting and enough data to send and receive e-mail and maybe do some web browsing each day) but start swapping large chunks of data via mail, and some of those folks will then tell the cable company to take a flying leap.  You can bet that sending data by mail happens already in areas where no broadband is available – people order a hard drive with several hundred gigabytes, or maybe even a terabyte in capacity, have it sent to a close relative that has a collection of videos, programs, games or whatever, and that relative fills up the hard drive and ships it out.  Today that’s a pain in the posterior – but when you can put that same amount of storage or more on a coin-sized surface (and maybe several terabytes on a disk that would just fit into a standard sized envelope) all bets are off. Would you rather pay a couple bucks to receive two or three months’ worth of viewing material in the mail, or pay the cable company a few hundred dollars (or more) for the same amount of viewing?

I always like to point to the fact that Western Union gouged people on sending telegrams (charging an outrageous per-word rate, even after they had developed teletype machines to replace the old Morse code keys) and the minute long distance telephone service became halfway affordable, people pretty much discarded the telegram like an old smelly shoe.  Then the phone companies continued to charge outrageous long distance rates even after technology brought their costs down, and now we see their landline business going the way of the dodo bird – I doubt there will be many landlines left by 2020.  The cable companies should learn from these mistakes and not antagonize their customers.  I know they probably think that they cannot be replaced in many areas – that customers have no other choice but to use their service – but that’s simply not true.  I’m sure we will see advances in digital wireless technology, and we can’t rule out the possibility of electric utilities getting into the broadband business (forget broadband over power lines, start stringing fiber on those poles!).

And then there’s the possibility of some totally new technology being developed.  Personally, I’d put my money on something having to do with quantum entanglement. If you can affect the state of a particle at any distance by altering the state of its twin, and you can do this in a totally secure fashion and with minimal power usage, then all you have to figure out is how to do the state changes quickly enough to send data, and how to decode the received data at the other end. If we ever put a colony on Mars or someplace even more distant, we are not going to want to wait minutes or hours for old-fashioned electromagnetic waves (limited by the speed of light). My understanding is that at the quantum level there is no speed-of-light limitation, and I’ll just bet that you don’t have to use several thousand watts of power to get the signal out. Maybe I’m wrong, and it will be some other technology we haven’t heard of yet, but if you have ever wondered why SETI hasn’t yet picked up an extraterrestrial equivalent of “I Love Lucy” on their gigantic dishes, I suspect it’s because any aliens that might be out there would no more think of using electromagnetic waves for communication than we would consider using smoke signals.

Point is, when the new technologies and alternative connection methods come along, the cable companies may just wish they’d treated their customers a whole lot better. Guys, you know bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper – get it right out of your heads that you can overcharge customers for a decade or two and they will forgive you.  No, really, they won’t, and their children won’t give you the time of day. The unintended consequence of bandwidth caps is that you become the next company that everyone loves to hate, and that’s definitely not a recipe for long-term survival.

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Associated Press: Internet provider’s usage cap raises questions

August 22, 2008 at 2:05 pm · Filed under Broadband, DSL, Internet, Regulation, Telephone, business ethics, consumer ·Tagged , , ,

Seems that the Associated Press has discovered Frontier Communications’ proposed ridiculously miniscule usage caps…

Internet provider’s usage cap raises questions

Additional commentary and links at BroadbandReports.com:

Associated Press Discovers Cap Debate

The only slim glimmer of hope for Frontier Communications customers is that there’s a rumor going around today that the company might be sold to Little Rock, Arkansas-based Windstream Communications in the next six months or so. As the linked article states,

Windstream has no plans to implement usage caps on broadband customers at this time, nor does it charge customers for company-supplied modems.

Of course, that could change at the drop of a hat, but then again we know of few phone companies that seem (in our opinion) so opposed to giving their customers a break on anything as is Frontier. Here in Michigan, they are probably the only company left that does not offer local adjacent exchange calling to all adjacent exchanges, to all of their customers (although if they did, no doubt the service would have a Minutes-of-Use cap!). We rather doubt that Windstream would treat their customers as badly (again, just our opinion, and really more of a guess) but since they don’t currently own any phone companies in Michigan, we really don’t know that much about them.

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WTF?? DSLreports editorializes in favor of broadband caps!

June 4, 2008 at 10:59 pm · Filed under Broadband, Regulation, consumer

At first I checked the calendar – nope, it’s not April Fools Day. Then I read the article to see if the title, “Editorial: Caps are welcome” was really a bit of headline sarcasm, and that the body of the article would complete the sentence in some way that would make sense (as in “Caps are welcome – in retirement homes”, though even that would make the unwarranted assumption that no senior citizen would actually want to use the bandwidth they are paying for).

I did discover that the author on this particular editorial actually lives in Australia, where apparently the broadband service is horrible, like it will be in the United States if the phone and cable companies get their way.

Anyway, without responding to the editorial point by point, I just want to mention what I think is the underlying fallacy behind the editorial, at least insofar as we in North America are concerned, and that is that the caps will only affect a small percentage of “broadband hogs” – these are supposedly the “heavy downloaders.”

Chicago Skyway toll plaza
Creative Commons License photo credit: mshobe

Now, let me point out that the satellite broadband providers have actually come up with a method of dealing with broadband over-usage that makes some degree sense, even though users tend to hate it. The way it generally works is, you are allowed to download so much per day. If you come close to reaching the limit, your download speed is severely reduced, for example to somewhere around 256K. The next day, you again receive full bandwidth (at least until you use up that day’s allotment). The point is, this makes sense for a lot of reasons – it accomplishes the goal of keeping anyone from using far too much bandwidth (to the point that it degrades service for other customers) but it still lets the customer access basic services like e-mail and web pages (although pages that contain embedded video will load rather slowly). And no customer ever gets hit with an unexpected bill for overage charges.

But, that’s not what some cable and phone companies want to do. Instead of actually limiting the bandwidth of those whose usage they consider excessive, their plan is to let them keep using bandwidth to their heart’s delight, then send a huge bill at the end of the month. If anyone can’t see the problem with this plan, you’re probably either not a U.S.A. resident or you are still in Junior High school using your parents’ Internet service.

Let’s think about this for just a moment. Do we think that, in the future, new Internet-based applications are going to use MORE or LESS bandwidth? Looking at past trends, my guess is MORE.

Now, then, do we think that new technology will make it MORE or LESS expensive to provide that bandwidth? Again, if we go by past trends, the cost of providing bandwidth should continue to drop, particularly as new technologies are developed that squeeze more bandwidth out of existing fiber circuits (that’s the nice thing about fiber, when you want more bandwidth you don’t usually have to replace the fiber, you just replace the equipment at the endpoints with something that utilizes the existing fiber more effectively).

Okay, now I want you to think really hard about this one. Even if customer bandwidth consumption stayed at current levels, and the cost of moving those bits around the world kept going down, do you think that a phone or cable company would ever reduce their prices (absent serious competition that does not now exist in most areas?). Have your phone and cable bills increased or decreased over the last several years?

Okay, so if your bandwidth usage has a tendency to go up, AND the phone and cable companies have a tendency to raise prices, do you suppose that it’s at all possible that as the bandwidth usage goes up, the “caps” before metering starts will keep getting REDUCED? I’m sure the goal at the cable company, and the wet dream of the phone company executive, is to see the day when no one pays flat rate for their Internet service anymore. Just as in the days when you paid a “flat monthly rate” for your phone service as long as you didn’t go over a certain number of calls per month, so it will be with your Internet service. And just as there were senior citizens that never made phone calls and always paid the minimum rate, there will be people who do nothing but read and send the odd piece of e-mail who, in theory, will pay the basic rate.

Why do I say, “in theory”? Well, here are a couple other things to keep in mind. First, broadband service isn’t presently regulated by any public service or public utilities commission, and is barely regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. What that means is that if your phone or cable company decides that you aren’t paying enough – that you are a “deadbeat” (to use the term that some credit card companies use about customers who always pay they balances off in time, and never incur any interest charges) – they may simply decide to tack on a few extra GB of usage. How will you contest it? Who will you complain to? They will have you by the part of the anatomy where it hurts the most (speaking as a guy here). Even if you then decide you can live without the Internet and cancel your service, they will still sic the bill collectors on you.

(I am convinced that one reason the phone companies are losing wireline customers is because so many have in the past had billing disputes and, not knowing how to complain effectively, either paid money they did not rightfully owe or had their service disconnected and/or their credit rating harmed by their refusal to pay. That sort of thing leaves a REALLY bad taste in the mouth of a customer).

And then there’s the other possibility. Let’s say that someone doesn’t like you and is out to get you. Maybe your kid is being cyber-bullied. Whatever. All someone has to do is somehow get a “trojan horse” program onto your system that does whatever it takes to suck up loads of bandwidth. Today if that happened, your broadband provider would probably notice and notify you (and maybe suspend your service until the problem was fixed), but from your point of view it would be a denial-of-service attack, nothing more. But the minute bandwidth caps go into effect, suddenly your ISP has a financial incentive to let as much traffic flow into your system as possible, since YOU will get stuck with the bill. Note we are not talking here about traffic you instigated (say, by foolishly using a torrent-type program) but rather about traffic sent to you without your knowledge and prior approval – and without even trying too hard, I could probably think of a dozen or so ways that could happen (everything from a piece of software that too aggressively “phones home”, to misdirected packets that come to you because some teenage hacker was trying to instigate a denial-of-service attack against the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and fumbled-fingered the IP address, and is sending his zillion packets to you instead).

U.S. Interstate 80 toll booth close-up
Creative Commons License photo credit: jetzenpolis

Now, if the past is any indication, I am urinating into the wind here. The big broadband providers, who (in case you hadn’t noticed) are quickly becoming duopolies or monopolies in their service areas, will crank up their PR machines and tell you that bandwidth caps are necessary and good and right, and that only an unpatriotic supporter of all that is evil would oppose them. AND (the Big Lie), they will only affect a very small percentage of customers. Yeah, right. That’s possibly true TODAY. And YOU, little lobster, have just been lowered into the pot of cool water, and never mind the hissing sound and that faint whiff of natural gas you smell.

Does anyone remember how people used to place calls to each other back in the days of the black-and-white movies? You picked up the phone and told Tillie the operator who you wanted to speak to, and she connected you, and (if local) it was a free call. Then along came rotary dialing, and people hated having to look up phone numbers and dial them, but they were placated by being told that they could call “Information” and get the number for free, if for some reason they could not look it up. THEN the phone company said some people were hogging the time of the Directory Assistance operators (by then it was called Directory Assistance) so they had to start charging the heaviest users, those who made more than 20 calls a month to Directory Assistance. Then the number of “free” calls went down to ten, then five, then three. THEN they started using computerized equipment so that the actual time a human operator was online with a customer dropped significantly. Did they then increase the “free” call allowance? HAH! When was the last time you got a free telephone number from a telephone company operator, or even one of their voice-recognition computers?

They say that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. But nowadays I sometimes feel like I’m surrounded by stupid people – the history of how phone and cable companies promise the moon and stars, then do nothing but raise rates, is so recent that it would be hard to overlook, yet people continue to believe the crap that the phone and cable company PR and advertising departments crank out. If, in this day and age, you really think that phone or cable companies have your best interest at heart by imposing bandwidth caps, then you have to be among the stupidest people on this planet. If you really are in that group, and what I just said offends you, don’t let the door hit you on the way out – you don’t deserve to be a reader of this blog.

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BETA Perl script for Caller ID popups when using Linksys/Sipura devices

March 23, 2008 at 3:17 pm · Filed under Apple, Broadband, Linksys, Mac, Sipura, VoIP ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Creative Commons License photo credit: bcostin

PLEASE NOTE: This  article has been updated as of December 30, 2008.  This now works with a Mac or Win32 computer (and Linux computers with libnotify installed or readily available, such as those running Ubuntu) and has been updated to reflect that fact. Also, please note that previous versions may have failed on devices/phones with more than two lines – this is (hopefully) fixed as of version 0.7.

If all of the following are true:

You have a Macintosh computer with OS X installed, or a PC with any 32-bit version of Windows installed (basically Windows ‘98 through XP), or any version of Linux with libnotify installed

You have Growl (if you have a Mac) or Snarl (if you have a PC) notifications installed (Note: There is now a version of Growl for Windows but the Windows script has not been rewritten to use it – e-mail me if you would like this, it should only require modification of a few lines of code)

You have a Linksys or Sipura VoIP adapter on your local subnet or home network and receive calls over it

You would like to see Growl, Snarl or libnotify popups on your computer when a call comes in, showing the caller’s name and number, along with the line that the call came in on and the time and date the call arrived (in case you are out when the call comes in)

You have previously run Perl scripts on your computer, OR are reasonably good at following instructions and problem-solving

AND you are willing to run a script that comes with NO WARRANTY whatsoever (if it breaks, you can keep all the pieces)

Then download this file (now at version 0.92), unzip it and read the Instructions.txt file in the folder appropriate to your computer.

This script is being offered under the GNU General Public License, so if you want to modify it to work on other platforms, you can do that under certain conditions (see the Instructions.txt file for details). Mainly, I’d hope that you’d contribute the modifications back (and please leave a comment on this article if you do that).

I don’t have any kind of regular web page up for this yet, for one thing it’s very rough (very little error-checking) and for another I’m very tired, having spent way too many late nights trying to get this to work. So this post will be more terse than most of my posts, but I think most everything you need to know is in Instructions.txt (and for Mac users, the “How to run at login.rtfd” file) inside the .zip file. Feel free to repost this information to other forums if you think anyone else might be interested.

For those Mac users that wish this were an app: I understand that there is an app called Platypus that allows Perl scripts (and any other types of scripts) to be converted to OS X app bundles. However, what it does not seem to include is any way to specify the command line options, or to load any missing Perl modules. So for now, this script will probably only be useable by those with sufficient knowledge to run a Perl script on their Mac. If I were a bit more knowledgeable, I’d build a preference pane to go in System Preferences, and then have the script read that for its configuration options. But I still have no idea how to make an app install missing Perl modules, particularly when OS X does not come with “make” installed until and unless the Developer Tools are installed.

Starting in Version 0.7 there is a minimal logging function, allowing all detected incoming calls (whether answered or not) to be saved to a text file and/or a comma-quote delimited file. I probably could support other simple formats, but don’t even think about asking for anything more complex (like a rather humorous friend of mine who asked for MySQL integration – considering that he knows how little knowledge I have about Perl programming, and that I have even less knowledge about databases, I’m sure he thought it extremely amusing to make that request). The one thing I really don’t like about offering these scripts in Perl is that it requires the user to know how to install modules from CPAN (or an alternative source if using Win32), but I barely know how to do this stuff in Perl and don’t know any other languages (well, except for QBASIC under MSDOS, but that’s even less compatible across platforms than Perl!).

Starting in Version 0.9 you can use a plain-text file of number-name substitutions, so (for example) if calls from a particular number always display a cryptic Caller ID name, you can change them to say “Uncle Bob” (or some other name if Bob’s not your Uncle, or it’s someone else’s number!). Read the sample config file to see the file formats. Note that the plain text file of number-name substitutions is a separate file, not a section of the optional configuration file, and also note that you must enter the numbers exactly as your VoIP provider sends them (in other words, if they send 8005551234 and you use 18005551234 or 800-555-1234 it will NOT match!).

Starting in Version 0.91 you can use a plain-text file of number-path/file substitutions, so (for example) if calls from a particular number are always from Uncle Bob, you can display Uncle Bob’s picture as the icon whenever a call arrives from that number. Read the sample config file for more information. Note that the plain text file of number-path/file substitutions is a separate file, not a section of the optional configuration file, and also note once again that you must enter the numbers exactly as your VoIP provider sends them.

Version 0.92 sets a rather short timeout on page fetches (still much longer than should be necessary to get the data), in an attempt to resolve a problem where very occasionally the script would just go into a coma, not exiting cleanly but still using memory and CPU cycles, without doing anything useful. I have been running this version for over six months now and have yet to see the script go into a coma, as it often seemed to do in previous versions.

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Verizon not upfront on contract terms – Los Angeles Times

March 19, 2008 at 1:35 pm · Filed under Broadband, Verizon, business ethics, consumer, corporation, litigation


Creative Commons License photo credit: thinkpanama

David Lazarus of the The Los Angeles Times blasts Verizon today for withholding contract terms from customers until AFTER they have signed up for service – and some of the contract terms are ones that I sure wouldn’t agree to:

Verizon not upfront on contract terms – Los Angeles Times

Excerpt:

For years, credit card issuers have gotten away with withholding contracts from customers until they actually have the plastic in their hands — a practice that denies many people a fair chance to look under the hood for onerous terms and conditions.Now it looks like Verizon has adopted the same technique.

…..

What really struck [Torrance, California resident Sandy Lough] was the discovery that to receive the promised discount for her bundled plan, she’d have to go online and agree to a 2,000-word “bundle service agreement” and a 7,000-word terms of service for Internet access.

This was the first time she was being presented with the full contract for her new FiOS setup, and the service had already been installed and activated.

The LA Times article goes on to mention some of the more notable terms of the contract.  The interesting thing is that it would appear that this is not simply an oversight – that perhaps Verizon deliberately withholds contract terms from customers until they’ve already committed to the service:

As for why the full contract is withheld until after FiOS has been installed in a person’s home, [Verizon spokesman Cliff Lee] said only that “this is the way we’ve found that works.”

Now, I Am Not A Lawyer, but it seems to me that in the old days a court would never enforce a contract imposed “after the fact”, that is, after the deal had been consummated and the customer had signed on the dotted line.  What has happened to make large corporations think they can simply change the deal at their whim, after a customer has already signed on the dotted line, without giving the customer the same right? Did someone slip a new amendment to the Constitution when I wasn’t looking, saying that corporations can do any sly legal maneuvering they want, and the courts are forced to go along with it, while individual consumers are put at a disadvantage?

This is one reason I’m not making too big a stink about Verizon not offering FiOS in Michigan.  Sure, it would be nice to have those high speeds, delivered via fiber.  But in the long run, I’d rather see a competitive market of many smaller broadband providers than one or two large mammoth corporations that seem to think they can do whatever they want to the consumer.

I know the amendment I’d like to see put into the constitution:

“Only an actual, physical human being shall be given the rights of a person under the law.”

Like I said, I’m not a lawyer, but that about sums it up.  It would mean that no large corporation, with almost infinite legal resources and billions of dollars behind them, would be able to use their wealth to put real people at a disadvantage, because it would be presumed that only the real person had any rights.  Think about that for a while, and how much it would change things from the way things are today!

Edit:  Additional commentary at DSLreports

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Did Comcast Hire Public Stand-ins For Neutrality Hearing? – Napping, disinterested attendees mysteriously appear, cheer Comcast – dslreports.com

February 26, 2008 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Broadband, FCC, Internet, Regulation, business ethics, cable, consumer ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

You’ve heard of a denial-of-service attack – read the following and see if it appears to you as though Comcast might have taken the same principle and applied it to citizen participation. Or, if you’re of my parents’ generation, see if this reminds you at all of the days when union organizers (or opponents) would fill a meeting with a bunch of paid shills:

The Save The Internet Coalition, a coalition of consumer advocates like the Consumers Union authors of Consumer Reports and the Free Press, is claiming that Comcast bussed in a large number of disinterested individuals to yesterday’s public FCC hearing at Harvard on network neutrality and traffic shaping. The group is claiming Comcast paid these individuals so those seats would not be filled with interested, question-asking participants. Many didn’t even know what the meeting was about …..

Full article here:
Did Comcast Hire Public Stand-ins For Neutrality Hearing? – Napping, disinterested attendees mysteriously appear, cheer Comcast – dslreports.com

The real question is, are the FCC Commissioners so isolated from reality that they can’t figure out that this sort of thing might be happening right under their noses? I mean, if we assume that the critics have the right take on this, it would seem to me that once the Commission discovers that Comcast apparently believes their case is so weak that they dare not allow opponents to fairly participate in the process, that would work against them. I might be wrong, but to me this sort of seems like an admission that if the hearings are conducted in a fair and open manner, Comcast doesn’t believe their position will be the one with which the FCC sides.  But then, that (and everything in this article other than the article excerpt and link) is just my personal take on what I’ve read in the linked article. As always, feel free to leave a comment if you disagree.

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Anger: Comcast Dings Your Credit Report For Moving With Their Precious Cable Modem

February 26, 2008 at 1:04 pm · Filed under Broadband, cable, customer service ·Tagged , , ,

Another tale of a large corporation that is so disorganized that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, so the consumer is the one who gets penalized.  From The Consumerist:

Comcast told reader Marcus that he could just take his cable modem with him when he moved from the Philadelphia suburbs into the city. Then he checked his credit report and found out that he was a cable modem thief.

Read the article here:
Anger: Comcast Dings Your Credit Report For Moving With Their Precious Cable Modem

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Former GTE North customers: No FiOS for you! (Except in Indiana)

February 5, 2008 at 8:59 pm · Filed under Broadband, Verizon ·Tagged , ,

I do not know exactly what GTE North’s footprint used to be prior to its acquisition by Verizon, but if my (admittedly shaky) memory serves me correct, it was the same five states served by Ameritech, plus Kentucky (and possibly portions of western Pennsylvania?).  In any case, we know they have over a quarter of a million customers in Michigan, and I believe they have significant holdings in the other states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky at least – I don’t recall seeing a lot of GTE in Wisconsin so I’m not as sure about GTE’s former presence there offhand). All of this went to Verizon post-merger, and all of it except for Indiana seems to be getting excluded from Verizon’s FiOS deployments.

Today, a post on Verizon’s policy blog, “FiOS Facts: Wrapping Up 2007″, states,

Where is Verizon Deploying its Fiber Network?

  • At the end of December 2007, Verizon had passed about 9.3 million homes and businesses  in parts of 17 states.
  • Verizon expects to continue passing some 3 million premises annually through 2010, when the company expects to have passed about 18 million homes, or over half the homes it serves.
  • Verizon has leveraged the versatility and capacity of the fiber network by introducing in 2007 industry-leading synchronous downstream and upstream data rates of up to 20 Megabits per second (Mbps), helping customers engage innovative broadband and video online activities and transfer large files more quickly and efficiently.
  • Verizon is investing nearly $23 billion in the FiOS project, between 2004 and 2010.  Over the same period, the company expects to save $5 billion because of the avoided maintenance costs and other savings associated with the new fiber plant.

But ominously, in the sidebar to the above text, there is a list of states:

California

New York

Connecticut

Oregon

Delaware

Pennsylvania

Florida

Rhode Island

Indiana

South Carolina

Maryland

Texas

Massachusetts

Virginia

New Hampshire

Washington

New Jersey

I don’t know if these are supposed to be the states where FiOS has been deployed, or will be deployed during the above-mentioned expansion. Either way, it certainly appears as though the former GTE North states, other than Indiana, are getting the short end of the fiber, so to speak.

There is a good part to not being the very first to get new technology – by the time it gets to you, it’s been field-tested and you’re not as likely to be stuck with obsolete equipment. But on the other hand, it kind of sucks to be the last to get it, and it sucks even worse if the company has no plans to ever deploy it.

Verizon is in the process of trying to sell all of its exchanges in three northeast states, and many people there are upset about that because they know they will likely not get anything like FiOS from the company that wants to buy those exchanges.  A few years ago there were rumors that Verizon was thinking about unloading some or all of their Michigan exchanges, but couldn’t find a buyer willing to pay what they thought those exchanges were worth. Their failure to include most of the former GTE North area in their FiOS deployment list makes me wonder if they are still wanting to exit the area, particularly given that there’s a lot of “outside plant” that is probably left over from the GTE era that is in need of replacement.  Rather than stringing new (and expensive) copper, it would seem to make a lot more sense to install FiOS.

I wish Verizon would come clean with their intentions for this area. Why are we in the former GTE North areas dead last (for the most part) to get FiOS?

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Computerworld: Opinion: Keeping a lid on broadband

January 28, 2008 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Broadband, Regulation, Telephone ·Tagged , , , ,

Computerworld correspondent Robert L. Mitchell has come out with a scathing critique of communications deregulation in the United States:

Will you get the bandwidth you need? If your business is in Europe or Asia, the answer is yes. The average advertised bandwidth in Japan is just under 1Gbit/sec. In Korea and France, it’s over 40Mbit/sec. That sort of capacity will drive innovations that U.S. businesses can’t even envision yet.

But in the U.S., except in a few metro areas, most people are lucky if they can get 6Mbit/sec. — and in rural areas, most users can’t even get that.

It’s a disgrace born of political failure. In 1996, the government agreed to free the Baby Bells to compete in the long-distance market if they met certain conditions. Among other things, the Bells promised to share their facilities with other providers and pledged to run fiber to every home. “Almost every one of them reneged on their promises,” says David Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group.

Full story here:
Opinion: Keeping a lid on broadband

I am in agreement with most of the article, but here is where I think Mr. Mitchell jumps the shark:

Furthermore, all ISPs should be required to contribute to the Universal Service Fund just as land-line carriers do. Unless those subsidies are replenished, high-speed Internet access will never be fully extended to the 20% of businesses and homes in rural areas left behind by the market.

Mr. Mitchell, you couldn’t be more wrong on that point.  The USF is a government handout to telecommunications companies, many of which are large, multi-state, old-fashioned wireline companies. It is a form of reverse socialism that takes from all ratepayers to subsidize inefficiently operated telephone companies. Some of these companies would be quite profitable (and some already are), with or without subsidies, if they were operated in an efficient manner. There was a big flap a while back where USF funds were being used to buy thousands of dollars worth of outdated computer equipment for school systems, much of which was warehoused and never used by students. The USF is just wrong on so many levels, and almost everyone who understands anything about it would like to see it gone (except for those who receive the funds, and the organizations that shill on their behalf), but it stays because it has the backing of powerful congresscritters like Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who of course receives campaign contributions from telecom companies, and organizations representing the phone companies that feed at the USF trough.

Perhaps what Mr. Mitchell intended to say was that we need to subsidize deployment of broadband in the rural areas. I would not have as much of a problem with that if the people owned what the people are forced to pay for.  You can make an analogy to a city street – we pay taxes to create it and for its upkeep, but it then belongs to the city, which in theory is representative of all residents of the city.  The USF is a hidden “tax” of sorts, but instead of going to a unit of government to build telecommunications facilities that we can all use, it goes to private corporations.  I do realize that there are some pointy-headed think-tank types that advocate the position that everything should be privatized, but I don’t buy it anymore.

Big corporations just take and take and take some more, then charge you extra for talking to a live customer service representative.  If you have a gripe with the city – if the road in front of your home is full of potholes, for example – you can go to a city council meeting and complain, and if enough of your neighbors do the same, chances are that the city officials will feel obligated to do something.  If your broadband service sucks, or if you can’t get it at all, you wind up complaining to a faceless corporation that would just as soon you just shut up and pay the bill (if you don’t currently have service, that bill might be several thousand dollars to extend service to your home, regardless of any subsidies they may have already received).

In any case, if we are going to have broadband subsidies, and our government is hell-bent on taking from the poor (the customers) and giving to the rich corporations, at least please find a new way to do it, and don’t rely on the broken and ridiculous USF model.   Instead, tie funds to performance – before taking any money from the fund, you must make a commitment to serving new areas that don’t presently have service, and by that I mean you actually submit maps (or maybe a list of municipalities that you intend to serve in totality) showing the areas to be served, along with a firm completion date.  Miss the date and you are fined for each day that customers are unable to obtain service beyond the deadline (and you must publish that deadline in a notice in local papers, so customers and local officials in the area know about the deadline). Miss the deadline by more than six months and criminal penalties kick in.  This isn’t China, so we don’t take telecom executives out and shoot them, but when they take ratepayer money under false pretenses and then don’t deliver what they promised, there ought to be severe penalties, and I don’t just mean that they lose their Christmas bonus.

Other than that one paragraph, Mr. Mitchell couldn’t be more correct in his assessment of the situation.  The reason we are having problems in the United States is because we have given large corporations free rein, allowing them to take money under false pretenses, lie to regulators and government officials, and then when they don’t deliver on their promises we do nothing at all about it. We have government officials listening to industry-funded experts who assure them that all will be well if the communications companies can just raise their rates and get more subsidies, and by the way, that municipalities and other public entities should never be allowed to compete with them.  So these corporations just take and take and take some more, and are never called on the carpet to explain why they haven’t delivered on their previous broken promises.

It is sometimes said that to do what you’ve always done, and yet expect different results than what you’ve always achieved, is a sign of lunacy.  If so, our government officials much be a bunch of lunatics, because they keep allowing the phone companies to do what they’ve always done, and yet somehow expect that the phone and cable companies are going to get this sudden urge to make our broadband offerings comparable with those in other parts of the world. I predict that the more money that companies receive from the Universal Service Fund, the less likely we are to be the world leader in broadband service ten years from now.

(By the way, I do recognize that there are a few, very small telephone companies that probably could not exist without the USF.  The problem is that these few small deserving companies have to share the pot with large multi-state companies that make boatloads of money from they other operations, such as their cellular service.  USF disbursement should only go to companies that genuinely need them to survive, even though they are doing all they can to tighten their belts and operate efficiently, and even then the customers of such companies might sometimes be better served if the company sold their operations to another, more efficiently-operated company.  I’ve seen small companies that give their customers a lot even while charging very low rate, and then other companies that seem intent on gouging their customers for every penny they can get, and if it were up to me, those in the latter category wouldn’t get a dime from the USF).

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I want to move to Madison, Wisconsin

January 22, 2008 at 6:45 pm · Filed under AT&T, Broadband, DSL, Telephone, VoIP ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Well, maybe not really… in some ways Wisconsin is a strange state  – I will never forget driving through Wisconsin several years ago and seeing dead deer lying alongside the freeway, which had been spray-painted with bright fluorescent orange paint- yes, you read that right, they spray-painted the dead deer, and we saw quite a few of them that had been marked in such a manner.  I somehow doubt it was rural gangs marking their turf, so I don’t understand who was spray-painting the deer, or why – very strange!

But still, I have to compare the announcement that AT&T made today…

Detroit is the first area in the nation where AT&T U-verse Voice is available. AT&T U-verse Voice is a digital voice service delivered over the AT&T U-verse Internet Protocol network. The company began a controlled launch in late December and has since expanded the service’s availability. The service will continue to expand to more local customers and additional markets in 2008.

…..

U-verse TV customers can choose from two flexible U-verse Voice calling plans:

  • U-verse Voice Unlimited, which includes unlimited local and nationwide minutes to any location in the U.S., Canada or U.S. territories for $40 a month.
  • U-verse Voice 1000, which includes 1,000 Call Anywhere minutes to any location in the U.S. or U.S. territories for $30 a month.

(The above excerpted from: AT&T U-verse Voice Launches in Detroit – VoIP Monitor)

… to this announcement made by TDS Telecom:

Today, TDS turns on the WiMAX signal in Madison, Wis.  TDS is the first communications provider in Wisconsin to offer true WiMAX — a revolutionary, wireless high-speed Internet and phone service. The new WiMAX technology will provide digital phone and broadband service to nearly 65,000 customers in the Madison area during the first stages of the product rollout.

…..

Depending on the service a customer selects, TDS will be delivering up to 6Mb Internet speeds in combination with the fastest upload speed available. “TDS WiMAX is the fastest upload speed currently available for consumers at 6Mb / 3Mb in Madison,” adds Cvengros. Business customers will have access to near symmetric download and upload speeds.

(The above is from a TDS Telecom press release – note that it’s in .doc file format)

And BroadbandReports.com fills in some specifics about the TDS offering:

….. TDS is offering three residential tiers: 2Mbps/1Mbps for $45, 4Mbps/2Mbps for $50, and 6Mbps/3Mbps for $55.

…..

Customers can add VoIP service with 30 minutes of long distance per month and unlimited local calls for another $5. VoIP with 300 minutes of long distance is another $10 on top of the price of just Internet, and VoIP with unlimited long distance is another $15 on top of the price of Internet.

Now let’s see…  AT&T is charging $40 per month for their VoIP (excuse me, digital voice service) and that’s only if you bundle with another AT&T service – BroadbandReports.com notes that…

While the company keeps talking about how lame forced bundling is, the press release notes that U-Verse Voice is available only with purchase of AT&T U-verse TV service or AT&T Yahoo! broadband (depending on the market). The new U-Verse Voice website lists the two packages as $5 more expensive than listed above, due to the various fine print bundling discounts — which are broken down in more detail here.

I guess it depends on your needs, but note that under the TDS plan you can get 6Mbps/3Mbps broadband plus VoIP with unlimited long distance for $70 per month.  I’m not sure what AT&T Yahoo! broadband costs these days (nor what kind of speed you get), but I’d be willing to bet that an equivalent bundle from AT&T would be significantly more expensive.

What strikes me as stupid about AT&T’s pricing is that VoIP is a competitive service.  If I lived in Madison, there would (in most cases) be no good reason I should go to an independent VoIP provider for my phone service, assuming of course that the TDS service is reliable (it should be – TDS is, after all, a telephone company).  I’d be hard pressed to find reliable unlimited VoIP service from an independent provider for 15 bucks a month. It seems to me that TDS has read the tea leaves correctly, and realizes that from now on the money will be made from offering broadband service, but that voice is now a commodity.

Whereas, AT&T just can’t seem to stop themselves from thinking like an old dinosaur of a phone company.  In today’s environment, $40 is an absolutely ridiculous price to charge for an unlimited VoIP (or “digital voice” or whatever you want to call it) offering, considering that people can buy it from an independent provider for half that price and probably get more features, plus they’ll be able to have a number in whichever ratecenter they want (out of a large selection), instead of being bound by the imaginary and generally arbitrary geographic lines drawn by the telephone company.

(No, I don’t know if TDS would allow their Madison customers to have, for example, a Milwaukee telephone number.  If not, that might be a valid reason for some customers to obtain service from another provider.)

I do have one question about the TDS offering, however.  The ILEC (wireline telephone company) in Madison is AT&T, so TDS is a competitor there.  However, TDS is the ILEC in a number of rural areas in both Wisconsin and Michigan (and in many other states).  I wonder if they have any plans to offer WiMAX in their own areas – on the one hand, it would make a great deal of sense to do so, since it would dramatically cut the cost of their “outside plant”, but on the other hand, making that move would probably cut into their federal subsidies from the much-hated (except by those who feed at that trough) Universal Service Fund. I hope that if the Madison system proves viable, TDS will do the right thing and deploy the system throughout both its own footprint, and in the areas where it is a CLEC (and those areas combined would include a large portion of lower Michigan).

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Talk about AT&T’s internet filtering plans is not an acceptable topic on AT&T-sponsored talk show

January 21, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under AT&T, Broadband, DSL ·Tagged , , , ,

They stopped the taping when the audience indicated they were not in favor of AT&T’s filtering plans! The story is here:

Talking About AT&T’s Internet Filtering on AT&T’s The Hugh Thompson Show

And here’s the YouTube-posted video:

I found this via a news item on BroadbandReports.com.

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Petoskey News-Review: Making connections: Some eye regional cooperative to expand broadband availability

January 18, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Broadband, Wireless ·Tagged , , ,

Those of us who live in places where there are two or more choices for broadband access may sometimes forget that there are large areas of Michigan where no broadband access is available.  The people who live in those areas, however, are getting tired of waiting for the phone and cable companies to hook them up, and are exploring other options:

This week, many potential stakeholders met in Gaylord to consider a new regional approach to broadband expansion.

Internet providers, public officials and economic development and information technology professionals were among the 100 or so people gathering at the University Center Wednesday.

Three dozen or so volunteered to be part of an exploratory committee, which will consider possibilities for forming a regional broadband cooperative.

Counties tentatively proposed for the cooperative’s service area include Emmet, Charlevoix, Cheboygan, Otsego, Antrim, Kalkaska, Crawford, Oscoda, Alcona, Alpena, Montmorency and Presque Isle.

“A cooperative is a business that’s owned and controlled by the people who use its services,” U.S. Department of Agriculture representative Traci Smith said. “This cooperative allows them to purchase their supplies at a lower rate than they would otherwise.”

Read the full story here:
Petoskey News-Review – News – Making connections: Some eye regional cooperative to expand broadband availability

I hope this works out – if the phone and cable companies are dragging their feet in bringing high speed connectivity to certain areas, then other options are needed.  Actually, this is true even in areas where you wouldn’t think it should be a problem to get broadband.  I’m aware of a situation in northern Muskegon County where some folks want broadband but can’t get it – they are too far from the Verizon central office, and they are on a side road that’s between two main roads, each of which is served by a different cable company, and neither of those companies has run cable down their road.  A strange situation but frustrating for them, and I’ve heard other stories of people who are just beyond reach of the cable lines, and the cable companies refuse to extend their lines (or won’t do it unless the customer pays a fee roughly equal to the local branch manager’s annual salary).

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The slippery slope of metered pricing for broadband

January 17, 2008 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Broadband, Regulation, cable, consumer ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

There have been a few reports surfacing this week that Time-Warner intends to try a metered pricing scheme for broadband service  down in Beaumont, Texas. I’m not sure why they picked that town but I’ll bet there’s not a lot of broadband competition there. Or perhaps Time Warner has friends on the Beaumont town council. Whatever…

In any case, The Consumerist points out that metered bandwidth to consumers might lead to unintended consequences.  They point out that,

Although tiered pricing is often touted as a means to resolve fears of a “bandwith crunch” on the Internet, the model may also serve to constrain one of the Internet’s biggest sources of innovation — user-created content, particularly home videos and movies uploaded on sites such as YouTube and Joost.

Bandwith-heavy services such as video hosting and sharing may never have gotten off the ground if users were concerned about exceeding caps on their bandwith, and if tiered services are adopted by cable and telecom providers on a nationwide basis, it may lead to slower usage of file-sharing services and video-sharing sites.

While that might mean fewer videos of pets performing silly tricks, it could also severely restrict the many ways Internet users communicate and share information via the Web.

Full Consumerist article here:
Time Warner To Test Metered Pricing For Broadband

I want you to stop and think for a moment – how much of the content that you download, view, or listen to via the Internet is NOT produced by large corporations with deep pockets? How much of that content is available to you for free, just because someone had something to say or to share with the world? That is the content that is endangered by metered pricing.

Sure, maybe the world could get by with fewer funny pictures of cats, or videos of people making fountains by dropping mints into cola, or even user-generated articles like this blog.  Maybe you can do without VoIP – after all, your cable company would be happy to sell you their version of phone service, and apparently quite a few of you see nothing wrong with getting phone service from your cable company, even if they do charge you twice the price of an independent VoIP provider. But mark my words, metered bandwidth will make us all poorer.

Let me tell you what I believe is the phone and cable company wet dream for Internet service:  You pay them a monthly fee for the service – the “base rate” just for providing a wire or fiber to your home – and then you pay additional charges for the traffic you use.  Chances are, the charging mechanism will be so obscure that you will not have any way to verify whether you are being charged accurately, or whether they are just pulling some usage number out of their … um, hat. But also, the people who provide the content you view or download will have to pay, or their packets will never reach you.  so you will pay once to have the service, again to have the packets get to you, and the people you serve up the content will also pay.  Oh, and maybe they slip in a few “unfees” while they are at it. Meanwhile phone and cable company executives will get multi-million dollar salaries and “golden parachutes” that will keep their great-great-grandchildren from ever having to work if they don’t want to.

Now I hear you cry, “but that’s not what Time-Warner is proposing at all!”  Well, of course it isn’t. They aren’t that stupid, and maybe not even that greedy – yet.  But the problem is, any type of enforced metered billing sets up the “slippery slope.”  Large corporations, and even governments, have learned well how to play the game.  You start out charging a small amount, and maybe to only the “top 5%” or so.  Then every year or two, you increase the amount charged, while also increasing the percentage of people who have to pay it.  The beauty of the system is that eventually it creates an “us against them” situation – by the time the top 30% or 40% are having to pay, they are looking down their noses at the “bums” who aren’t paying, and complaining that those folks are getting a “free ride.” If your great-grandfathers are still living, ask how many of them had to pay income tax during the early years, and what percentage of income was actually taxed, and compare it to what people are paying today.

As with taxes, once a usage charge is implemented, it NEVER goes away (unless, perhaps, it falls flat in the initial trials). And lest you think taxes and metered billing are unrelated, consider that for over a century the government had a usage-based tax on phone service. It certainly isn’t inconceivable that as people have to give up more of their income for broadband service, the government will see that as too good an opportunity to pass up, and will impose a “luxury tax” of sorts on broadband service – again, I don’t expect this will happen in the immediate future, but who knows how the politicians will be thinking about the Internet in ten or twenty years, especially if it turns into a medium that’s primarily commercial in nature (with much of the free content gone the way of the dodo bird).

Now, apparently some folks just don’t understand this.  Even David S. Isenberg is talking as though this is a good thing, because in his mind it means that broadband providers will be open and transparent about managing congestion.  He writes:

If you must manage congestion, then doing it explicitly is, at very least, honest. It is better than doing it (a) covertly or (b) indirectly, by injecting artificial interrupts and (c) denying you’re doing it — like Comcast currently does.

But that’s assuming that if they can meter bandwidth to end users, they won’t engage in any of the covert or indirect methods of limiting broadband.  However, that would logically only be true if they are making significant sums by allowing such content to flow without interference.  If only the top 5% of users are going to see extra amounts on their bills because of this scheme, that logically means that 95% will be free to continue doing what they’ve always done, without paying any more.  Do you see the problem?  If there really is a bandwidth shortage – which, by the way, there shouldn’t be if companies would properly engineer their networks – then there will be a strong temptation to apply the metered billing to a larger percentage of the customer base, or to use surreptitious methods to limit the bandwidth used by those customers not paying on a metered basis.

Furthermore, metering bandwidth is not something that you can apply the “lesser of evils” test to, because the problem is that it will grow like a cancer if not nipped in the bud – just because it may be the lesser of evils today doesn’t mean it won’t be a much greater evil a few years down the road. And beyond that, it opens a myraid of new opportunities for customers to be ripped off by providers.  The moment you meter anything, you then have the expense of metering (which, of course, gets passed on to the customer) AND you have the problem of making sure that the metering is accurate.  That implies that you either need a government bureaucracy to investigate claims of inaccurate metering, or you simply get into a “wild west” situation where companies can charge hapless consumers whatever they want, and if the customer suspects that the billing is inaccurate, tough luck – there’s no real recourse (particularly in areas where there’s little or no competition).

When I was a child, growing up in the 1950’s, kids didn’t just pick up the phone and call their grandparents (if there was any distance between the two), because a long distance call was a significant expense back then.  In our family, about the only time long distance calls were ever made was on Christmas or someone’s birthday (and my parents would still try to end the call within three minutes, even after the phone companies dropped the three-minute minimum).  I’m sure we will never go back to that, but do we want a situation where parents have to think twice about sending videos of their kids to the grandparents, or about letting the kids conduct long video calls over the Internet? That may seem ridiculous now, but maybe a new technology will be invented that will be too expensive to use over limited bandwidth (think some sort of 3-D presence – the technology exists now, but it’s too bandwidth-intensive for all but dedicated, very-high-speed connections). Do we want that technology to be metered, so that the new applications never see widespread usage, or in the alternative, shouldn’t we expect broadband providers to increase their available bandwidth, in order to keep up with the new technologies?

And as a final thought, why would bandwidth providers have any incentive to increase bandwidth to end users if that means that fewer people would have to pay for excess usage?  Have you noticed that traditional wireline phone companies still only give you minimal bandwidth of 0-3000 Hz or thereabouts, even though audio circuits capable of reproducing sound to the limits of human hearing (and beyond) have been available for decades now? If phone service had been flat-rate across the country AND there had been multiple phone companies that customers could have chosen from, my bet is that we’d have telephones capable of at least FM radio quality speech by now. The phone companies had the monopoly, they charged based on usage, and they gave consumers as little as possible in the way of innovation, except when they thought they could make a few extra bucks a month.  Is that the model you want to emulate for broadband service?

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XO Communications Announces Bandwidth Pricing for Phone Calls

January 15, 2008 at 6:36 pm · Filed under Broadband, Telephone, VoIP ·Tagged , , , ,

Tom Keating is reporting the following in his VoIP & Gadgets Blog:

XO Communications tomorrow will announce bandwidth-based pricing offering for converged IP services. Instead of paying per minute for voice calls like both traditional TDM and even current VoIP offerings do, XO will be completely bandwidth-based pricing.

Full story here:
XO Communications Announces Bandwidth Pricing for Phone Calls

This could be big, or it could be ahead of its time – in any case, charging for phone calls on a minutes-of-use basis makes no sense, unless you are a traditional phone company with a captive customer base and use that method to rip people off (I have posted paragraphs in the past about why per-minute pricing is inherently unfair to customers, beginning with the fact that customers cannot see, nor verify the accuracy of, the “meters” used to determine when charging takes place, and therefore have no way to know if they are being billed only for time actually used. I’ve heard stories of customers being double-billed for calls, or billed when getting busy signals, etc. – and then there is the fact that most telephone company expenses are unrelated to minutes of use, so it’s basically an arbitrary billing method).

I expect that, barring the phone companies retaining a lot more clout than I think they will (it’s hard for a dying industry to retain its power), per-minute pricing will all but disappear within a decade or so (it may still persist in some backward nations, or in a few situations where very limited bandwidth is available, but it won’t be the norm). Bandwidth-based pricing makes a lot more sense, encourages a more competitive market, and more easily permits customers to verify whether they are actually getting the service they are paying for. Let’s see if this is the beginning of the end of the old wireline telco pricing model.

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DSLreports.com: Is Connected Nation A Phone Industry Sham? – Looking more closely at the oft-praised Connect Kentucky model…

January 11, 2008 at 4:04 pm · Filed under Broadband, DSL, Legislation, Regulation, Telephone ·Tagged , , , , ,

From DSLreports.com comes a heads-up on another organization that may not be what it seems:

You may have heard of “Connect Kentucky,” a plan developed to bring broadband services to rural areas of Kentucky that’s being revamped as a national broadband cure-all under the name Connected Nation. It has the support of a number of key politicians (including President Bush and Hillary Clinton) and major incumbents like Verizon, whose policy men insist that the plan revitalized Kentucky and would do the same nationally.

Art Brodsky over at Public Knowledge paints a very different picture of the plan, noting that the Connect model was cooked up by aides to former Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher and representatives from BellSouth. Why are the phone companies so excited about the Connect model? Brodsky claims, and we’ve seen this claim supported by local ISP employees in the region, that the plan is little more than a political ploy aimed at lining incumbent pockets, killing regulation, and preventing any real work in the mapping of the nation’s broadband penetration.

Full story here:
Is Connected Nation A Phone Industry Sham? – Looking more closely at the oft-praised Connect Kentucky model… – dslreports.com

I’m getting to the point that I’m suspicious of just about any organization that claims to represent (or in some way benefit) consumers – even when such groups start out with good people and the best of intentions, that’s no guarantee that they won’t be highly influenced, or even taken over, by the very corporation(s) they originally organized to oppose (or that corporation’s PR firm, or their sock puppets, etc.).  Nowadays, you not only have to look at who founded the group and for what purpose, but also who leads them now, and who supplies the bulk of their support – and sometimes it’s like peeling an onion, if you stop at the first layer you don’t see who’s really pulling the strings behind the scene.  Sorry if this sounds like conspiracy theory, but there have been too many documented cases where organizations have taken a position favored by a major corporation, and then it’s been discovered that the same corporation is in some way funneling money into the organization (in a simpler context, there’s a five letter word starting with the letter “b” that might be used to describe such activity – can you guess what it is? – and since that might be illegal in certain circumstances, they money is often sent via one or more third parties, such as public relations firms).

There are days I think we need some sort of “truth in advertising” laws that require disclosure of all affiliations and funding sources for organizations, especially non-profits – and that such disclosures must be included in any printed or published documents advocating legislation, policy changes, or political action of any kind. Of course, if such a law were ever proposed, every lobbyist in Washington would  doubtless oppose it. I wonder if we will ever again be able to elect honorable men and women as government officials, that will have the backbone to take on these lobbyists and gut their power, so that they can once again represent all their constituents fairly, without feeling the need to kowtow to the large corporations.

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Why do companies hire incompetent and uncaring installers?

December 31, 2007 at 6:28 pm · Filed under Broadband, Telephone, cable, customer service, satellite television ·Tagged , , , , ,

So I’m reading this article on The Consumerist site (”DirecTV Contractor: No, We Won’t Fix Our Botched Installation“) and in particular, the comments left by readers of the article, several of which come to the same conclusion that I came to a long time ago:  There is no way any installer is going to care about your home the way you do.  They don’t have to live in your home for many years, but you do. They don’t have to put up with a crappy looking install, or leaks or water damage to your home, or insects or rodents finding a new route up from your crawl space or basement – you do.

Still, you’d think that these companies would try to get people that at least pretend to care.  For many years, telephone company installers were very careful about how they did an install – they were well trained and it was very seldom you’d see a telephone installation that wasn’t at the very least neat – the wires might be exposed, but they be in straight lines, and where possible they’d be run through closets or cabinets or attics to keep them out of sight.

Case in point: In the house I grew up in, the phone wiring ran around the outside of the house to a phone that hung on the wall, in what was then called a dining room, but by today’s standards would have been a large closet.  It had been there a while, and was the old stuff that had three individualy insulated wires stapled together.  My dad had talked about getting new siding on the home (as it turned out, we never did) but we drilled a hole from the attic into the wall and pulled a wire down to the phone to use as a fish wire, then called Michigan Bell to come out and run their wire through the attic and down inside the wall (this, by the way,was when they would still do that sort of thing for free!). Now, any normal person might have simply run the telephone wire from rafter to rafter and stapled it down, but not the telephone company – they actually ran the wire around each rafter and stapled it to the rafters and the underside of the roof board.  This meant it used about twice as much wire, but there was no way anything would catch on the wire and break it unless you went out of your way to jam something into it.  And the job was neat and straight.  Bear in mind, this was in a small, unfinished attic that we mainly used for storing boxes of Christmas decorations.

But nowadays you have broadband, cable and satellite installers that just don’t seem to care. In some cases the results can be tragic, in other cases just costly and/or inconvenient. It’s as though some companies just hire anyone, give them minimal training, and don’t even think to instruct them in basic courtesy.  If I ran one of these companies, I’d hang signs in employee areas saying things like, “Please respect your customer – treat their home as if you had to live there for the next quarter century” (but then again, that may not work if you have an installer that couldn’t care less about his own home).

One thing that constantly amazes me about satellite installs is that installers put the dish on the roof.  In any place that gets snow, that is an absolutely idiotic thing to do. Let me say this again: If the installation company wants to mount a satellite dish on your roof, they are a bunch of idiots (with one exception)! Now why would I say that?  Because, unlike terrestrial television signals, you do NOT get any appreciable signal gain by mounting a satellite dish high off the ground.  I have seen satellite dishes mounted at ground level that work just fine, at least until they get a pile of snow in front of them. There is only one good reason to mount a dish on a roof, and that’s where you need the additional height to get a clear signal over the top of trees in a neighbor’s yard (in which case you may simply be buying time until the trees get larger), or to clear some other obstruction such as an adjacent tall building.  It’s very rare that the additional height actually makes a difference, but it’s not totally unheard of, particularly when a neighbor’s trees are involved.

At the very least, dishes should be mounted under the eaves in a location where snow or ice will not slide down the roof onto them, if such a location is available.  For a great many people, perhaps even a majority, the ideal mounting option for a satellite dish is on a metal pole stuck into the ground, a few feet away from the side of the house (or further away if necessary to get a clear signal), where the dish is about five to six feet above ground level. This is high enough that the signal won’t be interrupted by people or animals walking nearby, but low enough that should snow accumulate in the dish, it can be easily brushed off with a broom. Who wants to climb up onto a roof to brush snow off of a dish?

But installers hate putting a dish on a metal pole because they have to make two trips:  The first is to dig the hole, insert the metal pole, insert a piece of plastic pipe or tubing so you can run the cable out through the concrete and keep it underground (to avoid damage from lawn mowers, etc.), mix and pour three or four bags of concrete, level the metal pole in the concrete, and then keep the pole perfectly level while the concrete sets. You may note that I keep saying metal pole.  You can buy a 10 foot long galvanized steel pipe at most home improvement stores that works great for the purpose.  But some homeowners have tried using a treated wood pole – that’s a big mistake, because even though the pole won’t rot, it will warp and twist, and soon your signal disappears. On the second trip (after the concrete dries), the installer then has to install and aim the dish.  Obviously it’s a lot faster and easier to just attach the dish to the roof or the eaves, and get it all done in one trip, and what do they care if it causes a leak or rots the wood?

Now you may be thinking that this is a reason to just get cable, but cable installers aren’t much better.  They may not drill holes in your roof, but when drilling down through the floor they tend to drill holes four to six inches away from the wall instead of right next to it, and often they have no idea what’s below where they are drilling.  It’s not uncommon for them to take out telephone wiring or (more rarely) electrical wiring, or to hit a water or sewer pipe with their drills.  And they sure don’t seem to care about appearance sometimes – it’s not as though they make any effort to conceal that big, black wire, even when they could easily do so. As an example, drive around any manufactured housing development (a.k.a. mobile home park) and you will see cable wires running along the side of the home, when there is no reason those wires could not have gone through the floor and underneath the home – except that the installer would have had to pop off a couple pieces of skirting and used some fish tape to do it right.

The moral of this story is, if you value your home and you are the least bit handy, do your own installations. If necessary, have the dish installation company come out and show you the best location for a dish in your yard, and have them leave the dish with you.  Buy the pole and the concrete and set the pole yourself (be sure to keep it level!).  If you don’t feel you are handy enough to do this, then shadow the installer and if he is about to do anything you don’t like, stop him! You can try to keep it friendly (suggestion: try to get him to tell you stories about the poor installations he’s encountered on his job that have been done by other installers; that may have the effect of encouraging him to do better than they did) but in the end, remember that you will be living in the home and if he causes roof leaks, or leaves holes where the elements can penetrate or insects or rodents can enter, you will be living with the result – and you may not find the damage until the statue of limitations is long past, so you’ll be the one that has to pay for the repairs. If you rent, the landlord may take the damage off of your security deposit (particularly if you never gave prior notification that the install was taking place).

As an aside, I just love the television commercials where the cable companies try to claim that they are more reliable than the satellite companies – the fact is, if the service is installed properly you will have very little trouble with satellite TV (you may lose signal for five or ten minutes during a torrential rain, but even that can be pretty much avoided if you use a slightly larger dish). On the other hand, what cable television subscriber would tell you that their cable service never goes out (or stays out for five to ten minutes at most when it does go out)? Snow accumulation in dishes isn’t as big a problem as you might think, but if you get a really sticky snow it can accumulate on the dish and potentially drop the signal below a usable level, which is a good reason to keep the dish low enough to the ground that a swipe or two with a broom resolves that problem.

Let’s hope that in 2008 the telephone, cable, and satellite companies rediscover the meaning of good customer service – which means, in part, treating every customer’s home as if the president or CEO of the company lived there!

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Consumerist: Bad Install: Verizon Loses Your Order, Tries To Install FiOS Without Permission, And Disconnects Your Phone

December 21, 2007 at 6:16 pm · Filed under Blog, Broadband, Verizon, consumer, customer service ·Tagged , , , , ,

From time to time I wonder why Verizon hasn’t yet made any significant deployment of FiOS in Michigan (actually not any at all that I’m aware of).  But maybe it’s a blessing in disguise – apparently getting FiOS, even in a state where it’s available, can turn into a real nightmare.  Take the case of this guy, as reported in The Consumerist:

It has now been 72 hours since Verizon took control of reader Matt’s phone, according to his new website www.verizon-fios-sucks.com. He originally tried to order FiOS way back in November, but when no one called to schedule an installation, he was told that his order didn’t exist and would need to reorder.

Annoyed, he declined. Since that conversation, Verizon has been systematically proceeding with his conversion to FiOS without his permission.

And it gets worse – they actually took his phone number (which had been ported to Vonage) and now it appears neither Vonage nor Verizon can get it back for him (at least they have not been able to do so in the last four days).  Read the full story here:

Bad Install: Verizon Loses Your Order, Tries To Install FiOS Without Permission, And Disconnects Your Phone

He’s taking this a lot easier than I would – he’s created a blog to post about his experiences, but I see no indication there that he has contacted either his state’s utility regulator, nor the Federal Communications Commission.  I would have at least filled out the complaint form on the FCC website if my number had not been restored within 24 hours, and by the second day I’d have been calling my state regulator and/or the FCC.

This, to me, is just another example of how the wireline phone companies don’t get it.  There is no excuse for this type of shoddy “customer service.”  Unfortunately, in far too many places, your choices for broadband are limited to a phone company with lousy customer service, or a cable company with lousy customer service.  I don’t know why the electric companies don’t run their own fiber cables – after all, they own the poles in most areas – and set up their own broadband offering (forget trying to put broadband on the power lines, just run a fiber underneath!).  Or they could set up a wireless mesh network with repeaters every few poles. Either way, it would be a welcome alternative to what passes for customer service at many of the large phone and cable companies – most electric companies still seem to care about giving decent customer service (although I suppose that would change if they ever start merging into huge conglomerates, as has happened in the telecom industry).

Point is, we badly need more competition in the broadband industry!

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Verizon now offering high-speed symmetrical FiOS – but NOT in Michigan

November 20, 2007 at 3:02 pm · Filed under Broadband, Telephone, Verizon ·Tagged , , ,

From a Verizon press release:

Starting today, Verizon is offering its high-speed symmetrical FiOS Internet services to consumers in 16 states served by its advanced, all-fiber-optic network. The symmetrical services make possible equally fast downstream and upstream connections of up to 15 megabits per second (Mbps) or up to 20 Mbps depending on the state where the service is sold.

Full press release:
Verizon Continues to Dramatically Raise Broadband Upload Speeds in FiOS Internet Service Areas

Michigan is not one of those 16 states.

So here’s my question, why is Verizon totally ignoring Michigan when it comes to FiOS deployment?  Granted that much of their Michigan territory is rural areas, but they also serve some fairly populated areas (some Lansing suburbs, Muskegon and surrounding areas, and a few exchanges in the Detroit LATA).  You’d think they’d start offering FiOS, if only to compete with Comcast and Charter.

A few years ago, there was a rumor that Verizon wanted to sell some or all of its Michigan exchanges. GTE got rid of its Upper Peninsula exchanges before it merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon, but Verizon still serves large tracts of sparsely populated area in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. So, their reluctance to begin offering FiOS anywhere in the state seems like a bad omen to me – I can’t help but wonder if they are thinking they’d like to sell their Michigan wireline holdings to another company, should some company make a sufficiently attractive offer.

As almost everyone knows by now,  wireline telephone usage is decreasing.  Young people are not getting wireline phone service, and more and more older people are starting to move to cell phones, VoIP, or cable telephone service (although a non-insignificant number of the folks that try the cable telephony option get disgusted with what passes for customer service at the cable company, and wind up going back to the traditional phone company).  So it may be that Verizon is looking at all that decades-old “outside plant” in rural areas of Michigan and wondering if they could ever make enough money off of FiOS to recover the cost of stringing all new fiber.  Still, it’s not as though Indiana doesn’t have plenty of rural areas, and Verizon has started offering FiOS in a few areas of Indiana.  So, what’s wrong with Michigan, that Verizon hasn’t announced any plans to offer FiOS here?

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No love for Verizon in The Consumerist today

November 13, 2007 at 10:03 pm · Filed under Broadband, DSL, Verizon, Wireless, consumer ·Tagged , , , , , ,

The Consumerist had not one, but two articles about Verizon today. The best one contained an embedded video, in which a guy phoned up Verizon Wireless fifty-six times to ask two basic questions about their rates. Take a guess as to what percentage of the time he received the correct answer, then see how close you came to guessing right.

And in the other article, they note that Verizon has changed their terms of service for DSL customers. Now, they claim, they have the right to disconnect your DSL and offer you FiOS in its place. While many users would be thrilled to death if they could even get FiOS (although, as The Consumerist notes, you might want to keep a working fire extinguisher handy during the install), there are folks that are happy with plain old DSL. That might be particularly true of customers who took advantage of Verizon’s recent promotion that offered a fixed price for life for a very basic tier of DSL service (more commentary on this issue at DSLreports.com).

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I will say that I would not assume that just because a company sticks something in their Terms of Service document, they can automatically make it stick. If that were the case, some company would doubtless try to sneak in something to the effect that once you’ve been signed up for their service for a year, you must give them the contents of your bank account, your home, and your firstborn child. Even if only a few people didn’t bother to read the ToS, a shady company could make out pretty well doing that. But the reason nobody does that is because courts won’t enforce unconscionable contract terms. I don’t know if a “sleeper” provision in a ToS document that could effectively force a customer to upgrade to a more expensive service just because Verizon happens to choose to install the fiber on their street would be considered unconscionable or not, but it would not surprise me if some court somewhere had a real problem with the idea of forcing customers to take the more expensive service, even when there’s no technical reason why Verizon could not keep providing DSL.

Of course, it may be that Verizon has no intention of enforcing this right away, but the day may come when the copper in those old cables is more valuable when sold at the scrapyard than when used to provide phone and DSL service to the one old codger in town that still refuses to upgrade, despite the fact that all his neighbors moved to FiOS (or some other alternative) many years previous. In other words, this provision may simply be there so that when they are finally ready to stop using copper wires altogether, they won’t have few diehard DSL users holding them back. There might be a good reason to think that could be a problem – after all, when the phone companies finally stopped offering party lines, you’d be surprised how many older folks threw a fit because they’d have to pay a buck or two more a month for a private line!

Edit (November 14): DSLReports.com has communicated with a Verizon spokesperson about this issue.

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