Best Broadband

• The Value Of VoIP forbes.com
• Obama Wants To Keep Internet ‘Open and free’ multichannel.com
• 70 Million European, 35 Million North American HSPA Subscribers By 2014 tmcnet.com
• Verizon, Frontier ask FCC to back license transfers reuters.com
• City WiFi Tech Gets New Green Lease on Life wired.com
• Is a Hulu Player coming to PlayStation 3? seattlepi.com
• CenturyTel gets final state approvals to buy Embarq KC Business Journal
• Hackintosher to open US storefront channelregister.co.uk
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The weekend has arrived. Plot, plan, and pontificate in the comment section below.
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In a filing, (pdf) the DOJ Solicitor General on Friday urged the Supreme Court not to hear a case in which the entertainment industry has sued Cablevision for use of a network DVR (or RS-DVR). The network DVR stores video content at the network head end, eliminating the need for a consumer-side set top box entirely. Cablevision tested the idea in 2006 storing 80GB of data for 1,000 trial users on their network. But the company was sued by the entertainment industry, who feared a loss of ad revenue and content control.

The entertainment industry (GE, NBC, CBS, Walt Disney, ABC; and others) saw legal success early on, but Cablevision won a key ruling from a federal appeals court in Philadelphia last summer. The case now heads to the Supreme Court, and a refusal to hear the case would in essence be a victory for Cablevision, who has previously stated their implementation of the service would provide customers with about 160GB of network-side storage for about the same price as current DVR service (around $10 per month).

Traditionally the Supreme Court doesn’t always listen to the DOJ’s Solicitor General, though they have been swayed by input in the past. Consumer advocates were please by the news, Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn “wholeheartedly agreeing” with the DOJ. “Common sense would dictate that a recording is a recording, whether made on a set-top box or in a cable head-end,” says Sohn “We hope the U.S. Supreme Court follows this advice and removes any legal obstacles from the Cablevision service going forward.”

Should the Supreme Court hear the case and side with the entertainment industry, network functionality could be significantly less interesting for consumers, as any compromises with copyright holders could result in annoying changes such as unskippable advertisements.
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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told investors at a Sanford Berstein conference today in New York City that the company was still struggling with the recession and slow housing boom. “We re really not seeing a surging of disconnects,” notes Roberts. “We re just not seeing a surging of orders, he says. While Comcast still had a pretty spectacular first quarter in terms of earnings and subscriber additions, the company says they’re seeing some slowdowns as we move through the second quarter. According to Roberts, “there are just less opportunities to sell new things right now.” On the bright side, new data suggests that Comcast’s effort to improve their customer satisfaction are starting to pay small dividends.
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Speaking publicly on the issue for the first time since Time Warner Cable’s PR disaster, CEO Glenn Britt admitted to attendees of a Sanford Berstein investor conference that efforts to hoist per-byte billing upon unwilling customers didn’t uh, go very well. Time Warner Cable temporarily shelved their metered billing ambitions after consumer backlash, though the company has consistently asserted that the problem wasn’t their low caps and high overages, but “confused” customers who needed “education.”

“Clearly we did not handle the public-relations side of it very well,” Britt admits in a bit of an understatement. “We had a bit of a debacle, to be honest. So we pulled back from that,” says Britt. But it’s been clear that Time Warner Cable plans another go, and Britt told conference attendees “I still think the use-less-pay-less and use-more-pay-more model can work.”

Britt told attendees that tiers sold based on speed has become “deeply embedded in the marketplace to the point where it has become somewhat meaningless.” “We never really had the element of consumption in the picture, which is actually going to be more of an important dimension, I think, over time,” he says.

Despite company claims, consumption-based pricing is aimed at monetizing the growing explosion in video delivery over the Internet, protecting TV revenues, and pleasing investors. “If, at an extreme, you could get all of the programming you get over cable for free on the Internet, over time people will stop buying (TV),” Britt told investors in a bit of candor that wasn’t apparent in the company’s communication with its customers.

That would leave Time Warner Cable as just a dumb-pipe bandwidth provider — and that’s the deepest, darkest fear of any cable or phone company CEO. Carriers are terrified of a future where they just provide high quality cheap bandwidth and other companies make a killing from video, content, and communications services.

When the company suspended the trials, they announced they’d release a usage meter for all customers. Like their DOCSIS 3.0 launches, the monitoring tools have so far been a no show. We expect that Time Warner Cable is working on the presentation of a new metered billing plan this summer that they’ll unveil this fall.
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Apparently a little jealous from all of the press AT&T Is getting for their planned HSPA 7.2 expansion, Verizon has been taking some shots at their rival. “In the first quarter, we drove 250,000 miles and the throughputs we saw on our network were significantly better than AT&T’s,” insisted Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam in comments made at the Barclays Capital Worldwide Wireless and Wireline conference. “We will have double the spectrum depth in most markets, and the physics is that the ceiling for their network will be the floor for our network when it comes to speeds,” McAdam continues. “When we get to 4G, there will be no question who is the fastest. ” Verizon begins testing LTE this year and hopes to have it deployed to thirty markets next year.

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Arris Offers Support To CableOps Applying For Broadband Funds multichannel.com
Cox Picks Bridgewater for its 3G Wireless Service tmcnet.com
Cambridge law professor says DRM pushes users to illegal downloads techdirt.com
Critical Windows vulnerability under attack, Microsoft warns theregister.co.uk
Muni Wi-Fi Firms Find New Life In Smart Grid gigaom.com
Obama Should Scrap Cybersecurity Czar, Analyst Says techweb.com
65% of UK citizens in the dark over digital switchover PCWorld Australia
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Earlier this week, the baby bells won a victory at the FCC after a court upheld a ban on exlcusive cable operator deals with apartment or co-op owners. Trying to ride on that victory’s coattails, Verizon is now pushing the FCC to prevent cable operators who own sports networks (ie Cablevision in NY, Cox in San Diego and Comcast in Philadelphia) from preventing the telco’s access to regional sports programming.

In an ex parte filing (pdf) with the FCC, Verizon cites several instances of cable operators withholding sports programming from satellite and telcoTV operators for competitive effect. MSG HD is probably Verizon’s biggest annoyance as it’s not yet available on Verizon FiOS TV, Dish Network, or AT&T U-verse TV, and Cablevision withholds access to the channel from competitors in order to deter defections. Interestingly, Verizon uses your comments in our Verizon FiOS TV forum to document the impact this problem has on consumers.

The selected posts are heavily redacted, in some cases purging responding posts from cable industry or Verizon employees. While it’s always kind of cute to see a massive telecom operator who has consistently engaged in anti-competitive practices complain about anticompetitive practices, this is an issue that many sports fans are eager to see resolved. Still, it’s not clear if this is a top tier issue for the FCC, which still hasn’t seen Obama’s pick for new chairman appointed to the top Commissioner spot by Congress.
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User uid://1440579 writes in to note that Grande Communications, the San Antonio based overbuilder who might be shopping itself around, has updated their website to reflect the new “G-Force Cheetah with Bolt” plan they’re now offering. The $50 uncapped tier will provide 12Mbps customers with bursts up to 24 Mbps, though the PowerBoost-enabled tier will burst as high as the network can stand (sometimes beyond 30 Mbps) if it’s able. Comcast’s popular Powerboost technology, which increases speeds for the first few moments (in Grande’s case they say ten seconds) of a transfer has been licensed to Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, Shaw, and other operators.
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The latest data from Nielsen suggests that Internet video remains a very small part of overall video viewership, notes MediaPost. While the threat of people “cutting the cord” is real and growing, Internet video viewing comprises just 1% of total US video consumption. For scale, TV viewership still outweighs the entire usage population of the Internet by about 100 million. As we noted yesterday, while Internet video remains in its infancy, you can expect Internet video numbers to climb sharply as next-generation broadband sees increased deployment, and simpler/cheaper hardware solutions emerge that allow casual technology users to bring video from their Internet and PC to their living room.
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