Best Broadband

FCC Economist: Congestion Pricing Could Mean Efficient Network Operation multichannel.com
Will Three Strikes Ever Really Get Implemented In The UK? techdirt.com
Arris Crafting Its Own Video Sling lightreading.com
ICANN allows non-Latin character domain names theinquirer.net
Pro-Net Neutrality Senators Rally Around Genachowski’s Proposal multichannel.com
WGAE: Internet As Primary News Source Threatens Quality, Jobs multichannel.com
Thieves steal half mile of BT cabling, down 8000 homes and businesses theregister.co.uk
Win7 + Intel P55 chipset = no iPhone sync for you! theregister.co.uk/
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That elusive beast known as the end of the work week has arrived. We’re off into the great unknown. Mind looking after the house in the comment section below?
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A new report by Infonetics Research indicates that VoIP service generated a whopping $21 billion for global service providers during the first half of 2009. The majority of that revenue came from residential VoIP service, and as most of you are aware, the majority (more than 90%) of the residential VoIP industry is now dominated by the biggest cable TV operators.

The biggest cable TV operator is of course Comcast, and Comcast is now the third largest residential phone operator in the United States. Japan’s NTT, France Telecom, and Comcast collectively own more than 20% of the world’s VoIP subscribers, notes Infonetics. Of course just because the field is dominated by giants, doesn’t mean you don’t have some high quality choices. Check out our VoIP carrier user reviews to see which carriers rank highest among our users.

And to think people were busily debating whether VoIP was dead back in January.
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The CRTC earlier this year couldn’t be bothered to come to the defense of independent ISPs facing extinction due to Bell Canada’s sudden throttling efforts, but the regulatory agency amazingly came alive this week to stop the entry of a new wireless phone competitor in Canada. A CRTC ruling has banned Globalive, a new entrant into the Canadian market, from doing business in Canada. Why? because it’s 61% owned by Orascom, a telecom company that does ample business in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South Asia.

Canadian regulation, lobbied for by incumbent companies, prohibits any telecom networks that aren’t majority-Canadian owned. The entry of WIND would be the first major threat to Bell Canada, Telus and Rogers in more than a decade, so the companies lobbied the CRTC extensively to investigate and ban Wind’s market entry. Wind Mobile has issued a press release saying that the ruling’s odd, given another Canadian agency had already given them the green light, they were already allowed to purchase spectrum, and they were well into the process of employing 500 people and setting up operations:

Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist blames the entire affair on outdated pseudo-patriotic regulation, being a bit too kind to the CRTC (stocked with phone industry executives) and Canada’s incumbent phone giants (who lobbied for the original restrictions and initiated the investigation in the first place). Mike Masnick at Techdirt gets to the point, noting how such pseudo-patriotic moves are usually just another form of protectionism that ultimately winds up crippling competition and harming consumers, be it in the U.S., Canada, or Tajikistan.
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Earlier this week we noted how Verizon’s quarterly subscriber additions for their fiber to the home FiOS service were lower than anticipated. The company added 191,000 new FiOS subs on the quarter, down from the 300,000 added in the second quarter. According to Verizon, they’re blaming the lower additions on “marketing campaigns that didn’t work” — though who knows which efforts failed, given Verizon does everything to promote FiOS from throwing local ice cream parties to ads taking jabs at the cable man.

As Verizon reaches the end of their initial $23 billion deployment wave, it’s becoming pretty clear the company is going to slow new deployments and spend more money on marketing to existing deployment regions. Verizon’s existing copper network covers some 32 million households.

According to the company’s fact sheet, 14.5 million of those homes are “passed” by Verizon FiOS (note that this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “served” by Verizon FiOS, or have an actual connection to their home or neighborhood). 3.3 million of Verizon’s 32 million households actually subscribe to FiOS service.

I’ve always wondered where Verizon would draw the line in terms of which markets were worth upgrading to FiOS, and it appears we’ll find out over the next few years. For now, it appears a brief deployment rest is in the cards. Chatter from Verizon and municipal employees in several states (CA, MA, NY, PA) suggests that Verizon is halting the negotiation of new FiOSTV franchises, which indicates they’d like to recoup some money from their existing deployment before moving on to new markets.

That of course makes sense, but it creates a lot of uncertainty about what happens next. Investors will now worry whether Verizon can hit growth targets without overspending on marketing. Consumers in Verizon DSL markets will now worry whether they’ll ever be upgraded, or if they’re part of Verizon’s fairly massive effort to sell off those markets deemed unworthy — most of them rural. Some of these questions should be answered early next year when Verizon announces what the next FiOS chapter entails.

Update: AdAge has a lot more interesting detail on why Verizon’s marketing efforts for FiOS during the last quarter didn’t quite resonate with consumers during a recession.
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Earlier this week we noted how Verizon’s quarterly subscriber additions for their fiber to the home FiOS service were lower than anticipated. The company added 191,000 new FiOS subs on the quarter, down from the 300,000 added in the second quarter. According to Verizon, they’re blaming the lower additions on “marketing campaigns that didn’t work” — though who knows which efforts failed, given Verizon does everything to promote FiOS from throwing local ice cream parties to ads taking jabs at the cable man.

As Verizon reaches the end of their initial $23 billion deployment wave, it’s becoming pretty clear the company is going to slow new deployments and spend more money on marketing to existing deployment regions. Verizon’s existing copper network covers some 32 million households.

According to the company’s fact sheet, 14.5 million of those homes are “passed” by Verizon FiOS (note that this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “served” by Verizon FiOS, or have an actual connection to their home or neighborhood). 3.3 million of Verizon’s 32 million households actually subscribe to FiOS service.

I’ve always wondered where Verizon would draw the line in terms of which markets were worth upgrading to FiOS, and it appears we’ll find out over the next few years. For now, it appears a brief deployment rest is in the cards. Chatter from Verizon and municipal employees in several states (CA, MA, NY, PA) suggests that Verizon is halting the negotiation of new FiOSTV franchises, which indicates they’d like to recoup some money from their existing deployment before moving on to new markets.

That of course makes sense, but it creates a lot of uncertainty about what happens next. Investors will now worry whether Verizon can hit growth targets without overspending on marketing. Consumers in Verizon DSL markets will now worry whether they’ll ever be upgraded, or if they’re part of Verizon’s fairly massive effort to sell off those markets deemed unworthy — most of them rural. Some of these questions should be answered early next year when Verizon announces what the next FiOS chapter entails.
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There’s several broadband subscriber perks that have gone the way of the dodo in recent years. The most notable of course is free access to Usenet, but many ISPs have also done away with offering users free dial-up connectivity for travel or during outages. We know Cox is still offering it, but several Time Warner Cable and Road Runner customers write in to note the company this week is e-mailing its customers saying that they’re no longer going to get free dial-up access starting November 30. With the availability of so much free Wi-Fi (much of it now being offered by carriers) it’s apparently seen as an added, unnecessary expense. Is your ISP still offering it?
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Yesterday we highlighted how a common flaw in the argument for metered billing is that it confuses pure per-byte billing with what carriers actually want to implement — which is usually value-limited tiers with high base prices, low caps and high overage limits. The push really is all about already profitable companies looking to raise prices ahead of the Internet video explosion, something that’s often disingenuously dressed up as altruism or fairness. Thankfully, we’re starting to see some of our colleagues in the sector notice this, like Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM, who correctly observes that “when ISPs talk about meters they’re talking about different service tiers that don’t reflect actual usage, but herd customers into set plans where most will be paying a monthly fee for more than they use.” It’s a simple but important distinction.
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Last year around this time, Comcast implemented a 250 GB cap for all of their users, which was a welcome change — given they’d been expecting customers to guess what constituted “excessive use” for much of the decade. Last year, the company said they’d be providing users with a bandwidth monitoring tool in January of 2009. We’re now approaching December, and Houston Chronicle blogger Dwight Silverman notes the tool is still nowhere to be found. According to Comcast, they’re still testing the tool among employees, “and making some refinements to the meter.” “As you can imagine, we want the tool to be simple to use and accurate before we launch it,” says the company, whose consumption FAQ still directs users to get the bandwidth meter offered free by Comcast as part of the McAffee security suite.
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Canada Decides That Canadian Ownership Is More Important Than Real Telco Competition techdirt.com
Is Digital Britain to be taxed back to the copper age? thinkbroadband.com
Yeah, I d Like Metered Broadband, Too If It Were Actually Metered gigaom.com
iTunes update evicts Palm Pre (again) theregister.co.uk
Sprint blocks phone use as a modem slashgear.com
iPhone goes to China – sans WiFi yahoo.com
Blackberry phones get eavesdropping spyware theinquirer.net
Facebook wins $711 million against spammer tgdaily.com
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