Category Archives: Competition

Time Warner Volume Charging

leaky_pipe.jpg Transparency via memo leak?
Metered Internet access is a fact of life for many broadband users around the world, but has been largely a nonfactor when it comes to wired broadband in the US. That may change, according to a memo leaked to the Broadband Reports forums. If the memo is to be believed, Time Warner Cable will be rolling out what it calls "Consumption Based Billing" on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas area.

Under the proposed scheme, new customers will be able to choose from a couple of different plans with varying bandwidth caps. They'll be given online tools to monitor usage and will be able to upgrade to the next higher tier of service to avoid charges for exceeding their monthly bandwidth limit. If the trial works well, Time Warner would then roll out bandwidth caps to current customers: "We will use the results of the trial to evaluate results for possible future nationwide rollouts," reads the memo.

Bandwidth caps have been a sore subject for some users who have found themselves bumping into mysterious, undefined limits. This past fall, a number of Comcast subscribers complained that their service was cut off after having reached Comcast's bandwidth limit.

— Leaked memo: Time Warner Cable to trial hard bandwidth caps, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, January 16, 2008 – 04:12PM CT

If the memo is legitimate, it’s good that Time Warner is going for more transparency. Although if they want transparency, why don’t they just come out and announce what they’re doing? Continue reading →

Principles: the FCC’s Don’t Mean Squat –Cleland

fccprinciples.png Duopoly apologist Scott Cleland spells out what everybody should have already known:
The petitions assume that the FCC’s policy of network neutrality principles have the legal and binding effect of formal FCC rules or law and that they trump all existing law and rules. This is preposterous.

— The Common Sense Case Why Network Management Trumps Net Neutrality, Scott Cleland, Precursor Blog, 15 Jan 2008

Indeed, it is preposterous to think that the FCC ever meant to enforce its net neutrality “Policy Statement” of August 2005. Even if it did, the very way the four “principles” in that statement are worded, every one in terms of consumers, excludes the very existence of participatory services such as BitTorrent.

Cleland’s blog goes to great lengths to spell out what he considers common sense (which means he knows he doesn’t actually have a legal argument). Don’t be surprised if his items get parrotted by other anti-Internet-freedom blogs. And don’t be surprised if the FCC rules in favor of Comcast, even though any competent network engineer can tell you that there are ways to do network management that don’t involve faking reset packets, a technique that would be considered malicious denial of service if it came from any entity other than an ISP, not to mention Comcast’s BitTorrent stifling seems closer to the fraudulent promise of unlimited service that got Verizon fined by New York State.

[Clarified:] It’s not about network management. It’s about a few corporations and their political allies trying to stifle net neutrality and Internet freedom against the best interests of everyone else, including their own customers.

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Forensic FCC Oversight

JDD_Headshot_2004.jpg Preventive Congressional oversight had no effect on the FCC. We’ll see if forensic oversight does any better:
Bipartisan leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, three weeks after the agency’s controversial vote to ease media ownership restrictions.

In a letter sent to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the committee asked that all electronic records and personal e-mails related to FCC work be saved.

The committee has “initiated a formal investigation into FCC regulatory procedures to determine if they are being conducted in a fair, open, efficient, and transparent manner,” said the letter written by Chairman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, and ranking Republican Joe Barton of Texas.

“This investigation will also address a growing number of allegations received by the committee relating to management practices that may adversely affect the agency’s operation,” the letter said.

— House panel launches probe of FCC practices, Reuters, Tue Jan 8, 2008 4:15pm EST

Maybe Congress will slap the FCC with another stern letter. I’m sure Kevin Martin is quaking in his boots.

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Users Revolt: Net Neutrality Wins

NodeMagazine.jpg This is the path to net neutrality:
“See-bare-espace… it is everting.”

—Odile Richards, Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007

Long version:
Top Ten Predictions for 2008

1. The Users Revolt. As advertisers focus in on social networking sites, users revolt against this trend, and power shifts in the worlds of Social Networking from owner to user, on issues ranging from Second Life rules and Facebook privacy to Cellphone Billing. Users will gain new leverage.

— My Top Ten Predictions for 2008, Mark Anderson, Strategic News Service Blog, 22 December 2007

He picks up on some of many signs of users’ discontent, such as Facebook’s Beacon fiasco: Continue reading →

Consolidation Flood: What Will Really Stifle Internet Innovation

monopolist.jpg Advocates of the “exabyte flood” political campaign against net neutrality claim they are for innovation and that the coming flood of Internet usage will stifle innovation unless they get their way.

What will really stifle innovation on the Internet is this:

The Federal Communications Commission, at the urging of Chair Kevin Martin, voted 3-2 on Tuesday to relax longstanding rules that block corporations from owning a broadcast TV station and a newspaper in the same city.

— Uproar Over FCC Vote on Media-Ownership Rules, By Frederick Lane, Top Tech News, December 19, 2007 10:14AM

No, not specifically newspaper and television consolidation. Further consolidation of media and information distribution in the hands of a tiny number of companies. This December the FCC lets newspapers and TV stations consolidate. Last December it let SBC buy Bellsouth. Internet access is already in the hands of a tiny number of companies (typically at most two in any given area) that are increasingly moving to control the information they carry on behalf of a small number of companies including themselves and movie and music content producers.

The exaflood politics isn’t really about how much infrastructure the duopoly has to build out. It’s about maintaining the duopoly and extending its control of information, to the duopoly’s short-term profit and the long-term detriment of of us all, including the duopoly.

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Exabyte Flood As Politics

465px-Deluge_gustave_dore.jpg Control or profits? Which does Wall Street want?

Slashdot finds a post by Ars Technica spelling out how the Nemertes report saying the Internet may get clogged by increasing usage is just part of a political campaign to use increasing Internet traffic as an excuse to nuke net neutrality. A campaign going on since at least January, when the Discovery Institute’s Brett Swanson posted “The Coming Exaflood” in the Wall Street Journal. Beware the thousand thousand petabyes!

My favorite piece of the campaign is this one:

We should not fear the exaflood, however. It is key to the innovative new services and applications that appear almost daily. Consider the growing number of universities that are making course lectures available online, often in real time. Or telemedicine programs that are transmitting medical images and linking patients with distant specialists for real-time consultations.

— Bring On The Exaflood! Broadband Needs a Boost By Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving Washington Post, Thursday, May 24, 2007; Page A31

No reason to fear the deluge! The telcos will protect you. As long as they don’t have that nasty net neutrality in the way, Continue reading →

Copowi: an ISP Based on Net Neutrality

copowi net neutrality guarantee Here’s an ISP that centers around net neutrality:
Within and subject to the constraints of the law and our Terms of Service, we guarantee:
  • We will not block, degrade or modify data users send or receive over the Internet.
  • We will not discriminate between network traffic on the basis of who it came from or where it is going to for some commercial advantage.
  • Where possible we will only deal with wholesale service providers who support keeping the Internet open and fair, in the same way.

—www.copowi.com, accessed 11 Dec 2007

That third point is a bit difficult to implement, given that Copowi provides its DSL as a reseller for AT&T, Quest, and Verizon, but at least their heart’s in the right place: they’re for equal access, innovation, participation, and lower cost.

Now if they can also deliver reliable and inexpensive service with good marketing….

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Moderate? Comcast Stifling Isn’t

MagrittePipe.jpg Promising unlimited access, not delivering, and refusing to admit it is managing a network for the good of the many above the activities of the few? Pete Abel thinks so:
Earlier this month, Comcast — the nation’s largest cable broadband company — was caught doing what any good Internet Service Provider (ISP) should do, i.e., manage its network to ensure that the online activities of the few don’t interfere with the online activities of the many,

Fair vs. Foul in Net Neutrality Debate, By Pete Abel, The Moderate Voice, 24 November 2007

The problem with Comcast stifling BitTorrent by faking reset packets from a participant is not that Comcast is trying to manage its network: it’s that Comcast used a technique that if it came from anyone other than an ISP would be considered malicious denial of service, that Comcast still hasn’t admitted doing it, and that Comcast bypassed numerous other methods of legitimate network management, such as those used by PlusNet. Comcast could even use the Australian model and sell access plans that state usage limits and throttle or charge or both for usage above those limits. What Comcast is doing it seems to me is much closer to the false advertising of unlimited access that got Verizon slapped down for wrongful account termination.

The biggest problem with what Comcast (and Cox, and AT&T, and Verizon) are doing is that their typical customer has at most one or two choices, which in practice means that if your local cable company and your local telephone company choose to stifle, throttle, block, or terminate, you have no recourse, because there’s nowhere to go. Competition would fix that.

Abel tries to back up his peculiar interpretation of network management with revisionist history: Continue reading →

Duopoly Fear Factor: Metered Access or a Thousand Flowers

rk_a_thousand_flowers_5315-4_teal_750.jpg EFF mentions “unmetered” once regarding how the duopoly currently says “unlimited” yet stifles BitTorrent or whatever else it thinks is too much.

George Ou flips that one word around: EFF wants to saddle you with metered Internet service. Scary, eh?

You know, I remember real metered pay-per-byte telephone charges, where Ma Bell would charge you a flat rate for the first three minutes and cash in for every minute thereafter, and the European PTTs would also add in exorbitant international fees. That’s not what EFF is recommending. Continue reading →

AT&T vs. Apple: iPhone and Maybe 700Mhz

gallery_apple.gif AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson announced next year’s 3G iPhone a few weeks before this year’s iPhone’s likely biggest sales over the holidays:
So what’s up? Was it a simple slip? Or is the guy so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t realize that with a few words he has probably deferred — maybe forever — at least a million new customers worth to Wall Street at least $1 billion in market cap for his company?

I don’t think Stephenson’s statement was by accident and I don’t think he is out of touch with reality. I think, instead, he was sending a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

— When Networks Collide: AT&T suddenly doesn’t like Apple so much. By Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, PBS, 29 November 2007

Well, it could be either. This is the same AT&T that couldn’t produce its own iPhone and had to make a deal with Apple; AT&T could be so out of touch that it doesn’t know what it’s doing in this announcement. And maybe Stephenson resents that so much that he does want to hurt Apple even if it hurts AT&T. If he thinks he can get away with it, it amounts to the same as being out of touch, because Apple could produce an unlocked iPhone and sell it on all AT&T’s networks, especially if Stephenson gives Jobs enough excuse to break Apple’s contract with AT&T. Or, as Cringely points out, Apple could join Google in bidding for 700Mhz spectrum, or enable its Apple computers for VoIP, or come up with something else that isn’t covered by the existing contract. Jobs and Apple know how to innovate. Telcos don’t. No wonder AT&T is scared.

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