Clement Again Says He’ll Overturn CRTC Ruling – If The Agency Returns From Review With Same Conclusion

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Clement-Again-Says-Hell-Overturn-CRTC-Ruling-112893″>
Just in case the CRTC, press and public didn’t hear him the first time, Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement this week repeated that if the CRTC comes back from their review of usage-based billing and concludes that they did the right thing, he’ll overturn the ruling anyway. “We asked the CRTC to review their decision, and if they come back with the same decision the cabinet would overrule it because it wouldn t be consistent with government policy … promoting competition and choice,” he said Wednesday after a forum with University of Alberta students. Given the agency (like most regulators) has a revolving door with the industry it oversees, the CRTC’s review was already expected to be <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/112585″>rather empty, and given they really can’t stick to their ruling — so is their authority at the moment.

Update: User uid://642531 makes a good point:

You could also mention in your story (or another) that Clement might not be able to do anything as the delay the CRTC asked for might bring their decision to AFTER Parliament is dissolved for the summer, therefore rendering the MP powerless to interfere.

If he really would have wanted to stop it, he would have interfered when the CRTC said they’d need two months (it wouldn’t be surprising to hear it was Bell’s idea).

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Clement-Again-Says-Hell-Overturn-CRTC-Ruling-112893″>

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Xoom No Longer Requires 3G Plan To Use Wi-Fi – Verizon Backs Off Ridiculous Requirement

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Xoom-No-Longer-Requires-3G-Plan-To-Use-WiFi-112886″>
Among what’s seen as a fairly rushed and bungled launch for a <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Motorola-Xoom-On-Verizon-Arrives-112874″>fairly decent if not overpriced Xoom tablet, one of the oddest choices by Motorola and Verizon was to require anybody who wanted to use the device’s Wi-Fi to pay at least for a month of mobile broadband service. It’s clearly an odd little contract requirement designed to fatten Verizon’s wallet a bit, with the Wi-Fi only version taking its sweet time to market likely being another. After complaints however, Verizon appears to have backed off the requirement and won’t require a data plan to use Wi-Fi on the unsubsidized $800 Xoom:

Verizon on Thursday began selling the Motorola Xoom and offered an olive branch to users. The company has responded to near-universal complaints over plan requirements and told Electronista it will no longer force those paying the off-contract $800 price to pay for at least a month of service to get Wi-Fi. The savings will slash the $55 minimum of ‘hidden’ fees for both the month of 3G and activation.

Hidden fees and other below the line charges is kind of what Verizon does professionally, but this one was a particularly bad idea from the start, and couldn’t even be justified with all the PR help in the world.
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Xoom-No-Longer-Requires-3G-Plan-To-Use-WiFi-112886″>

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Vietnam Forces ISPs To Ban Gaming After 10 PM – After Requiring ISPs Ban Night Access Via Game Cafes

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Vietnam-Forces-ISPs-To-Ban-Gaming-After-10-PM-112885″>
As part of the country’s ongoing crackdown against “gaming addiction” and the social issues arising from online gaming, Vietnam News notes that the Vietnamese government has decreed that all ISPs must block access to online gaming after 10 PM, beginning March 3. That creates a lot of hard work on the shoulders of the nation’s ISPs, who not only now can’t serve gaming parlors after 10, but now must also implement network management and sniffing technology to sort out those nasty MMORPG packets. ISPs were already required to shut off broadband service to gaming cafes and game retailers after hours. Of course there’s no way this actually works on any real level to solve the “problem” of gaming, and in fact will probably simply result in other problems (like oh, truancy so kids can play games during the day).
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Vietnam-Forces-ISPs-To-Ban-Gaming-After-10-PM-112885″>

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Deconstructing The Top 10 Metered Billing Myths – Canadians Continue To Ask All The Right Questions

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

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For years we’ve discussed how the arguments put forward by wired carriers looking to implement usage-based billing don’t hold water. More specifically, we’ve noted how companies like <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Cable-Metered-Billing-Will-Return-101962″>Time Warner Cable or <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cogeco-Metered-Billing-Not-About-Making-Money-101901″>Cogeco actually made things worse for themselves by assuming their customers weren’t particularly bright — claiming that charging up to $5 per gigabyte was about altruism and <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cogeco-Metered-Billing-Not-About-Making-Money-101901″>not making money. There’s an ocean of ISP disinformation on this topic, from claims that per byte billing is <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/One-More-Time-Metered-Billing-Is-Not-Magically-Inevitable-111635″>magically inevitable, that it’s financially necessary because flat rate isn’t sustainable, or that the push away from flat rate is about <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Grandmas-Tell-ATT-We-Dont-Want-Metered-Billing-Either-103080″>helping grandmothers.

Part of the reason such efforts in the States failed is because most consumers saw through these flimsy justifications, and realized these pricing models are about already perfectly profitable companies, who often lag on upgrades due to limited competition, greedily trying to cash in on Internet video and protect their cable TV revenues. As Canadians continue to <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/112615″>debate forced UBB practices and regulatory capture, one of the more eloquent deconstructions of Bell UBB talking points comes courtesy of reporter/author Peter Nowak. Nowak topples the top ten most common UBB supporter myths, including the ISP claim it makes sense to bill broadband like electricity:

There have been many attempts, including by the CRTC, to equate internet usage to a utility such as electricity or gas. Very simply put: it is not. The electrons that make up the data that passes to and fro over the internet are limitless and are not consumed and destroyed every time a YouTube video is watched. The pipes and other equipment over which these electrons flow are, of course, finite and therefore need to be continually expanded as the amount of traffic grows. These are two very different things, however. In electric-bill parlance, we re talking about delivery and usage the nice people at the hydro company bill us for both and the big ISPs would like to do the same. The difference is, the actual kilowatts that go over the hydro company s pipes ARE finite and ARE destroyed once they are used. If you want to talk about fairness, then yes, it is okay to charge internet users for delivery, but how is it fair to charge for consuming a non-consumable?

Don’t forget that in addition to broadband not being a truly consumed commodity, you’d be hard pressed to find any big ISP eager to be regulated like a utility to confirm their <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/112640″>often flaky meters actually work. Nowak touches on a wide variety of other issues popular among ISP PR folk, including the fact that carriers never actually reveal hard data proving that congestion makes such models necessary (tip: it’s because such data doesn’t exist, or when it does exist, a perfectly profitable ISP lagged on network upkeep). Most importantly he notes that if you allow ISPs in uncompetitive markets to impose steep overages — they’ll only get worse as there’s no way for consumers in these markets to vote with their wallets.

This is all stuff we’ve covered in probably nauseating detail, though Nowak does a particularly good job at it. It also remains interesting to watch educated and informed Canadians dismantle this punitive pricing push and understand the anti-consumer and anti-innovative ramifications of these kind of billing models. That can’t always be said about their neighbors to the South, in part because Canadians are already very familiar with being nickel and dimed to death for each byte, and understand perfectly just the kind of “value” ISPs have in mind when cooking up these pricing plans.
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-Top-10-Metered-Billing-Myths-112883″>

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DSL Pushed Toward 2 Gbps – Though You’ll Probably Never See It

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/DSL-Pushed-Toward-2-Gbps-112879″>
The last year has seen a ramp up in the number of research claims surrounding DSL, as vendors market to telcos that are <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Telcos-Going-To-Lose-Significant-Market-Share-Due-To-DSL-111061″>losing slow DSL customers to cable and <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/111061″>can’t afford to deploy fiber to the home, but have convinced themselves they can milk copper infrastructure for another decade. In April, Alcatel Lucent announced they’d <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/108002″>achieved speeds of 800 Mbps using a pair of traditional DSL lines and something called “phantom mode,” which involves creating a third “phantom” channel to supplement the two physical wires common with bonded DSL — then vectoring to reduce noise.

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/110493″>Last fall, Hauwei announced they were experimenting with similar “SuperMIMO” technology, capable of offering 700 Mbps over 1,300 feet. The only real difference from Alcatel’s approach is that Hauwei’s technology uses four pair instead of two. Nokia-Siemens also jumped into the party, announcing last October that their implementation of “Phantom DSL” is capable of 825 Mbps over 1,300 feet. With the ink barely dry on these promises, Stanford professor John Cioffi, whose research contributed to many of these four-pair DSL advances, is cooking up a new DSL variation called “Triple V” that someday could be capable of delivering speeds up to 2 Gbps over short distances:

They doubted when John Cioffi outlined in 2004 how four wires could deliver a gigabit one day. In 2010, Alcatel and others demonstrated 700+ megabits. Now, his ASSIA colleague Ken Kerpez shows a path to two gigabits. It requires 300 MHz, four wires and goes only a short distance. Presumably it’s many years away. But Triple-V could deliver 2 gig to Jennie’s 9th apartment from the basement. France Telecom is looking for an alternative for buildings they hope not to run fiber to each apartment. My mother in her old neighborhood and 20 attached homes could receive a gig and a half.

As noted, it’s once again distance constrained making it more useful for multi-tenant building runs to each apartment, and not necessarily helping rural telcos provide next-gen connectivity. It’s not even clear that many of the multi-hundred megabit-per-second copper-based solutions will reach market anytime soon, and this even faster DSL variant isn’t even in the lab yet. DSL hardware vendors hope that some of these advancements will provide a profitable way to help rural telcos maintain DSL relevance, but most of these advancements will be focused on multi-tenant dwellings.
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/DSL-Pushed-Toward-2-Gbps-112879″>

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FCC Notes Huge Interest In New Broadband Map – Agency Says They’re Tripling Efforts To Improve Infrastructure

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

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As we noted earlier this week, Uncle Sam <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/112787″>launched our first ever broadband map to mixed reviews. Many believe the map is better than having no data at all, though ISP lobbying prevented the NTIA from revealing price information and real-world speed performance. We also noted that the map appears to hallucinate ISPs out of whole cloth, listing carriers as doing business in many markets when they don’t even operate in the state. The map is a very expensive beta, and on a more positive note — the FCC servers didn’t collapse under the weight of interest. A blog post by the FCC’s Andrew Burger highlights visitation data from the first day:

Total hits yesterday: 158,123,884
Hits served by cache: 141,068,348 (89.21%)
Total Bytes Transferred: 863GB
Peak Requests per Second: 8,970
Average Requests per Second: 1,095
Visits in the first 10 hours: over 500,000

“This phenomenal response shows that the investment of time, energy, and not least of all Congressional funds were well worth it,” insists Burger. “The National Broadband Map clearly has a market of interest, and we re extremely proud to see that market being well served.” Burger insists that the map will “increase transparency and understanding,” and that the team is “tripling efforts” to improve infrastructure. Again though — the fact that the NTIA folded to carrier demands and isn’t collecting real speed and price data makes the map less useful — something that won’t be getting fixed by additional servers. Again if you haven’t checked it out yet, the map can be found here.
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/FCC-Notes-Huge-Interest-In-New-Broadband-Map-112875″>

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Motorola Xoom On Verizon Arrives – LTE Upgrade Details Explained

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Motorola-Xoom-On-Verizon-Arrives-112874″>
As we <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/112850″>noted earlier in the week, Verizon today begins selling the Motorola Xoom — generally considered to be the first real competitor to the Apple iPad in the tablet space. Verizon’s selling the device for $600 with a two year contract or $800 without — with required data plans of $20 per month for a 1GB cap up to $80 a month for a 10GB limit. Reviews are popping up around the Internet, with Walt Mossberg suggesting the device beats the iPad in certain respects, while lagging it in others.

The launch feels a bit muddled, disjointed and rushed and the timing can also be questioned with the launch of the iPad 2 expected just around the corner. One interesting though odd bit is that Verizon is offering to update the devices with LTE capability for free, the details of which have been detailed over at Droid Life and require actually sending in your device and being without it for a week:

For those of you heading into a Best Buy or Verizon store early tomorrow morning to pick up a Motorola XOOM, you are probably wondering how the upgrade process to 4G LTE will work and we have you covered. As expected, the upgrade will be free to everyone and will be available approximately 90 days after launch, so we re looking at May before this thing will be cooking up those 4G speeds. And as we were told by Motorola at CES, you will have to send in your device and will be without it for 6 days while they upgrade the hardware and software.

More detail on upgrading the device to LTE is available at the Verizon website.
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Motorola-Xoom-On-Verizon-Arrives-112874″>

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Frontier: 1,697,200 Broadband Customers – Company Earnings Missed Analyst Projections

Written by adminargon on February 25th, 2011. Posted in Internet Service

<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Frontier-1697200-Broadband-Customers-112873″>
Frontier Communications unveiled their fourth quarter earnings today, indicating that the comapny’s fourth-quarter 2010 revenue more than doubled to $1.36 billion, helped in large part by the 4.8 million largely rural phone lines Frontier acquired from Verizon Communications. At the same time, the fact these aging lines are losing both voice and data customers to faster cable options — combined with the cost of integration — weighed the company resulting in them missing most analyst projections. At the end of the year, Frontier had 3,445,200 residential customers and 1,697,200 total broadband customers. The company also serves 531,400 video customers, most of which are DirecTV customers, and the rest of which are former FiOSTV customers they’re <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/112633″>trying to offload to DirecTV.
<a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Frontier-1697200-Broadband-Customers-112873″>

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