Today we received news about a small town in North Carolina called Wilson. This town of about 47,000 residents had long complained about the price of cable TV, phone, and internet offered by Time Warner and Embarq. The only service providers in the little town. At first the town approached the providers about working with them on cutting the costs for residents. But the companies refused, unwilling to cut into their profit margins. So the resourceful city of Wilson took it upon themselves to find other solutions to their problem. In the end they found it cheaper to build their own provider network for the town and provide the services near cost to residents. This left residents paying about $99 a month for basic cable (81 channels), 10mbps broadband internet, and unlimited long distance to anywhere in the US and Canada. The city of Wilson also offered higher levels of service for considerably less than what either Time Warner or Embarq offered the same services at. They even offered a 20mbps premium service and a higher tier of 100mbps. Both of which are much higher than the top end 15mbps service offered by both companies.

After losing their business to the city, Time Warner and Embarq have now set themselves on a mission to prevent this from ever happening again. To accomplish this they have decided to lobby the state legislature of North Carolina to make it illegal for municipalities to setup their own telecommunications and content services.  Not only that but they are also trying to make it impossible for such services to get funding from the broadband portion of the national Stimulus Act that was passed recently. Looks like companies and lobbyists are trying to write laws to help line their pockets.

Embarq shot back recently saying that it has the right to make money. They claim that they have to keep costs so high to ensure a better customer experience. Yet they completely ignore the fact that in the technology industry the costs of equipment keep going down while the performance, features, and quality keep going up. What this means is that while they do regular equipment replacements, the equipment they are installing is more powerful and can handle higher bandwidth needs all for less than the previous equipment cost. They are not running out of capacity, they don’t need more money to upgrade their equipment, they are just being greedy. Instead of trying to level the playing field and competing on equal ground with local service like a normal capitalistic environment would require, they have decided that they want to be the only one on the field. They want legally enforced monopolies (which, by legal definition, are illegal) where ever they setup shop.

This reminds me of the city-wide wireless internet service that Philadelphia tried to setup years ago. It too was lobbied against by cable and telecommunications companies and was just barely allowed to happen.

The news doesn’t stop with the city of Wilson today though. Another story came to light about a cable provider called RCN. RCN has decided to raise its rates AND forcefully “upgrade” all of its customers to a higher tier. Then they charge their customers a $5 downgrade fee to go back down to lower tiers of service. So either they trick you into paying more on a monthly basis or they charge you to restore your service to a lower tier. Nice, it is great to see how lack of competition is forcing cable companies across America to improve the customer experience. Now I have to ask, how terrible does your service have to be that you have to resort to trickery just to keep you profits on target? Maybe, just maybe you may want to consider offering… oh, I don’t know… BETTER service with more features that people WANT. How hard is it to keep improving with the pace of technology and the lowering costs of equipment? Is there such a thing as an altruistic for-profit cable company….

Nevermind, I shouldn’t have even asked. Back to Time Warner again… So now that the tiered and capped broadband has been shelved, for now, Time Warner has decided to rethink rolling out system upgrades in cities where it wanted to roll out bandwidth caps. Because they just couldn’t afford to install new equipment as part of a regular schedule that costs less than the previous generation but offers much better speeds unless they started charging their customers inordinate amounts for their internet service. Oh wait, they could, but instead they have decided to act like children and refuse to maintain their services while they don’t get what they want (a lot more money). Oh I am proud to be a part of a country where a software company can be fined for having an illegal monopoly (Microsoft), a telephone company (Southwestern Bell) can be halved for having an illegal monopoly, and cable companies are paid more for having an illegal monopoly. Makes perfect sense.

You see Time Warner, like most cable companies, don’t like the concept of net neutrality at all because it would prevent them from leveraging the control of their customers internet access to force feed them their services and products. So obviously this means that Time Warner sees the FCC’s position on the subject as a threat to their negative position on net neutrality. They see that the FCC could recommend that restrictions be put on the new networks that include forcing net neutrality on the network operators. So they are trying to make dang sure that the FCC backs off the issue long enough for them to construct their own rules and policies for the network.

The second news-worthy event that happened was that Time Warner released a press release stating that they will be backing off the tests for creating absurdly expensive broadband caps that they were going to implement this summer in Texas and New York. I would like to note that they have backed off, but not entirely ended the idea within the company. Instead the plan is on hold while they “educate customers” on broadband caps. Essentially they are waiting for a successful PR campaign to soothe customers and ease them onto the idea. Hopefully most people will see through the efforts, but I’m not holding my breathe.

Then a news story came out discussing broadband caps versus bandwidth throttling and comparing broadband providers in the US with those in the UK. Now I find it interesting that in the UK users will get a few nice emails asking them to cut back on usage during peak hours when they use too much. Then when they don’t comply, instead of cutting them off or charging them a boatload in overage charges, they just throttle down their connection speed. Seems like a lot more reasonable approach than scheming and planning new ways to pump more money out of their customers.

Finally, just to rub salt in our wounds, a report comparing broadband access costs and features around the world came out that shows that if you lived in Stockholm, Sweden you would be paying $11 a month for 100mbps internet connections that are fiber-based residential services and uncapped. Now the reason for this is because they have a municipal network that reaches every block of the city. Then they lease this network to service providers and since all providers use the same lines and don’t need millions in capital to get started they get to compete on equal footing. This encourages fair competition and real value for consumers. Unfortunately here in the United States companies get to have monopolies on metropolitan areas and face little to no competition. It would be nice if we could break the stranglehold that providers here have on our politicians.

“Our current pricing plans require all users to pay the same amount, whether they check email once a month or download six movies a day. As the amount of usage has dramatically diverged among users, this is becoming inherently unfair and not the way most consumers want to pay for goods they consume.”

This sounds all well and good except when you look at the facts they don’t support this statement at all. With streaming media services such as YouTube, Hulu, and Pandora becoming ever more common and online gaming and social communities sprouting up everywhere the average internet usage by individuals has increased considerably over the past few years. As such, internet usage hasn’t so much as diverged but jointly skyrocketed. Now the statement above, pulled from http://a.longreply.com/101892, suggests that users don’t want to continue to have unlimited access for one common price. It, and the plans of Time Warner, suggest that people want limits on how much they can download. In the letter linked to above it suggests that people would not only want these limits, but also several options for these limits.

Now first of all I have yet to meet ANYONE who would, after years use a service for a flat rate that offered unlimited usage, WANT to move to a pricing scheme that not only stops being unlimited, but will also (more than likely) increase the monthly fees they will be paying to use that service in the same way as before. For years cable internet providers have provided unlimited access to the internet for a flat rate. Now some of them have decided that they want to squeeze more money out of us (during a world-wide recession no less) by severely limiting usage caps, charging higher rates, and charging excessive overage fees.

I understand that ISPs have to pay for the amount of bandwidth that their systems use on a daily basis and that the usage rates have increased immensely in recent years. They are now complaining that they will have to pay for equipment upgrades to maintain their network capacities. So it would seem fair that they pass those charges on to their customers right? Your first reaction may be to agree with this until you find out what they are not telling you.

First of all they are not even close to hitting the capacity that they are capable of. The United States has the largest groupings of what is called “dark” fiber optic cable backbone cabling in the world. This cabling crosses the entire country stopping in every major city and its capacity is mostly unused, hence the “dark fiber” label. The last estimates I heard were below 10% capacity. The next thing they are not telling anyone is that the “equipment upgrades” they are complaining about are part of the standard upgrade cycle that they have kept for years. The new equipment they are installing actually costs significantly less than the older equipment and provides immense speed improvements for wide area networks (not using the backbone cabling) without any significant changes to the current infrastructure.

There is, of course, more that Time Warner and other cable companies are not telling the public. They are working on creating their own online video and audio delivery services that won’t deduct data usage from these new data caps. Which means they are trying to monopolize online video and audio services by forcing you to pay for them one way or the other.

Now most reasonable people would think that it is fine for them to change their plans, give usage limitations to prevent abuse, and offer better price schedules. The problem is most people don’t have a clue how much data they consume every month and the cable internet providers are not telling anyone who calls and asks. So people won’t know what plan would fit them. Even if they did, if they watch more than 3 or 4 videos online per month they would easily exceed the 40GB limit that they have imposed for the highest capped tier.  There goes that Netflix watch instantly subscription. That plan goes for around $55 per month my last recollections. Oh, but they are offering an “unlimited” plan… for $150 per month. That is almost triple the current monthly plans (I know because I have their Road Runner Turbo service).

What is more is that in most areas they have a monopoly on service. Many cities and counties years ago limited the number of cable TV providers in a given area to one. Due, of course, to inept politicians looking to line their pockets. So consumers don’t have much of a choice, either cable TV or satellite and the latter doesn’t work at all in bad weather and have been known for their cost prohibative internet plans. Of course you can crawl under a rock and go without an internet connection. But don’t think that many people would be willing to do that.

So to think that consumers “want” to go through the kind of hell this would create is just lunacy and a great imagination. Now I have already called and emailed Time Warner about this and expressed, in no uncertain terms, that if they roll out this scheme in my area I will take ALL of my business elsewhere. I am lucky enough to live in an area that offers one cable TV alternative. I would recommend that you do the same if you are a customer of theirs.

Oh and ignore those ads from the cable companies about Net Neutrality. Despite what Comcast says (my parents have them) it is not all “mumbo jumbo” and “big words meant to fool you”. Net Neutrality is about preventing internet providers from filtering websites that offer competitive services. It is about not allowing them to dictate to the consumer what they can and can’t browse on the internet. They are fighting Net Neutrality because without it they strong-arm you into getting all your content from them or strong-arm websites into paying them for access to that ISPs customer base.

-Pjerky

References:

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090408/2349524449.shtml

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-COO-Metered-Billing-Is-What-Consumers-Want-101769

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/the-price-gouging-premiums-of-time-warner-cables-data-caps.ars

This, in part, may be related to news from cable executives that say that market saturation is the real cause of recent slowdowns in subscriber growth and not the worldwide economic woes nor increased competition from telephone companies. If this is true then they should instead focus on opening markets for free-for-all style competition instead of lobbying to limit the number of cable operators that can serve an area (often forming local monopolies). They should also increase their competitiveness by offering new and creative services, especially those related to music and movies (accessible over their networks and not blocking competition). There are a finite number of consumers on this planet. Eventually you have to reach critical mass where it is simply not possible to have any more subscribers than you already have. Before that happens they should diversify their offerings and find new revenue sources (excluding using ridiculous service limitations to create overage charges for internet usage).

It is unreasonable for any business, or economy for that matter, to expect perpetual growth. There is a finite number of resources on this planet. Resources used to create products and provide necessities for consumers to survive and even thrive. This, of course, limits the number of humans this planet can support and thus the number of customers a business can have. This drive for perpetual economic growth on all scales is part of what is causing this global economic meltdown. The unreasonable expectation that money will continue to grow without end. Instead an expectation of maintaining a stable level of income seems to be a lot more practical for everyone. That or create interstellar space travel to find new life and new civilizations to turn into customers.

The RIAA has been paranoid about online piracy for the better part of a decade. During which they have schemed and sued, lobbied Congress, created advertising campaigns full of falicies, and spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). They persistantly ignore the fact that the advent of the original Napster saw unprecedented climbs in music sales after years of declining sales. Instead accusing Napster of stealing their money, while blindly ignoring the enormous value that music piracy involved. The more actions they take, the more the walls close in around them. While the internet and its many content pirates are not actually stealing sales away from musicians what it is doing is providing a new (and cheaper) way for artists to expose themselves to vast audiences around the world. This exposure and the new distribution methods it provides makes the RIAA, the middlemen, obsolete. Big record labels are now just an evil of the past that is in its terrible death-throes.

The new 3-strikes project from the RIAA is one of those last-ditch efforts to save themselves. They refuse to adapt and so now they expect others to hold up their business model. For that they look to politicians and ISPs. This is not surprising considering their track record. What is surprising is that the ISPs, whom have all the real leverage here, are working with the RIAA to help them with their project. The ISPs are not required by law, their only real motivation are the empty legal threats that the RIAA has been making. However despite not being required we are still seeing stories of multiple ISPs that are working with the RIAA to implement this program. This includes AT&T, Comcast, and Cox.

What I don’t get though is why? Why would these companies give into these demands? What are they getting out of it aside from a bunch of angry customers? These are all good questions. And while we continue to mull them over there is some good news on this front. For some time now Verizon has out and out refused to have anything to do with this and other related projects from the RIAA or the MPAA. Not only that, but now an Australian ISP is standing up and fighting for its customers. I see this as a good sign that there is a major pushback happening even on the corporate level. Though it does bring up fears that the record labels will just go crying to some politicians and make the cooperation legally required.

I would encourage everyone to contact their ISP and tell them that they will not agree to this. Tell them to just say no to greedy, self-serving record labels. Contact your local political representatives and protest these actions. Get your voice heard.

Related Stories:

• Austalian ISP Stands Up For Users In Court — Claims They’re Not Violating Copyright
• AT&T And Comcast’s Non-Denial Denial Of Three Strikes
• AT&T exec: ISP will never terminate service on RIAA’s word
• ISPs Testing RIAA’s 3 Strikes Program

-Pjerky

If you are from the United States you can proudly say that your nation created the cell phone and changed the world with it. The world has embraced our endeavor and has built empires from it. Yet, though we were the first with it, we are ashamedly behind the rest of the world in not only our use of the technology, but also the advancement of it.

In November of 2008, I went on a trip to London, England. I had never been to the UK nor had I ever gone further than just crossing the Canadian border (as a kid no less). I was experiencing the world from a very different point of view for the first time and I learned much. While in London I decided to buy a mobile phone so that I could check on times for restaurants and attractions and so that I could call home. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money since I would only be there for a week, but after running the numbers I found it to be cheaper than buying phone cards or bringing my American phone (on AT&T) with me. I found a small shop with a phone that cost me £5 which, at the time, was roughly $7.

With each phone you buy in the UK and across Europe you must also get a SIM card for it. No big deal, I have done that before with AT&T and I knew that T-Mobile here uses that as well. So I bought a T-Mobile SIM card and put it in the phone. With less than 4 minutes of talk time (calling home) I ran out of minutes. Quickly realizing that I couldn’t afford those rates I decided to go with another carrier. However unlike here, when I found a carrier with better rates I didn’t have to buy another phone. I just bought another SIM card and swapped them out. No contracts, no hassles, nothing. This was amazing to me. I figured at least they would put me through some rigamarole just to irritate me. I expected it so much that I almost wanted it to happen. But it didn’t and I went on my way with a new carrier that had stellar international rates (something like 7 pence a minute).

Stories like that don’t happen in the United States unless you specifically hunted down and purchased an “unlocked” phone. Though carriers here have all but criminalized having unlocked phones. In fact Apple has criminalized it and has taken measures to stop it. Now what, you may ask, is going on in Europe? How did they get the freedom to move from carrier to carrier without penalty or contract? How can they take a phone sold by T-Mobile and use it with another carrier’s SIM card? Why don’t we have this available?

I can almost feel the outrage bubbling in up in the gut of anyone reading this story. I can also answer these questions. In Europe, sometime in the early days of cell phones, a few wise lawmakers and others saw trouble brewing. Carriers wanting to use proprietary technology to crush their competitors. Technology that they wouldn’t allow others to connect to. This would mean that every carrier would have to build their own cell phone towers. They also saw that innovation was being stifled in the US because of device to carrier lock-ins that were occuring and they took action. Europe’s limited space would mean that fighting for space to setup competing cell phone towers was impractical. So they passed laws that first required all carriers to adopt the same transmission technology, in this case the chose GSM. They also required carriers to allow competing carriers to relay calls from their towers. Thus significantly reducing the number of towers needed per square mile.

But they didn’t stop there. They also required carriers to sell unlocked versions along-side the locked versions of phone models. Customers took to these unlocked phones in such great numbers that it became a norm and the demand for locked phones greatly deminished. This opened up not only innovation but choice and better competition and the customer got to decide who won, not some deals done behind closed doors.

Unfortunately none of this skipped across the pond over to us. So we are left where we are now. Locked into contracts, no freedom of carrier and phone choice. You have to pick one or the other. Yes there are some carriers that offer no-contract services, but that is nothing compared to what we are missing because carriers insist on controlling the customer on every level. That includes telling us what phones we do and don’t like and what plans that we should have. Choice is not an option here and it is rediculous.

Recently some changes have been happening. More and more people are clamoring for more cell phone freedom. Hopefully we will get some. A further discussion on the issue can be found at TG Daily. Please feel free to leave your comments about this here.

-Pjerky

The second one is called “S. 425: Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act” which attempts to establish an extensive online database designed to track food from the moment it starts growing all the way up until it enters your digestive tract. It not only does that but also sets up the authority to force the recall of food which is currently done only on an advisory approach but is ultimately up to the manufacturer and/or distributor.

Now in principle these ideas don’t seem so bad, that is until you stop to think what this actually does on the larger scale. In order to implement such changes the farmers themselves will have to buy new computer equipment and learn to use it. The farmer will have to follow much stricter guidelines that even tell him what fertilizer to use, the minimum amount to use (say goodbye to organic farmers), harvesting, sorting, and storage operations, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water. All this is actually taken from the wording of the legislation itself. This means essentially the farmer has no real control of his farm. He just does what he is told. It seems to just stop short of telling them what they can grow.

Essentially all this means an end to organic produce and farming as well as farmers markets because the small time farmers simply can’t afford to comply with the regulations. What is the point of these things anyway? We don’t have problems with people dying left and right from poor quality food. When a product does have problems it doesn’t last long once consumers catch wind of it, so market forces essentially kill poor products.  The only thing that has actually hit news as of recent related to food problems is salmonella, a bacteria that grows absolutely everywhere, coming up in testing here and there. When that happens the production of the product is halted and the bacteria is eliminated. Plus anyone that actually cooks their food and washes their hands properly won’t have any problems.

There is no real need for any of this. It is simply over-regulation. So I decided to look a little closer and the involved politicians are heavily connected to companies that would profit greatly from the passing of this bill. To make matters worse, by killing off the small time farmers it means less competition for the bigger fish and an easier time raising food prices and increasing profit margins. This matter isn’t about public safety, it is about greedy politicians and companies trying to line their pockets.

To top all of this off I found another article, “Commodities down but food prices lag” By Lisa Baertlein and Ted Kerr at Reuters, talking about how the cost of producing processed food has gone down since their component prices have significantly dropped, yet the consumers are not seeing any price drops at all. It seems like everyone in the industry is trying to take more and more away from consumers and these companies wonder why the economy is suffering.

-Pjerky

Yes, that is right, a company used legal threats to shut down a FREE and Open Source software project that helped city emergency systems work more efficiently and help save lives. What is more appaling is the specific part of the system in question was a written document that listed questions that have links to related questions based on the selected response. It was a text document with hyperlinks. You know, those things that are the basis for the entire internet. The company that issued these threats is called “Priority Dispatch Corporation” and in their threat they simply said that it may violate one or more of their ten patents. They didn’t say which one, but when a group of programmers, working for free with no corporate backing at all, get threatened legally they don’t have a lot of options. So they closed up shop and deleted everything they had on it.

Now you might be thinking that this was probably a little dinky project that had no real impact on the community. Well you would be wrong. This software was put into use and people that found ways to improve upon it were able to easily do so and then contribute the improvements back to the community. This horrible abuse of the patent system has got to stop. I recommend everyone write to their senators and members of congress to voice your opinions on this matter. I would ask that this company be banned from supplying to any local, state, or federal agencies. I would also ask that they have any licenses pulled and to be investigated for anti-competitive practices and trying to run a monopoly. Then I would ask for government backing and funding of this open source project.

I am tired of seeing companies abuse patents and harm others just for their greed. It is time we take back the power from these greedy companies and stamp out those that would use the law to harm innocents.

Here are some related links…

• The open source project: http://openises.sourceforge.net/emd01.html
• The story I read about this on: http://techdirt.com/articles/20090308/0932074028.shtml
• An older article talking about the community benefits of this software: http://www.osnews.com/story/14492

Please write to your representatives and spread the word about these terrible abuses!

Sincerely,

Pjerky

Updated: Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Thanks to the extensive legwork of commenter Andy, we now have a link to the Cards 911 files that Priority Dispatch Corporation tried to get destroyed. I want everyone to download a copy of these files and distribute them far and wide. Let us make sure that the information doesn’t die. Let us make sure that Priority Dispatch fails to suppress open source EMS.

The files: http://mirror.optus.net/sourceforge/c/ca/cards911/

Good Luck!