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Cable companies promote free Internet access for locked down Californians, telcos not so much

19 March 2020 by Steve Blum
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Home alone

Update, 19 March 2020: AT&T announced today that the first two months of its Internet package for low income homes – Access from AT&T – is free to new subscribers.

The four major cable companies in California are offering free Internet access for a limited amount of time to low income households during the corona virus emergency, but not the two big telcos.

Charter, Comcast, Cox and Suddenlink seem to have figured out that what amounts to a one or two month promotional offer is a good way to attract new subscribers.… More

Accidentally honest AT&T tells CPUC to grab the horse by the tail and face reality

3 March 2020 by Steve Blum
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Chp horses capitol 3feb2016

Unintentionally, an AT&T witness injected an insight of startling clarity into the debate over whether or not broadband is a common carrier service. It happened during a hearing to determine if the company should be held in contempt of California Public Utilities Commission orders. The witness was discussing the difference between legacy digital methods for transmitting telephone calls and contemporary Internet protocol technology.

He said…

It’s like the difference between a horse and buggy, and an automobile.

… More

Streaming video hurts cable, but it’s killing AT&T

7 February 2020 by Steve Blum
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Elmer fudd

The traditional, linear subscription TV business is in a nose dive. In the fourth quarter of 2019, AT&T shed 945,000 subscribers, mostly from DirecTv but also from its legacy Uverse service and its new AT&T TV platform. Add in the 219,000 subscribers who dumped its AT&T TV Now streaming service, and more than million customers walked away from AT&T’s video products.

Comcast and Charter lost TV subscribers, too. But for both companies, they each lost fewer subs over the 12 months of 2019 than AT&T lost in the last three.… More

Investment analysts say AT&T, Frontier, others padded bottom line with FCC broadband subsidies

30 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote today on a new ten year, $20 billion broadband subsidy program called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) that will mostly benefit rural communities. The proposal on the table would set the U.S. minimum broadband standard at 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds. That’s a lot better than California’s pathetic standard of 6 Mbps down/1 Mbps up, and a significant improvement over the 10 Mbps down/1 Mbps up minimum that the FCC established for the Connect America Fund II program (CAF II), which RDOF will replace.… More

Internet magic means phone calls aren’t phone calls, AT&T tells CPUC

27 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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Alice tall 625

We’re all mad here.

On Thursday in San Francisco, AT&T defended itself against charges that it’s in contempt of California Public Utilities Commission orders and that it broke CPUC rules and state law. AT&T is admitting that California law no longer bars the CPUC from regulating Internet protocol enabled service such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), but doesn’t appear to be giving up the fight. Instead, it’s falling back to a second line of defence that was thoughtfully provided by the Federal Communications Commission.… More

Keep broadband slow so we can ditch copper, AT&T, Frontier tell FCC

23 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Communications Commission heading toward a vote later this month on the structure of the new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which is the reboot of the Connect America Fund (CAF) broadband subsidy program designed for rural communities (although urban and suburban areas sometimes qualify, too). In their eternal quest for more public money and less public service, AT&T and Frontier Communications, among others, are urging the FCC to lower speed standards for subsidised broadband, so they can rip out ageing copper lines and replace them with limited capacity wireless systems.… More

Penalties, but not prevention, for deceptive ISP billing practices

17 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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Consumer reports cable billing 3oct2019

Cost of Cable Fees in an Average
Monthly Cable Bill (2018). Source: Consumer Reports

It’s common practice for big, monopoly model broadband providers to promise low prices to new subscribers, then tack on arbitrary fees after they’re locked into long term contracts. AT&T was recently slammed for adding a property tax surcharge to some customers’ bills – no one has figured out yet why AT&T thinks it can do that in the first place, let alone why it more than doubled the charge – California property tax rate hikes are tightly restricted.… More

AT&T faces contempt hearing as CPUC defines VoIP regulatory role

3 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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Bluto pencils

The first shot in what could be the defining regulatory battle over broadband in California was fired in the closing days of December by the California Public Utilities Commission. An administrative law judge (ALJ) ordered AT&T…

To show cause, if any, why [AT&T] should not be:

  1. Found in contempt of [a 2019 CPUC decision regarding disaster preparedness].
  2. Found in violation of the Public Utilities Code and [a CPUC rule requiring telcos to file price/service terms (aka tariffs)].
… More

Some people aren’t buying the false data big ISPs sold to the FCC

27 December 2019 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft oregon analysis 5dec2018

The Federal Communications Commission’s broadband testing program evolved from a engineering-driven performance assessment when it was launched in 2012 to a marketing tool for monopoly model Internet service providers. That’s partly the result of the FCC republican majority embracing a role as a cheerleader for big telecoms companies, but it also reflects tensions in the program that date back to when it began under a democrat-majority commission.

Jim Warner, who recently retired from a long career as the network engineer for the University of California, Santa Cruz and still chairs the Central Coast Broadband Consortium’s technical expert group, helped design the FCC’s program, along with several others from the academic side of the house as well as industry representatives.… More

FCC allows big ISPs to add performance enhancing juice to speed tests, WSJ says

19 December 2019 by Steve Blum
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Syringe

The fast, reliable broadband service claims endorsed by the Federal Communications Commission are based on test data that’s been doctored by California’s monopoly model Internet service providers, according to a Wall Street Journal article Shalini Ramachandran, Lillian Rizzo and Drew FitzGerald (h/t to Jim Warner for sending me the link).

Annual speed measurements taken to evaluate U.S. broadband service are “juiced” by AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications and others, who know ahead of time where the tests are run and afterwards lobby the FCC to suppress bad results and hype good ones, the story says…

[AT&T] pushed the Federal Communications Commission to omit unflattering data on its DSL internet service…

In the end, the DSL data was left out of the report released late last year, to the chagrin of some agency officials.

… More