Why Comcast Needs Competition...Badly

As an Internet service goes down, you should know about it first? In Seattle, there is no Internet provider Comcast. Your customers failures.
This morning, the seat SunBreak, many offices in Seattle, was abuzz with complaints about our business class Internet Comcast High Speed. Parties were deadlocked, instant messaging clients that were not charged, was nearly the speed of molasses slow. After performing traditional rites and spells (unplug the modem and the router, restart the laptop) had no improvement.
I had limited connectivity, so Comcast status verified: all green! But to say, "Please sign on the local networks for health news, so I tried to know everything is still green. It was time to try online support. 15 people were in the queue before me, it took 5-10 minutes for my customer service has to wonder how I was. Slow Internet Service? If I had tried everything unplugged? Oh. I what? Well, maybe I could give my name and account number. Well, if I wait a few minutes while she stood in my mind ...
While this was happening, I was doing my Twitter account to see if anyone had questions and TechFlash Twitter "Comcast cutting in parts of Seattle." No matter, I told the bot, default is on your side, and closed the session. Meanwhile ComcastWA TechFlash Twitter is John Cook said it was "to check what is happening." This was about an hour in my experience, and was the first tweet from ComcastWA on the subject.
Until 10:30 the clock snafu was resolved, and @ comcastcares someone sent me a tweet to let me know. (What, you know, thanks, but I can say that the Internet works.) What is not explained why the state Comcast cards are green while stopped or why aid workers told people to unplug their modems and routers in the first place.
You may be thinking, Hey, come on, that is 90 minutes of your day. But what I think of how much time was lost cumulatively in Seattle this morning, largely because people had not been sure that was the problem. An early announcement, all hands on deck, Comcast would have been helpful. Seems a little crazy that a company offering Internet services is not very good at using the Internet.
But what can you do? No more agile competitor in the wings, as the Seattle City Council agreed signs ten-year franchise with Comcast. Ten years! It seems that both could happen in the market in ten years. This is the time to go to an out of business.
So we have our money value? Do you know what the city's aggressive lobbying for the extension of the agreement in 2006? An increase in the budget for the television channel of the exploration community. Four years later, the Committee is largely defunded. Here's an ironic quote from then-Mayor Nickels seems to purpose: "The franchise also are for the next 10 years." (No, SCAN!)
The city now wants to use the TV money to fund its Community e-mail system. This is not ... large. Why? Since Comcast can read. And when they learn that the funding of basic information systems of their city franchise fees, they give what is called "multiplier effect" on the negotiating table. You can hang like a limpet to a source of income is not seen as a tax gives the city a little more incentive than ever to open, cable competition. After all, the only loser here is the people of Seattle, and do not know what the hand of the city at 4.2 percent out of pocket.

Clearwire throttling at-home WiMAX users?

Ah, throttling. Can't ever seem to fully shake it, can we? Just weeks after hearing about a similar issue with the EVO 4G, scores of Clear at-home WiMAX users are now up in arms over apparent throttling on certain accounts. As the story goes, it seems as if the company is pulling back on upload and download speeds (from 10Mbps to around 0.25Mbps) for users who have consumed between 7GB and 10GB in a month, which is comically low even compared to Comcast's hated 250GB / month usage cap. Forum users are finding customer service lines to be no help whatsoever, and some digging has found that this may all be a part of a network traffic administration program that's ongoing within Clearwire. Have any of you seen similar issues? How much data are you sucking down per month? Does your usage clock still show up in your account profile? Let us know in comments below.

Most Comcast prices going up

Most of Spokane’s Comcast subscribers will see price increases in their Internet and video services effective in August, the cable company announced.
Comcast’s last price increase went into effect October 2009. According to Comcast spokesman Walter Neary, most Spokane cable television subscribers will see an average monthly increase of about $3.21, or 4.9 percent.
Customers who subscribe to Limited Basic, the least expensive package of Comcast TV channels, will have no increase in their monthly bill. Limited Basic includes all over-the-air local stations and the public, education and government channels.
Customers who pay for Comcast cable Internet will see two increases – a modem rental fee that will rise to $7 from $5 per month, and a $3 hike for monthly Web service.
Subscribers who bundle Internet with either Comcast voice or TV service won’t pay the $3 hike, but will still see the modem fee increase, Neary said. Subscribers can eliminate the modem fee by buying their own modem.
The Internet price hike reflects increased investment by Comcast in additional security services for subscribers and technology upgrades, Neary said.
Another price increase, not reflected in Comcast’s stated 4.9 percent average monthly hike, is a $2 hike in the “HD technology fee.” TV subscribers who see HD Comcast channels will pay $8 per month for that technology fee, said Neary.

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The FCC's New Plan for Broadband (and Why Nobody's Happy About It)

The FCC was told fairly bluntly it doesn't have the power to mandate net neutrality. So! Time for a new plan.

The problem, as FCC Chairman Genachowski sees it, is that the FCC can keep trying to regulate stuff using indirect authority (which sucks because it doesn't go far enough, as the chairman sees it), or they could reclassify internet communications, so that the FCC has direct authority, but that would mean ISPs would have crazy new regulatory requirements (which sucks because it goes too far down the regulatory road).

Hence, the third way, which tries to neatly slip between the two extremes by breaking broadband up into different components, subject to different regulations, giving the FCC what the chairman says is "modest authority" over broadband, shoring up the shaky legal ground its internet powers sit on following the Comcast decision:

• Recognize the transmission component of broadband access service-and only this component-as a telecommunications service;
• Apply only a handful of provisions of Title II (Sections 201, 202, 208, 222, 254, and 255) that, prior to the Comcast decision, were widely believed to be within the Commission's purview for broadband;
• Simultaneously renounce-that is, forbear from-application of the many sections of the Communications Act that are unnecessary and inappropriate for broadband access service; and
• Put in place up-front forbearance and meaningful boundaries to guard against regulatory overreach.

The main point being that under this plan, "the transmission component" of broadband falls under the FCC's direct authority—not any of the actual content on the internet, or how much it costs—which the FCC says wouldn't change much for ISPs, since it's narrowly targeted (it "would not give the FCC greater authority than the Commission was understood to have pre-Comcast"), but at the same time, it would let the FCC move forward on the things it needs to do, like work on the national broadband plan. The upshot is that while broadband wouldn't be regulated as tightly as say, telephone service, the FCC is interested in applying a limited form of net neutrality, limiting the ability of ISPs to discriminate against particular services or applications or websites.

Broadband providers hate it, as the NYT and WSJ show, because they think it goes too far, with Verizon saying it's "legally unsupported," and Republicans apparently passing around proposed legislation from a year ago that would ban the FCC from regulating the internet. And so do the hardcore pro-net neutrality groups, thinking the FCC isn't grabbing the authority it really needs, like Public Knowedge. Well, you know, you can't make everybody happy.

Though re-watching this clip of Al Franken reaming Comcast's CEO is still pretty entertaining. [NYT, WSJ, Broadband.gov]

Comcast's New VOIP Modems Offer Blackout Protection

by Natali T. Del Conte

Comcast said Monday that is offering a new cable modem with a battery backup, providing some level of assurance that VOIP services will continue to operate in the event of a power outage.

Comcast has placed orders for an undisclosed number of Motorola SBV5220 modems, Motorola representatives said. The modems will be used in conjunction with Comcast's Digital Voice offering, which costs $39.95 per month including unlimited local and long-distance calling. Users will not have to pay to upgrade.

VoIP's reputation has generally suffered from two criticisms: first, that the service does not allow the use of location-based 911 services without configuration from the user, and second, that the service's modems and routers are susceptible to power outages. The SBV5220, a combination cable modem and phone adapter often referred to as an embedded Multimedia Terminal Adapter (eMTA), solves that problem with its lithium-ion battery back-up, which provides up to eight hours of extended battery life.

"The rise in VoIP services and folks using VOiP to replace the primary landline [was the reason we created this new modem]," said Paul Alfieri, a spokesperson for Motorola. "Landlines have power already in the line so should your power go out, you can still make and receive phone calls. So this is just a way to deliver more comparable service."

Comcast will offer the new modem to customers later this year with Comcast Digital Voice, an IP-based service that uses the company's broadband network rather than the Internet to transmit phone calls. Comcast has offered Digital Voice since late 2004 but up until now has only provided modems made by ARRIS, a Canadian company.

"ARRIS and Motorola are our two eMTA partners that we've announced to date," said Jeanne Russo, a Comcast spokeswoman. "They both have the battery back up. It's an important requirement for our Digital Voice service."

Comcast's first-quarter earnings reported over 416,000 Digital Voice customers. Cox Communications, one of Comcast's main competitors, reportedly has over 1.5 million customers on their Digital Telephone plan but the company does not use eMTAs, instead installing a Network Interface Unit (NIU) to the side of customer's homes. Cox provides back-up power so that their NIUs are not susceptible to power outages.

Motorola currently sells modems without lithium-ion back-ups to all of the major cable companies but Comcast is the first to order the SBV5220. It can service up to two phone lines in the home using standard RJ-11 telephone connectors, as well as connect to a computer with either an Ethernet cable or USB data port.

Users must also own a phone equipped with its own battery backup to be able to place calls during a power outage. Some wired phones are also powered solely by the phone line.

Editor's Note: Through an editing error, a previous version of the article erroneously stated that the Motorola modem was the first modem with battery backup that Comcast had marketed.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1966170,00.asp

Comcast shows off blisteringly fast channel bonding modem

Two little words that could potentially give new life to copper, at least in the high-speed internet department, have found their way into the news once again, and this time it's Comcast who's showing us just what channel bonding can do. While you may have been scratching your head about Ambit Broadband's ridiculous claims, it looks like the technology may actually be edging closer to hitting the mainstream. Apparently, Comcast's CEO was able to demonstrate such a modem in front of the public and cable competitors alike, and while he claimed that it could reach speeds of 150Mbps, it was the testing that got everyone all riled up. Based on DOCSIS 3.0, the modem was able to download a 300MB file "in a few seconds," and he even snagged the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster's visual dictionary in "under four minutes." Interestingly, it was noted that the FiOS competitor "could be available within a couple years," but if fiber crawls to our house before this stuff is ready to rock, it'll sure to be hard to hold off.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/09/comcast-shows-off-blisteringly-fast-channel-bonding-modem/