Comcast Curbs Downloads, Seeks To Cut Own Throat

Yahoo!: Comcast to make monthly Internet use cap official

Comcast Corp., the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, Thursday said it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.
On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.
Comcast has already reserved the right to cut off subscribers who use too much bandwidth each month, without specifying exactly what constitutes excessive use.

Look, corporate natural selection in action! At the same time that digital delivery of HD content is poised to takeoff, rather than seeking to increase it's ability to serve its customers, instead it's looking to give them a reason to change broadband providers. Idiots.

Anecdotaly, it's no coincidence that several of my U.S. acquaintances have switched from Comcast to AT&T recently. It appears that America's "second largest Internet service provider" is gunning to be the fourth or fifth largest.

More power to them, I say.

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Telcos Getting Crazy For IPTV

I sound like a curmudgeon when I say this, but I can remember when the phone company and the cable company were two different things. Today, the distinctions aren't there anymore. The phone company is selling TV, the TV company is selling phone, and everyone's selling high-speed Internet. Now the next big thing, IPTV is picking up steam.

The Bridge: The Telcos Tilt to IPTV
All Internet Protocol All the Time Gains Favor Among Telco Triple Players

Looking at just the U.S. pay-TV market, the IP-supported U-verse TV service from AT&T is rapidly approaching the 400,000-customer mark and is aiming for 1 million customers by the end of the year. Small telcos are also embracing IPTV, using the technology as an affordable yet scalable solution that gets them into the video business.
But the United States is hardly alone in utilizing IPTV. There are nearly 10 million IPTV subscribers around the world, states one research firm. That number could grow to the tens of millions during the coming years.

Bring it on!

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Interesting Facts About Broadband Performance

I'm indebted to The Stalwart for making me aware of the tech policy blog Technology Liberation Front which has now rocketed to the top of my list of favorite tech blogs.

Linked up at The Stalwart was a piece that discussed the evolution of broadband services, and how the actual delivery of service differs from popular opinions about it.

Technology Liberation Front: More Broadband Progress

One of the things that makes it hard to judge is that broadband speeds and prices don’t tend to grow continuously and evenly around the country. Rather, carriers take turns leap-frogging one another, with each upgrade accompanied by a temporary price increase. So it can be tricky to judge the average rate of improvement by looking at just one market, because one market may seem to stagnate for several years at a time. But if one looks at the country as a whole, and focuses on time horizons closer to a decade, I think it’s undeniable that things are improving at a fairly rapid pace.

The facts that Technology Liberation Front present interested me because I've been keenly observing the improvement in broadband speeds primarily because of the advent of HD downloads, a subject that's very important to me. I don't think I'm being overeager when I say that quick and convenient HD downloads on demand are going to be here before a lot of people think.

On a related note, Going Private has an extraordinarily long diatribe (even by her standards) that is both archly caustic and achingly beautiful on several separate levels. There's almost a graduate-level seminar's worth of business acumen in that single post, but what I'm focusing on in particular is her comments about the bogus nature of telecom's service fees for broadband service.

Going Private: The Five ForcesCircles of Hell

Coming full circle, we arrive at the business model for every telecom company on the planet. The amazing part to me is that, almost De Beers like, wireless providers have managed to somehow maintain the fiction that they maintain massive proprietary networks, and price data transmission accordingly.

There's more to her post than that, but she's almost impossible to excerpt into small bites.

Consumers are well aware that they're being jacked by telco's on data rate prices. Note the recent post on Marketnews Gadget Talk about Bell's data shaping plans. Anytime this subject comes up it triggers a flurry of comments from angry readers. As it happens, I was IM'ing on Friday with Christine from Marketnews about the adoption rate of fibre to the home in the US. I glibly commented "If Bell or Telus or Rogers were offering fibre here in Canada, can you imagine how hard they would gouge us on it?"


I'm not 100% sure where I'm going with this post, but mostly I'm just talking out loud, putting the pieces of the puzzle together for myself. Thanks for listening.

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Home Fibre Broadband Connections On The Climb

Over the course of the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD debacle format war, any time I editorialized about how physical optical media was a dead end, and the future of entertainment is in digital delivery, I would get *reams* of hate mail from keyboard ninjas who would call me an idiot because it's "impossible" for there to "ever" be enough bandwidth in people's houses to download HD content swiftly and easily.

Right.

CE Pro: FTTH Connections Nearly Hit Three Million, Study Says

There are now 2.91 million homes with end-to-end fiber connections, according to a study released by the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council (pdf link).
The RVA Market Research study says that’s a 97 percent increase from last year, when there were 1.48 million connections in April 2007.
The study also shows FTTH networks now passing 11.8 million homes in the United States, up from 8 million a year ago.

First, when it comes to innovation, you don't ever want to go into the history books as the guy who said it would "never happen." Second, if you're still dubious, just keep watching.

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High Speed Internet Over Airwaves: Still Under Construction

MSNBC.com: FCC will test Internet over TV airwaves
High-tech group submitted devices that transmit service over TV spectrum

WASHINGTON - Federal regulators said they will try again to test prototypes on Jan. 24 for transmitting high-speed Internet service over unused television airwaves.
Late Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission said the devices — developed by Adaptrum Inc., Microsoft Corp., Motorola Inc. and Philips Electronics North America Corp. — will be tested in laboratory and real-world conditions.

One of my favorite aphorisms as it pertains to sports is "It's not if, it's when, and how bad." In the case of over the air broadband, you could say "It's not if, it's when and how broad."

There's not a whole lot to talk about at this point, but it's something to keep your eye on, and probably more likely to take off than Internet over your power lines.

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Broadband instead of broadcast?

I don't think you have to be Nostradamus to see this coming.

The Retail Bridge: Is Broadband The Future Of TV?

According to a report released last week by market research firm In-Stat, more than 16 million U.S. TV households may be using their broadband service more than their TV sets within the next three years.
...
The In-Stat survey found that as many as 30 percent of respondents would consider dropping their pay TV subscription and use the internet for their entertainment needs if they knew how to do it. Why? Because, even with hundreds of available channels, 42 percent of respondents said they are not getting enough of the content they want (especially international news and information) from their TV service.

What I really want to see is HD content available in a truly a la carte fashion: individual channel streams, hell, even individual programs selectable one at a time, like a Dim Sum menu. However, I'm a little uncertain that the content providers would ever go for it.

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More Commentary on Kid Nation

Last month I had some rude things to say about CBS' new reality show, Kid Nation:

Is Kid Nation the bottom of the barrel for Reality Television?

In the intervening time, there has been no small amount of anguished commentary on the Intar-Webs about this latest low-water mark. By far though, the most insightful article comes from humor site Something Awful.com.

Kid Nation Predictions *Warning! Spoilers*

It's no secret that reality television producers have been scraping the marrow of the barrel. They've been doing that since the first boiled horse anus passed between the glossed lips of a Playboy Playmate on Fear Factor. Now CBS television has reached a new and abyssal low with their latest offering.
Kid Nation, debuting this Wednesday, excretes 40 children between the ages of 8 and 15 into a "ghost town" in the middle of nowhere for a duration of 40 days. Together, mostly without adult supervision, they'll have to figure out how to live and rule over a suspiciously theme park like Wild West town stocked with jars of candy and tumbleweeds. According to the Wikipedia article on the taping of the show's first season, it also came fully stocked with unmarked bottles of bleach ready to quench children's thirst.
You have to give CBS a lot of credit for this ingenious idea, because no one is known for being more level-headed or less prone to violence than children. They're always rational and they never punch, hit, claw, bite, or spit on each other.

Read the whole thing, it's worth it.

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Telus gives up on buying BCE

Yahoo!: Telus to abandon BCE pursuit: report

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Telus Corp. is expected to abandon efforts to buy rival BCE Inc. in part because it could not get guidance from regulators about which assets it would have had to sell for a deal to be approved, the Globe and Mail reported on its Web site on Friday.
Telus pulled out of the auction for BCE in June but had been expected to come up with a better offer, the paper reported.
BCE, which is Canada's largest telecommunications group, has accepted an offer worth C$34.8 billion from a group including the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.
Since pulling out of bidding, Telus had been lobbying regulators and meeting the Canadian Competition Bureau, hoping to get some guidance before BCE held its shareholder vote, the paper reported, citing unnamed sources.
It was told recently that the guidance would not be forthcoming, the paper said.
The shareholder vote could happen as early as mid-September, the paper reported.
Telus could not be reached immediately for comment.

You would think that in order for regulators to approve a Telus purchase of BCE, Telus would have to divest itself of it's telephone and DSL broadband businesses first.

Seriously though, it's unfortunate that Telus has been unable to take a crack at getting themselves set up with an established broadcast provider. Left to their own devices, all they've come up with is Telus TV, and look how well that has taken off!

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Google & Earthlink have trouble giving away free Wi-Fi

, Los Angeles Times: Bad reception for free Wi-Fi
Iconoclastic, tech-savvy San Franciscans don't buy into a plan to offer wireless Internet access.
By Michelle Quinn and James S. Granelli, Times Staff WritersFebruary 19, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — In Los Angeles, officials want to blanket the city with wireless Internet access that's affordable to the masses. But their counterparts here can't even give it away.In his October 2004 State of the City address, Mayor Gavin Newsom pledged that his administration would "not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service."Newsom forged a plan with Google Inc. and EarthLink Inc., under which the companies would build a Wi-Fi network offering two tiers of service: a free one, plastered with online advertisements, and a faster version without ads for $21.95 a month. They would pay San Francisco to put signal-beaming antennas on its light poles.But in a city where suspicion of corporate interests flows as thick as the fog, the plan is meeting resistance at every turn.Dissecting every bit and byte, techies call the free service too slow and are pushing for alternatives. Privacy advocates fret that the Internet companies could track users' every move.At one of the marathon meetings to debate the proposal, a citizen suggested that Google and EarthLink fork over more money — to supplement the electricity bills of San Franciscans who use their computers more as a result of the free access. Another suggested that Google use its vehicles to shuttle children to the local zoo.More than two years later, the project hasn't gotten off the ground. Newsom signed a contract with the Internet providers in January. But the Board of Supervisors, whose approval is required, last week declined even to consider the deal, deciding instead to investigate turning the project into a city-owned public utility.

Isn't it remarkable how corporate altruism can get torpedoed by municipal bureaucracy, techno-snobbery, and fuzzy-thinking paranoia from people who don't understand the fundamentals of what's on the table?

I call it the coalition of the unknowing.

This really underlines the reality of how large infrastructure projects that involve multiple interested parties really are like trying to herd cats.

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Broadband over Powerlines gets a boost

TechWeb: FCC Endorses Broadband over Powerline
The Federal Communications Commission on Friday gave a big boost to Broadband over Powerline (BPL), classifying the technology as an "information service."
The declaration places BPL-enabled access services on equal footing with cable modem and DSL Internet access services. The FCC has campaigned for BPL approval for years, although ham radio operators have long complained that BPL would interfere with its service.

Remember, back in the dawn of the internet (when people still called it "the Web"), there was a brief flurry of media foorah about high speed internet via your home's power outlets? It was sensationalistic at the time because there was basically no such thing as "high speed" for the average user. Regardless, after a few excited articles in magazines and newspapers, things quieted down, and we didn't really hear a peep about this for some time.

Well, it's back, and it appears to be on its way to becoming a reality.

I suppose that in an era where the phone company is offering television, and the cable company is offering phone service, and everyone is offering internet access, it only makes sense for the electric company to offer broadband.

More to come, I imagine.

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