Comcast’s And Charter’s Broadband Monopoly Continues To Grow

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Fun fact: about 2,950,000 new subscribers signed up for broadband last year, and roughly 95 percent of them signed up with the biggest cable companies (primarily Comcast and Charter). These two cable giants’ market share continues to grow not really because they’re good — but because they’re the only option countless Americans have if they want modern-era broadband speeds.

We’ve long noted how most U.S. telcos spent the better part of the last fifteen years refusing to meaningfully upgrade (or sometimes even repair) their broadband networks. As a result, if you want a modern (100-200 Mbps, low latency, no weird restrictions) connection in America, your choice is increasingly: Comcast (unless your town is building its own broadband network).

That’s the textbook definition of market failure and monopolization (shielded by regulatory capture), but in clinical analysis of market share such concepts wind up not being mentioned at all. Take this PC Magazine analysis of the latest broadband market share data from Leichtman Research:

Cable accounted for almost all of 2020’s growth, 2.8 million and change, and most of that came from sign-ups at the two biggest internet providers in America. Comcast added 1.33 million subscribers for its Xfinity service to reach 31.9 million total, and Charter’s Spectrum service took in 1.2 million new subscribers to hit 30 million.

Analysis like this is always so sterile, lacking any context of the impact of this consolidation. As Comcast dominates a market, it exploits the lack of competition not only to routinely raise rates (even during a pandemic, as it turns out) but to also impose all manner of arbitrary usage restrictions and obnoxious, unnecessary fees, allowing it to drive up the advertised price even further.

In a bid to justify market failure, monopolization, and the corruption and regulatory capture that protects it, policymakers will often point to some looming technological innovation just over the horizon that will make all of this better without intervention. In the early 2000s it was broadband over powerline (BPL), which failed due to interference issues. Now it’s technologies like Starlink and fifth-generation (5G) wireless.

But we’ve noted repeatedly in lengthy posts how both Starlink and 5G won’t be some magical panacea. Starlink has a usage ceiling of only around 800,000 subscribers (in a country where 20-42 million lack access and another 83 million live under a monopoly). 5G can help fix some coverage gaps, but cost, reliability, and network restrictions usually don’t make it a suitable replacement for something like fiber.

As somebody who’s been covering telecom for a long time, something that has always stood out to me is how unwilling regulators, lawmakers, analysts, and even reporters are to call a duck a duck. In this case, the duck is monopolization and market failure. And it’s pretty hard to fix something you’re not even willing to describe accurately in analysis, news coverage, or pretty political speeches.

The problem (market failure and monopolization shielded by corruption and regulatory capture) is always ambiguously referred to as something else — usually using terms that eliminate any responsibility and causality. For example, the problem is most commonly referred to as the “digital divide” — a term that begs you to believe that the problem just fell from the sky, and wasn’t a conscious, multi-decade policy choice by heavily lobbied U.S. lawmakers.

Filed Under: broadband, competition
Companies: charter, comcast

It’s 2022 And Bullshit Cable TV Fees Are Somehow Still A Thing

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the fees-fees-and-more-fees dept

For years we’ve talked about how the broadband and cable industry has perfected the use of utterly bogus fees to jack up subscriber bills — a dash of financial creativity it adopted from the banking and airline industries. Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate — then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. These companies will then falsely claim they haven’t raised rates.

A 2019 Consumer Reports study found that about 24% of consumer bills are comprised of bullshit fees, generating cable giants $28 billion in additional revenue annually. The problem is just as bad over in broadband (see Centurylink’s utterly nonsensical “Internet Cost Recovery” fee).

Often cable and broadband companies will try to give such fees official sounding names like “regulatory recovery” so that consumers falsely blame government for being nickel-and-dimed. But between TV fees, hardware fees, usage fees, and other surcharges, bundled customers dole out a small fortune every year for absolutely nothing.

It’s fraud and false advertising, but fraud and false advertising that has somehow been normalized over decades in the United States.

One particularly annoying fee is the “broadcast TV fee” cable providers tack onto your bill. It’s basically just a portion of the cost of programming, again broken out and hidden below the line so they can falsely advertise a lower rate. Charter (Spectrum) this week informed customers that the broadcast TV fee on their bills will soon be jumping to $21 a month:

Effective March 18, Spectrum’s “Broadcast TV Fee” will increase by $3. Customers will have to pay $21 per month just to be able to watch their favorite local, over-the-air television stations.

The Broadcast TV Fee has been raised each of the last two summers; most recently, it was increased to $17.99 per month in June 2021. This means that Spectrum’s average surcharge for local, OTA stations is rising an average of $36 per year.

Competition really hasn’t hampered this behavior, in part, because many users still feel like they must subscribe to traditional cable to watch the full array of live sports options that aren’t consistently available on streaming. And again, regulators have generally chosen to turn a blind eye to this practice, much as they have in the airline, hotel, banking, and countless other industries.

The closest we’ve got to meaningful action has been the Biden FCC’s decision to revisit “nutrition labels” for broadband. But that doesn’t apply to television bundles, and while it’s helpful to bring more transparency to precisely how you’re being ripped off, it doesn’t actually stop it from occurring.

Filed Under: broadcast tv fee, false advertising, fcc, fees, hidden fees
Companies: charter, charter spectrum

Charter Spectrum Funds Front Group To Try And Kill Small Maine Town's Plan For Better Broadband

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For decades regional U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization. At the same time, they’ve fought tooth and nail against towns and cities that attempt to improve their own regional broadband infrastructure. Often by using a bunch of sleazy and disingenuous arguments, or, in some cases, literally buying and writing state laws that block locals from deciding what they can and can’t do with their own local infrastructure. The only real goal: protect giant regional monopolies from disruption and competition.

In Maine, Charter (which sells broadband and TV under the Spectrum brand) has been waging a not so subtle war against the town of Leeds, which is contemplating a community broadband network. Charter took the time to help create a phony grass roots group dubbed Maine Civil Action, which bombarded locals with pamphlets telling them such a project would be an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle resulting in worse service (that’s false, if you were unaware, not only do plenty of community broadband operations operate in the green, data suggests they routinely provide significantly cheaper, better broadband):

“McLean says town officials suspected that the pamphlets were linked to the broadband provider Spectrum, owned by Charter Communications, which has 31 million customers in 41 states, with revenues of nearly $50 billion last year. “There’s little precedent for this on any other town issue. Very small town. And so to have the expense of a color, double-sided pamphlet being hand-delivered to people’s homes was surprising for a lot of people,” McLean said.”

Creating bogus grass roots opposition to improving local infrastructure has long been a favored pastime of regional telecom monopolies. They hide their identity when running such marketing and disinformation campaigns, because if they pushed the pamphlets as themselves, nobody would (quite justly) believe that they have the best interests of the community at heart. Such local town initiatives are often being run on a shoestring budget, so a company with $50 billion in annual revenues can have a meaningful impact on the discourse.

In Maine, as is usually the case, when some local reporter presses the telecom giant about their involvement, they often lie:

“McLean said he confronted Spectrum’s government affairs liaison Melinda Kinney about the pamphlets and that she denied that the company had any involvement. Maine Public attempted to contact Kinney, but instead received a statement from Charter’s regional spokeswoman Lara Pritchard acknowledging that the company had provided funding to the Maine Policy Institute, the Portland-based conservative advocacy group that created Maine Civic Action.”

As we’ve long illustrated, there are two reasons U.S. broadband is expensive, spotty, and slow: regional monopolies and the state and federal corruption that protects them. As we’ve also noted, community broadband is an organic response to decades of obvious market failure. If ISPs truly wanted to thwart community broadband, they could offer better, faster, more widely available service. Instead, they resort to dodgy games and scare mongering through bogus proxy organizations, all in a bid to protect the broken status quo. And, thanks to their massive budgets, it often works.

Filed Under: astroturf, broadband, competition, leeds, maine, municipal broadband
Companies: charter, charter spectrum

Cable Giant Spectrum Endangered Its Employees And Screwed Its Technicians During COVID

Failures

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Most broadband providers saw a major uptick in both subscribers and revenue during the COVID crisis, as working and schooling at home exploded. But at the regional monopolies that dominate the U.S. telecom sector, revenue most assuredly didn’t go to employees at most of these major companies. In fact, Gizmodo has a new report highlighting how cable giant Charter (whose broadband and TV services are sold under the Spectrum brand) doubled its revenues last year thanks to COVID, yet found a way to dramatically reduce pay for its field technicians:

“Like countless other corporations, Charter amassed new pandemic-era wealth? $3.2 billion, nearly double the previous year. Charter did so, in part, by widely expanding its ?self-install? program, which it touted as a major ?cost-saving? measure. But contract workers say the ?savings? came straight out of their pockets through a systematic scheme to mislabel their jobs as lower-paying emergency fixes.”

Charter was widely criticized for putting both the public and its own employees at risk in the early months of the pandemic. Workers whose jobs could be done remotely were blocked completely from being able to work at home — despite repeated instances of positive COVID tests at the office (a stark contrast from Comcast). Meanwhile subcontractors complained consistently they weren’t being given the PPE necessary to enter consumer homes safely. The company has also come under fire for exploiting an FCC COVID broadband discount program to drive customers to more expensive tiers.

At the same time, pay dropped significantly thanks to a procedural classification trick. During COVID, Charter’s new self-install option reduced the need for an on sight technician visit, allowing the customer to connect and install the cable modem themselves. Inevitably cable technicians have to visit these homes anyway, either because the user screwed something up, or because there were inherent problems in the local building or block wiring that the customer couldn’t fix. But Charter used this opportunity to classify these visits as somehow less important than traditional installs, reducing subcontractor pay significantly:

“Under William?s contract company, a TV, phone, and wireless hookup for Spectrum would normally pay a contractor about $64. But the same job reclassified as a self-install pays around $35 through his contract company. He and fellow contractors sent their managers emails with photos showing that they?d done four or five hour jobs for only $35, but it didn?t change a thing. William said that he?s lost 60% of his pay since Spectrum took over his local market five years ago.”

For many years cable and broadband companies have distanced themselves from a lot of dodgy dysfunction by outsourcing work to third-party contractors. These companies are often dodgy as hell, and the employees are treated even worse than traditional contract employees, Gizmodo notes:

“Rob claimed that he lost his house and can?t afford to date because he can?t pay for dinner. He has to cover all of his own work expenses, which include surprises like a $2,000 meter that his company, which has a contract with Spectrum, forced him to buy, only driving him deeper into debt. That?s on top of the $300 per month for required liability insurance and the $8,000 to $10,000 in annual fuel costs. This summer, he couldn?t go to the hospital when he suffered heat stroke, a potentially fatal illness that can lead to organ failure. He worries that he?s one accident away from breaking down. ?I feel brittle,? he said.”

Most regional broadband monopolies don’t see enough real competition for the “free market” (which U.S. telecom decidedly isn’t) to apply any real pressure to do better. Charter union employees have been boxed out and are currently engaged in the longest strike in US history because they wanted better pay and health care. And because for the last 30 years the U.S. has generally operated under the idea that mindlessly deregulating U.S. telecom somehow produces near Utopian outcomes (it’s abundantly clear this isn’t true), regulators have largely become defanged and feckless. Then there’s Congress, which is so slathered with telecom campaign contributions as to be largely useless.

As a result, nothing meaningfully changes, and it’s not that hard to exploit a pandemic to grab more revenue without ever seeing regulatory or policy accountability.

Filed Under: covid, employees
Companies: charter

U.S. Broadband Growth Slows As the Profit Party Grinds To A Halt

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For years we’ve watched major cable TV providers lose traditional cable TV subscribers hand over fist to cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. It was a trend that only accelerated during COVID. Don’t feel too badly for companies like Charter and Comcast however; the companies’ growing monopoly over faster fixed-line broadband across huge swaths of the country have allowed them to recoup their pound of flesh via broadband fees (or unnecessary usage caps) without much in the way of repercussion.

But there’s signs that the cable broadband party could be slowing down. Both Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) reported the usual number of cable TV subscriber losses, but also reported significantly fewer broadband subscribers than usual:

“Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago.”

What’s the reason for the slowdown? For one thing, the COVID telecommuting boom had artificially been boosting subscriber uptick as people struggled to work and learn from home. That’s ending as people return to something vaguely resembling normal school and work life. Charter and Comcast largely blame a slow down in the new home market, leaving them trying to wring more subscribers out of a fairly saturated subscriber base (they often don’t want to expand into new, often more rural areas because it’s not profitable enough, quickly enough, for Wall Street).

Consumers also struggling during the pandemic aren’t spending as much on services, which means downgrades to slower tiers, or cancelling service altogether and going cell phone only:

“Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up. ?There?s clearly softness in consumer spending,? said Maribel Lopez with Lopez Research. ?They are making choices on tiers and downgrading services.?

This is where it gets interesting. With a saturated market and slowing growth, cable giants like Comcast will be forced to find a revenue boost from somewhere else to satisfy the insatiable appetite for quarter over quarter growth. Streaming isn’t going quite as they planned (Comcast took a $520 million loss on its streaming service Peacock last quarter) due to intense competition. That means increased pressure to do a lot of the dodgy shit (arbitrary usage caps, overage fees, prioritizing certain services over others) that got them in trouble in the net neutrality wars.

With the FCC effectively crippled courtesy of the Trump administration, and Comcast lobbyists busy trying to scuttle Biden appointments to mire the agency in perpetual gridlock, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Comcast and Charter come up with some aggressively idiotic new nickel-and-dime money making scheme in the next year. When a monopoly’s growth gets restricted and Wall Street grows impatient for its blood sacrifice, there’s almost always one person who winds up paying the price: the consumer. Especially when there’s neither competition nor competent regulators capable of reining in the monopoly’s worst impulses.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, growth
Companies: charter, comcast

ISPs Already Fighting FCC Plan To End Anti-Competitive Landlord Broadband Deals

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Earlier this month we noted how the FCC announced it would be taking a closer look at the dodgy deals big ISPs make with landlords to hamstring broadband competition. While the FCC passed rules in 2008 outlawing strict exclusivity agreements, big ISPs have, for years, tap-danced around the loose wording of the restrictions, often by simply calling what they’re doing… something else. ISPs also still do stuff like charging door fees just to access the building (making it tougher on less wealthy, small ISPs), or striking deals that ban any competitors from even advertising in the building.

Obviously the broadband industry loves these sorts of deals, as they effectively give them a building-by-building monopoly over broadband access. As such they’re already trying to apply pressure on the FCC while claiming such arrangements are secretly a really good thing:

“Comcast, Charter, Cox, and NCTA?The Internet & Television Association (the cable industry’s primary lobbying group) met with FCC staff to discuss the topic on September 2, according to an ex parte filing submitted last week by NCTA. During the meeting, NCTA “described the benefits of continuing to allow providers to enter into exclusive wiring agreements with MTE owners. Exclusive wiring agreements do not deny new entrants access to MTEs. Rather, exclusive wiring agreements are pro-competitive and help ensure that state-of-the-art wiring will be deployed in MTEs to the benefit of consumers,” the filing said.”

Granted this is the same industry that has a severe allergy to acknowledging that the U.S. broadband market has any flaws whatsoever, so of course Comcast’s policy and lobbying arm thinks anti-competitive building deals are covertly a great thing. While the FCC’s original rules tried to open up competitor access to in-building ISP wiring (often the property of a cable giant like Comcast), ISPs simply tap-danced around the restrictions by deeding ownership of those wires to a landlord in exchange for exclusive access to the wires. Because they’re no longer technically owned by the ISP, exclusivity deals no longer violate the FCC rules.

It’s all a very stupid affair, and highlights not only the lengths ISPs are willing to go to to hamstring competition, but the perpetual failure of U.S. telecom regulators to maintain baseline levels of competency. Not only were the original rules terribly written and constructed, ISPs have been exploiting that initial failure for more than a decade with absolutely no meaningful penalty. And while FCC does occasionally admit there’s a problem here, the net result is usually little more than a few meetings.

This time the FCC is opening up the public commenting system for input from the public and ISPs that are harmed by these practices. But again, there’s no guarantee the process actually survives ISP lobbying and ends with meaningful improvements to the rules. And because the Biden camp still hasn’t appointed a permanent boss, the agency still lacks the voting majority necessary to implement actual reform anytime soon anyway.

Filed Under: apartment buildings, broadband, competition, fcc, isps, landlords
Companies: charter, comcast, cox, ncta

Glitches And Greed Mar Effort To Bring COVID Relief To US Broadband Users

Broadband

from the band-aids dept

As part of a recent COVID bill, the government announced that folks struggling economically during COVID would be getting some temporary help. Under the EBB (Emergency Broadband Benefit program), U.S. consumers can nab a $50 discount off their broadband bill, or $75 if you live in tribal areas. The program ends when its $3.2 billion in federal funding expires, or six months after the government has declared an end to the pandemic.

To be clear the program is bringing some helpful aid to struggling consumers, with more than 2.3 million users signed up through the voluntary program’s 825 participating ISPs. But this being the busted US broadband industry overseen by fairly feckless federal leadership, the efforts aren’t going without a hitch.

For one, some ISPs like Verizon exploited the program to force consumers onto even more expensive plans (not too surprising for a company that thought it would be a good idea to cap, throttle, then upsell firefighters during an historical California wildfire). Other ISPs like Charter Communications, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T greatly restricted which plans qualified for the program. A few ISPs, like Charter, rejected users who didn’t agree to sign up for more expensive broadband tiers once the program ends. This violated FCC rules designed to prevent bill shock among poor people, but it’s not clear the agency did much about it.

Charter and Comcast also appear to be rejecting qualified applicants based on incompetence and some dumb database issues. One qualifying Comcast user, for example, was rejected four times by Comcast despite being approved for the program by the FCC:

“Over the last several weeks, Corsaro said he’s reapplied and been rejected by Comcast another three times. He’s followed the circuitous trails of automated FCC phone lines that all lead to dead ends and appealed to the kindness of mystified Comcast agents, who have told him again and again that he needs to finish the FCC’s verification process. “I keep telling them, ‘I’ve been approved. There’s nothing to finish,'” Corsaro said.”

Such complaints are common over at Reddit for both Comcast and Charter. Some of the problems stem from something as simple as “street” versus “St.” not matching between FCC and ISP databases, something it took several months to notice:

“It turns out even the smallest differences in how people enter their data into the different systems can trip them up ? for example, writing Elm St. in one and Elm Street in the other. “We’ve learned in these early days of the program that the information consumers provide to an Internet provider must exactly match, to the letter, abbreviation, and number, the information they enter in the National Verifier,” Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle said in a statement. He noted that Comcast is “continually working with the FCC and USAC to make the process easy to navigate.”

Again the EBB program is certainly a useful, if temporary, band aid, providing immediate relief to millions of Americans. But the program doesn’t really do much to address the regional monopolization and lack of competition that makes US broadband so mediocre and expensive in the first place. Nor does it address the fact the Trump FCC gutted its own consumer protection authority because a bunch of telecom monopolies asked them to, using completely bogus justifications (something the Biden administration seems in absolutely no rush to remedy).

Instead of fixing the real causes of US broadband dysfunction (monopolization and the state and federal corruption and regulatory capture that protects it), we seem intent on applying layers of cumbersome bureaucracies on top of the problem. It’s like applying a dozen band aids upon a severe arm wound, then wondering why a bunch of plastic strips aren’t truly fixing the problem.

Filed Under: broadband, covid, digital divide, discounts
Companies: at&t, charter, comcast, t-mobile, verizon

Big Telecom Sues New York State For Trying To Bring Cheap Broadband To Poor People

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

If there’s one thing that the U.S. broadband industry is terrified of, it’s price regulation. The idea that the government might eventually cap the rates regional monopolies can charge in the absence of meaningful competition keeps a lot of executives up late at night. But despite a lot of fear mongering by telecom industry folks on this front, the U.S. has never really gotten even close to that reality. Repeatedly, even the most modest of non-price related regulatory telecom oversight efforts (from net neutrality to privacy) are routinely and easily dismantled by powerful lobbyists either before they can take effect or not long after.

Recently New York State passed a new law (pdf) demanding that regional broadband providers (Verizon, Charter Spectrum, and Altice) provide low-income consumers $15, 25 Mbps broadband tiers to help them survive COVID. The goal: to try and help struggling Americans afford the high cost of broadband. Under the proposal ISPs are also allowed to offer $20, 200 Mbps tiers, with any price increases capped at two percent per year.

Regulators engaging in anything even close to price regulation of regional monopolies is, again, said monopolies’ worst nightmare. As a result the broadband industry quickly sued New York, insisting that the state is forbidden from passing such a law thanks in part to the Trump administration’s net neutrality repeal. While many folks think that repeal just killed net neutrality rules, that was never true. It also killed much of the FCC’s consumer protection authority, including its ability to adequately respond to billing fraud (which happens a lot in residential broadband thanks to misleading surcharges and fees).

The repeal even went one step further in claiming that states also aren’t allowed to protect consumers from telecom industry shenanigans. The problem: the courts haven’t been looking too kindly upon this argument so far. In part because once the FCC abdicated its regulatory authority over telecom, it lost any authority to tell states what they can or can’t do. The industry has used similar arguments to try and attack state-level net neutrality rules, and it hasn’t gone particularly well for them:

“An agency that has no power to regulate has no power to preempt the states, according to case law,? Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick told Motherboard. ?When the FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it said it had no power to regulate broadband internet access providers. That means the FCC cannot prevent the states from adopting net neutrality protections because the FCC?s repeal order removed its authority to adopt such protections.”

Basically, the broadband industry has spent four years having its cake and eating it too, demanding that nobody on either the state or federal level has any authority to tell broadband providers what to do, whether we’re talking about basic rate regulation or even the most basic of consumer protections. While the Trump and Ajit Pai FCC thought that was just nifty, it’s an argument that’s not being taken particularly seriously by the States, which have simply doubled down on their own regulatory efforts to fill the giant consumer protection void left by Trump-era apathy:

“I knew giant telecom companies would be upset by our efforts to level the playing field, and right on cue, they’re pushing back,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement. “Let me be abundantly clear?providing internet in the Empire State is not a god-given right. If these companies want to pick this fight, impede the ability of millions of New Yorkers to access this essential service, and prevent them from participating in our economic recovery, I say bring it on.”

Keep in mind New York is simply trying to force ISPs to offer low-cost service to low-income families. Despite the posturing here by Cuomo, the state likely lacks the political courage to take this idea one step further and regulate prices for all New York State residents truly upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors.

Again, none of this would be necessary if we had adequate competition in residential US broadband. But because pushing policies that increase competition upsets AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter, a corrupt Congress and captured regulators aren’t willing to really do that. Meanwhile, the US telecom sector continues to whine about a “fractured landscape of state-level requirements,” hoping you’ll ignore the fact that they created this entire mess by repeatedly, brutally attacking absolutely every effort at even the most modest federal consumer protection oversight.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, digital divide, fcc, low income, new york
Companies: altice, charter, verizon

Striking Cable Techs Build Their Own ISP In NYC

Broadband

from the build-it-yourself dept

Shortly after Charter Communications (Spectrum) acquired Time Warner Cable in 2016, the company simply stopped negotiating with its unionized employees in the New York City region. Not long after in 2017, around 1,800 Charter employees went on strike over a lack of any traction on healthcare and pensions… and they’ve been on strike ever since. At four years and counting, it’s technically the longest strike in US history, and there’s absolutely zero indication that Charter has any real interest in negotiating with the striking employees.

That said, they’ve been productive in their free time. Many members of IBEW Local #3 have been busy building their own broadband internet service provider (ISP) in the New York City region. Like the 750 other US towns and cities that have explored community broadband, the effort was born out of frustration with entrenched regional telecom monopolies:

“Watching every elected official constantly talk about finding a way to fix a problem while ignoring the solution we were already giving them motivated us,? (union worker and project lead Troy Walcott said). ?Having elected officials thank us quietly for our sacrifice but not say anything about our strike publicly motivated us. Seeing customers denied service during COVID because they had outstanding bills motivated us.”

So the union employees built an ISP, dubbed People’s Choice Communications, that uses both fixed and wireless to deliver broadband for as little as $10 to $20 per month. It’s so cheap because the model is effectively a cooperative, where the profits are shared by local customers. From the outfit’s website:

“After we build out a network in your building, it transfers to cooperative ownership, so profits are returned to users,? the organization?s website states. ?We are able to provide high-speed service in most cases for $10 to $20 a month. No more cable company ripping you off, and as an owner, you have a vote in policies like data privacy.”

Granted, like other similar ventures like NYC Mesh, we’re not talking about massive scale here. Such options lack the political and financial power to seriously challenge an entrenched regional monopoly like Charter, which is only growing more powerful as US telcos effectively give up on upgrading their residential networks in many markets because it’s not profitable enough, quickly enough, for Wall Street.

But collectively, community broadband remains an undeniable movement as a growing roster of US towns and cities, pissed off after decades of monopolist dysfunction, eye building their own networks. That’s not only bringing faster, cheaper options to market, but it’s also the only thing really forcing many entrenched monopolies to try harder given the lack of US broadband competition and competent regulatory oversight. That’s why said monopolies have effectively bought laws in 18 (soon to be 17) states hamstringing or banning local voters from pursuing the option.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, nyc, striking workers
Companies: charter, people's choice communications, spectrum

With Trump Loss, Charter Backs Off FCC Request To Allow Broadband Caps

Broadband

from the you-can't-always-get-what-you-want dept

To be very clear: American consumers don’t like broadband usage caps. At all. Most Americans realize (either intellectually or on instinct) that monthly broadband usage caps and overage fees are little more than monopolistic cash grabs. They are confusing, frustrating price hikes on captive customers that accomplish absolutely none of their stated benefits. They don’t actually help manage congestion, and they aren’t about “fairness” — since if fairness were a goal you’d have a lot of grandmothers paying $5-$10 a month for broadband because they only check their email twice a day.

Enter U.S. cable giant Charter (Spectrum), which has spent a good chunk of the last year trying to get the FCC to kill the merger conditions applied as part of its 2015 $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Those conditions, among other things, required that Charter adhere to net neutrality (despite the fact that the GOP has since killed net neutrality rules), and avoid usage caps and overage fees. Both conditions had 7 year sunset clauses built in, and Charter, eager to begin jacking up U.S. broadband consumer prices ever higher, has been lobbying to have them killed two years early.

To get its way, Charter petitioned the FCC, falsely claiming that such caps are “popular” among consumers. They even employed the help of the Boys and Girls Club, which was apparently happy to petition the FCC on Charter’s behalf even if that meant selling out their constituents. Unfortunately for Charter, COVID has brought renewed attention on the fact that usage caps are glorified price gouging bullshit. And with industry BFF Ajit Pai headed for the exits, Charter has been forced to back off its request:

“Spectrum internet customers can be assured of an additional two years of unlimited internet service after Charter Communications dropped its petition Tuesday with the FCC to allow the cable company to introduce data caps. The FCC?s Wireline Competition Bureau acknowledged receipt of Charter?s withdrawal of its petition to end a prohibition on the company imposing data caps and usage-based pricing mechanisms two years before the original agreement with the regulator expires on May 18, 2023.”

Granted this doesn’t mean that Charter won’t simply turn around in two years when the conditions sunset and impose the restrictions anyway. The problem so far has been the optics of imposing predatory price hikes in the middle of a pandemic where broadband is seen as essential to survival. Even then, such concerns certainly didn’t stop Comcast from recently expanding its own caps, or AT&T from restoring theirs despite the accelerating pandemic and millions of Americans still struggling to get online for work or education.

Even during COVID US broadband monopolies have tried to claim that such monthly usage restrictions are about “fairness.” But they’ve never been about fairness. ISPs love to insist they just want to “experiment with price differentiation,” but you will never see a giant ISP offer a super cheap plan for people like your grandma who only check the Weather Channel website and their email a few times a day. And they don’t do that because the goal is to drive up the costs of everybody’s connection over the longer haul to please investors’ needs for higher quarterly returns.

Cable giants like Comcast and Charter can get away with this because in most U.S. markets, their only competition is a phone company that hasn’t seriously upgraded its DSL lines since 2004 or so, or there’s no competition at all. If the market actually saw competition and had functional regulatory oversight, you might see plans more closely tailored toward your actual usage. But in a market absent of real pricing competition and overseen by fecklessly captured regulators, what you get instead is endlessly higher prices, usually in the form of sneaky, misleading fees.

Filed Under: broadband caps, competition, fcc
Companies: charter, charter spectrum