Cox Communications has announced that the company is now offering faster, DOCSIS 3.0 based service to businesses and residential customers in Connecticut. That of course includes the company’s fastest Ultimate Internet tier, which offers 50 Mbps downstream (55 Mbps when Powerboost kicks in) and 5 Mbps upstream for $99 a month. According to the Cox press release, the tier comes with three unique IP addresses, 10 e-mail addresses, and 50 hours per month of remote dial access (that last one being something you’ll enjoy for less than a month, since Cox is killing off backup dial-up starting in September).

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Users in a significant number of markets are complaining that they’re suddenly seeing their upstream iPhone speeds capped at just 100 kbps (if that, some users report closer to 50 kbps). Given AT&T’s 2008 HSUPA upgrades, those speeds should be at least 800 kbps. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the speed issues with consumers from NYC to Orlando reporting problems but other users (like in Dallas) seeing nothing unusual. While it’s possible that AT&T throttled upstream service in many markets to help manage congestion during the holiday weekend, a technical problem seems more likely given the severity of these problems.

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As far as April, the FCC has struck a deal with UK measurement firm SamKnows to test user broadband speeds across the United States. The agency plans to use a modified Cisco Valet with custom firmware in subscriber homes in order to test connections – and will use honest-to-goodness science to then forge broadband policy (surprisingly a first for the agency). According to an FCC blog post, the agency says that 20,000 users have already volunteered but they’re looking for more users “that represent a wide swath of ISPs, access technologies, service plans, and regions of the country” (well, unless you have bandwidth caps). The FCC’s TestMyISP.com website has information for those interested.

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What do you do when you’re a telecom industry trade group that wants the FCC to ignore the fact that U.S. consumers pay more money, for slower bandwidth, in fewer locations than more than a dozen other countries? You pick out a largely meaningless metric we actually are good at and blow it out of proportion. If you’re a lobbying organization like the USTelecom Association, for example, you can send a letter to the FCC (warning: pdf link) highlighting how all those critics of expensive U.S. broadband who say we lack competition are ignoring the fact that we’re a world leader in – consuming broadband:

To date, international broadband comparisons seem to have largely ignored actual usage in favor of more theoretical measurements based on capacity. We believe that the amount that Internet consumers are actually making use of their broadband connections to pull value from the Internet – whether education, government services, or entertainment – provides a more real-world, practical measure of how successfully a country’s broadband networks and regulatory environment are providing consumers with what they want. By this more consumer-focused measure U.S. Internet users and our broadband networks are among the world leaders.

In other words, USTelecom would prefer the FCC avoid looking at data that shows we are mediocre in most every metric – and instead operate from the belief that we’re doing great – because Americans like bandwidth. That certainly sounds almost like science, and it does put us at the top of something. Even after using the lobbying firm’s data (which is just culled from Cisco’s latest study) we’re still only in fourth place – American’s consuming about 14.24 gigabytes per month. As long as you ignore price, speed, competition, predatory practices, connection quality and every other meaningful metric – we’re world beaters.

Yeah. I’m convinced.

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Earlier this month an analyst for the Yankee Group and one of the primary developer’s of Amsterdam’s fiber to the home (and houseboat) network argued that the bandwidth hog didn’t exist, and was instead simply a concept used to disguise poorly designed networks and justify anti-consumer behavior.

To prove their point, they offered to analyze anonymous data from any ISP willing to volunteer – as long as the ISP offered data that adhered to a specific dataset. According to a new post over at the blog, several ISPs have offered to participate (though there’s no names so far). They’ve also set forth the exact dataset (warning: pdf link ) they’re looking for, if any additional ISPs wish to participate.

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Fake Steve Jobs (journalist Dan Lyons) recently proposed that iPhone users earlier today at 3PM EST begin gobbling up as much bandwidth as possible – in protest of AT&T’s shoddy 3G network performance. AT&T has since called the joke “irresponsible and pointless,” and now even the FCC has chimed in on “Operation Chokehold.”

“To purposely try to disrupt or negatively impact a network with ill-intent is irresponsible and presents a significant public safety concern,” the FCC tells ABC News. It added that “threats of this nature are serious, and we caution the public to use common sense and good judgment.” Even Lyons seems to be backing away from the campaign, though judging from comments to his post by his blog’s readers, AT&T users may not be listening.

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AT&T executive comments yesterday that the carrier might be ditching the current “all you can eat” iPhone data plan for usage-based pricing didn’t go over very well with either the company’s users or the press.

Many felt AT&T was blaming its customers for the company’s inability to adequate meet iPhone bandwidth demand. Others felt AT&T was continuing the industry trend of pretending that the flat-rate pricing model doesn’t provide enough revenue for network upgrades. The coverage has had echoes of Time Warner Cable’s botched attempt to hoist usage-based billing upon their customers earlier this year.

As has repeatedly been the case when it comes to AT&T’s 3G network this year, AT&T again found itself in the unenviable position of having to do damage control. As such, AT&T’s been going around to various news outlets insisting that AT&T Wireless boss Ralph de La Vega’s comments were “taken out of context.” As such, they’re providing a link to the one hour presentation where the comments were made. Here’s the transcript of the relevant bits:

I think one of the first things that we need to do is we need to educate the customers. And it s something that customers today have not been used to doing, so we ve got to get them to understand what represents a megabyte of data. And so what we re doing now is we re improving all of our systems so that we can begin to give customers real-time information about their data usage and begin to get customers educated. And I think longer-term, there s got to be some sort of a pricing scheme that addresses the usage, but that s going to be determined by industry competitive factors, regulatory factors and customer successes.

The idea that “user education” will somehow magically compensate for the capacity and network reliability AT&T failed to provide iPhone users is the kind of disingenuous language Time Warner Cable used when they tried to impose a new pricing model that lacked consumer value. Like Time Warner Cable, AT&T investors and executives are chomping at the bit to impose an unpopular usage-based billing model on both their wireless and wireline networks — simply because it generates more revenue than flat rate pricing. “User education” plays no part in the equation. User disinformation does, and there’s been a lot of it.

The argument that an already hugely profitable company wants to charge even more money for bandwidth isn’t one that sits well with consumers. As such, AT&T’s tried to sell the idea by arguing that usage-based billing is about being fair to grandmothers, while their lobbyists have spent a lot of money arguing that unless you embrace their new pricing vision, the Internet will explode. As with Time Warner Cable, AT&T’s customers see this “consumer education effort” for what it is: an effort to impose higher prices on consumers. As de la Vega himself notes, the issue will be whether regulators and consumers sign off on the idea.

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For years, ISP lobbyists and their hired mouthpieces have pushed the bogus concept of the “Exaflood”, or the idea that bandwidth demand is growing so quickly, ISPs can’t possibly keep up unless they get X. Usually X in this equation is fewer consumer protections, no price caps, the right to charge incredibly high overage fees, not having to pay taxes – etc. You get the point. Real science from outside lobbyist land, however, repeatedly shows that bandwidth demands can be met in both the core and the last mile with only reasonable network upgrades.

While network congestion certainly is real, it is also frequently used to justify anti-competitive behavior – be it Bell Canada’s decision to throttle wholesale competitors so they can’t offer superior service to consumers, or AT&T and Time Warner Cable’s desire to impose high overages on their users despite already making an incredible profit under the flat-rate pricing model. During these arguments, consumers who dare actually use the company’s product (as it’s advertised to them) are demonized as “bandwidth hogs.”

Techdirt directs your attention to two posts over at Fiber Evolution and DadaMotive, exploring how even the concept of a bandwidth hog is somewhat disingenuous. Herman Wagter, who has worked on Amsterdam’s FTTH efforts (covered here earlier, but also see this interesting interview with him) goes so far as to argue the bandwidth hog doesn’t really even exist. Wagter’s fundamental argument is that bandwidth hogs aren’t real; what’s real are chokepoints and network designs that companies are hiding from sight. Adds Fiber Evolution (run by Yankee Group analyst Benoit Felten):

Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5% and call them hogs. For those service providers with data caps, these are usually set around 50 Gbyte and go up to 150 Gbyte a month. This is therefore a good indication of the level of bandwidth at which you start being considered a “hog”. But wait: 50 Gbyte a month is 150 kbps average (0,15 Mbps), 150 Gbyte a month is 450 kbps on average. If you have a 10 Mbps link, that s only 1,5 % or 4,5 % of its maximum advertised speed!

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others. Blaming them for network congestion is actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the ‘all you can eat’ broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe. In other words, the marketing push to get people to subscribe to broadband worked, but now the telcos see a missed opportunity at price discrimination

Of course you can already hear all of the ISP lobbyists, paid think tankers and loyal policy soldiers getting upset, given the concept of the bandwidth hog sits at the foundation of more than a few card castles (especially their efforts at deregulation and desire for high per GB overage fees). As such, Felten offers them an opportunity:

I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what’s happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don’t wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.

One thing lacking in every Exaflood debate or congestion claim has been hard, raw data provided by the ISPs for independent analysis. By and large, the Exaflood, network neutrality and bandwidth hog discussions have been dominated by think tankers who make a living massaging statistics to suit the message, and focus on dressing up lobbying and public relations so it looks like real science. Here then, lies a very interesting opportunity surely an ISP wants to jump at.

Link to the original article…

Link to the original article…