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What pissed me off about Spectrum (Time Warner) while I had a cable card was they flagged every channel except for broadcast TV as copy once (0x01) - even though the content owner permits it to be flagged copy freely (0x00).

Time Warner Cable’s Dirty Little Secret

Meant that I couldn't use my MythTV with it - well, unless I wanted to pay $79.99/mo to choose between 13 channels. I loved MythTV when I had analog TV, loved MythTV when I had a bare coax piped into the back of my machine. Once TWC had the option to ruin it for me, they did.

Unfortunately, I live two foothill ranges away from the nearest broadcast towers - OTA isn't an option. So I go without.

Judging by your talking points, I'm sure you're also aware that EPB is prohibited by a state law witten by Comcast and ATT lobbyists from expanding to service people and areas outside of Chattanooga, and that AT&T is receiving $156 million in government funding to provide 10/4-gigabit service in those outlying areas EPB legally can't service. But by all means, keep up the spin and half-truths; the representative for AT&T is running for US Senate now and could surely use your help.

Money. Michigan just had a little episode involving a Senator from Comcast. Michele Hoitenga introduced a bill to block any township or municipal funding of community broadband initiatives state wide. She did this because there are some now voter approved plans to wire up a few semi-rural townships that Comcast et al. can't be bothered with, and because the telcoms and cable outfits are funding her campaign.

People are clued in though; she withdrew the bill after enough people noticed and let her know. She trotted out the usual "death threats" claim for good measure.

You can find that in the U.S. too. here, here, and here. Sometimes it's swept under the rug.

But for the most part, everyone in NY is already wired up, it just needs the wires and the equipment upgraded to 21st century tech.

and some set the copy flags in away that really hurts non cable co hardware for stuff like multi room.

http://stopthecap.com/2016/10/...

You think the republicans are the 'bad guys' and the 'democrats' are the good guys?

Let me introduce you to Ty Harrell. Former Democrat representative for north Carolina. One of the early net neutrality proponents. Then the republicans took over. He got thrown out. Guess who loved net neutrality now and thought it was the devils work? When one year earlier it was the polar opposite. This is nothing more than we are being played by lobbyist who write our bills bribe our representatives and then pretend it is a partisan issue. You think Hillary would have done better? Some of her biggest donations came from AT&T, Verizon, TW, and Charter.

http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/...

Yes keep up the fight against it. But do not pretend those people in Washington support you. None of them do. Not one of them. Your real enemies are the very people you pay for internet access.

Funny under Obama under Wheeler the FCC stopped rubber stamping bills written by the monopolies and started enforcing net neutrality. You all thought Trump would support you and he would end H1B1 visas. Well you were wrong, he does not care.

You think the republicans are the 'bad guys' and the 'democrats' are the good guys?

Let me introduce you to Ty Harrell. Former Democrat representative for north Carolina. One of the early net neutrality proponents. Then the republicans took over. He got thrown out. Guess who loved net neutrality now and thought it was the devils work? When one year earlier it was the polar opposite. This is nothing more than we are being played by lobbyist who write our bills bribe our representatives and then pretend it is a partisan issue. You think Hillary would have done better? Some of her biggest donations came from AT&T, Verizon, TW, and Charter.

http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/...

Yes keep up the fight against it. But do not pretend those people in Washington support you. None of them do. Not one of them. Your real enemies are the very people you pay for internet access.

Last year's financial statement, which you so helpfully linked to, shows that their subscriber revenue approximately covers the cost of customer service and other expenses they had last year while using the network that taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

You mean contrary to your false accusations, they are fiscally solvent and not dependent on your purported "Most of the cost of EPB is funded by federal tax dollars - residents of California being forced to pay the bill for Chattanooga's internet service." which you said just a post ago? Very quick of you. That's not a new record though, some people can contradict themselves in a single sentence.

PS, expenses include retiring the debt to pay for the infrastructure investment. Suspect you knew that, but thought you could obfuscate it.

If you didn't, then you're just dumb. But that was kinda obvious when you were lying about the number of customers they had.

When you invest in infrastructure, a key number is how long it takes to recover your investment. If you spend $350 million building a network and it generates gross profit of $70 million / year, the recovery period is five years - it takes five years to get your money back. Keep in mind you'll need to replace much of that network as technology advances, and you better recover your costs of the network before have to start replacing parts of it.

What is the cost recovery time for EPBFI? Five years? Ten? Try 300 years! At least 50 times worse than any operating private company.

And here we have Ray Morris babbling a bunch of numbers with no sources or foundation, unlike say, actual analysis.

Huh. Is that also why you made up accusations about municipal governments stopping ISPs, when instead, it's private ISPs doing just that to a municipal ISP?

For all I care, go ahead and pay an extra $230/month taxes and $50/month on your "electric" bill to subsidize an inefficient ISP, but don't then lie and say it costs $70/month. It costs $230/month plus $50/month plus $70/month = $350/month.

Tell you what raymorris, if that is your real name, you stop lying about the number of customers EBPFI has. See, I still haven't forgotten that. You can also stop making up numbers, like these, and those above, and instead, stick to the truth.

Really, you might as well be belaboring us about a Zombie Apocalypse for all the basis in reality your nonsense has.

Last year's financial statement, which you so helpfully linked to, shows that their subscriber revenue approximately covers the cost of customer service and other expenses they had last year while using the network that taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build.

You mean contrary to your false accusations, they are fiscally solvent and not dependent on your purported "Most of the cost of EPB is funded by federal tax dollars - residents of California being forced to pay the bill for Chattanooga's internet service." which you said just a post ago? Very quick of you. That's not a new record though, some people can contradict themselves in a single sentence.

PS, expenses include retiring the debt to pay for the infrastructure investment. Suspect you knew that, but thought you could obfuscate it.

If you didn't, then you're just dumb. But that was kinda obvious when you were lying about the number of customers they had.

When you invest in infrastructure, a key number is how long it takes to recover your investment. If you spend $350 million building a network and it generates gross profit of $70 million / year, the recovery period is five years - it takes five years to get your money back. Keep in mind you'll need to replace much of that network as technology advances, and you better recover your costs of the network before have to start replacing parts of it.

What is the cost recovery time for EPBFI? Five years? Ten? Try 300 years! At least 50 times worse than any operating private company.

And here we have Ray Morris babbling a bunch of numbers with no sources or foundation, unlike say, actual analysis.

Huh. Is that also why you made up accusations about municipal governments stopping ISPs, when instead, it's private ISPs doing just that to a municipal ISP?

For all I care, go ahead and pay an extra $230/month taxes and $50/month on your "electric" bill to subsidize an inefficient ISP, but don't then lie and say it costs $70/month. It costs $230/month plus $50/month plus $70/month = $350/month.

Tell you what raymorris, if that is your real name, you stop lying about the number of customers EBPFI has. See, I still haven't forgotten that. You can also stop making up numbers, like these, and those above, and instead, stick to the truth.

Really, you might as well be belaboring us about a Zombie Apocalypse for all the basis in reality your nonsense has.

Perhaps your usage is in that top percentile of users that will go over 1tb. If you are really in the top 1% of users, I think paying another $50 a month is justified.

The truth is that the marginal cost of a 1TB of data is on the order of a few dollars. In which case $50 is massive overkill considering that the average bandwidth usage is just 190GB/month.

Here's what wholesale bandwidth costs today:
Bulk IP transit costs:

10Gbps: $0.85 -- $1.10 Mbps
20Gbps: $0.75 -- $0.95 Mbps
40Gbps: $0.62 -- $0.80 Mbps
75Gbps: $0.55 -- $0.70 Mbps
100Gbps: $0.45 -- $0.60 Mbps

1mbps, running flat-out 24 hours per day for 30 days is just a tad under 1TB.
So multiply by 10 to more than compensate for peak usage and all other overhead.
That works out to $6/TB or less at the kind of wholesale prices that big ISPs pay.

Lets say your internet bill is roughly $60/month. Even with all the fixed overhead for hardware and support staff, that leaves a ton of margin since most customers are only doing 190GB/month.

Data caps are nothing more than abuse of monopoly status.

Funny, I just read Comcast has the opposite complaint. A local power utility was about to rip down Comcast's lines for failing to pay their pole attachment fees, "which would have killed service for about 7,000 Comcast customers."

âoeUnfortunately, the utility has been unwilling to compromise and has billed Comcast for arbitrary pole rates that are nearly three times the national average,â said Horwitz. Comcast claimed [the power company is] using their position as a monopoly to gouge customers with high rates.

If the cognitive dissonance of that last quote doesn't make your head explode, it's a good read:

http://stopthecap.com/2016/06/...

Yes, I'm sure I'll be modded as a troll but the fact is the democrat party is bought and paid for by the big cable lobby http://www.nationalreview.com/... It's no wonder that Comcast (CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, etc. etc) all endorsed Clinton. Follow the money. http://stopthecap.com/2015/06/... http://bud-meyers.blogspot.com... http://www.fiercecable.com/sto...

Very simply, if the town has expertise to run an ISP, why wouldn't not those people form a private company to do it?

Ignoring your double negative, it's because the town doesn't want to pay obscene 90+% profit margins that leave the town and don't help its economy. They want to pay the upfront costs using a bond, then run the broadband service at cost.

Private companies know they can't compete with a service run at cost, and that's why they lobby to ban them outright.

because, infamously, you can not fight city hall

The people of the town can elect or depose the leaders of city hall.

And if they don't, their establishing a governmental ISP anyway will preclude anybody with a clue from ever setting up shop...

What do you mean?

Except for the countries investing more efficiently in their infrastructure.

http://stopthecap.com/2013/12/...

Fiber is the future, this is a stop-gap at best.

Just to add:
http://stopthecap.com/2014/06/...
This is exactly what I mean...

This is really just a PR spin on desperation. Verizon can't afford to alienate 4G users, they invested heavily in 4G (and dumped all new fios investments) because they thought 4G would be a cash cow. But all the data caps and throttling they've done have chased customers to free wifi hotspots and there ain't no reason to come back.

Not all of us think that. Some of us think "Puny European Countries". Have you seen an overlay of Europe verses the USA?

Have you seen a map of Europe? All of it, I mean. I have. Your map sure doesn't look like it. Apparently Poland is no longer European? Or Hungary? Or Finland? Etc.

Here's a slightly better example. Just eyeballing, it looks like all of Europe together (including places like Greece and Romania and Finland, etc.) is probably bigger than the lower 48 states of the US.

And please, stop with that ridiculous "population density" canard. Finland has better broadband than the US. Iceland has better broadband than the US. Former Soviet Bloc countries Bulgaria and Romania have better broadband than the US. Heck, even Utah has better broadband than most of the rest of the US, and Utah isn't exactly known as a cheek-by-jowl, high-population center. I live in Seattle, within the city limits in a reasonably dense part of town, and I can only wish I had a 50mbps symmetric up-down connection for $70 a month. Instead, the best deal I could find was an entry-level business plan bundled with phone service at 4mbps down / 1.5mbps up, for roughly $125 a month. Laughably bad, painfully expensive, infuriatingly limited.

The key common thread in the success cases is that the major ISPs don't get to dictate broadband policy. Population density and size of the country pretty much has jack shit to do with the issue (unless you want to go into meta-arguments about the size and density of a polity and how that impacts public policy).

Cheers,

http://stopthecap.com/2011/12/...

and the FCC knows about it:
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/docum...

and even in Congress:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

That's the problem is a lot of cities like to collect rent from anybody who wants to lay any kind of infrastructure, and even then they grant exclusivity to one provider.

The reason google fiber is only in these "hick" areas is because they don't have to deal with these kinds of restrictions. There was one city government that tried to add one of these restrictions to google, so they pulled out of that city, and now their politicians are in hot water over it.

http://stopthecap.com/2013/10/...

Just a month earlier, council members including Terry Goodman, Curt Skoog, and Richard Collins seemed intent to pelt Google with a range of objections and unusual questions that suggested a lack of basic knowledge about fiber broadband.

According to those in attendance, Skoog in particular seemed far out of his depth, questioning if 1,000/1,000Mbps was fast enough to provide connections for 6-12 computer terminals inside a local school.

I'd do the same thing if I was google. By far the biggest impediment to broadband deployment is local city governments trying to put a stop to it. The big cities are the worst offenders, and those small time politicians tend to be the most corrupt and willing to accept backdoor deals with incumbent ISPs.

"Don't have FiOS in your area yet" doesn't apply because Verizon halted FiOS expansion almost 4 years ago. If you can't get FiOS to your house now you likely never will get it. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361919,00.asp

AT&T has virtually halted U-Verse expansion as well http://stopthecap.com/2012/02/08/at-atts-rural-broadband-solution-we-dont-have-one/

The future of high-bandwidth Internet access in America is not bright.

Comcast stop capping their customers a while ago.

Well, yes and no. Comcast still contacts people, but in most, but not all markets, the cap was removed. They still throttle and use shaping technologies, which is why my QoS is setup the way it does; On paper, I have almost twice as much bandwidth as I can reliably get without triggering a transient bandwidth clamp-down on my service. Weeks of careful experimentation has revealed that Comcast only provides unmetered access at about 75% of your rated line speed. Go above that, and at certain times of the day, it'll start buffering your downloads, becoming bursty, etc. -- by placing you in a lower priority queue. For people who use VoIP or Netflix, this can ruin your internet experience.

But yeah, in the strictest sense... there aren't any caps. YMMV.

Switching providers or to the competition is a fallacy since most places don't have any competition anymore thanks for franchise agreements, or at best a duopoly especially in the US. To REALLY "switch" people have to be willing and able to move and to invest in places that do have good broadband infrastructure and to ignore and economically affect those that do not. Supporting municipal networks, Google Fiber, and Sonic type projects and stop giving money to providers who cap. Aside from that property values, business investment, even tax dollars. These are now our weapons. The US is lucky enough to still have a private sector and local govts who have the means to build alternative networks. This is a luxury that many other countries like Canada do not. Support it and nurture it. Do not let these bastards win.

Others in the fight.
http://stopthecap.com/
http://www.muninetworks.org/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/186439608067383/ - Stop AT&T from capping, a FB group though no action is really happening. It's just a place to meet other like-minded folks

The kind of research produced by the ITIF is tainted as long as they don’t reveal who is paying for these research reports. As Stop the Cap! readers have learned well, following corporate money usually helps expose the real agenda of these so-called “think tanks,” which are created to distort reality and quietly echo the agenda of their paymasters with a veneer of independence and credibility.

What is scary is that congressmen actually take the ITIF's word seriously (should be no surprise why).

I'm happy to see the old business models die. its a bit of cosmic justice or pay-back, if you will.

If only it were - at 90% gross margin and nearly zero capital investment in the future it is the cablecos turned ISPs that are getting even richer on the new business models.

I'm happy to see the old business models die. its a bit of cosmic justice or pay-back, if you will.

If only it were - at 90% gross margin and nearly zero capital investment in the future it is the cablecos turned ISPs that are getting even richer on the new business models.

Anyway, as long as you got choices I would suggest to not contest and simply cancel your subscription on first notice as long as you got choices. Even if you only have a couple to choose from the ISP and you're going to is another six-strike ISP they will still hate that much more than anything else.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't live in the USA. The vast majority of customers here have only 2 choices - telco or cableco and the telco choice is usually butt-slow DSL.

Verizon has even colluded with comcast to stop building out any new fibre installs that would have competed with comcast's internet service business, and that's with the FCC's blessing.

How come the five largest ISPs in the country all deciding to implement the same tracking system and enforcing the same restrictions on millions of subscribers who have no other alternative to their services is not being investigated by the DOJ?

Because they are not competitors. Seriously. The vast majority of broadband customers have no more than 1 choice for high-speed service. Well, they could move to another town, but that's not really a choice in the way most people use the term.

Thus, since they aren't competing they can't be colluding.

As for why they aren't competing in the first place? Well, the DoJ has already given them a free pass on that bit of collusion.

Just because it is an essential service does not mean you have the right to abuse it. It does not mean everyone else should cover the cost of your Netflix addiction. If you want more then you should pay for more. In my part of the world the (monopoly) ISP is happy to provide more bandwidth, at a higher price.

The typical ISP has a 95% gross margin on bandwidth.
The only abuse here is by the ISPs.

Their whole network is in the shitter and they don't seem to be doing much about it.

Not doing anything about it?? Why, of course they are. They're bumping up executive pay.

I've lived in the United States continuously [...] to the best of my knowledge everybody (who has internet at all) has theoretically unlimited internet

For $50/mo, satellite customers are only allowed to transfer 10 GB/mo. Please see this story about ViaSat and the plans offered by WildBlue.

Fines would mean crap to companies and individuals alike if they were levied as a percentage of income instead of a flat amount. Is there any good reason why it isn't done this way?

Yes! Yes, there is. According to this article, AT&T paid zero taxes (received subsidies, even) in 2011, which means they probably had near zero official income in 2011.
Maybe you can't pull such crap in UK, but in US percentage of corporation income is not the way to go.

If it means universal service provisions for broadband internet access, then yes.

There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.

Universal service provisions allowed telephone service to reach every single person in the entire country back in the day. The same thing should happen for broadband internet access today.

I'm going to burst your bubble. In the US governments has already given cablecos and telcos hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to build out broadband. However all these companies did was pocket the money to be used as pocket liners. Former telecom industry analyst Bruce Kushnick documented how the federal government was ripped off by businesses in the e-book $200 Billion Broadband Scandal. In New Jersey alone Verizon was given tax breaks along with allowed to raise phone rates to cover the state with broadband. An agreement was reached between the state and Verizon 20 years ago but the state does not have wide coverage of broadband yet.

The only non-big government inexpensive way broadband will become more widely available throughout the US is by allowing competition and getting rid of monopolies/duopolies. Google is in the process of rolling-out fiber in Kansas City. Before fiber is rolled out in a neighborhood Google is asking 25% of the people to sign up and it costs $10. Wiki has an article on the plan, Google Fiber, including the cost for the services. 1Gbps net access and TV cost $120 a month with $300 construction fee. A Nexus 7 tablet is included. Internet access alone is $70 a month. In both cases the construction fee is waived if a 2 year contract is signed. And "Free Internet" with speeds of 5 Mbps / 1 Mbps is provided for the cost of the construction fee which can be spread out over a year, $25 a month.

There are people in rural areas right now that don't have Internet access because telcos aren't willing to spend the money to run it out to them.

While it may be expensive to roll out cables and fiber that's not true with radio, wire-less, access. Of course wire-less has it's own problems, such as not being that secure and not being as fast as fiber.

Falcon

while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms.

So they don't know who sells FiOS?

Verizon has not done any substantial FIOS build outs since 2009. Since then, they've colluded with comcast. Comcast gets a promise from verizon not to build any more fios plants and verizon gets some wireless frequencies that comcast has been sitting on for like a decade. Hell, verizon is now bundling comcast catv service with their dsl packages.

Comcast is implementing usage-based tiered billing.

It is now in Comcast's best interest for customers to pirate, because it means they get more money.

Two related points:

1) Unfortunately Comcast's incremental pricing is at least 5x too high - 50GB/$10.

2) We'll see if Comcast really likes pirates if they blow off their pending six strikes agreement with the MAFIAA.

Comcast is implementing usage-based tiered billing.

It is now in Comcast's best interest for customers to pirate, because it means they get more money.

Two related points:

1) Unfortunately Comcast's incremental pricing is at least 5x too high - 50GB/$10.

2) We'll see if Comcast really likes pirates if they blow off their pending six strikes agreement with the MAFIAA.

While I agree with you in principle, the problem is the copyright special interest groups often uses extremist, raving lunatic language too.

Except they are backed by millions of dollars, have PR agencies, and have the ear of politicians (or are politicians, in the example where a Conservative Canadian MP called backers of fair copyright "radical extremists").

Because in the case of Sonic.net, the founder/CEO, Dane Jasper, actively disagrees with the existence of usage caps, and has stated in interviews that he feels the government should be doing more to protect broadband customers from that kind of crap. There's a good article covering his (and by extension Sonic.net's) stance here.

Different idea. Established leaders want to stamp out competition. So you 'invest' in existing companies and they create sub companies that hold your money. So it is not a 'angel investor' it is just someone investing in an existing company and someone who did not get money before gets a cut.

My bet is on something like that. It is being used to stamp out competition. Laws like these are usually written by incumbent companies who grab their local law maker and hand them a script. This sort of shit happens here in the US too. We just call it 'campaign contributions' instead of bribes.

http://stopthecap.com/2012/03/14/inside-alec-how-corporations-ghost-write-anti-consumer-state-telecom-legislation/

When the average cost to transfer a gigabyte of data is below 5 cents - http://business.financialpost.com/2011/02/05/how-much-does-bandwidth-actually-cost/ - I don't buy all these complaints from carriers about customers using huge amounts of data, especially since the typical "unlimited" (heh) data plan costs $30/month. At that rate, a customer would have to transfer 600 gigabytes of data in a given month to equal the raw cost of that bandwidth to the carrier.

Now, admittedly, that is based on the raw cost of bandwidth, and, of course, other factors come into play in figuring the cost of delivering that data, but the point is that carriers are, without question, earning money hand over fist with the current rates they are charging. I mean, we also have carrier CEOs admitting that the cost of bandwidth has little to do with the cost of services - http://stopthecap.com/2011/07/28/time-warner-ceo-bandwidth-costs-are-not-terribly-relevant-to-broadband-pricing.

No, these common refrains from the carriers are due to nothing more than them wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. They don't want to upgrade their infrastructure to support the bandwidth capabilities today's customers are demanding, but they still want to justify charging the rates they do whilst continuing to advertise "unlimited" data plans. So how do they go about doing that? Blame any and all bandwidth problems on "data hogs".

Again, I'm not buying it.

I misspoke-- checking my email, it was not an eyewitness account, but one coworker referenced local verizon cuts, Verizon themselves apparently released photos of the damage, and there have been several stories on the news about union workers blocking service vans.

Again, my mistake for using the word "eyewitness"; however if you think Verizon is going out and severing their fiber lines so that they get tons of calls to their understaffed call centers so that customers can call and get disconnected, youre out of your mind.

Tell me that this was caused by VZW corporate. Please do, it makes it easier to detect your bias.

Sorry, left out my links:

http://stopthecap.com/2011/04/04/fcc-commissioner-mignon-clyburn-calls-north-carolinas-h-129-a-broadband-barrier/

http://www.wral.com/news/state/nccapitol/blogpost/9345628/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/op-ed-north-carolina-broadband-bill-would-eliminate-level-playing-field.ars

The bill as passed

We need to get away from the myth that bandwidth is a scarce resource like water or electricity. It is not. http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/15/congestion-pricing-myths-exposed-a-guide-to-the-bandwidth-crisis-at-att-or-anywhere-else/ I don't think we would have caps if the incumbent DSL and cable ISPs have competition or if they are disallowed to provide content. The very fact that you're advocating how to do metering properly indicates the ISPs have been successful in brainwashing lots of people in accepting it.

From the New York Times http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/time-warner-cable-profits-on-broadband-are-great-and-will-grow-because-of-caps/ "Mr. Hobbs tried to strike a balance, saying that while the company is concerned about the cost to maintain its broadband network, investors should not be worried. He said it was “absolutely not” true that Time Warner’s profits were being squeezed by the cost of heavy broadband users. " AT&T's actual release says the following "Lopsided usage patterns can cause congestion at certain points in the network, which can slow Internet speeds and interfere with other customers’ access to and use of the network." Not exactly a convincing argument that they truly have an issue. Especially as their revenues, profits rise and their costs for infrastructure and bandwidth drops. http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/14/stop-the-cap-investigates-atts-justification-for-internet-overcharging/ ""Clear conjecture?" Surely you jest. Unless you've made an enormous breakthrough in networking technology, all existing network interfaces can only handle a finite amount of information at once." No jest of all. What enormous breakthrough is needed. Just investment of their profits. If one of their FTTN cabinets is congested they add another or increase the backend as needed. Not exactly a miraculous trick when you are talking about fiber. The fiber that feeds that cabinet can handle many times the needed bandwidth for now and for well into the future. Best of all backend costs for the additional bandwidth and cost for the hardware drop every year.

For those with interest, the bill is here:
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2011&BillID=H129

There's good analysis and info here: http://www.muninetworks.org/taxonomy/term/564
http://www.muninetworks.org/content/natural-monopoly-north-carolina-need-community-networks-and-competition
http://www.newrules.org/information/news/bill-limit-community-broadband-north-carolina-will-kill-jobs
http://stopthecap.com/2011/03/08/broken-promises-rep-marilyn-avila-r-time-warner-says-one-thing-in-public-another-in-private/

Basically, it's a bill written by Time Warner with the goal of killing municipal broadband and the competition and increased service it brings.
They want to morgage our future competitiveness for a few thousand in campaign contributions, and I'm mad as hell about it.

I think this is the 3rd time a similar bill has come up, and it's more likely to pass with the greater Republican presence this go-around..

Anyone who is offended at the behavior of these ISPs could join http://www.stopthecap.com/ It may be futile, but at least it's better than whining.

Ironically, living in the Research Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Cary, NC) means some of the slowest choices available for home internet access. There are some places that can get AT&T Uverse here, but otherwise it is all DSL or Cable. I would definitely sign up for this access if I could get it. Then again, Time Warner cable has been buying legislators to pass laws restricting municipal broadband plans like the recent one in Wilson, NC.

I live in NC, and at least here companies are ACTIVELY and OPENLY trying to ban municipal broadband (for obvious reasons).
http://stopthecap.com/2010/07/12/you-win-consumers-fighting-back-help-kill-municipal-broadband-ban-in-north-carolina/.
And trust me, they try again and again!

My understanding is that both Rogers and Bell are also trying to persuade the CRTC to government regulated download limits of 60 GB for all ISPs. This of course would allow them to protect themselves from customers going to another ISP.

Also, before shrinking download limits, they've also doubled overlimit fees.

They've began to offer on ad supported on-demand video online, except this "free" video is still subject to their usage limits.

My understanding is that both Rogers and Bell are also trying to persuade the CRTC to government regulated download limits of 60 GB for all ISPs. This of course would allow them to protect themselves from customers going to another ISP.

Also, before shrinking download limits, they've also doubled overlimit fees.

They've began to offer on ad supported on-demand video online, except this "free" video is still subject to their usage limits.

http://stopthecap.com/2010/05/25/eight-members-of-the-congressional-black-caucus-abandon-constituents-oppose-net-neutrality-broadband-reform/

Our congressmen are WELL compensated *cough* bribed *cough*.

That is but one small example of what goes on. This goes on both sides of the isle.

To any congress critter reading this. Please stop.