F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

Dec. 14, 2017

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

The agency scrapped so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone services.

The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to better protect Americans as they have migrated to the internet for most communications.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the commission, said the rollback of the rules would eventually help consumers because broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast could offer people a wider variety of service options. Mr. Pai was joined in the 3-to-2 vote by his two fellow Republican commissioners.

“We are helping consumers and promoting competition,” Mr. Pai said in a speech before the vote. “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas.”

The discarding of net neutrality regulations is the most significant and controversial action by the F.C.C. under Mr. Pai. In his first 11 months as chairman, he has lifted media ownership limits, eased caps on how much broadband providers can charge business customers and cut back on a low-income broadband program that was slated to be expanded to nationwide carriers.

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SNIP

United States antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws that regulates the conduct and organization of business corporations, generally to promote fair competition for the benefit of consumers. (The concept is called competition law in other English-speaking countries.) The main statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These Acts, first, restrict the formation of cartels and prohibit other collusive practices regarded as being in restraint of trade. Second, they restrict the mergers and acquisitions of organizations that could substantially lessen competition. Third, they prohibit the creation of a monopoly and the abuse of monopoly power.

AT&T admits defeat in lawsuit it filed to stall Google Fiber

11/1/2017

AT&T is reportedly abandoning its attempt to stop a Louisville ordinance that helped draw Google Fiber into the city.

In February 2016, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop an ordinance that gives Google Fiber and other ISPs faster access to utility poles. A US District Court judge dismissed AT&T's lawsuit in August of this year, when he determined that AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false.

Louisville's ordinance created a One Touch Make Ready system that lets an ISP make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself instead of having to wait for other providers like AT&T to send work crews to move their own wires. Without such rules, the pole attachment process can take months, making it more difficult for new ISPs to compete against incumbents.

Legal fights over One Touch Make Ready are not over. A lawsuit Charter filed against Louisville is still pending. Both AT&T and Comcast also filed suits against the Nashville metro government to stop a similar ordinance.

“There will be a [Senate] vote” to reinstate net neutrality, Schumer says

12/18/2017

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he will force a vote on a bill that would reinstate the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.

Legislation to reverse the repeal "doesn’t need the support of the majority leader," Schumer said during a press conference Friday, according to The Hill. "We can bring it to the floor and force a vote. So, there will be a vote to repeal the rule that the FCC passed."

Just a simple majority needed

The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its own net neutrality rules last week, and the repeal will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. But Congress can overturn agency actions by invoking the Congressional Review Act (CRA), as it did earlier this year in order to eliminate consumer broadband privacy protections.

A successful CRA vote in this case would invalidate the FCC's net neutrality repeal and prevent the FCC from issuing a similar repeal in the future. This would force the FCC to maintain the rules and the related classification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

A CRA vote lets Congress "undo regulations with a simple majority," without the possibility of a filibuster, as a Washington Post story said in February. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) announced a plan to file the CRA resolution last week.

"It's in our power to do that and that's the beauty of the CRA rule," Schumer said. "Sometimes we don't like them, when they used it to repeal some of the pro-environmental regulations, but now we can use the CRA to our benefit, and we intend to."

Long odds for Democrats

The Senate's Republican majority will be just 51-49 after Alabama Democrat Doug Jones is sworn in. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) opposed the net neutrality repeal, raising the prospect of a razor-thin vote.

Still, the Democrats face long odds. While a few Republicans in the House of Representatives either opposed or expressed skepticism about the net neutrality repeal, Republicans have a 239-193 majority in the House. Finally, President Donald Trump could veto a CRA resolution even if it passed both the Senate and House.

Republican lawmakers intend to submit their own net neutrality legislation this week. A Republican bill could prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling Internet traffic. But it might allow paid prioritization and would not include numerous other consumer protections that the FCC is throwing out.

Meanwhile, state attorneys general from New York, Washington, and other states plan to sue the FCC to overturn the repeal. Besides overturning the federal regulations, the FCC vote attempts to preempt states from issuing their own net neutrality rules.

You’re Not Imagining It: The Internet Is Really Slow Right Now

Dec. 18, 2017

Everyone has a sluggish Monday sometimes. This week it’s the turn of … what feels like the entire internet? Right now, two major backbone internet service providers, Level 3 and Cogent, appear to be suffering from massive outages and downgraded service, according to the ISP monitoring service Downdetector, which collects and analyses network status reports to determine early interruptions.

According to Downdector’s outage maps, internet users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., are being hit the hardest. Comcast also appears to be suffering outages, though they’re less severe than those hitting Cogent and Level 3. Backbone internet service providers work directly with large internet platforms like Netflix to deliver large amounts of data across networks, and also work behind the scenes of consumer-facing ISPs. Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires, disruptions with Level 3 and Cogent could impact service for Comcast and Verizon users in turn.

Slate reached out to Level 3 and Cogent to ask if they’ve determined the cause of the disruptions.

The internet is a network of networks, and slowdowns can happen all the time for any number of reasons. These could be regular, vanilla network maintainance problems. More worryingly, it could be the side effect of a massive botnet, like the Mirai botnet that was identified last October when hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of internet-connected devices sent junk traffic to Dyn, a major domain name service provider, to cause severe outages across the internet.

Sometimes outages are the result of disputes over peering, a term used to describe the connections between websites and internet service providers that determine how they exchange traffic so that data can be carried from one part of the internet to another. Peering depends on pacts between internet companies, but sometimes, these companies don’t always get along. Take what happened in 2010 between Comcast and Netflix: Comcast said that Netflix’s high bandwidth video traffic demanded more from Level 3’s network then what they originally agreed to, and for a time, Comcast refused to upgrade its networks to handle Netflix’s increased traffic until they struck a new deal. Even worse, in 2008, a peering dispute between Cogent and Sprint became so bad that the two companies stopped exchanging traffic entirely, and the internet was momentarily portioned to the point where different parts of the internet couldn’t communicate with each other. But since this time the outages are happening with host Cogent and Level 3, a peering dispute is unlikely the culprit here.

This slowdown is also a reminder of what kind of internet we may well have once the new Federal Communications Commission rules axing network neutrality protections hit the books: They’ll allow internet providers to legally block or throttle access to websites, and are slated to go into effect as early as January 2018. The current outages are probably not a case of your ISP behaving badly—but come next year, that very well could be the case.

YouTube, Netflix Videos Found to Be Slowed by Wireless Carriers

September 4, 2018

The largest U.S. telecom companies are slowing internet traffic to and from popular apps like YouTube and Netflix, according to new research from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The researchers used a smartphone app called Wehe, downloaded by about 100,000 consumers, to monitor which mobile services are being throttled when and by whom, in what likely is the single largest running study of its kind.

Among U.S. wireless carriers, YouTube is the No. 1 target of throttling, where data speeds are slowed, according to the data. Netflix Inc.’s video streaming service, Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video and the NBC Sports app have been degraded in similar ways, according to David Choffnes, one of the study’s authors who developed the Wehe app.

From January through early May, the app detected "differentiation" by Verizon Communications Inc. more than 11,100 times, according to the study. This is when a type of traffic on a network is treated differently than other types of traffic. Most of this activity is throttling.

AT&T Inc. did this 8,398 times and it was spotted almost 3,900 times on the network of T-Mobile US Inc. and 339 times on Sprint Corp.’s network, the study found. The numbers are partly influenced by the size of the networks and user bases. C Spire, a smaller privately held wireless operator, had the fewest instances of differentiation among U.S. providers, while Verizon had the most.

"If you are a video provider, you have a patchwork of different carriers doing different things to your network traffic," Choffnes said. "And the patchwork can change any time." Consumers often don’t know about this throttling, he added, noting that he discovered AT&T began slowing down some of his apps earlier this year.

Carriers say they’re throttling to manage internet traffic. To deliver the videos people want to watch on their phones, sacrifices in speed are required, according to the three largest U.S. wireless companies, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. Terms-of-service agreements tell customers when speeds will be slowed, like when they exceed data allotments. And people probably don’t notice because the video still streams at DVD quality levels. If you want high-definition video, you can pay more, the carriers say.

While slowing speeds can reduce bottlenecks and congestion, it raises questions about whether all traffic is treated equally, a prime tenet of net neutrality. The principle states that carriers have to treat all data on their networks the same, and not discriminate by user, app or content. The Federal Communications Commission under President Barack Obama enshrined net-neutrality rules in 2015. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, a Republican-led FCC voted to scrap the regulations.

The Wehe app has so far conducted more than 500,000 tests involving more than 2,000 internet service providers in 161 countries. It measures how fast each wireless network delivers video from services like Netflix and YouTube and compares those speeds with the network speeds available at that time. For example, in one recent test of the app, Netflix speeds were 1.77 megabits per second on T-Mobile, compared with the 6.62 megabits-per-second speed available to other traffic on the network at the same time.

In recent months, Choffnes has become a new kind of net-neutrality watchdog since the FCC vote in 2017. He’s been retained by the French government to use the Wehe app to audit for net-neutrality violations. State and local governments in the U.S. have come calling, too. Choffnes said he also shared his findings with the Federal Trade Commission, which took over the job of policing U.S. internet service providers from the FCC.

"Efforts like Wehe are an important approach to detect whether internet service providers are engaging in traffic shaping, i.e., slowing down traffic of certain online services or apps," said Florian Schaub, a privacy and mobile-computing expert at the University of Michigan. "Now that net neutrality has been repealed by the FCC, it is important for consumers and researchers to watch out for ISPs starting to make use of their new ‘freedom’ in that way, and then call ISPs out for it."

Throttling was happening well before the FCC stopped enforcing net neutrality. T-Mobile has been streaming video at different speeds since it started offering free streaming through Binge On in 2015. It was an agreement between customers, T-Mobile and video providers like Netflix.

“We do not automatically throttle any customers,” said Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman. “To manage traffic on our network, we implement network management, which is significantly different than blanket throttling.”

John Donovan, head of AT&T’s satellite, phone and internet operations, said "unequivocally we are not selectively throttling by what property it is. We don’t look at any traffic differently than any other traffic."

He compared AT&T throttling to an electricity grid where some customers sign up for rolling blackouts in return for cheaper service. That’s what Choffnes’s research is detecting, the AT&T executive said. "We talked to him about some of his methodologies," he added.

Choffnes’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and ARCEP, the French telecom regulator. Amazon provided some free services for the effort, too. He even has a deal with Verizon to measure throttling at all U.S. carriers for a public report that’s yet to be published. Choffnes said Verizon can’t restrict his ability to publish research and the companies that support him don’t influence his work.

Choffnes became an internet celebrity in December, when Apple Inc. rejected his Wehe app from the App Store. He tweeted about it, and the news website Motherboard wrote about it. Following an outcry, Apple approved and published his app. Wehe had only a handful of users before the episode, but quickly gained tens of thousands new testers.

The net-neutrality debate came to the forefront again in recent days after Verizon limited the data speeds of California firefighters as they battled a blaze. The company said it made a “customer-support mistake” in limiting access to emergency responders.

"As we saw with Verizon throttling the Santa Clara County Fire Department, ISPs are happy to use words like ‘unlimited’ and ‘no throttling’ in their public statements, but then give themselves the right to throttle certain traffic by burying some esoteric language in the fine print," Jeremy Gillula, tech policy director at Electronic Frontier Foundation, said. "As a result, it’s especially important that consumers have tools like this to measure whether or not their ISP is throttling certain services. Only tools like this can really keep ISPs honest."

With no federal net-neutrality rules in the U.S., legislators and regulators from state and local governments including New York City and Massachusetts have reached out to Choffnes for advice on writing their own replacement rules, he said.

"I’ve always wanted to focus on areas where not only I benefit as a user but also pretty much everyone else will benefit," he said. "Problems where we can have a real-world impact." His prior work includes ways to improve download speeds of BitTorrent, an online service that’s used for sharing files.

Once Wehe collects a year’s worth of data, Choffnes hopes to present the trove at a major technology research conference. His recent paper on the project was rejected by the Internet Measurement Conference partly because it didn’t have 12 months of data, he said.

With his app, Choffnes said he wants to give regulators the tools to monitor the marketplace.

"I would not contest the term watchdog -- that was certainly was the goal of our project," he said.

Entire broadband industry sues California to stop net neutrality law

Top broadband lobby groups sue California, claim net neutrality law is illegal.

10/3/2018, 9:33 AM

Four lobby groups representing the broadband industry today sued California to stop the state's new net neutrality law.

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of California by mobile industry lobby CTIA, cable industry lobby NCTA, telco lobby USTelecom, and the American Cable Association, which represents small and mid-size cable companies. Together, these four lobby groups represent all the biggest mobile and home Internet providers in the US and hundreds of smaller ISPs. Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US, Sprint, Cox, Frontier, and CenturyLink are among the groups' members.

"This case presents a classic example of unconstitutional state regulation," the complaint said. The California net neutrality law "was purposefully intended to countermand and undermine federal law by imposing on [broadband] the very same regulations that the Federal Communications Commission expressly repealed in its 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom Order."

ISPs say the California law impermissibly regulates interstate commerce. "[I]t is impossible or impracticable for an Internet service provider offering [broadband] to distinguish traffic that moves only within California from traffic that crosses state borders," the lobby groups' complaint said.

The groups asked the court to declare that the state law "is preempted and unconstitutional, and should permanently enjoin [California] from enforcing or giving effect to it."

California now faces two major lawsuits challenging the net neutrality law signed by Governor Jerry Brown on Sunday. The Trump administration's Department of Justice also sued California and is seeking a preliminary injunction that would stop the law from being implemented. California' net neutrality rules are scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2019.

Multiple court cases will affect state law

Like the DOJ, broadband lobby groups argue that state net neutrality laws are preempted by the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of federal net neutrality rules. The FCC and DOJ claim that California's net neutrality law conflicts with the federal government's deregulatory policy for broadband. California argues that the FCC gave up its authority to regulate broadband and therefore cannot preempt states from regulating the industry.

Ultimately, the question of whether the FCC's preemption of state laws is valid will be decided in a different lawsuit pending at the US Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit. In that suit, state attorneys general and other litigants sued the FCC in order to reverse the repeal of federal net neutrality rules and the preemption of state laws.

But the US District Court in California must rule on requests for a preliminary injunction from the DOJ and lobby groups. Because of that, the US District Court will decide whether California can enforce its law while the US Court of Appeals case is pending.

The new California state law prohibits Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and from requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers. The law also bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating") and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points.

California's ban on paid zero-rating would force AT&T and Verizon to stop charging companies for data cap exemptions. The California law also prohibits zero-rating some applications in a content category but not others. For example, an ISP could zero-rate all video services but would not be allowed to zero-rate some video services while counting other video services against data caps. AT&T's zero-rating of its DirecTV streaming service could thus violate the California law because AT&T doesn't provide the same data cap exemptions to all other video services.

In a statement on their lawsuit, the four broadband lobby groups suing California praised themselves, saying, "The nation's broadband providers are the innovation engine of America's digital economy and remain committed to an open Internet for consumers. We oppose California's action to regulate Internet access because it threatens to negatively affect services for millions of consumers and harm new investment and economic growth."

Democrats’ net neutrality bill would fully restore Obama-era FCC rules

3/6/2019, 9:40 AM

Democrats in Congress today introduced a net neutrality bill that would fully restore the Obama-era rules that were repealed by the FCC's current Republican majority.

The "Save the Internet Act" is just three pages long. Instead of writing a new set of net neutrality rules, the bill would nullify FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's December 2017 repeal of the FCC order passed in February 2015 and forbid the FCC from repealing the rules in the future.

"A full 86 percent of Americans opposed the Trump assault on net neutrality, including 82 percent of Republicans. That's hopeful," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a press conference announcing the bill today. "With the Save the Internet Act, the Democrats are honoring the will of the people."

"People understand that their ISPs have far too much control over their connection to the Internet and the services they care about," Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) said. "Whether it's slowing down Netflix, blocking access to innovative mobile services, or adopting anti-competitive zero-rating policies, the track record for ISPs on this issue is clear. And consumers and small businesses want the protections and certainty that strong net neutrality rules provide."

If the Democrats' bill becomes law, home Internet and mobile broadband providers would once again face common-carrier regulation under Title II of the Communications Act, including prohibitions on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The bill is therefore nearly identical to one that was approved by the US Senate in May 2018 but never voted upon by the House.

This time around, there's a strong chance the bill could pass in the House but not the Senate. Democrats won a House majority in the November 2018 elections, so they can ensure that their net neutrality bill will receive a full vote in that chamber. But forcing a vote in the Senate will require more cooperation from Republicans than last year.

Last year's legislation was a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution, a type of bill that gets some special parliamentary privileges. Despite being the minority party, Democrats were able to force a vote of the full Senate with a discharge petition and ultimately passed the bill with the help of three Republicans who voted for it.

But CRA resolutions that nullify an agency decision can only be passed in the same Congressional session in which the agency decision was made. Because a new Congressional session began in January, a CRA resolution nullifying Pai's December 2017 repeal order is no longer an option. This time, Democrats had to file a regular bill that must go through the normal committee process, which in the Senate is still controlled by the Republican majority. Even getting a simple majority will be tougher than last year because Republicans gained two seats in the Senate and now hold a 53-47 advantage.

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U.S. Senate Republican leader calls net neutrality bill 'dead on arrival'

April 9, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday a Democratic bid to restore the 2015 net neutrality rules is “dead on arrival in the Senate.”

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday debated a Democratic plan to reinstate the Obama-era rules and overturn a December 2017 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to reverse the rules and hand sweeping authority to internet providers to recast how Americans access information.

Late Tuesday, the House opted to delay a vote on the measure and a series of amendments until Wednesday because of an unrelated issue over a separate budget measure.

The net neutrality bill mirrors an effort last year to reverse the FCC’s order, approved on a 3-2 vote, that repealed rules barring providers from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid “fast lanes.”

The reversal of net neutrality rules was a win for internet providers such as Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, but was opposed by companies like Facebook Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc.

On Monday, the White House told Congress that if the bill were approved, President Donald Trump’s advisers would recommend he veto it. The White House “strongly opposes” the measure that would “return to the heavy-handed regulatory approach of the previous administration,” it said in a statement.

The bill would repeal the order introduced by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, bar the FCC from reinstating it or a substantially similar order and reinstate the 2015 net neutrality order. The House will also consider a series of amendments.

Representative Mike Doyle, a Democrat, said Tuesday the bill “puts a cop on the beat to make sure our internet service providers aren’t acting in an unjust, unreasonable or discriminatory way.”

Republicans called a bid to restore internet protections akin to a “government takeover of the internet” and said it would open the door to the FCC eventually setting internet rates or imposing new taxes on internet service similar to levies on cable or telephone service. Democrats say polls show Americans overwhelmingly back net neutrality and want protections that providers will not interfere with their internet access.

White House aides advising Trump to veto Dems' net neutrality bill

April 8, 2019

President Donald Trump's advisors say they'll advise him to put the kibosh on a bill Democrats have crafted to reinstate Obama-era net neutrality protections, if the bill ever makes it to his desk.

The Office of Management and Budget on Monday sent out a statement saying it would "strongly oppose" HR 1644, the "Save the Internet Act," which codifies the controversial 2015 net neutrality rules, according to a statement sent to lawmakers sponsoring the legislation. OMB, which administers the federal budget and advises the president on how to run executive branch agencies, made the letter available in a tweet.

The statement was sent the day before the House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, is expected to vote on the bill. HR 1644 would prevent broadband providers from blocking or throttling access to the internet and would prevent these companies from charging fees to access the internet faster. Trump's FCC dismantled these rules in a 2017 vote, arguing that the rules had stifled investment because the rules imposed utility-style regulation on the internet.

OMB said in its statement that the legislation would nullify the FCC's effort to restore a "light touch" approach to regulation and would tie the hands of the FCC to adapt its regulation in the future.

"Last year, the FCC returned to the light-touch regulatory scheme that enabled the internet to develop and thrive for nearly two decades by promoting internet freedom and encouraging network investment," it said.

The letter went on to say that if the bill was passed, it would undermine gains in broadband download speeds and fiber deployments experienced in 2018.

"If HR 1644 were presented to the president, his advisers would recommend that he veto it," the letter concludes.

White House aides advising Trump to veto Dems' net neutrality bill

April 8, 2019

"Last year, the FCC returned to the light-touch regulatory scheme that enabled the internet to develop and thrive for nearly two decades by promoting internet freedom and encouraging network investment," it said.

The letter went on to say that if the bill was passed, it would undermine gains in broadband download speeds and fiber deployments experienced in 2018.

Broadband groups cut capital expenditure despite net neutrality win

US industry had argued that scrapping Obama-era rules would unleash investment boom

February 7, 2019

The big four US broadband companies invested less in capital projects last year than they did in 2017, undermining one of the rationales for a controversial decision by the Trump administration to remove so-called net neutrality protections.

Earnings reported in recent weeks show the four companies — Verizon, AT&T, Charter Communications and Comcast — collectively undertook slightly less capital spending in 2018 than in 2017, the first time there has been a drop in three years. They spent $56.9bn in 2018, compared with $57.1bn the previous year and $56.1bn in 2016.

The findings call into question one of the main arguments the industry used in its successful campaign to have the Federal Communications Commission overturn the Obama-era net neutrality regulations — a move that sparked anger among internet companies, activists and Democratic politicians.

Ajit Pai wants to cap spending on broadband for poor people and rural areas

3/29/2019

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed a new spending cap on the FCC's Universal Service programs that deploy broadband to poor people and to rural and other underserved areas.

Pai reportedly circulated the proposal to fellow commissioners on Tuesday, meaning it will be voted upon behind closed doors instead of in an open meeting. Pai has not released the proposal publicly, but it was described in a Politico report Wednesday, and an FCC official confirmed the proposal's details to Ars. Democratic FCC commissioners and consumer advocacy groups have criticized Pai's plan, saying it could harm the FCC's efforts to expand broadband access.

The FCC's Universal Service system's purpose is to bring communications service access to all Americans and consists of four programs: The Connect America Fund, which gives ISPs money to deploy broadband in rural areas; Lifeline, which provides discounts on phone and broadband service to low-income consumers; the E-Rate broadband program for schools and libraries; and a telecom access program for rural health care providers.

Ajit Pai’s rosy broadband deployment claim may be based on gigantic error

3/7/2019

Ajit Pai's latest claim that his deregulatory policies have increased broadband deployment may be based in part on a gigantic error.

Pai's claim was questionable from the beginning, as we detailed last month. The Federal Communications Commission data cited by Chairman Pai merely showed that deployment continued at about the same rate seen during the Obama administration. Despite that, Pai claimed that new broadband deployed in 2017 was made possible by the FCC "removing barriers to infrastructure investment."

But even the modest gains cited by Pai rely partly on the implausible claims of one ISP that apparently submitted false broadband coverage data to the FCC, advocacy group Free Press told the FCC in a filing this week.

Sorry, Ajit: Comcast lowered cable investment despite net neutrality repeal

1/23/2019

Comcast's cable division spent 3 percent less on capital expenditures last year, despite promises that the repeal of net neutrality rules would boost broadband network investment.

Comcast's cable division spent $7.95 billion on capital expenditures during calendar year 2017, but that fell to $7.72 billion in the 12 months ending on December 31, 2018.

Comcast Cable's capital spending should have risen in 2018 if predictions from Pai had been correct. Pai's net neutrality repeal took effect in June 2018. But the vote to repeal net neutrality rules was in December 2017, and Pai claimed in February 2018 that the repeal was already causing increased broadband investment.

Verizon won’t speed up 5G buildout despite FCC preempting local fees

Verizon also lowering capital investment in 2018 despite net neutrality repeal.

10/31/2018

Verizon Wireless says it will not move faster on building its 5G cellular network despite a Federal Communications Commission decision that erased $2 billion dollars' worth of fees for the purpose of spurring faster 5G deployment.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai justified the decision by saying it would speed up 5G deployment, and he slammed local governments for "extracting as much money as possible in fees from the private sector and forcing companies to navigate a maze of regulatory hurdles in order to deploy wireless infrastructure."

But in an earnings call last week, Verizon CFO Matt Ellis told investors that the FCC decision won't have any effect on the speed of its 5G deployment. Verizon also said that it is reducing overall capital expenditures—despite a variety of FCC decisions, including the net neutrality repeal, that the FCC claimed would increase broadband network investment.

The rural broadband divide: An urgent national problem that we can solve

Dec 3, 2018

Every day the world is becoming more digital. Cloud computing combined with new productivity, communication and intelligent tools and services enable us to do more, do it more quickly and in ways that were simply unimaginable a generation ago. But participating in this new era requires a high-speed broadband connection to the internet. While it’s a service that is as critical as a phone or electricity, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband is unavailable to roughly 25 million Americans, more than 19 million of which live in rural communities. That’s roughly the population of New York state.

Over the past five years, the FCC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided more than $22 billion in subsidies and grants to telecommunications carriers to sustain, extend and improve broadband in rural America. Despite these efforts, the country’s adoption of broadband hasn’t budged much since 2013. This inability to build out the last mile of the 21st century’s digital infrastructure has exacerbated the country’s growing prosperity and opportunity divides — divisions that often fall along urban and rural lines.

Cuomo's broadband coverage program will miss 2018 deadline

12/20/2018

Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised rural New York residents that they’d get broadband coverage, even in the most remote regions, by the end of this year.

He committed $500 million in state subsidies to encourage private companies to build out the necessary infrastructure and sought to leverage a major telecommunications merger to hit the goal. But technological limits, funding delays and a dispute with Charter Communications have combined to thwart the governor's goal.

Many of the state grants awarded in conjunction with the Cuomo’s “Broadband for All” initiative call for customers to be connected as late as 2021. The state continues to negotiate with Charter over its network expansion. And local officials in rural areas still waiting for reliable, high-speed internet service say they’re frustrated, disappointed and in the dark.

Charter fined $1 million over missed broadband internet build-out targets

Mar 27, 2018

The New York State Public Service Commission is fining Charter Communications $1 million for allegedly failing to meet the terms of its agreement to expand its Spectrum high-speed internet service.

As a condition of its merger with Time Warner Cable in January 2016, Charter was required to expand high-speed internet to 145,000 homes and businesses throughout the state by 2020.

Cox launches first gaming-optimized internet service, and it's worrying

When the FCC scrapped net neutrality legislation in 2017, many media outlets and analysts warned that it was only a matter of time until a company took advantage of the situation to create a so-called “fast lane” or an optimized internet connection.

And today’s the day it finally happened.

First reported by Brian Crecente at Variety, an American ISP called Cox is introducing a new package for subscribers called Cox Elite Gamer that will offer 34% less lag, 55% fewer ping spikes and 45% less jitter for its subscribers who play PC games like Fortnite, Overwatch and Apex Legends.

The service, which is only available only for Cox subscribers in the state of Arizona for the next three months for a trial run, works by giving anyone who subscribes to it an “optimized path” to a game’s server using a white-labeled version of wtfast.

To join, you’ll have to subscribe to one of Cox’s internet service packages, which range in price from $59.99 to $119.99/month, and then tack on the Elite Gamer package for an extra $14.99/month.

According to a statement from Cox sent to TechRadar, subscribers to Cox Elite Gamer service then download software and log in to their preferred game through the software. The software routes the player via a more efficient internet path to the gaming servers, resulting in an enhanced experience for gamers.

According to information on Cox’s website, the service will connect you to “thousands of popular game servers” and includes images of Fortnite, Overwatch and Apex Legends - though the telecom says this lineup of games could change in the future.

What Cox wanted to emphasize to TechRadar is that you're not paying for prioritized traffic or increased connection speeds – just a more optimized connection via the Elite Gamer software. According to Cox, that isn't illegal and would be permissible regardless of current regulatory laws.

But that raises the question: If a better connection to a game’s server is possible, why isn’t that the standard network path?

According to a Cox spokesperson, that's because "Cox Elite Gamer solves a problem with deficiencies in the public Internet, NOT our network. No customer’s experience is degraded as a result of any customers purchasing Cox Elite Gamer service as an add-on to their Internet service."

That said, we have a lingering concern that packages like Cox Elite Gamer set a dangerous precedent of paying extra for better access that could one day apply to all aspects of the internet, from social media to streaming video, all of which could have their own 'optimized connection.'

While proponents of fast lanes argue that less government regulation is a good thing and that fast lanes could promote competition among carriers, the general fear among consumers is that cable companies will take advantage of their oligopoly and use fast lanes as a wedge to drive up internet prices. Worse, it could force consumers to choose which parts of the internet they have access to.

While Cox isn't going as far as outright blocking or throttling connections to game servers, it is charging more for a service that could've been - and probably should've been - made available to all.