Wednesday Evening Links07:09PM Wednesday Jul 23 2008 by Revcb 7 comments
65,000 East Coast Verizon employees, 15,000 of whom live and work in the New York City area, have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if Verizon and labor unions can't reach an agreement by the August 2 expiration of their current deal. According to Crain's New York, 91% of workers voted to authorize a strike if negotiations fail. "That’s pretty much standard procedure," says a Verizon spokesman. "It really doesn’t mean anything about the tenor of the negotiations." Workers say the newly announced NYC FiOS plan gives them added leverage, as the company doesn't want install schedules disrupted. 102 comments
Explosive growth at Comcast has the nation's second largest broadband provider perpetually struggling to provide quality customer support. In fact, customer satisfaction with Comcast just reached record lows, according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index. Comcast says they've hired some 15,000 new support workers in the last 18 months to handle the strain, but the Washington Post today highlights the continued problems: A specialist for customers moving to new homes took the order and said all systems were go and everything would be up and running the day after his move in April. After five weeks, 20 calls, a day off work and three visits that ended without any idea why Bayes couldn't get service, Comcast found the solution to this head-scratcher of a problem: The company hadn't run cable lines to Bayes's house. Something tells me even Comcast's new found use of twitter to reach out to annoyed customers won't help communication disconnects like that one. 49 comments
For years, ISPs have been either outsourcing their newsgroup access or eliminating it as a perk altogether. That shift only accelerated with NY AG Andrew Cuomo's recent child porn " crackdown," which ISPs admit doesn't have them doing anything differently, but has given them a nice scapegoat for newsgroup elimination.  story continues..70 comments
Verizon today announced that the telco will be offering two new home gateways for FiOS customers starting in the third quarter of this year. According to the telco, the new broadband routers, built to custom Verizon specifications by Actiontec and Westell, will boost in-home networking speeds over coaxial from 75 Mbps to 175Mbps (using the MOCA 1.1 standard). 44 comments
A new study (pdf) from a telecom consulting firm named Costquest finds that while thirty-nine U.S. States have something vaguely resembling a broadband plan, only ten of the nation's fifty states have undertaken a definitive broadband mapping effort. Keep in mind that several of those states have embraced the "Connected Nation model," whose real benefits remain dubious. Even fewer states have actually reached the point where they've started getting service into unserved areas, according to the report: Only a select few have looked at the cost to deploy broadband in the currently unserved areas so as to provide information to encourage private capital as well as delineating the issue to determine if state assistance is needed in uneconomic areas. With the FCC themselves generally agreeing that their own broadband statistics aren't particularly useful, the agency only just started to reform their data collection methodology after a decade of debate (and they still plan on keeping most of the data they get from carriers out of public hands). In other words, with no effective federal or state level penetration mapping, the vast majority of the country has absolutely no idea how wired for broadband it is -- and obviously you can't fix a problem you have no data on. 31 comments
Judging from the way they've sent their paid attack dogs after Google, the baby bells don't like the search giant very much. They despise Google's positions on network neutrality, don't like their push into white space spectrum broadband, and generally think Google owes them for building a business model on the back of their networks. 70 comments
AT&T this morning posted their second quarter earnings, which reveal the company's profit jumped 30%, mostly thanks to the addition of 1.3 million new wireless customers. However, landline bloodshed actually accelerated: the total number of AT&T phone lines (including wholesale and business) in service continued to drop, down 8.1% to 58.9 million total lines from 64.8 million. 38 comments
While the Nintendo Wii remains in short supply, new Comcast customers may have an easy way to obtain the game console. An employee tells The Consumerist that from July 28-August 17th in select markets (Miami, San Francisco, Houston, Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit,), the company will be giving away a free Wii to new double-play (TV/broadband) subscribers. Keep in mind some default Comcast routers don't play nice with the game console. Stuck in a duopoly market and not thrilled by either option? Comcast may have just made your decision easier. Update: a user notes that the fine print doesn't make the offer quite as cut and dry as it seemed: Please note that beginning, July 28th, Comcast Sales Agents will begin to offer the Nintendo Wii promotion to *NEW* customers who sign up for a qualifying Triple Play plan [Preferred Plus or Premier, depending on market] *AND* pass the credit screening threshold TBD by market; if they do not pass, they will be required to pay the $250 Wii deposit to sign up for the Nintendo Wii offer. 35 comments
Wednesday Morning Links07:08AM Wednesday Jul 23 2008 by Revcb 4 comments
Tuesday Evening Links06:54PM Tuesday Jul 22 2008 by Revcb comments?
Estimates suggest that AT&T, Verizon, Qwest and Embarq collectively lose around 2.6 million landline customers per quarter. One technician that has worked with Embarq tells me that internal estimates peg their landline customer losses at around 2,000 per day. story continues..102 comments
"No matter who you are, or where you live, or how much money you make ... you will need, and you are entitled to have these tools (broadband) available to you, I think, as a civil right," said FCC commissioner Michael Copps during yesterday's broadband hearing in Pittsburgh. story continues..113 comments
The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet is investigating whether the use of NebuAD user-tracking technology violates wiretap and privacy laws, and at least one law is being crafted that would force carriers to make such systems opt in. As part of that investigation, last week Embarq received a letter from Congress, asking pointed questions about the ISP's trial of NebuAD technology. 62 comments
Last week Verizon finally got full franchise authority to deploy FiOS to NYC, something they've promised to complete by 2014. That's not particularly good news for Time Warner Cable. 45 comments
While the iPhone finally supports third generation wireless broadband ( assuming your neighborhood is upgraded), it still can't officially be tethered and used as a wireless modem for your laptop. It looks like some innovative folks have crafted a workaround. But it's not exactly a breezy process, requiring you jailbreak the phone, then use 3proxy and MobileTerminal. A tethered iPhone is also apparently quite the battery hog, and AT&T will probably come down hard should they find you're really gobbling up the data (your agreement gives them the right to sock you for consumption exceeding 5GB/month). 46 comments
At the FCC's hearing on broadband yesterday in Pittsburgh, AT&T Senior Federal Regulatory Vice President Robert Quinn said the company would be changing the way they advertise their broadband tiers. According to Quinn, the new system will change AT&T's practice of marketing their DSL tiers as "up to" the maximum potential speed. story continues..159 comments
Tuesday Morning Links07:01AM Tuesday Jul 22 2008 by Revcb 3 comments
Monday Evening Links07:01PM Monday Jul 21 2008 by Revcb 6 comments
New York AG Andrew Cuomo recently conducted a "sting" on broadband ISPs that consisted of discovering that Usenet is home to some horrible things (no, not TV show fan fiction). Under penalty of suit, the AG then got ISPs to agree to highly publicized deals that ISPs themselves admit don't have them doing anything differently. 71 comments
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