Category: Cox

Set Top Box Follies: Cox and LUS

The executive summary: Cox is acting like Cox.

The short version: LUS has asked for an exemption from an FCC rule mandating the use of cable cards in set top boxes. Cox, joined by the Consumer Electronics Association, objects.

The essence: Cox would like to throw a kink, into, to again delay if possible (or to impose additional costs on LUS if it is not) Lafayette’s FTTH project by using the FCC to force LUS to deploy technology that doesn’t exist. It seems, I suppose, like an clever way to try and use the feds to cause trouble for a competitor. The bitter irony is that the technology doesn’t exist largely because Cox and its cable brethren have refused to obey the law and develop the technology to comply with what Congress mandated 14 years ago.

If none of those short versions satisfies you’re going to have to settle in for a long, history-laden tale replete with bureaucratic battles, crippled 3rd party set top boxes, a long, successful rear-guard action by incumbents determined to keep consumers from controlling the boxes attached to their cable network and dueling technologies favored by self-interested players in a three-sided match-up. It’s one of those stories that nakedly reveals “the way things really work” in a way that doesn’t say much good about any of the major players.

Ok, first there is the cast of characters:

  • FCC: the federal communications commissions playing the part of the pitiful big guy all the tougher kids enjoy messing with.
  • The Telephone Companies: playing the confident old-timer with generations of home field advantage; the telcos have traditionally dominated the FCC game, but breaking into the video big time with IPTV-based set top boxes instead of the older cable tech requires all their lawyer’s talents.
  • The Cable Companies: playing the fiesty tough kid from the sticks the cablecos have fought a successful delaying action against federal regulations that try to impose teleco-like requirements that would allow mere consumers to attach their own devices to the tough kids’ network—and rob those tough guys of their traditional set top box charges.
  • The Consumer Electronics Association has wandered in from left field wanting to make sure that the big consumer electronics companies have a big single, unified market for set top boxes that keeps them from having to develop separate toys to control satellite, cable, and telco video set top boxes.

oh and:

  • LUS, the lonely little new kid on the block in the supporting role of the outsider whose seemingly innocuous question sets off a major battle. (This is the character whose fate is so unimportant to the plot that it’s never resolved…and only the friends and family of the actor notice.)

The background story, the setup for the latest battle:
Gather round kiddies, this story goes back to that dim time before the internet, 40 years ago, a time when things were different…Back then the FCC actually had the power and the will to break up huge monopolies like AT&T (really, it was broken up before the modern FCC midwifed in its rebirth). This all starts with the almost mythological Carterphone: a device that was to morph into the analog sound-based “modulate/demodulate” device that in turn became the digital modem of recent history. That’s right sprouts: without the Carterphone there would be no internet for anyone today. And we almost didn’t get the Carterphone. I won’t tell the long version of the story (but it’s a goodun.) What interests us today is that the FCC told the telcos that they had to let any device connect to the telephone network as long as it didn’t damage the network. Ma Bell (what we used to call AT&T) howled. But the FCC stood its ground and soon all manner of phones that hung on the wall or had push buttons, or were wireless, or were pink replaced the phone company’s black table-top rotary-dial ringer that had produced such a nice steady stream of income for Ma Bell. Though nobody knew it then the internet and VOIP and all manner of things that were to humble the once-invincible phone company flowed from that single brave decision to tell the phone company that it was only the owner of the network and had no right to tell legitimate users how they used the connection they bought.

—No, nobody knew back then but the story is oft-retold now… and the fiesty cable guys who’d once been little local municipal video providers but had coelesced into monopolies fully capable of taking on the telcos—and the sadly diminished FCC knew the implications of the Carterphone decision. And they had no intention of losing control of their network to consumers the way that the old AT&T had. Back in 1996, at the dawn of the internet era when the country was flush with enthusiasm for the new communications network, Congress passed a new telecom act which among other things, tried to reproduce the success of Carterphone by requiring that cable companies open their lines as well and specifically that they allow

“other converter boxes, interactive communications equipment, and other equipment used by consumers to access multichannel video programming and other services offered over multichannel video programming systems, from manufacturers, retailers, and other vendors not affiliated with any multichannel video programming distributor.”

In other words, Carterphone for cable. Congress passed the task of enforcement off to the FCC confident that they had done their part to insure a brighter future and turned to confusing other issues. Alas, the FCC of 1996 was not the FCC of their grandfathers and, long story short: this never really happened. The cable companies successfully argued that they had to retain control of “security” and the FCC responded by requiring that the necessary proprietary security be separated from the rest of the box and located in a device that could be used in either the cable company’s or a third party company’s box. The cable card. Delay followed delay. The FCC’s enforcement was pitiful indeed. So pitiful that it tolerated delays that meant that the first generation of cable cards was outdated by the time it was available and cable has still approve a card that is able to give third party producers access to their networks. This dithering about had damaging consequences: it left the producers of products that were clearly superior (in that people were really willing to pay for them); products that had usable interfaces and pioneered Digital Video Recording either bankrupt (Replay) or barely hanging on (TiVo).

Fourteen years later the FCC rule still stands and nobody is expected to actually follow it. Everybody has garnered an exception of one sort or another. All the players have their own version renewed occasionally on ever-varying grounds. The only constant is that the networks have never had to let their customers attach the equivalent of shiny new pink digital phones to their networks.

The consequence is that the much-anticipated digital convergence still hasn’t happened. You can’t surf the internet on your TV (well, there is an exception we’ll get to), you can’t do video telephony using your TV as a monitor, setting up recordings over the net or from your smart phone remains an uber-geek activity….and on. We could have used a cable version of the Carterphone. Instead what we got was a slightly faster version of the same access that the telephone companies had been forced to accept over their lines designed for voice. Faster internet, not access to a whole new communications network designed for video and much larger capacities.

The satellite companies never really had to comply with the law—the cable companies successful defense meant that satellite never really had to come up to bat since big brother cable proved capable of fending off the very idea. So satellite got an exception until cable could figure it all out…and cable wasn’t about to. As workable cable cards finally neared market acceptance cable whirled around and managed to get the day put off a bit longer by instituting a new non-hardware based software standard which would be oh-so-much better. They got an extension of their exception to work on that. When the telephone companies finally started to get into the provision of video over their networks it was built on the back of the new internet (the one that their lose in Carterphone days helped create), implemented a version of IPTV—and taking a leaf from the well-worn book of cable have claimed that their special technology wasn’t compatible with the old cable-card technology either. And (you see where this is going?) they got their version of an exception.

Who does that leave who does have to comply?

Surely you remember the lonely new kid on the block who asked the uncomfortable question? LUS? Apparently the argument is going to be that LUS should be the only guy in the neighborhood that has to follow the rules. This argument comes from none other than Cox Communications whose own exemption to the rule is still in place. Cox doesn’t argue that the technology exists to allow LUS to follow the rule. (And it doesn’t) Cox just argues that LUS should comply with a rule that it has never, ever, over 14 years done anything but fight itself. Citizens of Lafayette will be amused to learn that they are arguing that they only want to provide a “level playing field.” Again. Like the state’s (un)Fair Competition Act, you can be sure that when Cox says it wants a level playing field what they really mean is that they want the government to impose limits on Lafayette that it has never had to abide by itself. What is fair about asking your small local competition to abide by rules you yourself have successfully evaded? Of course this isn’t about fairness. It’s about advantage. In a halfway sane world the FCC would laugh in the face of an effective monopolist like Cox that tried to impose rules on a brand new competitor coming in from the outside any of the major sectors to provide the very high-speed, fiber-to-the-home, low priced competition that the FCC has been sniveling about wanting for the entire 14 years it has failed to enforce the law….but we don’t live in a halfway sane regulatory environment.

To pile on the insult the latest is that the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has weighed in. Understandably frustrated after all these years, all the companies that want to make the magical media devices that record all and control all in your living room have demanded that the FCC quit making exceptions and enforce its rules….on a small municipal provider that is actually providing an innovative, powerful, cheap alternative that the FCC says it wants and that is the model of everything the CEA should hope happens to US broadband. Just for the sake of completeness I should note that each of the three-telco, cable, and CEA–have their own candidates for a new technology to enable video network openness. Each of them would dearly love to control that technology and no one can doubt that the one they’d come up with would 1) advantage them, 2) disadvantage their competitors, and 3) enrich the owners of the tech. Nobody’s hands are clean.

LUS, of course, doesn’t have the wherewithal to develop a new technology itself. The set top box family deployed in Lafayette is apparently the only one that is usable with both the Alcatel equipment the community is using and with IPTV. The fact that the network is all IPTV (translation into analog for analog tier users takes place on the wall of the house) opens up vast new areas for innovation. The 100 meg intranet “campus” is a good example of what a really innovative community-oriented network can do. Neither Cox nor any other cable provider is providing free unthrottled in-network bandwidth to its users. Even more on point: LUS offers our community an internet connection through the IPTV set top box. That the box is natively IP is crucial to that very desireable feature. Subscribers that don’t even own a computer are able to surf the net. That’s something that IP enables…and something, again, that I don’t see that Cox or any of the other guys who have set top boxes have done. Really opening up the set top box is something that Congress was right about. There is huge room for innovation. The FCC’s failure to enforce, and Congress’ failure to provide adequate oversight to see that the nation’s laws are enforced have cost the country dearly.

LUS points out that every other IPTV-using network has already received this waiver and that all they are asking for is the same waiver that Verizon and other established IPTV providers have already secured. To ask new entrants who are actually competing and using the new technology to offer a cheaper, faster, more innovative system is to bear a burden the established corporations do would be stunningly counter-productive.

Let’s hope the FCC can find the courage that the FCC forty years ago had, do the right thing here and refuse to reward the bullying of a large corporation who has evaded the very rule that they hope to impose on a cheaper, local, competitor. A competitor who, incidentally, is actually demonstrating the value of innovation on the set top box that the rule is designed to achieve.

Cox’s 50 Mbps Tier in Virginia

What’s Being Said dept.

Lafayette got some good press in the national broadband media* lately…not because of anything we did here but because Cox offered its 50/5 meg tier for the first time outside of Lafayette and Lafayette got mentioned as the first place it was offered. The new area is in Northern Virginia, a region which 1) has some of the nation’s small areas of overbuilder competition, RCN competes sporadically with Cox cable there and in DC., 2) is one of the first areas where Verizon’s fiber service FIOS was launched and where it has a 50/20 meg tier, and 3) is a commuter center for some of DC’s most influential people….

That’s northern Virginia, the sort of privileged place that gets Cox’s latest and greatest tier second is a real testement to how much Cox must be worried about LUS and municipal broadband in general. Not convinced?

Well consider this: Cox is offering their 50/5 meg for $139.99 per month in Northern Virginia where it has substantial private fiber-based competition (Verizon sells its 50/20 tier for $94.50 a month in that area.) It’s not really competing on price or speed and is thus essentially conceding the upper end of the broadband market to Verizon in the limited areas where they overlap—What this offering really achieves isn’t competition, it’s simply piggybacking on the excitement created by other firms about really high bandwidth offerings. Cox picks up a lucrative set of upgraders as their established customers in that region develop a taste for really big broadband as a result of hearing friends brag about the fantastic capacities Verizon and other regional powerhouses are giving their customers.

But ONLY in little ole Lafayette does Cox bother to cut its price—in Lafayette parish you can get Cox’s service for $90 bucks. Washington lobbyists and congressmen get to pay $140….I’d say that tells us a lot about how Cox views the competition here. Of course LUS’ 50/50 tier is only 58 dollars and Cox isn’t really competitive with that — so even down here in Louisiana it is more about taking advantage of the demand some other company developed and not much about real competition. In the city anyone desiring high speed connectivity would be crazy pay a 33% premium to get a slower speed tier and higher latency…. No in Lafayette, as in Northern Virginia the real play is to get those outside the competitive islands to buy a higher priced package that has already been proven a winner by companies that pioneered those speeds. It is just that in Lafayette the local competition’s price is so much lower than what Cox wants to charge nationally that it’d be more embarrassing than helpful to try an market a service for $140 dollars that could be had down the street for 58 bucks from the local public provider (and at better upload speeds and latency too…) Big broadband adopters out in the parish have a lot for which to thank LUS— availability and 50 bucks a month.

*See the coverage in Broadband Reports (the most detailed), Gigaom, and PCMag for examples.

When Swine Flu

Lafayette has emerged as something of a regional epicenter of the swine flu outbreak. Five parochial schools have been closed, final exams for seniors have been canceled, and local media types are in high dungeon over the fact that our fair community has been targeted by this disease. First, Stanford; now swine flu. Man, it’s been a rough spring for the geaux-geaux crowd in this part of the world.

There are some indications that this version of the flu, in its current incarnation, could prove relatively mild (although, the virus continues to mutate and may head south of the equator for cooler, more hospitable climes as summer breaks out up here). So, elements of the response we are seeing now from public health officials and public institutions is something of a test run for the real thing — which could be either a more virulent form of this flu, or something like the bird flu or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

On the other hand, Lafayette is beginning to experience a bandwidth flood which is going to position this community to respond much more effectively to potential disasters like the outbreak of an infectious disease. The LUS fiber network is continuing is ponderously slow roll out across the city (the fiber is getting in place, the problem seems to be a shortage of installers). Cox has announced that Lafayette will be the first community on its network where it deploys Docsis 3 technology, bundling a bunch of network strands together as a means to try to keep up with the bandwidth delivered over fiber.

And, so?

Well, all of this bandwidth will give schools, businesses, government and others the ability to continue functioning in the event of a disease outbreak here. They will be able to do this via teleconferencing, teleworking, distance learning. Call it what you want.

Essentially, we are approaching the point in Lafayette where we can rely on network resources to offset the negative economic, social and other impacts of calamities like disease outbreaks (possibly even man-made and/or natural disasters). That is, if we use the current outbreak as a teaching opportunity, we will see that it would make a lot of sense to bring fiber to our classrooms, so that teaching can continue to take place, even if large numbers of students are absent. Wire the teachers’ homes to enable them to teach from there, if conditions warrant.

Within a couple of years, if we commit to it, every household with a child in Lafayette Parish could be connected to a network that ties them into their school. Over these connections, the process of education in our parish could continue unabated, regardless of other circumstances in our parish. It would be as simple as setting up Skype video conference dial-ins under most circumstances.

Companies should ensure that their key employees have fiber or other robust connections so that they can work from home, if something in the environment — disease, chemical, bio hazard — prevents them from being able to go into the office.

Discussions about this possibility are taking place in various places in the technology world. However, Lafayette is uniquely positioned to act because of the kind of connectivity that is being deployed.

This kind of connectivity is not possible in every community, but it is possible in Lafayette Parish because of the network infrastructure that LUS, Cox and even AT&T have deployed here. That connectivity enables a different kind of response; one that can enable life and commerce to continue with limited disruption using the network resources now at our disposal.

This possibility has been out there for a while. It has been part of the case this site has been making in support of the LUS fiber system over the past five years.

Hopefully, the current swine flu outbreak will prove mild. More importantly, we should begin focusing immediately on the lesson we can learn about how to make our next response fundamentally different — and more effective.

Next time an infectious disease hits Lafayette, no school should close. We should begin preparing now so that, next time, learning and commerce can switch seamlessly to the network without missing a beat, a buck, or a lesson. It is another way that Lafayette can put our technology investments to work enhancing the uniqueness of our community.

LUS Fiber HYPE

It’d be funny if it weren’t so overburdened with irony.

Those of us who still get a daily newspaper will have been amused by Cox’s latest attempt to “me-too” (“fiber is nothing new” cough, cough) the LUS network’s offerings. As my wife was going through our morning ritual of removing the 3/4 of the paper that is glossy ad inserts and sections we never open out slipped an 8 1/2 x 11 Cox flyer with the screaming bold headline “LUS Fiber HYPE.” The irony, of course, is that the hype and FUD is entirely being performed by Cox. Have you seen any LUS advertising “hyping” —or even promoting— LUS Fiber in the major media yet? I haven’t. And I watch. Now no doubt the day will come when LUS will hype its network. When it is offering the service to a large enough base that it makes sense to advertise in the paper or other local media. But that day has yet to arrive. My guess is that this flier is the best evidence available that LUS’ “controlled roll-out” is beginning to significantly cut into Cox’s base of subscriptions; painfully enough to buy an insert which will be distributed almost solely to people who can’t—Yet—buy LUS services. Now the motivation may be to just try and insert the headline into the “LUS fiber HYPE” into the community unconscious. If so that shows a pretty profound misunderstanding of this community. Cox has played the game of playing fast and loose with truth with Lafayette before and it’s proved embarasssing. Who can forget the disastrous story of the “local blogger T. J. Crawdad” or the infamous “push polls? Even more than embarrassing…folks got to saying tha “you can’t trust anything they say.” This flier is in that (ig)noble tradition.

The thing Cox forgets is that to be truly effective attack advertising has to be true. And it has to be about something that people care about. Otherwise you just end up looking desperate. Cox is hyping its “digital TV,” claiming to have more digital channels than LUS…and is using that hype to sell what’s on the backside of the flyer: it’s lowest triple play tier. For 89.99. For 12 Months.

“It’s a day late and a dollar short” as the old saying goes. You’re supposed to assume that the claim on the front supports the offering on the back. That you’ll get more with Cox’s cheapest “digital TV” offering.

But you won’t.

Take a gander at the slideshow below; it’s from Terry Huvals presentation at the recent (and fantastic) F2C conference. The relevant slides are numbers 31, 32, and 33 which detail the “expanded basic,” “digital basic,” and “digital basic plus” tiers for both companies.

What Cox wants you to buy, on the basis of their claims on the front of the sheet, is the product on the back of the sheet, that 89.99 (for 12 months) sale offering. If you go to Cox’s “Greater Louisiana” website & drill down you’ll get to a page that shows you get their “expanded basic” cable tier with that deal. So surf on over to slide 31 on the display below….

Terry Huval style=”margin: 0px;” width=”425″ height=”355″>

View more presentations from f2c

You’ll see that in truth LUS offers more channels in their lowest tier combo deal than Cox. If that strikes you as strange soldier on to slide 32. There you’ll notice that LUS offers more channels in the middle tier too..only at slide 33 the highest tier do you find Cox offering more channels that LUS. So the (hyped) claims on the front, while not entirely untrue at every level, do not support the product they are selling on the back. A little bait and switch, that.

And LUS’ low tier combo deal is cheaper too: Cox’s “Good” comes in at 89.99 (intro price) vs LUS’ “VIP – $84.85” (allathetime price).

(And, while we’re at it you also get 30 megs up and down with LUS but only 10 megs down and 786 k up… with video shifting to the web and more and more people doing their telephony through 3rd party VOIP that’s going to be more and more significant. I already do a healthy amount of my TV viewing over my shiny new computer-TV hookup.)

One Big Happy? Family

Cox has announced that it is combining its New Orleans operations with “Greater Louisiana” Market — Greater Louisiana is made up of the former Baton Rouge and Lafayette divisions which were combined three years ago.

The new division has half a million customers and will be Cox’s 3rd largest market.

But Cox the spokesperson is careful to note:

Ann Ruble said the move would not affect rates.

Now that might sound reassuring. But what it means at the current moment is that Baton Rouge and New Orleans should not expect to share in Lafayette’s good fortune with a cheaper, installation-cost-optional version of Cox’s only-in-Lafayette 50/5 mbps ultimate tier.

WBS: “Municipal Fiber Competition Benefits All Lafayette Citizens”

What’s Being Said Department.

Geoff Daily over at Apps-Rising has put up a post whose title says it all: “Municipal Fiber Competition Benefits All Lafayette Citizens.” Daily too thinks that Cox’s competition is good for Lafayette—and he can see it from D.C.

What this says is that municipal fiber deployment doesn’t just bring the best broadband to citizens, it also introduces competition that spurs investment by incumbent providers to upgrade their networks.

And in fact the citizens had already been reaping the rewards of its municipal fiber project before it even went live. After the fiber initiative started Cox stopped raising its rates for cable TV in Lafayette, but it kept raising them everywhere else.

Go take a peek. And while you are there you should take note of Geoff’s two sponsors; including a new one. I’ll think you’ll find it interesting.

“Cox builds Internet speed”

This morning’s Advocate weighs in with an interesting view of Cox’s new 5o mbps down/5 mbps up service. The report focuses on the reactions from most of the principals including Cox, EATel and AT&T but oddly excluding a direct reaction from LUS.

The article makes it clear that while Cox denies any direct influence, (apparently the local folks are making that mistake after all) knowing that LUS Fiber is offering a 50/50 mbps fiber-based internet service is the key to understanding why Cox would debut its new flagship service in such a small market.

The gist of the story as far as LUS vs. Cox is concerned is contained in the following paragraphs:

The introductory price of Cox’s “Ultimate” Internet service in Lafayette is $89.99 per month, plus $99.95 for the required modem and an installation fee that will vary by customer, according to information from Cox.

The company has set the standard suggested price for the service at $139.99 a month.

That price is comparable to similar offerings by Verizon and Comcast, though those companies generally provide their top-tier Internet services only in large markets.

LUS Fiber is selling its premium service of 50 Mbps download and upload for $57.95, with no additional cost for installation or equipment.

LUS Fiber customers can exchange information with others on the local fiber network at 100 Mbps.

The 50 Mbps residential Internet service options in Lafayette Parish are unique in the state.

The larger story is that competition is good: Lafayette has two 50 mbps providers, one with real symmetrical service and the rest of the state has NO such providers. The rest of the country will get this service, when Cox gets around to it, for 1 1/2 times as much, 50 bucks a month more…and it looks like the installation fee locally will “vary by customer” instead of being the 99 dollar pro install that others will uniformly pay. My guess is that, more precisely, the installation fee will vary by customer location…if you live in Lafayette and want this then tell Cox that you don’t want to pay for installation—after all the competition, LUS, isn’t charging for it. 🙂 Cox will probably be happy to put you on the hook for only the 100 dollar modem that you will have to dump when LUS gets to you. Like I said: Competition is good.

Reports from other providers flesh out the local and regional competitive picture. AT&T gets pitifully aggressively vague:

AT&T is preparing to launch its U-verse package in the Baton Rouge market with download speeds of 18 Mbps and upload speeds of 1.5 Mbps, AT&T spokeswoman Sue Sperry said.

Sperry said she could not give a specific timeline for Baton Rouge or plans for other markets…

AT&T will be a third run competitor in the city of Lafayette’s already competitive market. Since Cox is battling LUS’s full 50 meg offering with the best it can muster for the lowest price it can muster AT&T will surely be shut out of the city broadband market. It is hard to imagine that they see much upside to the costs of upgrading in-city only to remain in third place. What AT&T has on its side is wireless mobility — but both Cox and LUS have plans to minimize that strong point.

EATel in East Ascension and Livingston parish is a privately owned rural telephone company that has rolled out a FTTH project in some of the fastest growing parishes in the country.

A pocket of 30 Mbps service is offered in portions of Ascension and Livingston parishes by EATEL, a privately owned communication company that launched its own fiber-optic system in 2005.

The company charges $99.95 per month for download speeds of 30 Mbps and upload speeds of 15 Mbps, with $20 shaved off if Internet is bundled with phone and video, EATEL Sales and Marketing Director Brad Supple said.

He said EATEL’s fiber-optic system still has much capacity to offer faster service in the future.

EATel is running a very aggressive billboard campaign in its footprint. But has yet to elicit cheaper new services for its customers.

Finally, the Adovcate story makes sure its Baton Rouge readers understand the pickle they’re in:

In Baton Rouge, Cox’s top-tier Internet service provides standard download speeds of up to 15 Mbps — with boosts of up to 20 Mbps — and upload speeds of 1.5 Mbps.

What the reporter neglects to mention is that AT&T back in March of 08, while it was successfully hoodwinking the state legislature in to passing an industry-sponsored bill to set up state-wide video franchising in Louisiana took the capital city off the table as a player by cutting a separate deal to offer the capital city many of the priviledges it was insisting that other city’s not receive. At the time LPF insisted that this was a ploy and that AT&T was likely to treat Lousiana, and Baton Rouge, exactly as it had treated North Carolina where a similar successful move to infringe on the property rights of communities had lead to exactly NO new service launches by the incumbent AT&T. But the law had helped get a long, long list of cable providers off the hook to the communities whose land they use to provide cable services. AT&T has yet to launch any new services in our state and any it eventually launches in Baton Rouge will be, at best, second rate.

Competition, where you get it, is good. And in our state competition that boosts services and reduces prices has ONLY come from a municipality, a local government. State laws that gift the private duopolists with further privileges have had exactly no beneficial effect. It is never smart to feed the bully. And it’s always a good idea to do it for yourself.

Cox Gets 50 megs (Updated)

Cox announced yesterday that it is launching its first DOCSIS 3 product, a 50 meg down “ultimate” tier in, of all places, Lafayette, LA. That’s a huge feather in the cap of Lafayette and is certain to get Lafayette press across the country.

Despite the fact that yesterday was April fools this appears to be no joke even though it has yet to make it onto the official Cox page… Cox really is launching it first offering of the much ballyhooed DOCSIS 3.0 service in Lafayette. DOCSIS 3 involves “channel bonding” —taking up a mutliple “chunks” of the available bandwidth on its hybrid fiber-coax systems and its current rollout by Comcast is widely seen as a response to the FIOS fiber to the home project being marketed by Verizon in its territories.

I first heard about Cox’s launch through the Lafayette Technology Google group where the press release was posted but have since found references on Broadband Reports and the Baton Rouge Business Report, both of which add interesting details.

Here’s the lowdown as gleaned from the press release and stories….

  • Speed down: 50 megs
  • Speed up: 5 megs
  • Install cost: $99.95 for a “pro install”
  • Modem cost: $99.99 from Cox (you must buy a Cisco DPC3000)
  • Introductory/Louisiana/Lafayette Price: $89.99/month
  • Regular/not Lafayette Price: $139.99
  • Contract length: ? not specified
  • Extras: 3 IP addresses, no transfer caps “at this time,”
  • Offered in Cox’s footprint in Lafayette Parish–Broussard, Carencro, Duson,
    Lafayette, Scott and Youngsville

What’s interesting about this announcement, of course, is that it represents an attempt to challenge LUS’ just-launched service. The Business Report, however, posts that Cox national spokesperson

Ruble says the high-speed Internet was launched in Lafayette because of “loud and vocal demand.” The Lafayette Utility System has launched its own fiber-optic Internet, phone and cable service. Ruble says LUS wasn’t a factor in introducing the new service in Lafayette first.

That’s a bit of newspeak if ever I heard it. “Loud and vocal demand” probably can be fairly interpreted to mean that Cox has finally heard what Lafayette said on July 16th four years ago when the people overwhelmingly voted to get LUS to provide them with fiber to the home. If you can look at it that way I guess that LUS wasn’t a factor…..but it seems a pretty far stretch and I hope the local PR folks won’t keep up such an unlikely position. Reasonable people have to think that what Lafayette has to recommend it as the place to launch a major new initiative is that it has a unfinished FTTH project. It is not a major market by Cox’s standard…and is, in fact, the smallest market in Louisiana that Cox retained after shedding mot of its rural and small city holdings (Alex and Lake Charles got the boot).

As a response to LUS’ 50 meg offering it doesn’t come off too well. Cox only matches LUS on download speed; upload is a 10th of what LUS offers and both monthly cost and upfront costs are higher. A comparison:

  • Speed down: 50 megs
  • Speed up: 5o megs
  • Install cost: 0
  • Modem cost: 0 (what modem?)
  • Introductory/Louisiana/Lafayette Price: No special pricing
  • Regular Price: $57.95
  • Contract length: No Contract
  • Extras: 100 meg intranet, Internet on cable box, Money stays in hometown (my favorite),
  • Offered in LUS’ footprint in Lafayette Parish (the city of Lafayette currently)

On the upside is, mainly, that folks in the neighboring smaller cities can get 50 megs—and that has got to be a good thing. Theyll be able, for a price, to join the elite few in our country who have that much bandwidth. I’ve got family in Broussard and I know they’ve looked longingly at what the city is getting. Demand is great in the surrounding cities. What’s interesting is everything I’ve heard Huval say recently has lead me to believe that LUS will move into the surrounding areas as soon as they are done with Lafayette proper. All the folks in the parish have to do is ask. It seems likely that Cox making this treat available is intended make take some of the fire out of those requests.

But will folks really be happy to pay more for what the people in the city are getting for less? Especially when they will still be outside the 100 meg intranet and have to make do with 1/10 the upload? It seems risky to me: It’s one thing for fast bandwidth to be a “city” thing. It’s another thing all together to be offered a product but to find out that you will be paying more for one that isn’t of the same quality as what those in the city is getting.

Interesting times.

UPDATE: 1:25 PM, 4/2/09: The national prss release release is also available on PR Newswire. The Advertiser has a story up on the topic this morning: “Upgraded Internet launched.” MarketWatch, reporting on a speech by Dallas Clement, Cox’s senior VP of strategy and development, noted that Cox was rolling out their 50 meg docsis 3 service in Lafayette:

He added that the company will be careful about rolling out the service more widely, as it would be an expensive proposition. It will rely on what it learns about consumer demand for the service in a given location before committing to a new launch.

That explaination is a little puzzeling…a slow rollout makes sense in general if you are afraid that the demand won’t be there. But if so, Lafayette seems an odd place to roll it out first: They can’t possibly assess how it works for them in most of their footprint since our situation is uniquely difficult for them. In most places the 50 meg product would blow away the competition. It doesn’t here.

UPDATE: The Independent Blog has a post on this subject as well. In it the national Cox representative takes a more realistic stand than the one she apparently took with the Baton Rouge Business Report:

While Cox says the decision was not based solely on the competion it faces here from Lafayette Utilities System, it clearly was a factor. “It has to do with competition period,” says Cox spokesperson Ann Ruble. “I think Greater Louisiana was chosen because we have competition from many different sides. This is described as a hyper-competitive market across the entire footprint, the Baton Rouge market and the Lafayette market. We put so much investment into Lafayette that it made sense for the first place to launch.”

That makes a little more sense; obviously launching your first docsis 3 product in a place where you have a competitor that is offering much greater speed than you are makes a certain specie of sense—especially if you realize that “Greater Louisiana” aka the Lafayette-Baton Rouge market is NOT getting this service. ONLY Lafayette is…Baton Rouge where there is no LUS doesn’t get ANY access, not even at the 139 dollar level. The only thing that is “hypercompetitive” about the “Greater Baton Rouge” market is the presence of two fiber-based competitors. EATel in East Ascension also offers a FTTH alternative. Maybe Cox will offer it in Ascension Parish, where EATEL is offering Fiber To The Home if EATEL puts up a 50 meg tier too. Either way, Baton Rouge is out of luck….

Cox Steps Into It: Network Neutrality Returns

Cox has stepped into the glare of the net neutrality limelight with its new policy, announced yesterday afternoon, on bandwidth throttling.

Succinctly: Cox has decided that it knows best which of your network activities is “time sensitive” and which ones are not. And it intends to force its ideas on your use of the bandwidth for which you’ve paid.

Initial Reaction
Unsurprisingly, reaction has been negative. Om Malik of GigaOm sez:

Who is Cox to decide that a certain FTP transfer is not time sensitive, or that some software update is not time sensitive? More importantly, why should consumers trust cable companies, whose record of giving customers the short end of the stick is pretty well known?…

Unfortunately, as long as we have this comfortable duopoly in the broadband market, we the broadband consumers are going to have suffer from these kind of practices as we don’t have much of a choice. Hopefully a post-Kevin Martin FCC will be more citizen-friendly, and will act promptly against Cox and other traffic shapers.

The Free Press, epicenter of the net neutrality battle in Congress, similarly remarks:

“The lesson we learned from the Comcast case is that we must be skeptical of any practice that comes between users and the Internet.

“As a general rule, we’re concerned about any cable or phone company picking winners and losers online. These kinds of practices cut against the fundamental neutrality of the open Internet. We urge the FCC to subject this practice to close scrutiny and call on Cox to provide its customers with more technical details about exactly what it’s doing.”

This will clearly be the first contentious issue to come before the new FCC and it is surely no accident that the strategy is announced at the moment when the agency is being reorganized and will find reacting quickly difficult.

Some Background
Hovering in the background of this story is series of failures on the part of Comcast the nation’s largest, and hence most visible, cable company to extend the industry’s privileged position in regard to regulation. (Cable companies have historically been much more lightly regulated than their competitors the telephone companies.) What Comcast failed to secure was the “right” to inspect your bits and to discriminate against bits it didn’t like—especially P2P protocols. In doing so it ran up against the long-established ideals of common carriage. A common carrier is not allowed to discriminate in what it carries…it is not allowed to charge some loads of coal more than others nor to give some customers privileged service by delivering their coal first. Comcast was asserting the right to treat some bits differently based on the protocols that governed them.

The FCC came down on Comcast and in the ensuing back and forth Comcast, and the cable industry, got a huge black eye in public opinion as is evidenced by the qoutes above.

Cox steps into it
So Cox is deliberately taking up the network neutrality fight by declaring a new policy and is hoping to do a better job of it for the industry than the #1 guy. What’s not so well know, but was cited in the story-breaking AP account, is that Cox has also been doing exactly what Comcast has been castigated for attempting:

Comcast is fighting the FCC’s ruling in court, but has abandoned its congestion management system in favor of one that doesn’t discriminate between different types of traffic. It has also abandoned secrecy and revealed details on how the new system works.

Tests conducted by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany indicated last year that Cox was using the same discriminatory network management system that Comcast employed then. Cox never revealed the details of its system but said it used “protocol filtering,” a principle also used by Comcast.

Further testing by the Max Planck Institute indicated that Cox cut back sharply on its use of the old congestion system in August, and that it was shut down by January.

Cox, apparently, is not willing to follow Comcast in a shift away from discrimination based on protocol to one based on the particular customers who actually use the most bandwidth. Instead it is trying to recast the issue in terms of “time sensitive” and “time insensitive” categories of protocols. (Cox, by all accounts, uses the same equipment (from a company called Sandvine that Comcast has; a technology that engages in deep packet inspection to try and discern the protocols used to transfer bits and other traits.) But whereas Comcast has been remarkably open about what it is trying to do since being spanked by the FCC and public opinion Cox appears to firmly set on the path continued obfuscation and misdirection. In its FAQ on the topic it says:

Our past practices were based on traffic prioritization and protocol filtering. This new technique is based on the time-sensitive nature of the Internet traffic itself, and we believe it will lead to a smoother Internet experience with fewer delays.

This is nonsense. Honestly. Past practices are present practices. The FAQ directs your attention to the categories of protocols that Cox has created (time sensitive and insenstive) and away from the raw fact that all that is being done is that Cox has grouped some protocols into one pile and some into another and is discriminating against more than one protocol at a time. Protocols in the disfavored pile include: P2P (the one that got Comcast in trouble), usenet, and FTP. All of this requires deep packet inspection—Cox examining your data to determine what’s in it—then deciding what is and isn’t important and slowing down those that it thinks aren’t important enough to get speedy service.

The confusing discussion that will ensue…….
I expect that all this will be recast by commentators, as soon as they get it together today, as a fork in the road betwen “caps” a la Comcast and “management” a la Cox. No. The real issue is congestion—the slowdown that comes when too many users are clogging the internet; usually in the local “last mile.” Comcast is essentially telling some of its biggest users that they are using an unfair amount and “capping” their use at 250 gigs a month in the hopes that will serve to make congestion bearable. Cox, in contrast, is saying that some protocols deserve better service and is slowing others in its attempt to make its congestion less visible by passing the slowdown off to less important (in its view) uses.

What the first wave of comment0rs will be ignoring is that Cox also caps usage. It is much less transparent about how much incurs its wrath—it apparently differs by location and even then is not applied consistently. (In Las Vegas, for instance, the cap is 60 gigs on its 12 Mbps tier…much more restrictive than Comcast’s more highly publicized and decried version.) So while Cox can be the newest villan in the the protocol arena of the network neutrality fight it cannot be cast as a hero to those who are disturbed about the implications of bandwidth caps. You can rest assured that if Cox succeeds in its current strategy Comcast will follow it into using both caps and “management” to restrict its users. The industry is not offering an either/or…this is an “in addition to” effort.

But the confusing discussion around caps and management will serve the incumbents as a whole by presenting the policy community with a Hobson’s choice between two objectionable “solutions” to the problem of congestion. There is a third choice, a better choice, that doesn’t involve picking either of the industry’s favorite children.

A Third Way
Commentators (and policy-makers) would be better served by focusing on the actual problem: The real issue is congestion. The real solution is to directly address the undersupply of bandwidth that is the root cause of congestion. A congested network is, almost by definition, one which is under-engineered and so cannot handle the traffic demands that its users put on it. The real solution to the real problem is to fix that…to put in place a network which can handle the traffic and one which can easily, quickly, and cheaply be upgraded to handle downstream increases in demand.

It is no accident that I find it easy to reject the choice offered by Cox and Comcast. It is largely a product of where I happen to live. Lafayette’s citizens are in a good position to see that there is a solution which doesn’t involve making selections between false choices presented by the incumbents that seek to get concessions from the public in order advance their interests instead of actually taking the costly and admittedly risky business of fixing what is broken. Lafayette’s new network, built explicitly to provide with the capacity the community believed was necessary for its future, is about to take on its first customers.

There are ways for the country as a whole to address the bandwidth/congestion issue directly without simply building an new network as Lafyette and other impatient communities have done. Regulators can do something as simple as setting standards on the advertising that currently allows companies to grossly overstate the amount of bandwidth they can reliably provide—buying a 12 meg tier seldom means that you can reliably get 12 megs. Simply require a truth in advertising standard of some sort: say that you have to actually be able to provide the advertised speed 98% of the time and that you must monitor and report your performance on a node by node basis to the FCC. If you fail to provide such speeds then you must rebate to your customers a per cent of their bill for the months in which the undersupply occurred. Performance standards like this used to be de rigeur for telephones back in the days before deregulation. They motivated the phone company to build the world’s best phone system.

The almost inevitable consequence of this and other regulatory methods of demanding better service (why not make symmetrical up and down speeds a service standard?) would clearly and cleanly set a framework for rational behavior on the part of the incumbents. [An aside: for a good, current, take on why competition is never enough in some situations see Harold Feld’s latest.]

What you could expect would be rational economic behavior that would drive

  1. telephone companies to follow Verizon’s lead in building out a new FTTH network capable of dealing with today’s demands. Verizion is unquestionably the smartest actor in the field. It is now well understood that Verizon has succeeded in what was initially judged a risky venture by the capital markets.
  2. the cable companies to push fiber much closer to the home and to restructure their use of bandwidth to supply fewer channels and more switched digital and raw bandwidth to customers.
  3. areas which have poor competitors in these categories—or who don’t want rely on national policy to secure their futures—to build their own FTTH networks. As Lafayette has done.

Cox is, frankly, a bad actor on the national stage as it has been here in Lafayette. The country would be wise to reject the false choices currently being offered and to find a concrete, direct way to insist on more, and more reliable, bandwidth.

How My Internet Connection Spent New Year’s Eve — Or, Please Hurry LUS!!!

I recently shot some video for some friends of mine in a band when they played at the Blue Moon Saloon. It’s going to be released as a DVD in the next month or so.

The band members are scattered across the South but I wanted to let them see the near final cut of the video. I saved it as a Quicktime movie in a small (480 x 270 pixels) widescreen format and it came in at a grand total of 1.69 gigabytes. Too big to send via conventional email.

I tried Pando (a service a friend in New Orleans and I had used to exchange video) but that service has a 1 gig file size limit.

Googling around, I found Filemail.com which has a 2 gig file size limit. Ah, we’re good to go.

So, I signed up, linked to the file and began sending it.

There is a handy/scary network speedometer on the upload page. I finally got that baby up to 104 kbps via my Cox Internet connection. But what was really scary was the “Time Remaining” figure: four hours and fifty-plus minutes!

Well, it was what it was, so I went to read a couple of things on my laptop while the iMac, Cox and Filemail did their thing.

A couple of hours later, I returned to the iMac only to find an error message!

Not knowing the source of the error, I decided to try to FTP the file to a domain that I own. FTP is supposed to be pretty fast (faster than email, any way). But, looking at the progress dial on Fetch, it was clear that this process would take about five hours at the connection speed I was able to achieve.

Sure enough, five hours later, the file was on the website. I linked to it and it began to play.

Still, knowing that video over the Internet is network speed sensitive, I went back to Filemail to see if I could successfully send the file so that the band members could download it onto their respective desktops and get a better playback experience.

I figured out that the original problem had been that my hard drive had ‘gone to sleep’ in the initial transfer process — and who wouldn’t after three or four hours? 😉

So, I resent my system preferences to keep the hard-drive ‘awake’ no matter how long the transfer took.

Sent the file again and — again — delivery time was going to be about five hours.

This time, the process was completed without a glitch.

But, using that great Cox fiber to the neighborhood network with the asymmetrical upload and download speeds, I spent at least 12 hours of time moving a 1.69 gigabyte file to a mail service and/or a website for viewing.

I am happy to see that LUS has announced their pricing on packages and I’m thrilled about the network speeds. But, they can’t get here soon enough as far as I’m concerned.

I’m tired of the giant sucking sound Cox’s network is making in my wallet and with their underperforming network.