Author: Jon Brodkin

(credit: Jason Farrar)

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to cap the rates charged for phone calls made to and from prisons, saying inmate calling services are overcharging prisoners, their families, and attorneys.

“Just how high are these rates? A pro bono attorney paid $14 a minute to speak to an incarcerated client,” FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said in a speech last week. “Families write explaining how they are making extraordinary sacrifices by paying $400-$500 a month to hear their loved one’s voice. The endless array of new and increasing fees can add nearly 40 percent to costs—fees as high as $9.50 to open a new account, $4.75 to add money to an account, and $2.99 a month for the account maintenance fee. These rates and fees would be difficult for any family to bear, but if you were already struggling to stay afloat, you are now foregoing basic necessities like food and medicine just to make a phone call. No family should be forced to make this choice.”

Studies have shown that contact between inmates and families during incarceration reduces the risk of recidivism, the FCC said.

(credit: Dominik Meissner)

A mobile operator called Digicel announced yesterday that it plans to block advertisements at the network level—unless Google and other companies pay the carrier to let their ads through.

Such a scheme would likely violate network neutrality rules in the United States, but the Jamaica-based Digicel operates in the Caribbean and South Pacific. That means ads will be blocked on mobile devices starting “in the coming months” even if customers haven’t installed ad-blocking software themselves. But ads will get through if ad-serving companies are willing to pay Digicel.

“Digicel is looking to companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook to enter into revenue sharing agreements with it so that this money in turn can be reinvested in network deployment,” Digicel wrote. “Currently, these companies do not pay to make use of the network and the services they provide on it suck up bandwidth to make money for themselves through advertising while putting no money in.”

The Federal Communications Commission is considering new restrictions that would make it harder for users to modify Wi-Fi routers, sparking controversy and an apparent misunderstanding over the FCC’s intentions.

The FCC’s stated goal is to make sure routers and other devices only operate within their licensed parameters. Manufacturers release products that are certified to operate at particular frequencies, types of modulation, and power levels but which may actually be capable of operating outside of what they’ve been certified and tested to do.

The extra capabilities can sometimes be unlocked through software updates issued by the manufacturer, or by software made by third parties. Lots of users install open source firmware on routers to get a better user interface and better functionality than what is provided by the vendor, and the wording of the FCC’s proposal has some worried that such software will effectively be outlawed.

Kathleen Cox of Jacksonville, Florida has been a Comcast subscriber for 13 years, and besides getting cable service she also uses a Comcast e-mail address.

But recently, her e-mail address suddenly disappeared. First Coast News reported the story last night:

In April, another Kathleen Cox, who lives in Michigan, signed up for a Comcast account. The company took the Florida’s Kathleen Cox’s e-mail account and gave it to the woman in Michigan.

“It has been crazy,” said Cox. “It is frustrating that’s what it is.”

It means all of her e-mail contact information went away, but it also resulted in Cox getting the other woman’s bill.

“Your bank, your doctor, everybody you know that had your email address for 13 years,” said Cox. “All gone.”

The problem apparently wasn’t fixed until the news station got involved. “Everyone says ‘within 24-72 hours,’ and nothing happens,” Cox told First Coast News. Cox said she spoke to 18 Comcast agents who promised to fix the problem. It took “more than a month” to finally get it solved, according to the report.

Although Verizon says its FiOS Internet service “doesn’t cap usage in any way,” one customer who has been using 7TB monthly for several months in a row got a letter warning him that his broadband will be disconnected unless he reins in his “excessive usage.”

“If this excessive usage continues past May 31, 2015 on your FiOS Internet account, your service will be disconnected on June 15, 2015,” Verizon wrote to the subscriber.

The subscriber pays $315 a month for Verizon’s 500Mbps plan, according to DSLReports.

The State of Tennessee is fighting for its right to enforce a law that prevents municipal broadband networks from providing Internet service to other cities and towns.

Tennessee filed a lawsuit Friday against the Federal Communications Commission, which last month voted to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. The FCC cited its authority granted in 1996 by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which requires the FCC to encourage the deployment of broadband to all Americans by using “measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market, or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” (Emphasis ours.)

In Tennessee, the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga offers Internet and video service to residents, but state law prevented it from expanding outside its electric service area to adjacent towns that have poor Internet service. Tennessee is one of about 20 states that impose some type of restriction on municipal broadband networks, helping protect private Internet service providers from competition.

Google Fiber’s TV service is now delivering targeted ads based on subscribers’ viewing history, the company said in a forum post on Friday.

“In the next few weeks, we’ll be starting a small trial of this type of capability with our Fiber TV subscribers in Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO,” the Google Fiber statement said. “These ads will show during existing ad breaks, along with national ads, on live TV and DVR-recorded programs. Fiber TV ads will be digitally delivered in real time and can be matched based on geography, the type of program being shown (e.g., sports or news), or viewing history.”

Customers will see the targeted TV ads unless they opt out. Google provided instructions for opting out using the TV remote control.

Comcast says it has begun rolling out gigabit per second cable technology to employee homes for testing, LightReading reported today. The company appears on track to test in consumers’ homes this year and roll out the faster speeds on a wider basis in 2016.

“The target for us is to be in the field establishing network readiness in 2015,” Comcast VP of Access Architecture Jorge Salinger said, according to the LightReading article. “Our overall goal is to be able to deploy DOCSIS 3.1 and gigabit-per-second in a broad scale starting in 2016.”

The new version of DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) is able to support gigabit download speeds, bringing cable in line with the top fiber downloads available to consumers, though with lower upload speeds. Broadcom announced a DOCSIS 3.1 system-on-a-chip for cable modems in January; at the time, Comcast said it would use DOCSIS 3.1 technology to “offer our customers more than 1 Gigabit speeds in their homes in 2015 and beyond.”

The Federal Communications Commission voted on February 26 to reclassify broadband as a common carrier service and enforce net neutrality rules, but the commission’s entire ruling didn’t become public until this morning.

Now you can read the entire ruling, all 400 pages of it, including the dissents from Republican commissioners. That includes a 64-page dissent from Ajit Pai and 16 pages from Michael O’Reilly. We’ll be reading it ourselves for potential followup articles.

Republicans on the commission and in Congress had urged FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to make the rules public before the vote, but the commission adhered to past practice by not releasing them until the final touches were ready. Wheeler explained on the day of the vote that the majority was required to include the minority’s dissents and “be responsive to those dissents” in order to make the ruling complete.