Yesterday’s ruling by a federal appeals court gives Internet service providers the ability to charge premium rates or additional fees to whichever content providers the ISPs want. Considering that Netflix is the single largest user of bandwidth in the U.S., many observers predict this ruling is bad news for the streaming video service, but some contend that Netflix may come out a winner in the long run. [More]
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The Net Neutrality Rule Is Dead. So How Can The FCC Fix Net Neutrality?
By 1.14.14
This morning, a federal appellate court vacated FCC rules guaranteeing net neutrality, effectively giving Internet service providers the right to throttle data speeds and demand premium rates from content providers. So your ISP has a service that competes with Netflix? It can (and probably will) get preferred treatment. Companies like Netflix that eat up bandwidth? They had better be prepared to pay the piper. It would essentially mean the end of the Internet was we know it, but is it a done deal? [More]
Appeals Court Strikes Down Net Neutrality Rules
By 1.14.14
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., today released a ruling that strikes down key provisions of the FCC’s net neutrality rule. [More]
Does $100 Moto G Shake Notion That Unsubsidized Smartphones Must Be Expensive?
By 1.2.14
The general line of thought in the wireless market is that prepaid customers are offered older and cheaper smartphones because most prepaid customers don’t also want to splash out the $500-800 for an unlocked, top-of-the-line device. Meanwhile, contract phone customers are pitched those pricier phones but at discounted rates (or monthly installment plans) that make the phones more affordable (and lock the customer into months or years of service). But does a good smartphone need to cost so much? Do phones for the prepaid market need to be so bad? Maybe not. [More]
The Pros And Cons For Consumers Of Ending Wireless Phone Subsidies
By 12.26.13
While many overseas wireless providers choose to not subsidize customers’ new phone purchases in exchange for locking the consumer into a contract, it’s still the prevailing model among three of the four major wireless companies here in the U.S., with T-Mobile the sole provider offering only non-contract plans (sort of). But with AT&T recently dipping its toes into the water to encourage customers to buy their own phones, the market may be in for a major change. [More]
Verizon Says It Will Publish Reports On Law Enforcement Requests For Phone Records
By 12.20.13
In the ongoing brouhaha over the National Security Agency’s data-collecting, Verizon announced last night that it will publish information about how many requests it received from various law enforcement agencies this year for customer records. [More]
Don’t Hold Your Breath Waiting For Verizon FiOS To Come To Your Town, Says CEO
By 12.11.13
Back in 2012, Verizon Wireless announced a marketing deal with several of the country’s largest cable operators that would let these companies sell cable/Internet/wireless bundles. We warned at the time that this would give Verizon even more reason to halt expansion of its costly FiOS network, as the company stood to make more money from the wireless business than it would from the TV/Internet service. Now Verizon’s CEO has confirmed that the company has no plans to expand FiOS beyond the existing markets. [More]
Ethical Or Not-So-Ethical: Using A Secondary User Name To Give Free HBO Go Access To Friends?
By 11.21.13
Whether you approve of it or not, a lot of people out there share usernames and passwords for services like Netflix and HBO Go so that their friends, families and loved ones can share without having to pay for their own subscription. And some say there is a way you can do this for HBO Go (and presumably other services that use your cable login) without having to actually share your info. [More]
Verizon Hit By Too Much LTE Demand, Pushing Some Customers Down To 3G
By 11.13.13
You know those Verizon ads where the company brags about its flippin’ awesome 4G and LTE coverage maps? Those may look pretty on an art museum wall, but the nation’s largest wireless provider admits that it may not currently have enough LTE bandwidth to go around in some markets, meaning some users are being thrown back in time to 2009, forced to use the Verizon 3G network. [More]
Law Would Make It Illegal To For ISPs To Throttle Streaming Video
By 11.13.13
For years, there have been accusations of Internet service providers deliberately slowing down or degrading the quality of data from streaming video services. Recently, a company that provides a good deal of bandwidth to Netflix accused Verizon of allowing traffic to streaming video traffic to get snarled in bottlenecks. Newly introduced legislation would outlaw the practice of throttling and degrading video content. [More]
Verizon Tests Same-Day Delivery Of Phones For People Too Busy To Go To The Store
By 10.16.13
Are you a Verizon Wireless customer who wants a new phone but A) doesn’t feel like waiting for delivery and B) doesn’t feel like going to the store to buy one in person? If you also happen to live here in Philadelphia, you might be in luck. [More]
New Jersey Island Won’t Get Its Landlines Back After Sandy Because Copper Is Too Expensive
By 10.15.13
Gather close, you young folk, and listen to a tale of times past, when everyone had phones that connected them to the rest of the world through wires. In days gone by, people relied on these so-called landlines especially in times of natural disasters or power outages. As such, one New Jersey island’s residents are none too pleased that Verizon won’t reinstall its landlines after Hurricane Sandy destroyed the original lines. [More]
Verizon Wireless To Honor Unintentional Upgrades For Unlimited Data Customers
By 10.1.13
There are still some Verizon Wireless customers holding on to the unlimited data plans the company killed off in 2012. Over the weekend, VZW accidentally allowed some of these customers to upgrade to new phones without requiring that they switch to a new, shared data plan. In a move that makes the company look slightly less evil, it has decided to honor these upgrades without forcing the subscribers to change plans. [More]
Verizon Decides To Not Force Sub-Par Service On New Yorkers Left Without Phones By Hurricane
By 9.10.13
Last fall, Hurricane Sandy tore through the Mid-Atlantic, leaving entire coastal towns in New York and New Jersey without landline service. Verizon only made it worse for some residents, choosing to test replacing the ruined copper-wire network with its craptastic Voice Link service. After months of complaints from residents businesses and concerns about public safety, Verizon has decided to abandon that test and replace the copper lines in Fire Island, NY, with fiber optic cable. [More]
Verizon FiOS Tries To Win Over Blacked-Out CBS Employees
By 8.20.13
Millions of Time Warner Cable customers have now gone more than two weeks without knowing which attention-starved individuals got kicked out of the Big Brother house or if the people of Chester’s Mill ever got out from under the dome (Spoiler: Maybe). Many employees of CBS have been unable to watch the shows they air if they have TWC as their cable provider (which in NYC, Dallas, and L.A. is highly likely), so Verizon is trying to reach out to them and lure them over to FiOS. [More]
Wireless Plan Comparison Calculator Shows Just How Screwed Up Phone Prices Are
By 8.19.13 — Updated: 2.17.14
Do you think you’re paying the best possible price for your wireless service? Given that there are around 700 different permutations of plans available just from the four national wireless carriers, it can be complicated to figure out whether you’re getting the most for your monthly subscription. [More]
Mad At A Verizon Worker? Don’t Lock Him In An Airless Underground Vault
By 8.7.13
In what sounds like the very worst case of “Get off my lawn!” syndrome, police say the owner of a Boston-area storage facility was so ticked off at a Verizon worker who had parked on his grass, he locked him an underground vault. And if we know anything about sealed underground chambers, it’s that they usually don’t have a lot of air. You know, for breathing. [More]
Without Drops In Monthly Wireless Rates, New Early Upgrade Programs Are A Fool’s Bet
By 7.18.13
In just the last week, three of the four national wireless providers have each announced their version of some sort of program to entice people to pay more for early upgrades. But AT&T and Verizon aren’t lowering their monthly rates to account for the higher phone prices (and T-Mobile is actually charging extra for the program), people who enroll in these offerings are really just paying for other customers’ phones. [More]
