Author: Jon Brodkin

The Federal Communications Commission is making another $2.15 billion available for rural broadband projects, and it's trying to direct at least some of that money toward building services with gigabit download speeds and unlimited data.

The FCC voted for the funding Wednesday and released the full details yesterday. The money, $215 million a year for 10 years, will be distributed to Internet providers through a reverse auction in which bidders will commit to providing specific performance levels.

"We now adopt an auction design in which bidders committing to different performance levels will compete head to head in the auction, with weights to take into account our preference for higher speeds over lower speeds, higher usage over lower usage allowances, and low latency over high latency," the FCC said. Prices should be "reasonably comparable to similar offerings in urban areas," the FCC said.

An annual customer experience survey of 10,000 US consumers has rated broadband service and pay-TV as the least-liked industries, with Comcast being the lowest-rated company among the Internet and TV providers.

"Of the 20 industries covered in the 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings, TV service and Internet service providers tied with healthcare providers for the lowest average ratings," the Temkin Group said yesterday. "These industries have been at the bottom of the ratings for the past four years, and their scores hit an all-time low this year. The poster child for poor customer experience in these industries—Comcast—was not only the lowest-scoring TV service and Internet service provider, but was also one of the lowest-scoring companies in the entire Ratings. It ranked 289th overall out of 294 companies for its TV service and ranked 284th overall for its Internet service."

The free report can be downloaded here. The ISP and pay-TV industries ranked just below auto dealers, airlines, major appliance vendors, and rental car agencies.

House Republicans yesterday released a plan to slash the Federal Communications Commission's budget by $69 million and prevent the FCC from enforcing net neutrality rules, "rate regulation," and its plan to boost competition in the set-top box market.

The proposal is the latest of many attempts to gut the FCC's authority, though it's unusual in that it takes aim at two of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's signature projects while also cutting the agency's budget. The plan is part of the government's annual appropriations bill.

"The bill contains $315 million for the FCC—a cut of $69 million below the fiscal year 2016 enacted level and $43 million below the [agency's] request," said an announcement by the House Appropriations Committee chaired by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who received $25,500 from the telecom industry in the current campaign cycle. "The legislation prohibits the FCC from implementing the net neutrality order until certain court cases are resolved, requires newly proposed regulations to be made publicly available for 21 days before the Commission votes on them, prohibits the FCC from regulating broadband rates, and requires the FCC to refrain from further activity of the recently proposed set-top box rule until a study is completed."

Starting June 1, Comcast customers who face data caps will not be able to rack up more than $200 worth of overage charges in a month.

Comcast will continue to charge an extra $10 for each 50GB allotted to customers beyond the standard data plan. But prior to this change, there was apparently no limit on how many times per month a customer could be charged the extra $10.

Comcast confirmed the change in one of its data cap FAQs. On a DSLReports forum, a customer in Georgia posted a copy of a letter in which Comcast describes the change.

When Charter purchased Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, federal regulators forced the company to agree to some conditions designed to boost competition in the Internet service market. Charter, now the nation's second largest cable company behind Comcast because of the merger, is required to bring broadband of at least 60Mbps to at least 1 million homes and businesses where there's already a provider offering at least 25Mbps.

This is known as "overbuilding," something that happens infrequently enough that many Americans have only one choice for high-speed Internet. But when Charter fulfills the overbuilding requirement imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, it'll apparently do so without actually competing against other cable companies. Instead, Charter will enter the territory of phone companies like AT&T or Frontier, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said.

Why is that? Because Charter might want to buy more cable companies later. And the FCC is less likely to approve a merger between two companies competing against each other.

AT&T's home Internet data caps got an overhaul yesterday when the company implemented a recently announced plan to strictly enforce the caps and collect overage fees from more customers. Customers stuck on AT&T's older DSL architecture will be facing lower caps and potentially higher overage fees than customers with more modern Internet service.

AT&T put a positive spin on the changes when it announced them in March, saying that it was increasing the monthly data limits imposed on most home Internet customers. This was technically true as AT&T already had caps for most Internet users. But previously, the caps were only enforced in DSL areas, so the limits had no financial impact on most customers. Now, a huge swath of AT&T customers have effectively gone from unlimited plans to ones that are capped, with an extra $10 charge for each additional 50GB of data provided per month.

The only customers who aren't getting an increase in their monthly data allowance are the ones who have been dealing with caps the past few years, according to AT&T's data usage website:

Sprint is now allowing some online video to be streamed without counting against customers' data caps, making it the fourth major wireless carrier in the US to implement data cap exemptions (or "zero-rating").

Sprint's first foray into zero-rating, announced last week, is for the Copa America Centenario soccer tournament being held in the US beginning June 3. Sprint has partnered with FuboTV, a soccer streaming service, to give customers access to every match if they sign up for a 60-day trial. (FuboTV costs $9.99 per month if customers keep it after the trial expires.) Data streamed from FuboTV will not count against data caps during the tournament, but the zero-rating will end on June 27 right after the Copa America is over.

Zero-rating plans are being scrutinized by the Federal Communications Commission. Net neutrality advocates argue that zero-rating gives an unfair advantage to services that don't count against data caps, thus allowing carriers to favor some content over others.

It's been seven weeks since Frontier completed a purchase of Verizon's fiber and copper networks in California, Florida, and Texas, and the company is finally explaining why so many former Verizon customers have been hit by service outages.

Bad data from Verizon is the culprit, Frontier West Region President Melinda White told lawmakers in California yesterday during a nearly-two-hour hearing held by the State Assembly's Utilities & Commerce Committee. Corrupted data prevented Frontier's network from communicating properly with equipment at customers' homes, making it impossible to provision service to everyone, she said.

Frontier is providing bill credits to customers who lost service.

Internet service customers have filed 20,991 net neutrality complaints since the rules went into effect on June 12 of last year, according to new data released by the Federal Communications Commission.

The data includes 86,114 Internet service complaints filed since October 31, 2014 against home Internet and cellular ISPs. Net neutrality has been the most common type of complaint since the rules went into effect and is near the top of the list even when counting the first seven months of the data set in which net neutrality complaints weren't yet being accepted. In the full data set, billing complaints led the way at 22,989—with 16,393 since June 12. The other top categories for the entire period since late 2014 were service availability with 14,251 complaints, speed with 11,200 complaints, and privacy with 7,968 privacy complaints.

Despite the large numbers, this data doesn't show that there were any net neutrality violations. The FCC's website notes that the agency doesn't verify the facts in each complaint; these are just raw numbers based on the categories selected by customers when they file complaints. As we've written before, complaints filed under the net neutrality category are often unrelated to the core net neutrality rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Consumers often complain about slow speeds, high prices, and data caps under the net neutrality category.

BOSTON—Federal Communications Commission Tom Wheeler may be Public Enemy #1 in the cable industry, but he's quite happy with his Comcast service.

"I am a happy Comcast subscriber in Washington, DC," Wheeler said today at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's (NCTA) annual conference in Boston. Wheeler said he also a "happy Atlantic Broadband subscriber in Oxford, Maryland," where he and his wife have another house. Wheeler made the comments on stage in a Q&A with C-SPAN Senior Executive Producer Peter Slen, who asked about Wheeler's TV service.

Wheeler may be a rarity, as Comcast routinely posts some of the worst customer satisfaction scores in the lowest-rated industry measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). But despite his Comcastic experience and the fact that he used to be the cable industry's chief lobbyist, the FCC chairman has repeatedly clashed with his former industry.