Author: Jon Brodkin

AT&T and Verizon Wireless now charge $20 fees when customers upgrade their mobile devices, with one notable difference: AT&T charges the fee even when customers bring their own phones to the network instead of buying devices from the carrier.

Verizon started charging a $20 upgrade fee on Monday this week, matching the $20 fee it introduced in November for customers activating new lines. MacRumors published a leaked memo, which said the upgrade fee applies when customers buy their phones from Verizon—whether they pay full retail price or make monthly payments on an installment plan—and also when customers enroll in Apple's iPhone upgrade program. Verizon won't charge an upgrade fee when customers supply their own equipment. (A $40 upgrade fee still applies when people get an old-fashioned two-year contract.)

Verizon's memo compared its own upgrade fees to those of other carriers, noting that T-Mobile doesn't charge a fee, while Sprint charges $30 and AT&T was charging $15.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become a $10 billion business this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders this week.

While Amazon as a whole "became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales" in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark "at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone," Bezos wrote. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from "organizations of every size across nearly every industry," he wrote.

AWS launched in March 2006 with the Simple Storage Service (S3). It expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a few months later, letting customers rent virtual machines over the Internet. The service allowed developers to obtain computing capacity on demand without having to operate their own servers, and over the years many startups have built online businesses with Amazon's data centers and services providing the back-end infrastructure. It's not just small companies relying on Amazon, though, as big names like Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media, Netflix, and Pinterest use the online platform.

The White House has reportedly decided not to give public support to legislation that would force tech companies to help law enforcement agencies break into encrypted products.

Reuters reported the news today, attributing it to "sources familiar with the discussion." The draft legislation from Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) could be introduced this week and "would empower judges to require technology companies such as Apple to help law enforcement crack encrypted data," Reuters wrote.

The Obama administration said in October that it wouldn't seek legislation requiring tech companies to install backdoors in their products. But last month, President Obama said he thinks the government should have some access to encrypted data to investigate terrorist plots and crimes such as child pornography and tax fraud. "You cannot take an absolutist view on this," Obama said at the South By Southwest conference. "If your view is strong encryption no matter what and we can and should create black boxes, that does not strike the balance that we've lived with for 200 or 300 years. And it's fetishizing our phones above every other value. That can't be the right answer."

Frontier Communications took over former Verizon territory in California, Florida, and Texas on Friday last week, but the transition has caused problems for many customers and Frontier now says it needs until mid-April to fix everything.

Frontier, which bought FiOS and DSL networks in the three states from Verizon for $10.54 billion, set up a webpage to provide updates on the transition. Video on Demand content from FiOS TV will take longer to fix than the other services. This affects video from premium channels including HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax, and Epix. "Many" videos are available now, but "the vast majority of titles, including any previously purchased titles, will be available by mid-April," Frontier said in an update yesterday.

Billing and account problems should be resolved by Friday of this week, Frontier says.

The National Football League announced today that Twitter will stream 10 Thursday Night Football games, free for all users, during the 2016 regular season.

"The NFL and Twitter will provide free, live streaming video of Thursday Night Football without authentication to the over 800 million registered and non-registered users worldwide on the Twitter platform on mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and connected TVs," the league said.

Periscope broadcasts from players and teams are also planned. There is already "a massive amount of NFL-related conversation happening on Twitter during our games," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell noted.

A project to bring free wireless Internet to poor people in California is only providing a fraction of the promised Wi-Fi hotspots, according to multiple reports.

With a state grant issued in 2012, a nonprofit called Manchester Community Technologies was supposed to "install free wireless Internet along busy boulevards in low-income neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County," said a report last week by the Los Angeles Daily News. The organization reported success to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in March 2015, saying it had connected more than 100,000 people to the Internet.

But today, few of the sites actually have Internet access. The Los Angeles Times visited the hotspot locations and reported that hardly any had Wi-Fi signals. CPUC staff visited the Wi-Fi hotspot sites in January in response to the Times' investigation, finding Internet connectivity at just two of 25 locations. CPUC says it is now planning an audit.

Former Verizon customers who were switched over to Frontier Communications on Friday are still reporting outages and other problems today.

Verizon sold its FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas to Frontier, but the transition has not been smooth. On Friday, Frontier acknowledged a "technical issue" involving the integration of systems, but the company said it had been fixed by 9:30am ET that morning.

That assurance seems to have been premature, with customers still reporting problems on DownDetector and Twitter throughout the weekend and today. "Onto the 4th day without Internet or any working account...any timeframe guys? This is getting really crazy!" one California customer complained today.

The Federal Communications Commission today unveiled new broadband labels modeled after the nutrition labels commonly seen on food products. Home Internet service providers and mobile carriers are being urged to use the labels to give consumers details such as prices (including hidden fees tacked onto the base price), data caps, overage charges, speed, latency, packet loss, and so on.

ISPs aren't required to use these labels. But they are required to make more specific disclosures as part of transparency requirements in the FCC's net neutrality order, which reclassified Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC recommends that ISPs use these labels to comply with the disclosure rules and says use of the labels will act as a "safe harbor" for demonstrating compliance. However, ISPs can come up with their own format if they still make all the required disclosures in "an accurate, understandable, and easy-to-find manner," the FCC said today.

The labels were approved unanimously by the FCC's Consumer Advisory Committee, a group with both consumer advocates and industry representatives. ISPs on the committee include CenturyLink, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the primary lobby group for the cable industry, is also on the committee.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said yesterday that he has no plans to investigate Netflix for throttling its own video streams, despite Netflix's critics calling for an investigation.

Netflix acknowledged last week that it reduces video quality on most mobile networks to help users stay under their data caps and avoid data overage charges. Opponents of net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from throttling online content claimed Netflix is being a hypocrite, since the video company supported the FCC's ban on throttling.

Netflix critics acknowledge that the FCC's net neutrality or "Open Internet" rules apply only to Internet service providers and not content providers like Netflix. Nonetheless, they insist that the company should be investigated. That isn't going to happen, Wheeler said in a Q&A with reporters after yesterday's monthly FCC meeting.

Tennessee is at the center of a nationwide battle over whether cities and towns should be allowed to build broadband networks without facing restrictions that help private ISPs avoid competition from the public sector.

But with a lawsuit and legislative battle over a Tennessee state law still pending, one home developer decided to build his own ISP. John "Thunder" Thornton of Chattanooga needed to install high-speed Internet for "his mountaintop residential development in Marion County," but was unable to get affordable service from AT&T or Charter Communications, a Chattanooga Times Free Press article said yesterday. He also couldn't get service from a Chattanooga electric utility that also provides Internet because the state law prevents it from expanding to nearby areas that lack fast, affordable service.

To solve the problem, Thornton "spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available," the article said. He announced yesterday that his Jasper Highlands community in Jasper, Tennessee, "is now able to offer high-speed, gigabit-per-second Internet service for all home sites in his 3,000-acre complex."