Michael's Insight

Comcast announces download caps and other links for Friday

Web sites covering broadband Internet issues lit up yesterday with news that Comcast, the nation's largest cable broadband Internet provider, was set to announce a change to their customers' acceptable use policy setting a monthly download cap of 250 GB. There had been quite a bit of buzz about the cap issue leading up to this announcement, and it's interesting to see how the actual announcement differed from the speculation.

According to Comcast, the company has long had an internal policy of contacting users downloading more than 250 GB per month and offering to upgrade them to a commercial tier to accommodate their broadband needs. Less than 1 percent of Comcast's residential users exceed this monthly cap, with the average Comcast customer's monthly download being between 2 and 3 GB. Yesterday's announcement will be sent to customers in their monthly bills, notifying them of the cap policy.

Microsoft releases latest beta of Internet Explorer browser and other articles

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available [IE Blog]

While it's still in beta, Microsoft is unveiling the second beta download of their Internet Explorer 8 web browser. Facing stiff competition from the Firefox and Safari browsers, Microsoft has reportedly upped the ante on its browser's security features. It's also supposed to be more crash proof.

Will these new features reverse the trend of users switching from Internet Explorer to other browsers? Take a look for yourself and see what you think.

Articles for your Wednesday morning on security and the political conventions

Malware Authors Stealing Babies [Sherman's Security Blog]

Sherman Hand, Insight's director of data and security, fraud and abuse, has started his own blog on computer security issues. Sherman does a great job of ensuring the security of Insight's network, and he shares many of his best security tips on his new blog. His latest post focuses on a new variant of malicious spam that threatens the recipient "we have hijacked your baby." The intent of the message is to bait distraught parents into activating the malware in the email.

Thanks for staying vigilant, Sherman.

Insight's Headquarters

Eric sent me an email asking the following question.

Please write a blog post to help customers understand why Insight Communications does not have its corporate headquarters located in the geographical region they serve.  Although New York is cool and all, doesn't it make more sense to be where your customers are? 

Great question.  And the fact is, most of our corporate functionality is in Louisville, KY.  We maintain a New York office that houses primarily our finance and accounting department.  We continue those functions in New York for a number of reasons.

Louisville stations to conduct DTV test on September 3rd

If you live in or near Louisville and watch television via an over the air antenna, you're going to have an opportunity soon to see whether you're ready for next year's digital transition. On September 3rd, five Louisville television stations will be temporarily pulling the plug on their analog signal and broadcasting in digital only.

WAVE-TV 3, WDRB-TV 41, WHAS-TV 11, WLKY-TV 32 and WMYO-TV 58 have announced the digital transition test will happen at 7:58 PM on September 3rd. At that time the stations will broadcast in digital only for 90 seconds, before returning to regular analog broadcasts. Those viewers with digital TVs, digital converter boxes or cable or satellite will continue to receive each station's signal during the 90 second switchover. But those without digital-ready equipment will lose signal.

Let the market drive

When I posted my first blog upon my return from Africa on Monday, I told you I wanted to discuss how important a light touch in government regulation was in telecommunications policy.  Just so you know, I wasn't born with an anti-regulation gene that caused me to be so firmly in the camp of being pro competition and anti regulation.  Indeed, it was an acquired taste for me, drawing from several very real experiences in my life-long career in cable. 

Here's one of them. 

In 1994, the cable industry was in dire straights.  Two years prior, Congress had passed the Cable Act of 1992 which imposed massive regulation on the industry ending a decade of dramatic expansion into new areas and an unprecedented increase in program options.

The communications revolution continues to create innovations in elections

Over the next two weeks both political parties will be hosting their national conventions along with the requisite gavel-to-gavel coverage on the cable news networks. The political season will be underway in earnest, and along with it the communications revolution has brought us new ways to interact in the political process. Some of these new interactions put a new spin on existing technology, others are so new that they would have staggered the imagination only four years ago.

Cell phone text messages have been around for a while now, but Barack Obama has decided that he'll announce his vice presidential pick to supporters via text message rather than first announcing it to the press. Obama promises supporters that they can be "the first to know" (after the VP nominee, of course). It's a new spin on older technology, but Obama has managed to get quite a bit of attention in the traditional press for this tactic, not to mention the thousands of people he has managed to entice into signing up for text message announcements on his web site.

Articles worth reading on Wednesday

Verizon exec: Some Net neutrality fans suffer from 'paranoia' [CNET News]

Verizon's CTO dove headfirst into the net neutrality debate yesterday at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's technology policy conference. Regarding the net neutrality debate, Richard Lynch said, ""We need to guard against turning technical and business decisions into political decisions," according to CNET News.

In the article, Lynch asks the audience how he is supposed to prioritize VoIP packets over his company's network without latency (which customers expect when they're talking on the phone) when he is not allowed to prioritize those packets over those with less time-sensitivity. Lynch accuses net neutrality advocates of "paranoia" when their peer-to-peer application packets are delayed due to network management.

Also a nugget in the article - the FCC order regarding network management (which the FCC voted for nearly three weeks ago) still has not seen a final draft and the dissenting commissioners have yet to see the text.  However, I believe the final draft is finally making its way to the public eye.  Should be very interesting how far reaching its impact will be.

The FCC's decision and it's unintended consequences

The very day I left for an extended vacation, the FCC voted to sanction Comcast for their network management practices. While this action was widely anticipated based on comments made by the commissioners prior to the vote, the final decision gave bloggers and other analysts an opportunity to dissect the rationale behind the 3-2 vote.

Basically, the FCC majority found that Comcast managed a particular peer to peer application's network traffic and that action had significant impact on Comcast's subscribers' ability to access the content of their choice - thus violating the FCC's net neutrality principles.

But within the FCC's decision, there remain a number of unanswered questions and contradictions that lead to more questions about the FCC's attempt to create a set of rules for net neutrality in their enforcement action against Comcast.

Reflections upon my return from Africa

I'm back from vacation.  I think this was the first time I actually took a full two weeks off from work.  Even more unique for me, it was the first time I was pretty much incommunicado for more than a few hours. 

We flew into Arusha in Tanzania.  I knew instantaneously that we "weren't in Kansas anymore, Toto."

Cable broadband now the choice of 4 out of 5 new customers

Today, guest blogger John Dobken writes about the decided majority of new broadband Internet customers choosing cable over DSL.

Michael has IP Democracy on his list of must-read blogs, so I thought I'd write about a story that blog posted last week about the fact that cable broadband Internet is now the overwhelming choice for new broadband customers.

Surveying the second-quarter broadband subscriber additions for the top nine cable operators and the top four telephone companies, IP Democracy finds that 81% of new broadband subscribers chose cable over DSL. That's an increase from only 44% a year ago.

As IP Democracy puts it, customers are choosing cable broadband's speed over DSL. DSL is the new dial-up, and the customers are making that choice clear in these latest results.

By quarter's end, the cable operators served a collective 34.2 million high-speed customers, while the phone companies served 27.1 million broadband subscribers.

Both cable and phone companies have acknowledged the sudden disparity between cable and telco broadband growth rates. Cable operators say that speed, not price, is the ultimate killer app and DSL just can't compete. It's the new dial-up.

Phone companies say that a weak economy and a marketing pullback hit them harder than expected. It's hard to tell at this stage just what really happened during the quarter, although I tend to think that the telco broadband price war, which started in 2003, has, in fact, played itself out.'

...

Whatever the case may be, if this disparity keeps up, phone companies could soon actually lose broadband customers.

Communications Technology recognizes Insight for best practices

Yesterday's guest blogger John Dobken is writing again today about an article in Communications Technology magazine.

Communications Technology magazine recognizes Insight Communications in its most recent issue for best practices in the area of technology. Take a look at what they had to say about Insight and our Chief Technology Officer Hamid Heidary.

Insight Communications is no stranger, having taken our Operator of the Year award five years ago (before we shifted the focus toward regions and systems).

Less well-known is the new Insight, the slimmed down MSO that emerged without its Illinois or much of its Indiana markets as a result of the dissolution of its partnership with Comcast; or the Insight where technical leadership now resides with Hamid Heidary, his predecessor, the popular Charlie Dietz, having retired.

Heidary added CTO to his title in April. For the previous two years, he held the title of executive vice president, central operations. His previous career included chief operating office at Iesy Hessen (a German MSO) and CTO of NTL:Europe.

What tripped the wire for us this year was not Heidary's promotion, but rather evidence that he leads a team that very much knows what it is doing.

A year ago, PC World readers ranked Insight Broadband 10.0 ahead of its competitors in terms of overall customer satisfaction and both downstream and upstream speeds. In addition to its 10.0 (10 Mbps) service, the MSO offers a 20 Mbps download service and up to 1.5 Mbps upload.

Insight's prowess in high-speed data is commonly known and attested by savvy users on at BroadbandForum.com, where Insight execs have been known to mix it up. As is clear by talking with Heidary, high-class performance is no accident.

"Two years ago, if you were to have asked what is the speed or experience of customers that get on the Internet to browse or do whatever they do, we hoped it was good, but had no way of knowing," Heidary said.

What it took to gain that kind of granular and widely accessible visibility was the combination of an off-the-shelf measurement tool and a homegrown database presentation interface. Add to that a tenfold expansion of its network operations center (NOC), the codification of hundreds of processes, and the use of PCs programmed to act like subscribers.

That's the kind of operational sophistication that lies behind end-of-year Q4 2007 results that included 26 percent growth in high-speed Internet, 60 percent growth in phone, 18 percent growth in digital and - stranger yet to say - 5 percent growth in basic customers. Results from Q1 2008 were consistent with those numbers. Consider that they were achieved amidst a distracting corporate split, and you have our third example, another top-tier performance in broadband cable engineering and technical operations.

Insight Business: The advantages of Insight's high speed fiber Internet for your business

Today's guest post is from John Dobken, Insight's Senior manager of business development, and Chris Hibbs, Engineering Manager for Insight Business.

Most of our customers are surprised when they find out that we not only offer our high speed broadband Internet over cable, but that we also offer fiber-based Ethernet products to businesses under our InsightBusiness brand name. There are some distinguishing features of our fiber-based Ethernet products.

Simple Customer Handoffs - Rather than using traditional carrier interfaces such as T1, DS3, OC3, etc. for our private line and dedicated Internet products, our handoff to the customer is an industry standard copper Ethernet interface which can be plugged into any switch or router that has an Ethernet port. This is a major benefit to customers since Ethernet ports are typically less expensive and more readily available than T1 or DS3 interfaces. Customers can also use off-the-shelf laptops or PC’s to verify the speeds we are providing them, rather than needing to use specialized and expensive telecom test equipment.

It sounds so good, but it is so bad……(a la carte that is)

Today's guest post is written by Geraldine Laybourne. Laybourne is a cable pioneer who lead the team that created Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Noggin; headed up Disney's cable division (The Disney Channel, Lifetime, History, A & E, E!); then raised the money for and founded Oxygen Media.  She is currently on the Boards of Insight Communications, Move, Inc, Symantec and Vassar College.

I awarded myself a “gap” year (you know kids who aren’t quite ready to go to college so they take off a year and travel) after I sold Oxygen last winter.  My husband Kit and I have been all over the world and frankly haven’t thought that much about the cable industry. Imagine my surprise to get back to the US and see that once again the “a la carte” debate has yet another life.  I thought when Michael Willner and I testified to the FCC bureau in 2005 that we had seen the last of that “oh so intriguing” notion.

Kyle McSlarrow: The development of the tru2way framework

Today's guest post is written by Kyle McSlarrow, President and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

While Michael is away, he asked if I’d be willing to share some of my thoughts on what is happening right now with the cable industry. We at NCTA have been running our own blog – www.cabletechtalk.com – since January.  We’ve frequently recognized Michael’s posts, and I am happy to contribute here.

With this week’s announcement that LG and Funai have signed the tru2way Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), it is probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what this MOU really represents for consumers.

And, while Michael has discussed tru2way here before, some background is probably useful because there are lessons to be learned. (News flash: they don’t involve the government picking technology winners and losers).

Even I get some down time with the clan

For the first time ever, I'm taking off a full two weeks with the wife and kids. 

Now, I'm not much of a vacation taker (the Jersey Shore is exotic enough for me) but about two years ago, my teenage kids convinced me that we should do something really different.  They enlisted the help of their step mom and the rest is history.  We're off to Tanzania to chase some lions and elephants around the Serengeti.  Hopefully, they won't be chasing us!  Believe me, I have never done anything like this before.