A German Judge has ruled that broadband subscribers have the right to receive compensation from their ISP for outages because Internet connectivity is an “essential” part of life. As Reuters notes, under German law the loss of use of essential material items can be compensated, though one German DSL subscriber was struggling to get compensation for a two month outage. The ruling comes a few years after both France and Finland declared broadband to be [...]

Leaked documents on the entertainment and ISP industries “six strikes” anti-piracy initiative show that small businesses won’t be exempt from the program. The group behind the upcoming program, the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), tells Torrent Freak that while most alerts will go to residential users, businesses may be impacted as well. There has been worry that businesses running Wi-Fi hotspots will suddenly find their connections throttled or temporarily severed due to patron behavior. That’s [...]

You might recall that iiNet, one of Australia’s largest ISPs, was sued by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and the Australian arms of various movie studios for failing to stop the transfer of pirated content across their network. iiNet fought back and won; Company CEO Michael Malone at the time argued the industry’s demands for iiNet to play traffic cop were unreasonable if not impossible, and that “these guys are asking us to [...]

As users in our Cox forum have documented, the cable operator has been dealing with an e-mail outage across the majority of its footprint that has been causing trouble for users since last Friday. According to Cox, the outage was caused by a “storage platform” issue, and primarily impacted users on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Cox technicians worked through the weekend to resolve the issue early this morning, and no e-mails should [...]

Mirroring what I’d been hearing in my own recent conversations with ISPs, it appears that the entertainment industry and ISPs have again delayed the launch of their “six strikes” anti-piracy initiative until sometime early next year. In a post at their website the group responsible for overseeing the controversial program (the Center for Copyright Information) blames the delay on Hurricane Sandy, which they insist delayed the testing schedule for numerous ISPs. Leaked AT&T documents had [...]

Broadband ISPs for years have dreamed of being everything to everyone, delivering every potential service to the home imaginable, including home monitoring and security services. Several (like Comcast) have made major efforts into home automation and home security, though ISPs often don’t release adoption numbers for these services. A new study suggests that just a fifth (14%) of all U.S. broadband subscribers are interested in such services. Home security interest has been slow during the [...]

Back in August we explored how a Canadian citizen and Videotron customer Arthur Pequegnat found himself banned from his own account and e-mail after his wife removed him during an ugly divorce. At the time, Videotron stated there was nothing they could do, since the man had added his wife as an authorized user to the account. After filing complaints with Canadian regulators the CRTC, Pequegnat has received his final and official response: sorry, but [...]

Last October we received early word that cable operator Suddenlink was going to start capping users and charging overages, a leaked memo highlighting that the effort was only “equitable.” After apparently needing some time to get their billing and metering systems in order, Suddenlink started imposing the limits on all users this past Spring. An e-mail sent out to users informed them that to “further enhance your experience, a monthly usage allowance will be put [...]

While the 2007 Comcast traffic shaping fiasco has resulted in fewer U.S. ISPs throttling BitTorrent traffic, Canadian ISPs continue to throttle BitTorrent connections (legitimate or otherwise) happily, according to the latest data from M Labs. In the United States, throttling among ISPs has taken a sharp dive since 2010 when ISPs throttled 50%; tests now show only 3% of Comcast BitTorrent connections are throttled, with Cox the worst offender at around 6%. In the UK [...]

Here in the States, we’ve seen Verizon try to claim that this country’s new network neutrality rules (which are actually quite weak) violate the company’s First Amendment rights. U.S. cable industry lobbyists have also tried to claim that keeping networks neutral and protecting them from anti-competitive behavior violates ISP free speech rights. Canadian cable operator Rogers is taking a similar approach, fighting off criticism of misleading ads by Canada’s Canada’s Competition Bureau, by claiming their [...]