Have you ever had trouble with a company and said to yourself, “Even I could run it better!”  Well if that company was your cable or telephone company, now is your chance to prove it.

The folks at Cisco (an NCTA member) have put together a fun little game that lets you build your own ISP.  Starting in 1990, your dial-up internet company has to attract customers, make money, invest in new technologies, and remain profitable.  If you do it well, you’ll progress through the years and become a broadband innovator.

If you’re a tech/telecom junkie like me, you’ll find this very addictive.  If you can make it through the 1990s, please drop us a note in the comments and let us know.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has overturned an FCC decision to impose a cap on cable companies – barring them from serving more than 30% of cable customers nationwide. The ruling reaffirms a 2001 court decision that rejected the same cap.

In vacating the FCC decision, the court found:

• The Commission had failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30% of all cable subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming
• The record is replete with evidence of ever increasing competition among video providers
• Satellite and fiber optic video providers have entered the market and grown in market share since the Congress passed the 1992 Act
• Cable operators no longer have the bottleneck power over programming that concerned the Congress in 1992
• Over the same period there has been a dramatic increase both in the number of cable networks and in the programming available to subscribers.

Citing, “overwhelming evidence concerning ‘the dynamic nature of the communications marketplace,’ and the entry of new competitors at both the programming and the distribution levels”, the court found the FCC’s decision to be arbitrary and capricious.

In response, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell issued the following statement:

It was clear in December 2007, when I dissented from the FCC decision to once again impose a 30 percent national cap on cable system ownership, that the effort to re-justify the very same cap that the D.C. Circuit first struck down in 2001 was even more vulnerable to court challenge the second time around.  Despite the Commission staff’s best efforts to provide post hoc empirical support for the chosen outcome, the court recognized that the 2007 analysis’ aging data and questionable assumptions sat oddly against the facts about new – and successful – competitors to cable systems in the multichannel video marketplace.  It should go without saying that, in the future, outcomes in our proceedings should be driven by the facts and law, rather than the other way around.

Time Warner and Comcast held a press briefing this morning to provide some details about the much anticipated “TV Everywhere” project that Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes has been discussing for a few months including during a panel at The Cable Show back in early April.  Joining Bewkes for today’s briefing was Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts.

The main takeaway from today’s briefing is that Comcast and Time Warner will begin a trial to provide 5,000 Comcast customers access to cable programming (TBS and TNT for now) on a platform (the computer screen) where it wasn’t previously available, for no additional charge.  It is no more complicated than that.

The primary details released today include a set of principles that the companies agreed to:

• Bring more TV content, more easily to more people across platforms.
• Video subscribers can watch programming from their favorite TV networks online for no additional charge.
• Video subscribers can access this content using any broadband connection.
• Programmers should make their best and highest-rated programming available online.
• Both networks and video distributors should provide high-quality, consumer-friendly sites for viewing broadband content with easy authentication.
• A new process should be created to measure ratings for online viewing. The goal should be to extend the current viewer measurement system to include advertiser ratings for TV content viewed on all platforms.
• TV Everywhere is open and non-exclusive; cable, satellite or telco video distributors can enter into similar agreements with other programmers.

You can check out this story from CNET’s Marguerite Reardon – Comcast and Time Warner team up to deliver TV online – for a complete recap.

More details about the trial will undoubtedly be forthcoming, but the immediate knee-jerk negativity by some in the blogosphere was not only predictable, but uninformed.

But thankfully, there are also some more reasoned voices weighing in that recognize the potential of this announcement to bring real benefits to consumers by offering them access to more content in more places.  Will Richmond from VideoNuze boldly declares:

Despite what some skeptics say, consumers also stand to gain.  All that great cable programming that’s been locked to the set-top box in the home would now be available online. It sort of like cable’s version of on demand Sling, but without any upfront or monthly charge (at least that’s what we’re hearing for now).

Richmond takes a more rational view that this model is one that benefits both programmers and consumers, but they still need to work out some of the technical issues:

Comcast and Time Warner are taking a solid step forward in delivering more value to their subscribers who increasingly live their lives online. Now they need to tamp down the hype and just focus on executing in a logical, user-friendly way.

The rest of Richmond’s post is available here and he also aptly highlights some of the challenges that this trial will face including the necessary business model issues that the free lunch crowd tend to ignore.

It’s been more than a year now since I first mentioned deployment of wideband Internet access based on the DOCSIS 3.0 standard. With the use of channel bonding, cable operators are able to offer speeds exceeding 100 Mbps downstream.

The first launch was in the Twin Cities market in April of 2008. Since then, it’s been popping up all over America: Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Indiana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York.

Now, Washington, DC will also be benefiting from more robust bandwidth. In May, Cox deployed its Ultimate Internet service to residential and business customers in Northern Virginia. Today, Comcast announced that its Extreme 50 service will be launched in the DC Metro area. The service is first being offered in the Anacostia neighborhood, with the entire area expected to have wideband by year’s end. Most existing high-speed Internet customers will see their speeds double for no additional cost.

Now that cable is the broadband leader in Our Nation’s Capitol, you can look for continued wideband deployment by operators all over the country. Stay tuned!

One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride. Remember when the character Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, notes the two classic blunders — one of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia and the other, never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line? There’s probably a third, which is to never go “blog” vs. “blog” with organizations like Free Press that cut its teeth on this medium.

So, it is certainly not a surprise that the Free Press response to my last post smoothly skips over some fundamental points. On the Free Press homepage, the first thing you see is a technicolor box blaring “Tell Congress: Investigate the Unfair Internet Penalty.” In the Free Press response, this has now turned into a mere “inquiry.” Who could be against that? Especially when these plans are rolling out “under the radar.”

Huh? Time Warner Cable couldn’t have possibly been more transparent about their thinking over the last year, including repeatedly briefing members of Congress and reaching out to interested groups like . . . oh, Free Press. And they have repeatedly made clear that they were listening to constructive comments and views.

Thus, Time Warner Cable’s announcement today that they will spend more time on engaging interested parties, members of Congress . . . and most importantly, their customers by deploying metering tools that help all us become more educated consumers . . . is completely consistent with how they have approached this from the beginning. Bottom line: they have been and are engaged in exactly the kind of outreach and transparency interest groups profess to want.

And I have a lot of personal respect for Ben Scott, but I had to chuckle at the very lawyerly but ultimately inadequate attempt to explain why they were really against usage metering before they were for it. But I suppose I will end on a note of agreement: Ben now says, “As for whether metering is fair — it can be.” Right.

None of us knows with certainty what works best for consumers. As broadband providers, we face daunting and ever-changing challenges in ensuring that we do our level best to provide consumers with what they want, when they want it. But our goal has been, is, and will be to communicate with our customers in an open and transparent manner; to try new models that can be used to attract new broadband users and more equitably spread costs among high and low volume users, and – at the end of the day – to let the consumer make the ultimate choice of whether new models survive and thrive or are thrown into the dustbin of history.