Jon Brodkin

CenturyLink has agreed to pay a $6.1 million penalty after Washington state regulators found that the company failed to disclose fees that raised actual prices well above the advertised rates. CenturyLink must also stop charging a so-called "Internet Cost Recovery Fee" in the state, although customers may end up paying the fee until their contracts expire unless they take action to switch plans. CenturyLink charged its Internet Cost Recovery Fee to 650,000 Washingtonians. The attorney general's office said that "CenturyLink is required to...

T-Mobile announced that it has launched "America's first nationwide 5G network," but T-Mobile's definition of "nationwide" doesn't include about 40% of the US population. "America gets its first nationwide 5G network today, covering more than 200 million people and more than 1 million square miles," T-Mobile's announcement said. The US Census Bureau estimates the population to be more than 330 million people.

The Federal Communications Commission's extremely hands-off approach to broadband-customer complaints has alarmed Rep Mike Quigley (D-IL). Rep Quigley wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in Aug after learning of a Frontier customer who was forced to pay a $10-per-month rental fee for a router despite buying his own router. It turns out that the FCC hasn't proactively forwarded any broadband-billing complaints to the Federal Trade Commission despite the agencies' working agreement. But Chairman Pai's initial response to Rep Quigley didn't reveal that tidbit.

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome. The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees.

AT&T is planning to spend just $20 billion on capital investment in 2020, down from $23 billion in 2019. The company is under pressure from investors to control spending, in part because its TV business is tanking and because of AT&T's giant debt load stemming from the purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner. AT&T increased capital investment between 2018 and 2019, but its 2020 outlook would push the company's spending to lower than its 2018

Although the Federal Communications Commission abandoned its regulation of network neutrality, it wouldn't be accurate to say there are no net neutrality laws anywhere in the US. No one enforces net neutrality in Washington, DC, but on the opposite coast, the state of Washington (WA) imposed a net neutrality law in June 2018 that remains in effect today. The WA law prohibits home and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from charging online services for prioritization.

AT&T and other mobile carriers are trying to hide detailed 5G maps from the public despite constantly touting the supposed pace and breadth of their 5G rollouts. With the Federal Communications Commission planning to require carriers to submit more accurate data about broadband deployment, AT&T and the mobile industry's top lobby group are urging the FCC to exclude 5G from the upgraded data collection. "There is broad agreement that it is not yet time to require reporting on 5G coverage," AT&T told the FCC in a filing.

Comcast's data-usage meter gave thousands of customers inaccurate readings for two months because of a software bug, causing the broadband provider to incorrectly charge about 2,000 users for exceeding their monthly data caps. Comcast has admitted the error and said it is giving refunds and additional credits of $50 each to customers who paid data overage fees that shouldn't have been assessed. Comcast said it's still trying to figure out if the bug is in the meter software, the billing software, or in the interaction between the two.

The Federal Communications Commission has mostly defeated net neutrality supporters in court even though judges expressed skepticism about FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's justification for repealing net neutrality rules.

Comcast offered customers in Utah a "lifetime" price guarantee in order to compete against Google Fiber, then later violated the lifetime promise by raising those customers' prices, according to a lawsuit pending in a federal court. "In 2016, Comcast was under intense competitive pressure from Google's high speed fiber-optic data service," the lawsuit says. In Salt Lake City, "Comcast engaged extra sales staff to try to effectively beat the Google Fiber sales staff as they made their way up and down the streets of each neighborhood.