Today’s Broadband Bytes was brought to you by the letters C, W, and T.

• Robert X. Cringely has some words to say about Comcast’s new bandwidth caps. He compares today’s caps to the caps he had years ago. Do they match up? Is Comcast offering a better deal than the ISP’s of the late 1990′s? And from Slashdot, “Comcast has filed a court appeal of an FCC ruling that says the company can’t delay peer-to-peer traffic on its network because it violates FCC net neutrality principles.“
• Australia’s caps make Comcast’s look great.
• With all the talk about city wifi networks becoming ubiquitous there are some downsides…scalability. Networkworld has an interesting article about the the technical problems with scaling WiFi to meet today’s bandwidth hungry users. As a side note, some users ask the network engineers at my place of employment (higher ed) when wifi will become our primary means of connecting desktops to the network. The answer is always the same: never. They say: “What do you mean I can’t use this new 2.4Ghz phone I just purchased?” Some departments decide to go wireless anyway (usually to avoid the cost of wiring) but later end up having to convert to physical connections anyway.
• It looks like Comcast’s new caps are around thanks to Florida consumer protection laws. It seems that prior to the 250Gig caps there was no cap. They just cut off the top 1000 users every month. Because consumers were unable to find out how to avoid this in the future the Florida AG became involved.
• As the Analog TV signals fade out, will you receive the new digital signals? In rural areas you may not!
• Along those lines I dug up these old articles about Utah getting a jump start on converting the state-wide network of TV translators to digital signals. One interesting tidbit from the article: “It is widely believed that Utah has the largest terrestrial-analog translator network in the world. The system provides rural viewers with over-the-air television in approximately 80 percent of the state.”
• Speaking of rural communities, two very small communities got federal grant money totaling $1.7 million from the United States Rural Development to build fiber optic networks. Is this different than the RUS funding UTOPIA originally had?
• Verizon is using Yahoo as their “portal partner” for all their broadband users.
• We’ve talked about the FCC wanting free broadband before. Here’s a company that wants to make it happen (good details). In a letter to the editor in USA Today, the writer asks, why should broadband be free? (he thinks it shouldn’t be). T-Mobile has been the most vocal opponent to this plan by the FCC to give out free broadband, they say because it could cause interference with other wireless signals. The FCC is trying to put that fear to rest in a demonstration.
• The Register (based in the UK) has a great piece titled “Why the U.S. faces broadband price hikes” (due to the recent FCC Comcast net neutrality ruling).  But in somewhat unrelated news, others like CNET are talking about broadband price wars brewing. Those price wars could end up hurting consumers though instead of helping them.
• Cable broadband is growing faster than DSL and tecos, and interestingly, VOIP is a big factor in driving broadband growth and makes up the biggest percentage of broadband value added services.