A group of annoyed users have recently launched a Time Warner Cable spoof website that takes aim at the company for poor customer service. Videos posted to the website (like this one) involve the folks behind the website going around New York asking locals what the company can do worse -- as well as rather concise fake letters from Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt (whose $17.4 million in 2012 compensation likely dulls the blows received from such critics substantially).

Amusingly, the group also recently called Time Warner Cable customer support (via Techdirt) for a spoof, during which they were informed that Time Warner Cable can record its customers, but customers cannot record Time Warner Cable:In many states, if one party asks and gets permission to record a phone call, both parties are thereby allowed to record a call. Granted Time Warner Cable has a long history of just making things up when it suits them, from claiming they care about cutting edge speeds to insisting users would face Internet "brown outs" if the company wasn't allowed to dramatically over-charge for data.

The last few months have seen several leaks that suggest the next Xbox will require an "always on" broadband connection as a way to counter both piracy and used game sales. Microsoft isn't commenting, but the news -- if true -- is angering a lot of possible customers with they botched launches of Diablo 3 and SimCity (both requiring always-on connections) freshly in mind.

The FCC still has around $185 million out of the $300 million broadband funds available from phase one of their Connect America Fund, dedicated to shoring up broadband coverage gaps. While companies like Frontier took $71.9 million to wire some 92,000 homes, other companies like Windstream balked at taking full funding, saying that getting $775 per install wasn't enough for their liking.

Time Warner Cable hasn't been exactly what you'd call a hero when it comes to furthering national broadband deployment. The company was behind bills in both North and South Carolina banning or hindering towns and cities from deploying their own broadband, even when nobody else will.

According to a new survey by the Fiber to the Home Council, running a fiber to the home network isn't just great for consumers and businesses looking for more bandwidth, but it can save a medium or small scale telco up to 20% in savings annually. "On average, respondents estimated those savings to be 20.4 percent, largely because of a decrease in ongoing repair and maintenance," says the group.

According to the Council (which is comprised of companies selling fiber gear), the number of homes that can access FTTH networks has jumped 17.6 percent over the last year to 22.7 million. Granted most small to mid-sized telcos aren't installing fiber -- not because they don't realize potential cost savings, but because they either don't have the funds to do so, or there's such pathetic competition across their footprint there's simply nothing driving them to.

Back in May of 2011 we were the first to exclusively report that AT&T would be imposing usage caps on the company's DSL and U-Verse users. Users were told DSL users would see a cap of 150 GB a month and U-Verse users would see a cap of 250 GB a month -- with both sets of users paying $10 for every additional 50 GB of data they use.

According to the FCC, phones sold in the U.S. can't have a specific absorption rate (SAR) higher than 1.6 watts per kilogram.

Antennas manufacturer Antennas Direct is angry at Charter Communications because it claims Charter has banned the company from advertising to Charter's customers. According to the company, Charter refused to run a sixty second ad in the St.

Researchers at the University of Southampton in England say they've developed a new type of optical fiber that smashes all previously held bandwidth transmission records. The fibers are more hollow than traditional fiber, yet significantly faster at transmitting data; specifically they can transmit bandwidth at 73.7 terabits per second — roughly 1,000 times faster than today’s 40-gigabit fiber optic links -- and at lower latency:The downside? The cable's still see 3.5 dB/km loss and are only really ideal for shorter range runs.

Earlier this month CenturyLink confirmed to us that the company now imposes usage caps of 150 GB for 1.5 Mbps lines, and caps of 300 GB for anything faster. Users who exceed those caps get on-screen warnings and are urged to upgrade to faster tiers or business-class service.

UK's marketing regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) – has censured Virgin Media for claiming that their broadband is unlimited. The ASA's ruling, the first to use new guidance on use of the term 'unlimited', prevents the fastest of the UK's main ISPs from using the line: Unlimited downloads: Download and browse as much as you like with no caps and no hidden charges.

A new report by OpenSignal investigates just how much bigger screens (increasingly the rage as Android phones get continually larger) impact data usage. According to the firm, each additional square inch of screen area leads to 75 MB of additional data downloaded per month over a cellular connection. Over Wi-Fi, each additional square inch of screen area leads to 288 MB of additional data consumed per month. Specifically, the firm found that the bigger the screen is -- the more likely you are to use it for entertainment or your primary computing device, leading to more data consumption. The study was based on 9,962 data usage patterns collected from 9,962 mobile devices.

BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has been trying to monetize his creation for the better part of the decade, and while the man may have somewhat revolutionized file delivery, efforts to build a legal business model around the technology have seen mixed results (yet a seventeen year old this week sold a news reading app to Yahoo for $30 million). Cohen's initial efforts at monetization of his creation began with the now-defunct BitTorrent store, which floundered in 2007 due to a clunky GUI, DRM, and games that came with complimentary spyware.

As expected, T-Mobile over the weekend launched the company's new contract-free pricing plans that are part of the company's aggressive new "uncarrier" disruption strategy. T-Mobile's getting rid of contracts entirely, and their new base pricing offers users an new unlimited talk, text, and 500MB of data for $50 a month. An additional $20 nets users unlimited data, or users who want to use their phone as a mobile hotspot or modem can add $10 for every extra 2 GB of data. The company is expected to formally announce the new plans on Tuesday. As part of T-Mobile's strategy, they're also getting rid of phone subsidies, letting users either pay full price for a device, or pay in installment plans tacked onto their monthly bill.

Comcast VP of public policy Rebecca Arbogast informed attendees of a Free State Foundation conference this week that the "alleged failing and falling state of U.S. broadband" is "based on misunderstood and misused statistics." According to Arbogast, the claim that the United States is 22nd in broadband is effectively a lie, used by critics to unfairly attack what is secretly a top ranked broadband infrastructure. Arbogast went on to argue that comparing the United States to markets in Asia is "silly at best" and that those criticizing United States broadband are just engaging in "hand wringing":

AT&T appears poised to begin offering new U-Verse speed tiers that should offer a belated speed increase for bandwidth-hungry users. Earlier this year AT&T promised users they'd eventually see 75-100 Mbps using line bonding, though the company was somewhat murky on deployment time -- or upstream speeds.

Rumors surrounding the next Xbox suggest that the game console may require a constantly running broadband connection to function -- in addition to banning used games. Leaked screenshots of an Xbox Development Kit (XDK) for Microsoft's next-generation console (currently code-named "Durago") strongly suggest that game installations to the hard drive will be mandatory, after which "play from the optical drive will not be supported."

The last few round of rumors have collectively suggested that Microsoft could be cooking up some incredibly dumb new ideas for their new console:

A survey of 1,500 smartphone users by NPD Connected Intelligence found that the average Android user now gobbles up 1.36 GB of data each month. As Fierce Wireless notes, T-Mobile users appear to have taken the crown in terms of consuming the most data each month, after the company last year re-introduced unlimited data as an option. T-Mobile's showing is followed by Sprint, who also offers unlimited data, at 1.12 GB a month, followed by AT&T and Verizon at .79 and .76 GB per month respectively. The companies acknowledge the sample size is just a little too small to be truly representative, but their data is included below in case you're interested:

ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré has proposed a new plan that would aim to have the entire world wired with 20 Mbps, $20 connections by 2020. At a meeting focused on technology gender equality and the shoring up the provisioning of broadband access to women, Touré unveiled the goal, naming it "Goal 20-20 by 2020." As it stands, the ITU's only real guideline on this front is to urge all countries to have some kind of broadband plan, something countries are of course free to ignore. How we get to 20/20 by 2020 isn't clear; getting 20 Mbps to parts of rural United States is already a significant challenge, before even considering the significantly poorer regions of the planet.

Comcast today stated that customers in California will now be seeing some of the speed upgrades we've been seeing deployed elsewhere around the country at no extra cost. Specifically, Comcast's Blast tier is going from 25/4 Mbps to 50/10 Mbps, their Extreme tier will be going from 50/10 Mbps to 105/20, and their Performance tier will be going from 12/2 Mbps to 25/5 Mbps for all users. The Comcast press release lists a handful of communities that won't be getting the upgrades until later on this summer -- because you were bad I'm guessing. An insider tells me that the 12/2 Mbps to 25/4 is running behind the other upgrades for many users, who'll see that specific bump in April.