Anyway their phones have apparently lit up pretty good on this thing since the wait time for a service rep has gotten long. The prospect of going from no limit to 5GB a month is, well, breathtaking to anyone who ever rented a 3-hour movie and downloaded its 2GB heft onto a computer to view it.

Do the math: rent 3 of those long features like Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia or whatever in August and you’re over the cap without having read your email or paid any online bills or checked to see if the Yanks are still breathing, and with a week or so to go before your quota refreshes. Try a bunch of more average 1.2GB movies and you could get four into a month if you also don’t read websites with a lot of flash ads on them or have much email that month.

Frontier has started saying well look, really it’s a guideline for now, we are not enforcing it at the moment, and we might sell an overrun option later, just use the service the way you have been for now and don’t worry.

The policy does not say the cap is a guideline. The policy, which was revised on July 23 and still stands there with that date on it, says it is a cap. So of course some people are trying to opt out and get a waiver, or opt out and cancel without penalty for early termination. Frontier is trying to buck this by saying since they are not enforcing it yet, then there are really no new terms to be waived out of, eh, so no waiver. Plan B is opt out and cancel inside the 30-day window for doing that. Plan C is take a chance and stay in the contract and just wait for Frontier to say when a cap is a cap and no longer a guideline. Plan D is the one most Frontier DSL customers are probably still on at the moment: surf the net on their Frontier DSL in blissful ignorance of the waning days of their “unlimited” bandwidth usage. I wish I were still in Plan D myself. I’m sorry I bumped into the policy revision information.

I’m not big on Plan C but I’m trying to take a few days of my remaining opt-out time to think this through. I like DSL and don’t want to leave Frontier and I can live with some sort of cap (not 5GB for God’s sake, I can pass that mark buying a season of TV shows I never saw when first aired). But I’m going to get some legal advice before I decide.

Apparently Frontier now plans to issue some kind of letter to customers about the new cap in the September billings. September?? How about full page ads in local newspapers next week, with previews of the 2009 tier prices to try to regularize this chaotic “cap launch” while they still have anyone left to bill in September!?

Your article doesn’t even mention the local TV stations, who are among the bigger losers in all these telecom wars. The biggest loser is the general public. Local access is slowly dying.

And HD? — There is a great number of older viewers, that, at any reasonable viewing distance from the TV, can’t see any difference between HD and NTSC, on similar sized screens. Why not get a big screen? Simple. Many of us in the retired population, are living on fixed incomes, have downsized our houses, and have very limited indoor real estate to devote to such large monsters. With the average population growing older every year–with diabetes (and retinal neuropathy) becoming more and more a problem–with the onset of cataracts affecting more and more of an aging population, how many big screen, HD televisions do they think we’re going to buy? Wouldn’t it be frightening to many, if they suddenly realised that HD may be something of a “nitch” product?

I guess I’m making a case for saying that the FCC has seriously blundered in their quest to adopt new things, follow the latest technology, and create new markets and profits. At some point, we’ll be unplugging the cable, and watching our old video on our antiquated TVs. I think the telecom/satelite/cable zybots we’re allowing to form are in for a rude awakening.