The company, backed by Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, plans on Wednesday to start taking preorders for an $89 device to offer home broadband service using fixed WiMax service powered by Clearwire.

As it does on the mobile side, FreedomPop will offer a chunk of data free each month, with low-cost options for additional gigabytes. With the home product, customers will get 1GB of data free each month, with a $10-per-month plan offering enough additional data to meet the typical consumer’s needs.

In an interview, FreedomPop CEO Stephen Stokols said that the average U.S. household pays upwards of $40 per month for home broadband even though more than half of users consume less than 6 gigabytes of data.

“It’s going to be extremely disruptive,” Stokols said.

FreedomPop says the home router will deliver far faster speeds than Clearwire’s mobile devices and that FreedomPop will only offer service to addresses where the company can deliver speed equal to or faster than those offered by DSL.

Stokols said that the company had planned to wait until later to move into the home broadband market, but was encouraged by its early results on the mobile side which showed a substantial number of customers opting for FreedomPop’s paid services.

“We’ve always kind of planned to go after the home market pretty aggressively,” he said. “We’re accelerating that.”

In the first couple of months of offering an iPod Touch sled, USB stick and mobile hotspot, Stokols said that more than 20 percent of users have switched to a paid plan while more than a third of customers are opting for one of the company’s existing value-added services — such as notification of when one is about to hit their free limit.

“We’re getting much better traction … than we ever imagined,” Stokols said.

On the home side, the broadband plan is also a gateway to also offer additional services, including VoIP calling, among other things.

The Dallas telecommunications company said that customers who exceed a monthly limit of 150 gigabytes of data in three separate months will be charged $10 for every extra 50 gigabytes of data they consume. Customers on AT&T’s higher-end U-Verse Internet service have a limit of 250 gigabytes. AT&T will impose the new limits on May 2.

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That might seem an inane question, coming from the FCC, but when you think about it, it has never really been answered, not even by broadband carriers, which would undoubtedly prefer that the term be ambiguous enough to allow for all manner of throughput/delivered speeds, usage caps, and latency. So it’s a good time to ask it. As senior adviser Carlos Kirjner explains in a post to the FCC blog today:

• If we want to decide who has and who does not have broadband, we actually need to agree on what we mean by broadband.
• If we want to decide who can take advantage of one type of application or another, we need to know what they are actually getting today, and what is the gap between that and what they actually need to get.
• If we need to know how much it would cost the country to enable all or a subset of its households and businesses to take advantage of one application or another, we need to know what the gap is between where we are and where we want to be.
• If we want to ensure that consumers have a clear and accurate view of what they are getting for their money, we need to decide what are the important metrics, and how to measure them.

Good points, all. But allow me to suggest one more:

• If we’re going to start handing out $7.4 billion in federal grants for broadband improvements, we should make damn sure that broadband is improved.

Because the last time we invested in our broadband future, we didn’t see much return on that investment.

In the run-up to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the incumbent telecoms promised to provide fiber-optic connections to millions of households across the country. In exchange, they were given some $200 billion in tax cuts and higher service rates to pay for it. But the telecoms didn’t spend that money on fiber upgrades; they spent it on long distance, wireless and inferior DSL services.

“By 2005, if the Bell companies had actually delivered on their broadband promises, approximately 86 million households would have had fiber-optic-based services,” Bruce Kushnick, executive director of New Networks Institute, explains in “The $300 Billion Broadband Scandal.” “These state commitments also would have rewired schools and libraries, hospitals and government offices. And in most states, the plan called for ALL customers to be rewired equally, whether they were in rural or urban areas, rich or poor. Universal broadband was to be accomplished state-by-state because customers were, in essence, de facto investors funding these network upgrades.”

But that’s not what happened (click on image below to enlarge). Know anyone in California who had Pac Bell fiber in 1996? How about 2000? Yeah, didn’t think so. And that’s something worth mulling today.

The cable giant had planned on charging customers in four locations on a “consumption” plan in which they’d pay between $15 to $150 a month based on the amount of data they hoovered via the Web. But noisy opposition to the plan surfaced immediately and has been getting louder over the past few weeks.

Instead, the company says, it will spend time on “customer education” to clear up “misunderstandings” about the plan, which it still believes “may be the best pricing plan for consumers,” etc. Translation: We need more time to figure out how to do this without getting our heads ripped off. Or handing over customers to the competition.

That’s what was already happening in Rochester, where Time Warner’s plans were supposedly driving customers to Frontier Communications Co., which offered a (presumably slower) DSL service. From the Associated Press:

“‘We have gotten hundreds of calls from Time Warner customers into our call centers,’ said Ann Burr, the head of Frontier’s Rochester unit, in an interview with The Associated Press. ‘I guess it’s been a public relations crisis for Time Warner.’”

This doesn’t affect other pipe guys’ plans to institute similar caps or consumption-based pricing plans: Comcast (CMCSA), for instance, has a monthly cap on its broadband plans, and threatens to cut off customers who exceed it (thanks to Business Insider’s Dan Frommer for the fact-check).

And as of yesterday, at least, the cable guys’ trade group was pooh-poohing people who complained about the idea. Here’s Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, on his group’s blog:

“Hundreds of billions of dollars have been and continue to be invested by our industry in the deployment of broadband and now the deployment of next generation broadband; speeds have doubled or tripled in just the last few years; new and spectacular applications keep getting launched; no anti-competitive conduct has remotely occurred; and, in fact, compared to many other industries, the Internet ecosystem seems to be one of the few really healthy, growing, and creative parts of our economy with continued investment and innovation taking place every day. At a time of economic and financial challenges for our country, I for one would rather Congress spend its time on real problems, not fictional ones.”

[UPDATE: McSlarrow just put out a new post discussing Time Warner's move.]

By the way: McSlarrow, Time Warner Cable, Comcast other pipe guys with similar plans, like AT&T (T), may not have a terrible idea. But they’re going to undergo a lot of public whippings before they get this one through.

NEW YORK–Time Warner Cable today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make measurement tools available as quickly as possible. These tools will help customers understand how much bandwidth they consume and aid in the dialog going forward.

Britt added, “We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable.”

I plan to purchase a new laptop. My uses are primarily Internet searching and email. I don’t play videogames. The salespeople are pushing me to buy a fast processor. Will buying a faster processor improve my slow DSL connection?

Compared to your old computer, any new PC, even one with a midrange modern processor and graphics system, plus more modern network components inside, may well be faster at using the Internet. That’s because things like rendering Web pages will likely speed up, and the computer may be better able to take advantage of whatever DSL speed you have entering your home. But even the fastest processor won’t make your DSL connection itself fundamentally speedier. To achieve that, you’d need to pay for faster service from either your current provider or a competitor.

Will my Quicken finances run on a Mac? And how do I transfer, from a Dell PC, my 2007 Quicken data?

There is a version of Quicken for the Mac, and there is a way to export your data from the Windows version and import it into this Mac version. But, because the two programs are actually very different under the hood, this process can be laborious and too often goes wrong. So, for people switching to the Mac who are devoted to Quicken, I suggest installing Windows on your Mac, and continuing to use the Windows version of Quicken. If you’d rather perform the export instead, you can find the instructions at quicken.intuit.com. Click on “Support,” then on “2007 for Mac,” then search for the keyword “convert.”

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

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Consider a few data points. As I noted this morning, Comcast today disclosed that it added 555,000 new phone customers in the June quarter (499,000 when you back out losses in their circuit-switched segment), along with 278,000 high speed Internet customers and 320,000 digital cable customers. (It did lose 138,000 basic cable subs.)

Compare that with AT&T, which lost 993,000 residential primary wirelines in the quarter, or Verizon, which lost 833,000 primary residential lines and another 133,000 DSL lines.

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