December 10, 2007

Happy Holidays!

To start off, I apologize to Steven from Pennsylvania for waiting soo long to post this. Apparently I somehow missed a bit of news about Verizon. Seems they used to advertise Unlimited Internet and were punished for their false advertising by the Attorney General of New York. The amount is a pittance. Only $1 million along with a couple other things like not marketing "unlimited" when it's obviously not unlimited. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I did send a letter to their AG asking if they were looking at also going after Comcast for violating the law. It should be interesting to see if any other AG's (maybe Utah's?) are interested in fraud. There are dozens of us here in my neighborhood who signed up. It should be interesting. And yes, I have filed with them.

I'm told that Qwest may be pushing their Internet Service to a whole new level here. 20 Megs and potentially up to 40 Megs to the home with fiber! With Salt Lake potentially seeing it in the near future. You heard me. It seems Comcast and Utopia are pushing soo hard that Qwest is beginning to wake up and talk about building the Infrastructure American's have already paid for. Yes, I'm talking about the 200 Billion in taxes shelled out to ... where? And don't forget, that's the conservative number here.

After all, without a proper foundation, how can we expect to thrive in the new tech future? I've heard it said many times that Internet Bandwidth is the new currency of the future. Those who have it will do well. I even ran across a new tech term. Internet Brownouts. I had no idea what people were talking about until I read this article. If I read this right, in a nutshell the Infrastructure here in America won't be able to handle our needs in the next 2 or 3 years. Now that's a frightening thought.

Here's another problem. People are using the Internet soo much that web sites were seeing problems on Cyber Monday. So the Internet might be important after all.

So how to solve the "last mile" problem. Seems a guy in Korea already did that. Well.. sorta. Basically instead of the traditional fiber he's worked out a plastic substitute. There are limits. 2.5 Gig bandwidth but that's far better than what copper can dish out if I am comparing the two correctly.


I've been watching a bill crawl around Congress these last few months called The Community Broadband Act. I'm hoping it's as good as it seems. So far I haven't seen anything that worries me. It basically would prevent (for example) the Utah State Legislature from messing with Utopia and giving companies such as Comcast an unfair advantage. I encourage everyone to contact their Congressmen and Representatives. Tell them what you think about this bill.

Found this while researching. Seems Comcast has quite the fan club and it's not the good kind. People want customer service as well as products from a company. It's been very insightful to see how many people are posting and complaining since the company doesn't seem to care.

So is Comcast going the way of the Dinosaur?

For a short time, Comcast will be able to sit on the customer base it has developed and sap money from customers that could receive better products at a more competitive price. But, just like AOL, once people get a taste of where technology is heading, that pile of money will deplete to nearly nothing…unless Comcast can step up, stop functioning like a monopoly, and start being competive.

It goes to show you, when you're a monopoly, you can make products that suit you, not your customers.