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.

August 19, 2007

Looks like Comcast is making friends today. A reader sent this to me today. While I understand why they are doing it, I don't believe this is the right answer. Bit-torrent relies on upload and download bandwidth being available. Sending RST to terminate the upload (while creative) is only alienating their customers even further. Personally I don't believe they really care. They simply want you to send them their money and read 130,000 email's every month. Or better yet, just send them the money and don't use the service. It's better for everyone that way :-)

Services such as Zudeo would be affected by this stunt. BTW, if you are a Star Wars fan, download "Dark Resurrection" from them(it's in Italian with English subs). It's awesome!

If Bit-Torrent is such a problem, here's another protocol which could finish the job of trashing the Internet. Internet Television is becoming VERY popular especially in my house (along with Internet Radio).

A recent report urges restraint to nurture growth of the Internet. I thought this part of their report was very interesting

The think tank, the New Millennium Research Council, released an 18-page report that called on Internet policymakers to avoid new regulations that could restrict Internet investment by the private sector and to find ways to encourage investment to handle the coming Internet onslaught.

How well has this "Hands Off" approach worked? Any guesses? Just read the above article on P2P for the answer. Oh, and for those who think fiber to the home isn't possible because of all the fiber we'd have to run across the country, check this out

The report said investment in network capacity by ISPs typically involves activating fiber optic cables that are already constructed but still dark; connecting the fiber to higher speed routers; dedicating circuits to Internet traffic; and expanding end user access lines where needed. Notably, 75 percent growth in the average traffic on the world's Internet backbones in 2006 outpaced the 47 percent growth of capacity, the report said, citing TeleGeography Research. That trend had continued for the third straight year.

Dark Fiber in other words. I believe we have the infrastructure already in place for the long runs people frequently bring up. It's the last mile which is the problem. This is why I support Utopia's efforts.

Finally I leave you with this thought.

The average IPTV user will likely consume about 224 gigabytes per month, he added, at a monthly cost to carriers of $112, a giant leap from the less than $5 attributed to Internet use. If that content were high-definition video, the average user would be consuming more than 1 terabyte per month at a cost to carriers of $560 per month. "Clearly that's not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service," Kafka said. "That's why we need help."

Now I think I understand the knee jerk reaction and the fear companies such as Comcast display. The future doesn't look very bright without a fundamental change in either the habits of their customers or investment in the infrastructure.

Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.

• By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and could handle 500+ channels.
• Universal Broadband: This wiring was to be done in rich and poor neighborhoods, in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.
• Open to ALL Competition: These networks were to be open to ALL competitors, not a closed-in network or deployed only where the phone company desired.
• This is not Verizon's FIOS or SBC's Lightspeed fiber optics, which are slower, can't handle 500 channels, are not open to competition, and are not being deployed equitably.
• This was NOT fiber somewhere in the network ether, but directly to homes.

We already paid for it in taxes. So why don't we have it? Does anyone else feel like fraud occurred somewhere?

• Costs to Customers - We estimate that $206 billion dollars in excess profits and tax deductions were collected - over $2000 per household. (This is the low estimate.)

• Cost to the Country - About $5 trillion dollars to the economy. America lost a decade of technological innovation and economic growth, about $500 billion annually.

• Cost to the Country - America is now 16th in the world in broadband. While Korea and Japan have 40-100 Mbps at cheap prices, America is still at kilobyte speeds.

• The New Digital Divide - The phone companies current plans are to pick and choose where and when they want to deploy fiber services, if at all.

• Competitor Close Out - SBC, BellSouth and Verizon now claim that they can control who uses the networks and at what price, impacting everything from VOIP and municipality roll outs to new services from Ebay and Google.

Next time you are told you didn't pay for it, remind them they already grabbed over 200 Billion from Americans under Clinton. It's time to cough up the benefits of our investment.