1. Windstream’s biggest customers are AT&T and Verizon
Telcos buy backhaul from other telcos when it comes to providing cellular service. As long as Verizon and AT&T continue to rule the roost in the wireless biz, Windstream will continue to get a fair chunk of change per month for T1s and fiber Ethernet connections to cell sites in their footprint. In many cases other cellular providers also have to use Windstream for backhauling their cell sites, which generates even more revenue for Windstream, which isn’t particularly forgiving when it comes to T1 pricing either.

2. Rural wireline customers are going to be around forever
His words, not mine. The idea is that cellular service out in the sticks isn’t all that great to start with, and  if cell service is good then it’s riding over Windstream lines. Rural folks are also more reticent to give up landline service even if cellular service works just fine, and Windstream DSL  goes places that cable never will. Combine that with a USF kickback or two, plus low pricing on both DSL and landline service and you’ve got, in theory, a captive user base who will keep paying you $5o or $60 per month ad infinitum, as long as you keep that copper pair to their house in reasonable shape. Oh, and you’re getting some USF funding on each line because you’re rural; even Windstream’s “naked” DSL service still has a phone line involved, albeit one where outgoing calling of any kind costs 10¢ a minute.

Of course, the model breaks down if you’re serving areas that do have cable, where you just have to compete on price or lose customers unless the cableco is grossly incompetent. Or if the cellular providers use the cablecos for bandwidth and take wireless backhaul routes instead of Windstream wired ones, Windstream loses out. Or if some wireless ISP decides to offer service that beats Windstream’s standard 3 Mbps down, 635 kbps up (after ATM overhead), $40 DSL service, Windstream’s position gets a little less tenable.

Of course, Windstream does do fiber to the home for all of their new builds, and the tech supports either 12 or 24 Mbps down and 768k or 1.5M up. However even those speeds pale in comparison to what companies like Comcast have done with their DOCSIS 3 products. Then again, Windstream tends not to compete against Comcast.

3. Windstream could have bought Frontier, FairPoint , Embarq or even Qwest, but the price was too high
Windstream is no stranger to acquisitions; buying their way into being the ILEC in a given market  has been done several times recently, with Iowa Telecom being the biggest purchase. Windstream is also not averse to buying competitive carriers, as long as they can make a pretty penny on data revenues. To that end, they bought NuVox.

However the company has passed up deals like Verizon’s now-Frontier territories, the sinking carcass that is FairPoint and even such hulking giants as Embarq and Qwest, leaving the two last companies to CenturyTel…erm…CenturyLink. What’s interesting is that the rural telephone market…which also happens to include Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver and all of Oregon…seems to be converging to two or three carriers: CenturyLink, Windstream and Frontier, with Frontier a possible acquisition target down the road by one of the other two operators. Note that the consolidation talk reflecting future buy-outs is my conjecture, not that of the source I talked with.

4. Verizon will sell its remaining rural markets, but they may be bled dry before that happens
Verizon didn’t sell their rural Texas markets to Frontier in the gigantic July 1st swap, yet many of these markets will never see FiOS. So Verizon is shopping the markets around…somewhat…though at this point the price to Windstream is still much too high for the company to bite. In all likelihood, Verizon will wait too long to sell to a provider who actually cares about copper-based service, forcing the company to offer fire-sale pricing because they are selling copper plant rather than a customer base. WIndstream is good at keeping churn low, but I don’t hear about the company picking up new lines of service on copper infrastructure unless it’s DSL service for someone who already has a landline.

So, what do y’all think about the above?

The problem in my case had to do with embedding videos into the slideshow. You see, when Picasa exports a slideshow it takes advantage of some of the more esoteric specs of the MPEG-4 container, saving video clips, unmodified, with their accompanying audio alongside the photo slideshow, which includes your music track, captions, etc. So you get multiple video and audio streams “neatly” packaged into a single MPEG-4 container. Cool, right?

Right…as long as you have something that won’t roll over and die when it sees a multi-stream, multi-resolution container file coming down the pike.

Yes, I said multi-resolution; the camera that I used to take the videos built into the slideshow shoots at 720p. THe slideshow itself was outputted at 640×480. Add to that multiple audio stream formats (the music track was one thing, the videos were another) and you get a rather fragile system if your player doesn’t support the whole MPEG-4 container spec to a tee.

QuickTime took the whole thing in stride, though of course deciding 720p video on a 1.6 GHz Pentium M laptop is not as easy as dishing out 640×480. However every other application, transcoder (e.g. ffmpeg) or player (e.g. VLC…yes, even VLC didn’t get the clip right) either couldn’t deal with the video at all (ffmpeg) or was missing one or more of the audio or video tracks (YouTube and Vimeo…neither service transcoded the clip correctly).

Yes, YouTube butchered a video that was exported from Google’s own photo management software. They need to work on fixing that. I thought the issue was with the copyrighted music I had playing in the background (MercyMe’s All of Creation), but they’re actually perfectly fine with that, as I would expect Google to be. After I uploaded the video in a format the YouTube transcoder could parse correctly.

What was that format, and how did I get the darned thing to transcode correctly? Wait for it…MPEG-4…from QuickTime, via iMovie.

I imported my slideshow output file into iMovie (the new version, ’09 I believe), then used the Export to QuickTime option to get some fine-grained control on exactly what I was doing. The specific settings I used were as follows, though minor changes shouldn’t mess anything up…

• Video compression type: MPEG-4
• Frame rate: current
• Key frames: automatic
• Data rate: restrict to 1500 kbps (for quicker uploads over my 384k up DSL connection in TX; quality is still fine)
• Compressor quality: best
• VIdeo filter and size: no changes
• Sound format: AAC
• Channels: Mono
• Rate: 22.050 kHz
• Quality (under advanced settings): Best
• Bit rate: 64 kbps
• Encoding Strategy: Average Bit Rate
• Prepare for Internet Streaming: unchecked

The above settings got me a video that uploaded perfectly to YouTube, though it wouldn’t work right on this site’s (brand new) FlowPlayer install. Can’t win ‘em all I guess, though I’m sure for people exporting their slideshows from Picasa to YouTube their service is plenty.

When will Google fix Picasa’s multi-res MPEG-4 export issue, or tweak YouTube to import the videos without making scrambled eggs of the lot? Not sure. Maybe a few dozen retweets and a Digg posting will do the job.

Comment if you’ve run into this issue as well, and let me know if this fix worked. Also, if Picasa on Windows has this issue, let me know; I can test the process on a Windows box but haven’t done so yet. Unfortunately though, if the same issue exists, I know of no Windows application that can transcode its way out of this situation. Unless Apple still does the whole QuickTime Pro thing for Windows, post-OS X 10.6.

UPDATE 3: Added another news source. Swamped by homework so tweets will have to wait, but other than those I think I’ve got all the online info on the outage linked from here.

UPDATE 2: Added another couple of news sources, corrected one of my usual typos…some how I forgot to add a “not” into the paragraph about Wal-Mart taking credit card transactions. Sorry for the confusion. Also modified information based on an article from the Fredericksburg Standard Radio-Post. The link below takes you to the subscriber-only version of the article; the non-subscriber snippet just makes the paper look bad (very little info).

UPDATE: Added some more news articles, (still) working on collecting all tweets about the incident, revised some information for accuracy (originally wasn’t sure about CricKet and Pocket, but they too were taken down by the outage…DSL was also apparently iffy in Kerrville).

Granted, I wasn’t in the area when it happened, but since I have plenty of family and friends down there I’m certainly going to talk about it!

Kerrville Daily Times Articles
March 24th Front Page (JPEG image)
Photo
Editorial
Note about landlines/safety
Info about 911 operations
Main article (covers cellular, credit cards, banks) Reprint in iStockAnalyst
Businesses adapt (anyone remember credit card imprint machines?)
Humorous recap by one Daily Times reporter (not a newspaper article)

MySanAntonio
911 article
Original article

Articles from other outlets
KENS5 KVUE WOAI WOAI VIdeo KSAT12 Boerne Star Burnet Bulletin Fredericksburg Standard Radio-Post Blanco County News TMCNet

Rather scary stuff for the folks affected. The outage, by my calculations, lasted for a full seven hours, and knocked out cellular communications completely in the Hill Country. Verizon cells? Down. Sprint? Down. AT&T? Dead. T-Mobile? Not 100% sure, but probably gone. HCTC phone service? Nada. Pocket and CricKet were dead in the water as well.

Oddly enough, the Fredericksburg Standard Radio-Post cites Five Star Wireless as not being down during the incident, for local or long distance service. This on one hand makes sense, as Five Star doesn’t necessarily use phone-company T1 lines to power their cell sites like other providers do. However I tried calling a Five Star connected friend yesterday during the outage and couldn’t get through. I’m going to keep poking around for more info on what happened with that provider.

On the landline front, you could call to your own exchange but no further. This was the case for both Verizon and Windstream…and, as remarked before, HCTC. Time Warner Cable digital voice users apparently had the reverse issues; able to call out but unable to call folks in town…just like everyone else in the world. Sprint’s IP-based long distance also stayed online…it’s what powers Time Warner Cable’s digital voice service (at least for the moment…see this article) and I suppose runs on TWC’s network in the Hill Country.

Internet was more of a mixed bag. Time Warner Cable’s fiber route is different from that of the AT&T cable that was cut (near Waring), so their service, including service for the City of Fredericksburg, continued unabated.

Windstream DSL also continued without issue in Fredericksburg; my mom’s workplace uses them and was able to send an e-mail out about the incident. The phone lines on which the DSL was served couldn’t call beyond Fredericksburg, but internet connectivity did just fine. Oddly enough, Kerrville DSL didn’t weather the outage with as much gusto, according to reports by the Kerrville Daily Times.

Verizon DSL was flat-out down. Bee Creek Communications, riding on that AT&T fiber for their backbone, was out as well. On the flip side, Hill Country Telephone Cooperative’s dual internet links (one to the north, one to the south) didn’t miss a beat. As such, Kerrville’s school system was also unaffected; they use HCTC.

The impact of the outage went a bit beyond calling from point A to point B. Gas stations and Fredericksburg’s Wal-Mart could not take credit card transactions. I’m guessing Wal-Mart has a T1 internet connection, and their T1 was down along with everyone else’s (Sprint and AT&T’s cellular backhauls, for example). The gas stations were probably using plain old telephone lines to process plastic. For some businesses, old-style credit card imprint machines were dragged out and used to process transactions, but for many businesses those machines just don’t exist, relegating purchases to cash or check only.

Last but not least, some banks stopped early for the day (the outage started around 3 p.m. Central Time), as they also tend to use T1 connections to get online. Other banks just processed transactions manually, following procedures similar to blackout protocol.

This just goes to show how much the Hill Country’s communications infrastructure relies on a single provider. Pretty scary if you ask me. It also shows that voice over IP, combined with a real redundant network, is just a good idea; with VoIP it doesn’t matter if you’re running on cable, DSL or mobile broadband, as long as you’ve got access to the Internet. It’s fortunate that the service came up when it did, that TWC, HCTC internet and Windstream DSL customers were apparently not affected, and that emergency services were quickly restored in the area. However running all communications through a single AT&T fiber link (as opposed to a ring, or at least some sort of redundant route!) is just plain bad policy.

Comments/thoughts/additions? Post ‘em!

Tweets compiled about the event (more coming):

Windstream – @bmodisett @kerrvillegossip yes there is an outage; currently no ETA ; fiber cut by another carrier^MC
HCTC – Another good reason to be on Hill Country’s Ethernet backhaul service! Listen up wireless carriers! Can you spell “Diverse Routes”. We can! Call me!!! http://bit.ly/bpPHZU
KerrvilleGossip - Phone service down,, Windstream to blame…. working on the story, looks like HCTC is about to be the BIG DOG! #kerrville (retweeted by bmodisett)\
KerrvilleGossip - Cell service is starting to come back! GO KERRVILLE!

bmodisett - what is up with #Kerrville and the cell phones, it was like they pulled the plug for everyone here.
MrAdkins - Any 3G outages going on out there in twitterland?
tsampson - Anyone in Kerrville experiencing cell phone/land phone outages? Please at reply for potential story on this crazyness.
bmodisett - @tsampson i guess windstream finally had it and are leaving town.
tsampson- @shueytexas Working theory is that Aliens have landed, sending out a electromagnetic pulse… or something to that effect.
tsampson - @mradkins Also, have you heard anything from any carriers? I went over to Windstream and Verizon. No cause yet.
mradkins - @tsampson Just in from Sprint: there is an AT&T Outage affecting both cell and landlines west of Boerne on I-10 and north to Dallas.
mradkins - @tsampson But not sure if this is true. One carrier will blame another. WS won’t say they have a problem even if you drop by.
tsampson - So it’s Apocalypse Cell in the Hill Country today. Read all about it in the Daily Times’ team coverage tomorrow.

KENS5 - Communications cut in Texas hill country, services impaired http://bit.ly/b0QhIz
KVUE - Communications cut in Texas Hill Country, services impaired: It’s a terrible Tuesday for some people living in the… http://bit.ly/bDnGdc
News4WOAI - Major communication outage in Hill Country area: News 4 WOAI has confirmed that a fiber line was cut somewhere bet… http://bit.ly/awvd1X (retweeted by barbaramagana)
KABBFOX29 - Cut Fiber Line Causes Large Outage in Hill Country: A contractor working on roadside drainage causes a major…
http://tinyurl.com/yh3fku5

phlezk - DUDE WTF? phones (cell AND LANDLINE) in the Hill Country (my home!) are DOWN?! HOW THE–?!
phlezk - News 4 WOAI confirmed a Verizon fiber line was cut somewhere between Fredericksburg & Comfort, causing outages throughout the Hill Country.
that1collegeguy - @phlezk Dude, the entire cell network is like…non-existent at the moment!
that1collegeguy - NEWS FLASH: Texas Hill Country economy collapsing rapidly due to cell & landline networks crashing. LifeAlert reports record “pushes”!
BobGambert - Anybody up in the Hill Country? Talk to me about the major comm outage.
bbridges620 - AT&T says it is Verizon’s fault phone are down in the Hill Country, Verizon says it’s AT&T. What is up with Red Vs Blue everywhere? (retweeted by Brandy_Williams)
jfstx - all verizon communications down in Hill Country, no cell, home service , sprint is limping along on 1xrtt
priskillya - the entire hill country was cell phone and land lineless today. i also had no internet. that’s ok cause i had to move. it was just a pain
katiewright - cell service is finally FINALLY back up after about seven hours of being down in the entire Hill Country area.
2dogexpedition - phones in hill country down someone cut a fiber optic
metroane - this fn blows…….major phone, cell, internet services out since 1pm in hill country, can’t upload mag to press……

TaxesNews4u – San Antonio News: Widespread phone outage in Hill Country: Kerr, Gillespie counties are among the areas affected http://bit.ly/aW1t1y
SanAntonioCP - San Antonio: Major communication outage in Hill Country area http://bit.ly/dw8pUi
tweetsa - Widespread phone outage in Hill Country http://bit.ly/ayMHTA
salocalnews - Major communication outage in Hill Country area – http://fx.ly/a/16_78e8750bdc
salocalnews - Widespread phone outage in Hill Country – http://fx.ly/a/16_ad169f14d2
MsTechAngel - Widespread phone outage in Hill Country: By Zeke MacCormack – Express-News Damage to an AT&T fiber-optic line caus… http://bit.ly/cwMjyH
JeffVaughn - Breaking: Parts of Hill Country experiencing phone outage, including #Kerville: http://tinyurl.com/ydvwm2m
wrstech - Major communication outage in Hill Country area http://shar.es/mgfnZ
wxProBrian - Red vs Blue! RT @ksatnews: Now, Verizon tells us it’s an AT&T Fiber line that was cut – causing phone/cell/net outages in Hill Country.
GSMTalks - GSMtalks :: Service returns after widespread phone outage in Hill Country http://bit.ly/bml2pm
SanAntonioLocks - Phone Lines Out In Hill Country: A severed AT&T fiber line has cut cell, land and Internet connections in the Hill… http://bit.ly/b8Q9cj

1. My mom saw a Verizon truck in the county fair parade today (I didn’t go; saw no need and was tired). The truck has “High Speed Internet coming soon!” or similar painted on te side. This is DSL, not FiOS (Verizon always refers to their fiber offering by its trademarked name). However from what I hear Verizon’s DSL release is just a ploy to drive up the sale cost of their system here; Fredericksburg isn’t a large metropolitan area, and there are too mayn bridged taps and other phone system anomaies here for DSL to reach beyond a small part of town. At least that’s what the scuttlebutt says. My prediction: Verizon offers some flavor of DSL to folks who can currently get Windstream DSL, then sells the system to whoever will take it, using the “we have DSL in our central office” argument to jack the price up slightly above what the system is worth.
2. Bee Creek Communications, the local our-hands-are-tied-and-if-anyone-competes-with-us-we-lose wireless ISP, was in the parade today as well. They also have a third-of-a-page ad in the paper advertising free installation to new customers until September 15th. A few years ago an installation with similar equipment would have run you around $220. The problem here is that their network is already over capacity in some areas, they’re spread too thinly in terms of manpower and their speeds are the stuff of yesteryear, barely competitive with satellite internet (though their monthly transfer caps are higher). The service also requires a two-year contract with a $125 early termination fee. If you want a one-year agreement service will run you another $10 per month. In short, don’t buy.
3. Clearwire is launching WiMAX service in San Antonio and Austin on September 1st. Maybe they’ll bring their service here. Would put Bee Creek right out of business, since Clear has an uncapped-download, one-megabit-upload (or is that uncapped too?) tier for a mere $45 per month. They even have cheaper tiers to compete with your garden-variety DSL options. They even have business tiers that will fill the gap between Bee Creek’s woefully slow packages and Time Warner Cable’s woefully expensive ones. In a nutshell, something for everyone as long as you’re within range of one of their towers. I’ll be keeping close track of what happens here. For what it’s worth, I told Bee Creek about Clear’s possible imminent launch nearby, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their larger-than-usual print ad was a direct result of this.
4. Hill Country Telephone Cooperative has run fiber around the city of Fredericksburg and plans to get CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) operations started before the end of the year, or something close to that anyway. They may just focus on high-end business operations (like they’re doing in nearby Kerrville, where they recently connected the city’s independent school district) however they’re a residential provider in their home area, so they know how to deal with “normal” customers. Plus, they have a lot of options for deploying service; in addition to their new fiber-optic network they have an AWS (1700 MHz cellular) license for this area, a 3.65 GHz “light license” which they’re using for WiMAX service in the nearby town of Mason, and maybe (if the price is right) Verizon’s old copper network, though I’m not sure why they’d want it. I heard HCTC offered $50 million for the network a few years back, and Verizon wanted $80 million fot it. Knowing that the network wasn’t worth that much, HCTC walked.

In short, it will be interesting to see what happens around here in the relatively near future with regard to internet service. Right now Time Warner Cable is the only provider who will give you more than a 2 Mbps connection (okay, HughesNet will give you 5 Mbps but they don’t count due to obscenely low caps and ridiculously high monthly fees). They’re also the only provider around here with customer-available fiber; Verizon apparently doesn’t have any. Sounds like that may change soon though. I’ll tell all I know (or am allowed to tell, whichever is less) as I find out more.

So the big question in my mind is, how would I design the perfect set top box, from both a consumer and a provider point of view? Here are some specs I came up with:

1. nVidia ION chipset. Everyone says the thing can decode 1080p video with no problem. Paired with a decent operating system and a halfway-decent processor (like the low-power Atom 330) you’ve got an STB that not only performs well, but also can be used for a variety of things and isn’t going to run up the power bill.
2. CableCard support, multiple streams. Granted, this is a given these days, but why not make things clear? RF video (via GPON) is what I’m assuming as the last mile medium; IPTV would work a bit differently of course.
3. Easy-access 12.5mm height 2.5″ hard disk bay to turn pa plain set top box into a DVR. Pop in a bare SATA drive and pay a one-time upgrade fee, then start recording shows. Or pay a slightly larger fee plus the price of a handpicked drive and a tech will do all of that for you. Bottom line: there should be no hardware difference between a regular set top box and an HD one, aside from the presence of a hard drive, or lack thereof. If you’re wondering why a 2.5″ drive, it’s because the drive is smaller and takes less power. If people want to store gobs of content they can add an external drive. There might come a time when all video content is cached at the edge of the network (networked DVRs) but until then, let people have as many bits in their box as they possibly can install.
4. Flash storage for non-video, namely the operating system and program guide. You want that stuff to load quickly, so why commit it to spinning metal when you can get enough flash to hold it for under $20?
5. HD on every STB so you can say that there’s no extra equipment required. Plus, having a single model of box makes things a whole lot easier to keep track of.
6. 2 USB ports. Aside from easy testing of devices, this would allow people to view media on their STB by plugging in a memory card reader or something equally quirky-but-cool. More importantly, people would be able to connect a whopping 2TB drive to their STB if they wanted and record shows onto it. The more shows they have recorded, the longer they’ll stick around to watch ‘em, and the longer they’ll pay for service. Also, you can hook…
7. …an external Blu-ray player to one of those USB ports. Make one that fits in with the decor of the typical media center and you’ve got yet another feature that makes that STB “sticky”. Why not? The onboard processor can handle it.
8. Whole-home functionality. No need having multiple DVRs recording the same thing when you can just pull between them. That way one DVR does all the work and the rest sit there with less stuff to break.
9. TiVo as the operating system, with no TiVo monthly fees. If you’re a service provider, you can probably work with TiVo on lowering the “price for life” subscription per box. Also, why use any other piece of software than the best? People say “I TiVoed that” just like they say “I googled that” so why not take advantage of the latent mindshare?
10. Farm out on-demand as much as possible, with an “you’re on our awesome box” commission of a few percent. Nobody wants to spend $8 on a cable-provided movie on demand. Though on the other hand some sports stuff has to be done that way, at which point just download the on-demand stuff over the internet rather than via RF.

The above list might make for an expensive” dumb” set top box, but then again it might now. I’m pretty sure that, when purchased in bulk, all the above components would total less than $200, so if you charge $8 per month per box with the first one free you’re making your money back before the boxes are obsolete. Plus the fact that you’re using a single box across your network will make things a lot easier to deal with for customer service. I’m pretty sure any provider who instituted all of the above would have people running from competitors, even if the service did cost a few bucks more per month. Then again, I’ve never had pay-TV in my life :p

1. Pocket can now “flash” phones at all of their locations, as long as their software is working correctly. The price: free. The upside: you can take your old name-your-CDMA-carrier phone and plunk it down on Pocket’s network without having to shell out for one of the company’s own phone models. The downside: you may not get data access on a non-Pocket phone, depending on the model.
2. Pocket’s roaming option, available for 19¢ per minute or $5 per month for 50 minutes, mainly picks Verizon as the out-of-area provider. This hapens whenever the Pocket phone can’t pick up a “native” signal, not just if you’re out of Pocket’s licensed service area. This is a good thing in areas where Pocket doesn’t have towers, but at that point you’re limited by how good your phone is at receiving signals.
3. The UTStarCom 7025, even with its pull-up antenna, was bested by my parents’ Nokia 2126i internal-antenna Tracfones in the reception department. So if you want a Pocket phone with good reception for $39, consider your options narrowed.
4. Pocket will be expanding to the western side of the Colorado Rockies (to the Grand Juntion area, to be exact) shortly. They appear to be leasing spectrum from ClearTalk PCS, another unlimited-minutes CDMA provider, and they don’t face competition from anyone else in the area as far as cheap unlimited providers go. Rumor has it that Grand Junction will be 3G-enabled, in contrast to the highly competitive-albeit-2.5G Texas market. Guess when you’re priced $5 per month lower than in other markets due to competition there isn’t a whole lot of dough left over to roll out 3G for the handful of customers who will actually care about the tech at this point.
5. GJ and Texas are 1900MHz markets for Pocket, allowing them to use a plethora of phones, some of them cheap. These markets also allow Pocket to flash phones from other carriers without worrying about whether those carriers support Pocket’s network. In contrast, Pocket’s New England market (also rumored by Teas staff to be 3G) is in the AWS 1700 band, as are the newer network expansions of CricKet and MetroPCS.
6. Pocket handles voicemail in an interesting way (for a cell phone provider) on their $25 plan: they don’t have it. Remember when your landline phone would ring “forever” without an answering machine on the other end? Seems like Pocket is the same way, which makes it a great fit for Google Voice forwarding or the like. Then again, if your phone’s off, callers will hear a message like the following: “Pocket Communications. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please try again later.“
7. Pocket now has some nice phones on their network, thanks to their rather large-for-a-regional size (over 300,000 customers) and use of standard frequency bands in the Texas area. While they do have a number of AWS-equipped handsets in their lineup (including multiple models from ZTE and Kyocera, plus a Huawei phone or two) their upper echelon is star-studded with the likes of Motorola’s VE20, a phone that sells on Pocket for a mere $100 more than on Sprint…with a two-year contract! On the other hand, the newer mid-range Pocket phones all have AWS radios , and include such standard fare as the Motorola VE240 and the Nokia 1006 (both of which are lovely entry-level phones by the way).
8. If you want stellar rural coverage, look elsewhere. Pocket doesn’t have that quite down. Then again, that’s not their business model, and their coverage map doesn’t set up any false expectations. Wherever they say they cover, they cover. No dropped calls due to overloaded networks, no “it should work here but doesn’t” areas, no roaming where home coverage is advertised. Then again, get a phone with good reception so you’ll get better-than-advertised coverage; chances are that, if you’re traveling around the hill country, you’ll need it. Less so in markets that are easier RF-wise.
9. Pocket’s customer service is just fine. I’d say excellent, but the guy I talked to on the phone didn’t know off the top of his head that shortcode-based SMS still doesn’t work on the carrier (a blessing and a curse…no stupid ringtone deals either). The IVR tree is exactly one level deep: press one for English, 2 para Español. You’re connected with a live rep mere seconds later. Now that’s service.

The bottom line: I like rooting for the home team by default, especially when they haev a great product. Pocket is “gettin’ there” even in an area that’s hard to cover in terms of cell towers, with prices lower than a landline for a similar feature set. Plus, you can get phone numbers with the 777 prefix. Now how cool is that?

UPDATE: Newegg (prematurely as far as I can see, I might add) ended the coupon promo, and the Hitachi drives are now all sold out. Nice run though. Still, Newegg has some cheap drives, like this Seagate 1.5TB $109.99 beaut’. Just remember that life’s a little slower when you want more bits for the buck, that drive runs at a mere 5900 RPMs.

Want some cheap internal storage? Don’t mind using Hitachi for said storage? Then check out the below:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145233

But wait, it gets better. In addition to the $10 mail-in rebate, you can get another 10% off with the coupon code hddsale15.

The result: a full terabyte of storage for a mere $54.99 shipped after rebate. That’s a teeny 5.5¢ per GB.

Just keep in mind that the window of opportunity for the rebate and the promo code ends at midnight on Monday the 17th. After which things are back up to normal with 1TB drives bottoming out at about $75.

So below are the APs my computer “saw”, along with their channels. To my knowledge, all SSIDs of similar naming (e.g. North Fbg. A and D) are on the same tower, just on different radios/antennas. Also, to my knowledge my provider only uses 20 MHz channels to deploy its service, rather than economizing on spectrum by using smaller bandwidths. So if they’re broadcasting on channel 1 (this is all 2.4 GHz stuff) then channels 1-4 are all at least partially occupied. See this diagram for more details.

SSID – Channel
Hayden Ranch – 9
Hospital A – 9
Hospital B – 7
Grapetown – 11
Grapetown B – 2
Morris Ranch – 3
Morris Ranch B – 7
North Fbg. A – 7
North Fbg. B – 1
North Fbg. C – 11
North Fbg. D – 4

Note that on the North Fbg. tower all frequencies are used in the 2.4 GHz band. Not the best use of spectrum, I’d say…

Okay, so maybe not everyone using HughesNet is suffering, always lonely, is stuck on a deserted island and has a bunch of people in the background chanting about his doom. Still, the plight of someone on HughesNet these days can’t be overstated by much. Hence the excerpt from a play that I acted in my sophomore year in high school. Four years later, I had to Google it to make sure I got it word for word, but I was close enough to find the passage.

What does this have to do with my short, albeit rather painful, experience with HughesNet? Not much, other than the painful part. In fact, the rest stop west of Eden, TX, while remote, is quite different than a deserted island. For one thing, the structure on which the internet satellite dish was purched was well-maintained. Second, US-87 runs by said rest stop. Third, the Texas Department of Transportation instituted the free wireless hotspot as a public safety measure, seeing as how some carriers’ cell phones (ahem, Sprint…ever heard of roaming on Five Star Wireless in the Eden area?) just flat out don’t work around those parts. Of course, you can’t use any sort of voice communication technology over HughesNet, but I suppose that’s beside the point. Still better than a deserted island with vipers and no free public WiFi, right?

So enough with the literary references. As is my usual wardriving custom, I did a few traceroutes, speed tests and forays into the wireless access point admin panel while we were stopped at the rest stop. This took a little longer than the family liked due to the length of each hop of the traceroute (five to ten seconds) but I got them to stick around long enough to yield the below results:

Tracing route to google.com [74.125.45.100] over a maximum of 30 hops:

 1     3 ms     3 ms     3 ms  192.168.10.1
 2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 3  2078 ms  1842 ms  1854 ms  host67142002135.direcway.com [67.142.135.2]
 4  2555 ms  1842 ms  1944 ms  host6714200158131.direcway.com [67.142.131.158]
 5  1848 ms  1772 ms  2115 ms  host6714200149131.direcway.com [67.142.131.149]
 6   913 ms  1820 ms  2031 ms  host671420078131.direcway.com [67.142.131.78]
 7  1750 ms  1535 ms  2047 ms  12.86.52.225
 8  1826 ms  2047 ms  2038 ms  cr2.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.129.142]
 9  1838 ms  2057 ms  1842 ms  cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.28.177]
 10  1840 ms  1944 ms  2558 ms  cr1.attga.ip.att.net [12.122.28.173]
 11  1836 ms   984 ms  1820 ms  12.123.22.5
 12  1036 ms  2763 ms  1944 ms  12.88.97.6
 13  2585 ms  2224 ms  1646 ms  72.14.233.54
 14  2041 ms  3168 ms  1970 ms  72.14.232.215
 15  1975 ms  1304 ms  1977 ms  209.85.253.137
 16  1228 ms  1841 ms  1535 ms  yx-in-f100.google.com [74.125.45.100]

In short, you don’t want to game on HughesNet. It’s bad for your health. No Voice over IP either; the connection is jitterier than a junebug on a caffeine high.

Want a speedtest? I did one of those too…used testmy.net as it seems to be the de facto standard for sat internet speed testing. All the other tests paint Hughes, WIldBLue and their ilk in an even dimmer light…

:::.. testmy.net test results ..:::
Download Connection is:: 812 Kbps about 0.81 Mbps (tested with 1024 kB)
Download Speed is:: 99 kB/s
Upload Connection is:: 40 Kbps about 0 Mbps (tested with 386 kB)
Upload Speed is:: 5 kB/s
Tested From:: http://testmy.net (Main)
Test Time:: 2009/07/19 - 6:44pm
D-Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-91E08GPX2
U-Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/stats/id-ZJ9AFBQ43
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 [!]

I actually did the test twice. Apparently HughesNet isn’t terribly good at uploading data; I know my computer does fine at it, and I’m supposing the wireless access point (a Colubris model; everything except that and the internet’s public IP address was hidden safely behind a login page) wasn’t falling down on the job.

So, according to the above, HughesNet isn’t very good at what they’re supposed to be doing: providing high-speed internet where cable and DSL can’t reach. Then again, WildBlue doesn’t seem to be that great at the job either lately, but at least WildBlue will give you their internet access package for $50 per month, and have internet plans that top out at a whopping 22 GB of data transfer per month, usable any time the service is available.

Of course, service on HughesNet varies from area to area. I’m just hoping that the above is the lower end of the scale for Hughes, though I have it on good authority that there’s worse out there. It jsut doens’t happen to be on a deserted, snake-infested island minor highway at a rest stop.

What had really happened is the modem has been kicked off the network for a bit, been reassigned a new IP address, and I had forgotten to set up DynDNS again on my router (easy to overlook when you’ve had the same IP for months on end). So in reality the internet at my place was hunky dory…I just didn’t know where “my place” was on the ‘net.

So what was the cause of the modem reboot and subsequent switch from 76.xxx.xxx.xxx to 67.xxx.xxx.xxx for my IP address (people with 24.xxx.xxx.xxx addresses probably didn’t see a change; they’re still around here)? A DOCSIS 2.0 upgrade, as a matter of fact.

How do I know that the upgrade was to DOCSIS 2.0? I can’t access my modem configuration/status page; the modem in question (a Zoom 5241) has those funcctions walled off for whatever reason. However I *could* do a speed test, and Comcast’s own test revealed a near-shocking 7-11 Mbps on the upstream, a far cry from my typical 2.6-3 Mbps, limited by the DOCSIS 1.1 technology the system had been running on until recently. Another tip-off: Comcast e-mailed me a few days ago, tuting their new DOCSIS 3.0 services as “coming soon”…they’re still not here yet but DOCSIS 2.0 upgrades are one big step closer to that reality.

If you’re wondering why Comcast gave me the upgrade, it’s not because of competition; Qwest’s services are handily beat by DOCSIS 1.1 on Comcast. However if Comcast upgrades their systems to DOCSIS 3 (with DOCSIS 2 as an interim step) they’ll be able to release higher-speed tiers at higher prices, including a 50 mbps down, 10 Mbps up tier weighing in at $116 without TV (versus the $65 I’m paying right now for 8 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up, plus PowerBoost in both directions).

Speaking of rampant capitalism, apparently Comcast wants me to sign up for some of their other services. During my absence, the company sent me two letters. One offered cable for $30 per month (I think it was the mid-tier digital package; I didn’t get further than that since I don’t want cable and I certaily don’t want a one-year contract for the service). The other offered phone service for $15 per month (I already have a cell phone…and yes I know that the phone package is normally $40). Despite these offers, and the fact that the internet portion of m bill would go down if I added another service (TV in particular would drop my internet price by $12 per month), I’m not interested. Still, nice try guys.

Lastly, Comcast has been sprucing up their website portfolio lately. Comcast.net is now shiny and new, as are Comcast.co’s pricing pages. The company has even overhauled their account managment portal so that it now looks pretty cool. I’m pretty sure all these upgrades, combined with the relatively recent introduction of their SmartZone Webmail/web-voicemail system, means every portion of Comcast’s online consumer presence has been reworked in the past nine months or so.

Lastly, while messing around with my modem I decided to test IPv6 connectivity. Not that anyone cares about IPv6 yet, but I was able to ping and trace to a few hosts (he.net, softlayer.com, fdcservers.net). Though I must say, latency was rather absurd, on account of all IPv6 traffic being routed through AMS-IX (AMSterdam Internet eXchange) and SWIPNet before going to those fragments of the internet that are IPv6 enabled. Of course, the situation on that front will improve and it’s cool of Comcast to have the tech in place, but it’s largely a bragging-rights deal at the moment.

Personally, I’d rather have a minimalist online UI and 10 Mbps symmetric fiber with no PowerBoost and IPv4 only for $40 or $50 per month including one branded GMail address, but I suppose I’ll have to pioneer that service myself. For now though I suppose Comcast’s service is becoming more passable every day, and that’s rather Comcastic of them :p