Posts Tagged cable

State Of The Internet, Fredericksburg, TX

Interesting stuff happening lately about internet service in this area:

  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. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Perfect Set Top Box

So I’ve got some crazy ideas about launching a fiber-optic triple play operator somewhere. Or maybe someone else has those ideas and I’m just throwing in my own ideas. Now the hardest “play” would be TV, once you’ve got all your infrastructure in place. Internet is pretty much a given, as is VoIP; just white-label a solution from someone who already does it well (VOIPo for example, or so I hear). But with TV you have to not only make deals with all your content providers, but also figure out how you’re going to get video from point A (the content providers) to point B (subscribers’ TVs). Cable providers have fallen down on this a bit with utterly crappy set top boxes. Sat providers are a good bit better, as are TelcoTV providers (like U-Verse and FiOS) though, except in the case of FiOS, a better set top box goes hand in hand with lower picture quality. Which is unfortunate.

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: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

That’s Comcastic (in a good way)

So I’m back in my apartment in Colorado. And, as usual, I’ve got my ear to the ground on tech. Especially since, mysteriously, my quite-reliable router had dropped off the ‘net sometime a few weeks ago…or so it seemed.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big Spring, TX (aka I Get A Networking Green Belt)

So I’m here in Big Spring, TX on a mission trip at Gateway Baptist Church. I’m helping with sound and various other things. Lots of community events and a Vacation Bible School program are how my home church is ministering to the populace. So far, life’s good; despite hot sleeping quarters for the guys I think we’ve God through us has had a huge impact here this week. So far twelve kids have come to Christ; there will probably be more salvations before the week’s up. That’s really cool. I’ll link to a slideshow once I’m done here on Twitter (I’m leaving Saturday morning for Colorado).

So if you’re a techie and am wondering what the “Networking Green Belt” part of the post is, bear with me. First let me lay out the internet situation in Big Sprint: Alltel EvDO, Basin 2Way as a WISP, Suddenlink for cable, one or two numbers for dialup. Sprint (my typical cellular carrier) is 1xRTT-only here, as is Verizon for the moment (but they’ll be EvDO soon once they integrate Alltel’s network). Not sure yet abut Basin 2Way’s services and pricing, though I’ll bet it’s only economical for folks who can’t get cable. For cable, Suddenlink is the provider; I’ve detailed their pricing plans and traceroutes here, here and here. Please disregard the extraneous discussion about DOCSIS modulations. Dialup is one of two phone numbers to my knowledge, one for AOL and one for everyone else. This is one of the few areas where TOAST.net has no local numbers, depiste their aggregation of dozens of dialup access number providers. The numbers here are owned by SBC/AT&T, but not WorldNet. Fun stuff.

So back to my networking green belt.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,