Yannblog

The personal website of Ian Littman

Posts Tagged fiber

Looking back on today’s communications outage

Mar 23

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | 3 Comments

UPDATE 4: Added a Kerrville Daily Times link for a new article on how 911 is handled. Lots of good information there.

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! Read the rest of this entry »

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My experience with GVTC

Dec 22

Posted by Ian Littman in General | No Comments

So I’m headed down to South Padre Island for some downtime with the family before Christmas. We made a pit stop at the Flagstop Café and my mom noticed that there was a big sign in the window advertising the availability of WiFi.

So naturally I pulled out my HTC Touch Pro, which has WiFi, to see what network they were running on. After registering for an account on the hotspot provider (Less Networks, never heard of them) I checked whatismyip.com to see who I was on. Sure enough, the connection there was GVTC, registered as “Guadalupe Valley Telephone”. Right before we pulled out of the place I opened up my laptop, logged into the WiFi network that way and did some tests. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Perfect Set Top Box

Aug 18

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | 3 Comments

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 »

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