Posts with tag "broadband"

If you are using Canada as an example please try to base your reasoning on facts

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  • Posted 667 days ago

Don’t get me wrong, I like it when I see Canada make it into the tech news but what I don’t like is when a writer takes a situation in this country and uses to validate some line of thinking in a post – without checking some simple facts.

The latest incident of this is a post at ReadWriteWeb by Dan Rowinski where he was talking about the sale of Hulu and the implication of that sale on the future of the web. In the post he points to Canada as an indicator of what his fellow American can expect.

To be fair he is partly right but really for all the wrong reasoning.

Dan is right that if Americans want to see what their Internet future is like just look north; but it has nothing to do with Hulu but something that has already happened in the US. I am talking of course about the purchase of NBC by Comcast and the dangers of a carrier owning a major content producer.

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Telus_Coloring_Book_Port

Rural Canadians wanting broadband told they aren’t worth it

I know from experience that living in the country; and I mean the type situation where your nearest neighbor is miles rather than blocks away, isn’t always fun especially for techies. Even in small towns like where I live now the amount of choices in connecting to the web typically boils down to two – Ma Bell and some cable company. In the country you’re damn lucky to get either let alone pick between two options.

One of the regulations that telecoms have had to agree to in order to do business in Canada is what is referred to as “obligation to serve” which simply stated means telecoms were given certain incentives to provide basic telecom services to rural areas. However in this Internet Age there appears to be a disagreement over what basic means any more.

In a recent appearance before the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) Michael Hennessy the senior vice-president at Telus for regulatory and government affairs said that the regulator could not apply this age old “obligation to serve” to broadband Internet. He went on to say in an interview

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I hope I live long enough Doc

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  • Posted 1239 days ago

Stewing Beef

Doc Searls nailed it in a post today.

But actually I care less about the right thing to do now than I care about the only thing to do in the future. That’s to build out the Net as a basic utility. Not as a secondary (or tertiary) service of phone and cable companies.

I know that’s not how it is now, and that’s not how it’s gong to be for awhile. Right now the Net is still seen as gravy rather than as meat.

I dream of the same thing. A ubiquitous Internet that we can all access no matter where we are or what device we might be using. Some will say we have that.

Except for one thing.

Broadband providers treat access like gravy while they keep swapping out steak for stewing beef. Through deceptive marketing they con people into thinking they need the most expensive access for doing the simplest things.

It’s called the up-sell. Making us believe we can only do mediocre type shit for outrageous prices. Want better? Then damn it’s gonna cost a whole bunch more. Thickening the gravy to help hide the cheap cuts of beef.

Doc believes this will change and that a lot of money will be made during that transition. I really want to believe. A Martin Luther King kind of believe, but when I close my eyes hoping to see the mountain all I see is P.T. Barnum laughing his ass off.

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CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast: Getting jacked by broadband providers

cbn1-podpost Santa might be getting the day off after a hectic night but the same doesn’t hold true for myself or Sean as we are back to host tonight show once again and thanks to a post on Gizmodo.

Sparked by that post Sean and I end up having a spirited conversation about the way that broadband providers are misleading unsuspecting inexperience Internet customers into thinking that they need the more expensive broadband packages even for stupid things like downloading software or having video conferencing.

Near the end the conversation kinda branches out to a more general business greed and CEOs that get paid handsomely even as some of them fail.

Enjoy the show.

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CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast: Miscellaneous ramblings – blame it on the turkeys

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  • Posted 1270 days ago

cbn1-podpost In light of it coming up on a long weekend in the US things are getting a little on the quiet side as everyone is prepping for the turkey snooze expected to make the tech blogosphere a wasteland of news Sean and I decided to do a more of an off the cuff show tonight.

We start out with good intentions of talking about Google’s leaked secret new results page layout that has been floating around the web today. It isn’t long though before we branch out onto the sorry state of our broadband services and how when you get down to the 1’ and 0’s we are paying for more than what we are getting.

Enjoy the show.

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The fiefdoms – a long way from reliable and fast

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  • Posted 1412 days ago

steve rubel Steve Rubel was good enough to share with us his experience of using in-flight wifi on his Virgin America flight and how the real-time video chat was usable. Not perfect but passably usable.

His parting shot in the post was how Internet everywhere is finally becoming a reality:

Having the Internet everywhere is finally becoming a reality. We still have a ways to go. It should be like running water or electricity – reliable and fast. But the final cones of disconnectedness are slowly but surely falling.

Well as nice as that might sound I think we are very long way from seeing any kind of broadband that is everywhere like running water or electricity. We are also a long way from it being reliable and fast. It will only be as reliable and fast as the broadband providers want it to be. As long as they control the pipes don’t expect to be everywhere like running water or electricity any time soon.

For the broadband providers those pipes are their personal fiefdoms and they are going to milk them and us for as much as they can, as long as they can, while doing as little as possible to provide us with world class ubiquitous Internet connectivity.

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Cogeco Cable confusing it’s customers? Tell me something new.

screwed Up here in Canada we don’t have the luxury, regardless of how the companies involved like to spin it, of real competition when it comes to broadband Internet access. We have Bell Canada deciding to throttle the speed of third party ISPs who buy wholesale broadband access from the telecommunication giant because they don’t want competitors offering faster service than what they offer their own residential and business customers.

This is the same company that has also announced the closing of their online video store, leaving customers holding the bag with videos that they will no longer be able to play (thank you DRM), so they can concentrate on their Online TV service. At the same time we have Rogers appearing to revisit to controversy again over injecting Rogers’ content into users browsing activity.

Now we find out that Cogeco in their effort to further screw their customers through their instituting metered billing back in April can’t even get the software being used to track usage to work right.

After a several month adjustment period where customer usage was tracked but not billed, Cogeco was supposed to start billing in June. Judging from posts to our Cogeco forum, the process isn’t going particularly smoothly for most customers, in part because the bandwidth usage monitor Cogeco is using doesn’t work.

Many users are getting e-mail alert notifications with consumption numbers that don’t match the consumption indicated in Cogeco’s online usage-tracking portal. Others aren’t seeing accurate amounts on either. Some aren’t having any bandwidth usage registered whatsoever. It looks like Cogeco hasn’t started billing yet which is good — given they wouldn’t know what they were billing for.

Source: DSL Reports :: Cogeco Metered Billing Goes Live, Confuses Customers

When I first switched to using Bell’s DSL service almost two years ago now I was paying $24.95 (and another $39.95 for regular phone service) for 5MB down. I am now paying just over $50.00 for the same service. My only other alternative where we live – Cogeco Cable.

Either way like many of the people in Canada I’m screwed either which way. Competition? It doesn’t exist outside of maybe the large metropolitan areas like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.

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The Internet we dream of will never be the Internet we get

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  • Posted 1565 days ago

minority report As an avid science fiction reader the one unifying thread of the future has been the idea that communication would be seamless and done without any real thought regardless of where you were or what you were doing. The Internet as it has grown and become more of a part of our daily lives it seemed to be the medium that all these sci-fi authors had written about. After all it was the Internet that allowed us to reach across the street or around the globe and be able to talk with anyone we chose.

We have reached that point where it really is technically feasible to do much of what sci-fi has foreseen; or it is pretty damn close. Even though we might marvel and drool at the technological imagery that movies like Minority Report puts on the screen the fact is that we are potentially at the doorstep of such marvels becoming common place.

The other predominate idea; especially as the Internet has grown, is that there will come a point when regardless of where we are; or what we are doing, we will be only fingertips away from the vast treasure trove of information we call the Internet. As well instant communication will be just that – instant.

Talk to any futurist or even early adopter and they will tell you how our society; and world, is changing – and will continue to change because of the ubiquitous connection we will all have to the Internet. We are being told of a rich future where we will be able to do or know anything we want because we are always just one step away from being on the Internet.

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