November 2007 Archives

Broadbandreports points to a post by a Canadian scientist who is leaving Bell Canada in order to get the internet he's already paying for.

Of all the cable monopolies, Cablevision is one of the best in terms of reliability and customer service, according to user rankings on broadbandreports. But that did not stop one unhappy customer from threatening to blow the ISP up.

Broadbandreports finds a Newsday story about the incident. Although bomb threats are new, local police are accustomed to being called in to handle unhappy customers.

internetnews is reporting that a new study shows that telecommuting improves the health of employees.

On ISP-Planet, I wrote a series on telework and believe that it is the future.

Information about the FCC's seminar on the auction, to be held on Monday November 19, 2007, is contained in this .pdf file.

I'm reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, which is a gift from my father, who believes I should study capitalism.

Chapter seven, "The Men Who Knew Nothing", is about the design of spectrum auctions. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book (well, for me it was free except for the opportunity cost of a gift of a different book). It describes how spectrum auctions have failed in the past, why they have failed, and why the auction of 3G spectrum in the UK was such a success.

The key insight is that the success of a large auction depends on getting as many bidders as possible. You may be considering buying spectrum, and you may want to know what the price might be.

One valuable indicator is how many bidders there will be. At ISPCON, in a session I will write up later this month, attendees were told that when you file to bid on 700 MHz spectrum, you will be told who the other bidders are and will be told that you cannot talk to them because that would be collusion.

But knowing who the other bidders are is a valuable piece of information, and is worth the price.

I was in an actual market the other day, a supermarket, and spoke with a representative of Grown-up Soda (s.i.c., a.k.a GuS) who was trying to persuade me to try their newest flavor, cola. But I like the ginger ale and I complained to her that GuS needs to supply more ginger ale to stores that sell its product because the ginger ale sells out first and then the store waits for less popular flavors to sell out, like cranberry, before re-ordering the wonderful ginger ale (wonderful because it contains actual ginger and sugar).

She said that's not her job and that the stores can order more ginger ale.

But it is her job, and it's your job to educate your resellers and to know what products are selling through the channel. It's your job to track sales and if product cycles move erratically, as happens when a grocery store orders from GuS irregularly, it's your job to find out why.

By all means use the channel but don't expect the channel to do your job for you. The channel is a lot of work. It's about making money, not about reducing your workload.

Last night, at the urging of my girlfriend, we attended an event hosted by her favorite physicist, Neil deGrasse Thyson, called A Scientist Goes to the Movies: The Matrix.

The Matrix is primarily about our perception of reality and also is an ambiguous retelling of the Christ story that mixes religion with the basic philosophical questions, but there's plenty of science, plausible and not, in the movie as well and that's what the lecture (with movie clips) was about.

Thyson described the big picture but he also noted several tiny details. One of those details is that in order to leave the matrix, you need a landline phone -- cell phones won't work.

Today, as regulators are challenged by increasingly powerful phone companies that want to restrict what their customers can do with the services their customers pay for twice (once through taxes and again through subscription fees) and are already collaborating with the government to build a surveillance system of unprecedented scale, it's nice to see that at least some part of the popular culture has been clued in to the power of the network -- I'm sorry, I mean the matrix -- and the rules that are intended to confine us for its benefit.

If you don't know Columbia professor Tim Wu, BusinessWeek has a quick profile (h/t BoingBoing).

Plenty more Tim Wu publications are available on his website.

The academic writings are particularly good.

Yesterday, The Web Host Industry Review Reported (C I Host Data Center Robbed) that a well known data center in Chicago was broken into.

On our ISP-Lists, members wanted to know how a data center that has had four break ins in three years remains certified for HIPAA, SOX, etc. The article notes that C I Host's website claims its data centers are "limited access environments located in high security buildings with 24x7 armed guards on-site" and wonders how armed guards could permit this.

Has Comcast fallen for AT&T's rhetoric? Comcast, foolishly, may be preventing its customers from accessing Google.

As I noted early last year, if any ISP, even one of the four monopolies, blocks Google, it will lose customers.

So I hope, for the sake of all independent ISPs, that Comcast really is blocking Google, mistakenly believing that Google is a parasite on Comcast's network.

The reality, of course, is the opposite.

When the FCC gave the phone companies full ownership of "new network" fiber buildouts four years ago, I predicted that the phone companies would still not build those fiber networks. As Rep. Ed Markey noted at the time, that was certainly the lesson of history, and for some time after the giveaway, it appeared that nothing would happen.

But it turns out that instead of aiming for cash, the telcos were trying to get permission to redline and this week AT&T won confirmation of that permission in court.