The BFC Computing Weblog: Category Telecommunications

NH Broadband Action Plan

Bill McGonigle — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:57:00 -0400

DRED has published its ’Broadband Action Plan’ with recommendations on how to improve the penetration of high speed Internet service in NH. I attended a session in Plymouth last year to provide input on the plan.

Overall it’s a good report. I’m especially impressed with its recommendations to get State out of the way for access to land and towers, permitting, etc. Also, predictable, uniform, and competitive access to utility poles is a very important issue. They recommend the creation of a government office to oversee this work, but don’t set a recommendation for when that would would be finished. It may be necessary but this issue ought not be used to grow government in a permanent manner. This kind of communications infrastructure has the potential to really streamline government, so it’s probably a net-win to have the office. They’re asking for $100,000 for each of the next two years to fund the office, so it’s necessarily limited as currently proposed. A citizen of NH might expect to pay a dollar over the next few years to fund it.

I’ve noticed that Burlington Telecomm has been having revenue shortfalls and the ECFiberNet project, which I had high hopes for, has apparently abandoned the core attribute that made it exciting - that it would be self-funded, and has gone asking for bond money instead. That was always the uncreative option, but the private model made ECFiberNet free of coercion. That is to say, government-run models don’t appear to be very healthy, but where the government can act to get out of industry’s way or improve its monopoly grants we should welcome its action.

FCC Rules on Conflict of Interest at Comcast

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:53:00 -0400

Following up on my March 2007 article Conflict of Interest at Comcast, in excerpt:

Odds are those high-traffic users are downloading video. … This is directly in competition with Comcast’s other, main, business, providing video services. The amount of traffic they’re killing at (~250GB/mo) is probably just about what you need to replace a Comcast video service.

the FCC yesterday ruled:

Comcast had an “anticompetitive motive” because it delayed and blocked peer-to-peer files through applications such as BitTorrent. Such files often are high-quality video that might otherwise be watched and paid for on cable television.

and ordered Comcast to behave. As I noted earlier, this mirrors a previous decision about DSL companies monkeying with VOIP traffic.

Twittervision

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:19:00 -0400

Twittervision is combines Tweets and geo coding to show a realtime display of what people are Twittering. It’s quite a beautiful thing to watch, especially the 3D view.

I guess I wasn’t aware that Twitter fed all updates to third parties, so that’s something important to be aware of - it’s not just your followers who are seeing your updates.

I’m not sure it’s actually useful, but it certainly is neat, so probably it is useful to somebody.

I wonder if Twitter will be coming up with a trademark licensing program to allow apps like this to live peacefully.

Fonality Astroturfing FreePBX?

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:00 -0400

Have a read here and boggle in disbelief.

I used to run Trixbox on my PBX; I started when it wasn’t a commercial product, and Tim did a great prezo on it for SLUG. When they required registration to run the software I became very uncomfortable. When I couldn’t administer my PBX one day because their server was down, I switched to Elastix, and I couldn’t be happier - I should have done it sooner; it’s a superior product.

If you’re still sitting on the fence, this behavior from Fonality is likely to knock you square off it. That Fonality relies so heavily on FreePBX only makes it so much more inconceivable. Assuming this is true, only the dismissal of the individual involved could regain any trust the community once had in Fonality.

Oh, and BTW, a FreePBX backup and restore makes it fairly simple to switch from Trixbox to Elastix.

Missing Sync and the Garnet VM on Nokia n810

Bill McGonigle — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:23:00 -0400

In the long and continuing saga to have a decent mobile Internet solution that is friendly to Free Software, I’ve been working out a porting strategy to get rid of my Treo 650, which, while it’s been useful, is now beyond the end of its useful life. The replacement for the Treo is a Nokia n810, which is not a phone, but can use a phone over Bluetooth to get Internet access. It’s a great little linux box, with a Mozilla-based browser with Flash and wealth of 3rd party apps via .deb repositories. Wifi, bluetooth, GPS, etc. Meanwhile, I want a phone with good phone audio quality (pretty much rules out smartphones - bummer), EVDO, Bluetooth, and 4+ hours talk time (so I can run it all day without charging). A flip-phone is really what I want, to avoid accidental dialing in my pocket (DAMHINT), not just for the Captain Kirk factor.

I have a decent workflow established with the Treo 650 and Missing Sync on Mac OS X that works pretty well for me. Access, the company which owns Palm OS, released, a while back, a PalmOS 5 emulator for the Nokia n810 which runs all the basic Palm applications. I tried getting this working earlier but wasn’t successful.

Now that’s changed. One unexpected checkbox later and I have full HotSync between n810/Garnet and Missing Sync 5.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.11. Here’s how to do it:

First, in the Sharing Pane of System Preferences, make a new firewall exception like this, to allow in Network HotSync preferences:

Now, add a new handheld in Missing Sync, and change the Preferences, to include these:

And set the various standard conduits to overwrite data on handheld with desktop (once only).

Now, on the Garnet VM, put in the IP address of your Mac (dns didn’t work for me), and click the HotSync button. You should get a successful sync. Do it again to make sure it does nothing, quickly, indicating successful sync. Change some data on both ends and make sure it syncs. OK, you’ve got sync.

Now, go back and uncheck the allow-all-handhelds-to-network-sync box to protect your data. Make sure ‘Network’ is set in ‘Edit Handhelds’, and it’ll continue to work. I’m not sure what happens the first time, but there must be some handheld negotiation that’s required without permissions. Minor inconvenience, just needs to be documented.

All the iCal stuff should sync just fine, but MemoPad apparently doesn’t allow a way for sharing Memos between handhelds. So, to get this you also need to copy the Memo data file; copy:

~/Documents/Palm/Users/treo-profile/MemoPad.memopad

to:

~/Documents/Palm/Users/n810-profile/MemoPad.memopad

and sync again. You should have all your common Palm data on the n810 at this point.

Have fun. I ordered a new-in-box Motorola e815 radio from eBay for $90, which meets all my phone criteria. From here, I’d like to move to KDE PIM apps, and perhaps OpenSync. OpenSync to iSync is a non-starter, currently, but perhaps SyncML can bridge the gap.

Collateral Damage in Comcast vs. Bittorrent

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:25:00 -0500

It’s already well known that Comcast interferes with bittorrent traffic but what is less known is that their measures also take out other legitimate applications, such as iChat AV.

The trouble with interfering with some traffic is that you then have to defend why you don’t interfere with other types of traffic, of a more pernicious nature. One would think Comcast would save more money by building a decent network and defending its common-carrier status.

Vermont Confuses Me (specifically re: Fairpoint)

Bill McGonigle — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:11:00 -0500

The first half of that title could apply to so many things, but regarding the Fairpoint proposal, Vermont’s PSB found this:

In rejecting the application, Vermont’s Public Service Board said in a statement that FairPoint failed to demonstrate that the company would be financially sound after completing the transaction… “Significantly, the Board noted that its review did not consider a recent settlement in Maine that had the effect of lowering the purchase price of the merger,” the Vermont Public Service Board said in its statement.

And the article adds this:

The companies settled objections from Maine regulators on December 13 and revised its transaction proposal that lowered the price by about $200 million. The new reworked proposal, has not yet been submitted to Vermont regulators.

So, the Vermont PSB knows about the altered terms of the deal but decided to issue a ruling based on what it knows is inaccurate data? Why would they do such a thing?

Possibilities:

They were under a deadline
They can only cast a reject/accept under such a deadline
There wasn’t a deadline but they wanted to make the news and/or color perceptions
They’re clueless.

So, the menu as presented is: incompetence, malice, or bureaucracy. What other possibilities are there (I’m asking, not being rhetorical)? What does Hanlon have to say about government?

[Thanks to Steve for the link]

Fairpoint Deal Closer?

Bill McGonigle — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:21:00 -0500

I got this in my e-mail over the weekend:

   
Dear Verizon New England Inc. Customer,

Pending approval of the Maine, Vermont & New Hampshire public utilities commissions, Verizon has agreed to transfer control of Verizon New England Inc. assets in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire to FairPoint Communications. After the transfer, your new local service provider will be FairPoint Communications. We currently expect that this transfer will occur between January 31 and May 1, 2008.

Beginning December 2007, Verizon will cease providing paper-free billing. It is Verizon’s current understanding that FairPoint Communications will reinstate paper-free billing at a future date.

It has been a pleasure serving you.

Sincerely,
Verizon

Meanwhile, the Valley News seems to be printing the IBEW talking points without analysis and, while paying lip service to the necessity of high speed Internet for regional economic viability, it completely ignores the white elephant in the room which is Verizon’s neglect of New Hampshire’s telco infrastructure and unwillingness to make further investment. They do point out that Vermont has more regulation on the telcos there, but one has to wonder why a New-Hampshire based newspaper would conveniently leave out mention of its own state’s problem.

Is Net Neutrality a Waiting Regulatory Disaster?

Bill McGonigle — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:47:00 -0400

Ed Felten voices his concerns that asking for net neutrality is a regulatory disaster in the making. I left this response to his post:

There’s some level of reasonableness that can be achieved in any regulatory system, and, of course, room for abuse. That’s not unique to net neutrality, yet some regulation seems to help some markets. When I first wrote about Comcast’s conflict of interest in throttling heavy bandwidth users as video competition, I linked to an FCC ruling about DSL providers being forbidden to interfere with VOIP traffic. To me, there are some no-brainers that regulators can do like that without hosing the Internet forever. As far as folks here complaining about the bandwidth hogs - imagine if electricity usage were flat-rate. That’s what we have with bandwidth packages now. In the case of the natural monopoly, such as an ISP with xTTH, history has shown that metered usage with public oversight of rates is the model that is least-bad given the forces involved. All these issues of TCP resets, port filtering, SPAM zombies, bloated websites, torrent seeding, illegal p2p usage, etc. would work themselves out with a reasonable per-GB fee (20 cents, perhaps) and a minimal connection fee ($10 per mo, maybe). I suspect that those on the $15/mo package now would still pay a similar rate, and those on the $80/mo package would also still pay a similar rate. But there’d be none of this hassle of offering and ‘managing’ free, because ‘free’ doesn’t exist.

What I forgot to add is that this model also would drive the providers to increase speeds to the user, which the US is sorely lagging in. Obviously prices would have to decrease over time, compared with the overall economic environment.

One counterpoint would be all-you-can-talk phone plans. While these are technically ‘unlimited’, nobody actually talks all the time (even teenage girls need to go to school), as that takes labor, whereas a bittorrent client can run 24/7 with no real effort.

Dumb Heuristics (Facebook)

Bill McGonigle — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:17:00 -0400

Using heuristics to look for behavior patterns is a good idea. Implementing dumb heuristics just ticks off your users.

Case in point: Facebook. I rarely have need to use it much, but recently I had the opportunity to make a couple groups, and sent some invites to folks to join the groups. Well, Facebook decides to tell me that I’m using it to spam people and they’ll deactivate my account if I continue. Fine, I sent an e-mail to the folks instead (aside: an ad-driven site telling its users to stop generating more page loads?!?!) which was actually much easier.

Then I went looking for a couple folks I’d lost touch with and sent them friend requests - and it still told me I was using the site for spam. All I can figure is that friend requests must internally generate messages and it tripped on the same shortbus algorithm.

Googling for this leads to kinds of people complaining about the same thing - some even are banned for life for sending ‘too many’ friend requests. Facebook CSR’s apparently have authority to do so. No wonder Microsoft bought these guys.

I also setup an Orkut account. That I just had to go look up how to spell Orkut is one of the many things that’s keeping Google from squishing Facebook.