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No Thrusday Show?!
::grumble::
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Where is the Thursday show? I had to listen to the radio on the drive into work today!!! Grrrr.....
Our ISP is -still- having problems even this morning. -_-*
The state of competition among ISP's is pathetic. It's all to do with the telecom industry. If you have a choice between 1 cable provider and 1 dsl provider, you have an unusually high number of choices. Where I live, I'm lucky enough to have excellent cable. But it's just that: pure luck.
Google has miles of dark fiber, but they really don't want to start an ISP. They're willing to pay big bucks to lobby for net neutrality, so apparently it's worth a lot to them. If ISP's decide to jack Google in a non-net-neutral world, running an ISP would be the only choice. While I can imagine the industry of telecom is a nasty clusterfuck they'd rather keep their hands off, I wish they would run one.
I'd pay whatever the hell they wanted if I could get on an ISP as reliable as all of Google's services. An ISP that really doesn't want to be one is perfect; that means they wont become complacent with their service, since they don't even like to do it. They won't try to base their entire company's profits on the ISP, they'll just use it to ensure smooth delivery of other Google services.
There's hardly an upper limit to what I'd pay for a high-quality ISP. I get somewhere north of 10 Mbps on my cable, and I'd pay more for more bandwidth. If one ISP had a proven, verifiable reliability advantage over another, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable premium. In other words, if I'm not a complete freak, there is plenty of demand for competitive service, but there's just no supply.
It's probably because the telecom in this country is a virtual monopoly; through a combination of collusion, cartels, and actual monopoly practice (coughAT&Tcough), the industry suffers all the classic problems of a monopoly. We can only hope the Democrats remember their role as trust-busters and protectors of the American consumer.
Over the past week or two it's been having problems. It would go down frequently, come up for a minute and go down again. Last night was the final doom. I got home and tried to download Firefox to install on my new laptop. It was going to take 5 hours. wtf? At one point everything went back to normal and I was able to grab Firefox in a few seconds. Eventually it got slow and useless again. This morning when I woke up, it didn't work at all. It better be working when I get home, that's all I can say.
I'm waiting for Verizon to offer FiOS where we live. I don't know why they don't deploy that shit in as many places as they can as quickly as possible.
Several years ago, when my company was still called SNET, we trialed an amazing new fiber optic system where the cabling combined the fiber and the power in one thick cable. It was a great idea and it solved the problem of what happens to your phone if the power goes out because power was fed from the central office to the remote site. Without this option the fiber fed remote node would die when you had a commercial power failure. Yes most remote terminals do have battery back-up but at this point in time (mid 90's) the back-up batteries would only last 30 minutes due to the drain of the laser/fiber equipment.
After convincing the power company that we were not trying to compete we had to deal with the cable companies, with who we were competing. See, the company acquired a statewide cable franchise at this time. We were planning to use this new fiber to the home system (remember, this is from over ten years ago) to compete with cable TV.
At any rate, because phone wires are on the bottom of the pole with power on top and cable in the middle we ran into some problems hanging the cabling. The biggest problem has to do with cable companies. Cable companies are the worst. Their techs constantly stand on telco wires while they work on the cable wires! The cable companies raised a stink saying that having the power run below the cable wires would be a safety problem for their techs. We explained that their techs should not be walking on our wires with climbing spikes on!
Eventually the project died...