Computerwold has a very intriguing article. The jest of it is businesses are encourging ‘casual telecommuting’ in an effort to support a reduction in commuting and drive down fuel prices. It is in companies interests to do so as they too consume fuel. –

A Reuters report today highlights organizations that are cutting back the number of days employees are required to physically show up at work because of soaring gas prices. Even employees who are required to be on-site in order to work, such as janitors, are being cut down to four-day workweeks to save gas. White collar workers, of course, are being allowed, encouraged or forced to stay home once a week or more often and telecommute.

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

“… it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?”, well yes it does unfortunately. That is if you are going to telecommute then you need a broadband connection on a fairly regular basis. Which is the rub. Say my company said I only had to show up for a video conference once a week the rest done via telecommute. To pull that off I have to be located in cities providing the service. For example here is a map of FIOS deployment.. Were I to want to be in Denver I would be out of luck.

The point? If We the American People want to put a stake thru the hearts of the middle east then we need to complete a transcontinental broadband system. We did it with the railroads in the 1800’s, the phone system in the 1900’s. It is time to do the same in the 2100’s. Till we have the top 500 metro markets covered in broadband and wireless access nearly everywhere we will not achieve the dream of ‘extreme telecommuting’ and deliver a death blow to both high gas prices and middle east geopolitics.

The article does have a kernel of opportunity though. The gas situation may just be the point at which corporations do finally figure out that management by proximity is not the most efficient method of management. If that occurs there will be an explosion in cottage industry employment. With location decoupled from employment results becomes more important than schmoozing as companies will have to develop result oriented metric management styles. We can only hope.

Drive bits not cars.

Compterworld article.

iProvo, once touted as a proof of concept for government run networks has gone private. The technically excellent FTTP never managed to grow and was hemorrhaging customers at the end.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that one of Utah’s two struggling municipal fiber networks, iProvo, is going to be sold to Broadweave Networks for $40.6 million. Broadweave will lease the existing network operations center from the city to service residential and business fiber, while the city continues to use the network for municipal functions. Last December I mentioned the city brought in consultants to find out why the project was losing customers, and discovered it was thanks to incumbents undercutting prices, and poor customer service.iProvo now becomes a private enterprise, which should thrill regional incumbents like Qwest and critics like the Libertarian Reason Foundation, which had consistently targeted the project as an example of government dysfunction. According to the Provo press release, the FTTH network reached some 36,000 residences. However, only 10,300 actually subscribed, and 120 were leaving per month. (Broadband Reports)

While the usual cast of government network advocates are busy formulating reasons for failure, I can tell you the real reason is government itself. I can also predict the gov net advocates will conclude that the problem was not enough money was spent. While there’s no denying a government entity can build anything given a blank check, they are not accustomed to competing for customers. In the end that’s the underlying problem that no amount of taxpayer dollars can fix. Our incumbent duopoly of private access providers isn’t accustomed to competing much either, but they do have shareholders to please. It’s also important to remember that the existence of the duopoly is due to governmental meddling on a colossal scale. Assuming any government entity can improve things by an attempted end run around a beast of government’s own creation is pretty naive.

Dear FCC and Congress: Tell me again how the marketplace has become competitive enough to dump local loop unbundling. Darth V’s FIOS product faces so little competition in either speed or price, that they’ve been able to incrementally bump prices on a regular schedule. The average big bundle FIOS customer pays around $150 for what can be had for $40 in Paris. Before we start hearing excuses, France has a more antiquated legacy infrastructure, more labor union control of business, higher taxes, higher salaries and a shorter work week.

Discussing this morning’s earnings, Verizon CFO Doreen Toben told investors, analysts and reporters on a conference call today that FiOS users can expect a new round of price hikes this quarter. “You may recall we increased prices for selected products in the first quarter last year,” said Toben while discussing FiOS (see transcript (pdf)). “We anticipate increasing prices once again in certain products and bundles in the second quarter this year.” Which FiOS products and bundles was not specified.

Verizon has consistently nudged up the price of FiOS broadband, especially for customers who refuse to sign up for long term contracts or add additional bundled services. Standalone broadband service jumped $5 in many markets last fall, while double and triple play bundles have consistently increased anywhere from $5 to $20 since FiOS was launched (depending on the product market). (Broadband Reports)

A small family owned telco plans to invest more than $3100 per customer to deliver fiber broadband service. Are they crazy? I think not. Rural areas tend to have higher take rates for services like satellite tv and internet - often at inflated prices. When deployed the customer base should grow spurred by new economic growth.

On Monday, executives of Ellettsville-based Smithville said they will invest $90 million over three years to build a fiber-optic network across 17 counties, including Hendricks County. The network will be faster than most offerings from cable and phone companies and will reach 29,000 customers, mostly in southwestern Indiana. (Indystar)

Lucky carriers. The lab rats keep finding more ways for them to milk more capacity out of the same old infrastructure. This time it’s a 100X jump in down load speed. More plug and play upgrades may be on the way.

Wales’ Bangor University claim to have discovered a means whereby data can be downloaded over 100 times faster than today’s typical broadband speeds.

According the university’s Dr Jianming Tang, “Importantly, it works with the existing fibre optic technology we have, so there is no need to rip out the cabling which runs the country’s telecommunications network.” (from The Inquirer)

Life is good if you’re a carrier. It keeps getting cheaper to to add capacity, and business as growing. Too bad life is not also so good for the average US consumer who keeps being forced to pay more for the same or less.

So Verion, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have launched the trend that will change their industry. So what does this do to the telecommunications scene? Its obvious for the wireless industry. We mentioned it previously. But what about land line, VoIP, etc?

VoIP –

• Man their life just got harder. In a situation where someone was using a wireless plan local and VoIP for national calling that is about to fall apart. The consumer could apply their Vonage $$ to their wireless plan and go unlimited on a single instrument.
• As a business model standalone VoIP is toast. As a technology it will survive. But as a enabler to carrier technologies.
• Google’s Grand Central maybe the alternative that represents VoIP. Gmail has already inegrated IM and voice.
• SIP as a VoIP sister will also survive. But its use will be layered under integrated, unified portals be it cell, mail systems or textual contexts or an amalgam of all of them.

Landline POTS –

• The exodus for primary lines will go from single digits to double digits in a year. That will make their POTS debt structure harder to sustain.
• A battle is going to occur between the Telcos and the Federal Government on ‘Carrier of Last Resort’ provisions. Though the carriers get compensated for doing so it won’t be enough to offset the capital drain to maintain older technology or upgrading low density areas on a long term basis.
• The cross over point. At some period in the near future the Telcos are going to be earning more income on broadband and its services than on POTS. When that occurs and penetration of broadband is over 50% they will again wish to move off the old technology even in profitable POTs areas. Fiber is cheaper to maintain and they will wish to go there.

700mhz –

• The unlimited plans set the upper marker for similar services in the pending 700mhz band. To get any further funding out of the customer will require new differentiated services.
• To encourage a customer to switch to the 700mhz services the costs will also have to be cheaper just to forestall some of the switching costs.
• Quality of Service better be better! Wireless still has problems with QoS. A clearer connection would be a fair customer inducement.
• Penetration. Can’t expect it initially, but at some point the new kid will have to have penetration levels comparable to wireless today. Its the price of ante long term.

Other –

• As a practical matter does it make sense to continue a 10 digit number scheme? In a world where the cell morphs into the communicator and its use transcends just cell telephony the old 10 digit system might be passe. It might just as identifying for someone to use their XXXXXXX@gmail.com name as a number.
• Routing services evolve away from SS7 of the PSTN world. An enhanced RADIUS-like metadirectory structure takes over so that the directory system is unified and extensible and possibly even user modifiable. XML like tools and structures make that possible.

And so it begins…

Compilation by admin and Dr. Dog.

Don’t always focus on saving money at the outset; such as in the process of domain registration. Unless your website design is not attractive; it can’t appeal your visitors to stay there. Also bear in mind the tracking of internet connectivity i.e. dsl or ISP types of your visitors. Your web hosting servers should comply with all types of ISPs and explorers.

Well I picked on AT&T in a post below. Verizon’s turn in the barrel. Verizon had a satisfied customer in FIOS till he signed up for FIOS TV service. Part of the sad tale below –

For a detailed history of all the problems I have experienced with FiOS since March 2007, see my full review of the service at dslreports.com: according to technical support, I have 55 unique support tickets under my name, the majority of which are related to problems with FiOS TV.)

Since March 2007, I have been forced to use the “nuclear option” - contacting Verizon’s “Presidential Appeals” department - on two separate occasions, as their first-level technical support was unable to resolve anything in a timely manner. So far, the appeals department is 0 for 2 - each time, the problem was not resolved.

I contacted the presidential appeals department because HBO video on demand would not function properly; signs of tiling would appear every few minutes. Numerous technicians were dispatched and were unable to resolve the situation. Several weeks passed before the representative working for the appeals department came across an internal Verizon document stating that this was a “known issue” and a fix would be implemented in August 2007. To this day, this has not yet been fixed; according to a Verizon employee who posts on the FiOS TV message board, a fix is supposedly still being tested.

Weeks later, I was forced to contact presidential appeals for a second time when the normal levels of support were unable to resolve issues with the image quality; once again, several technicians were dispatched but were ultimately unable to resolve the issue. At one point, in an act of desperation, the local group decided to replace most of the components up to and inside the home. The measures were ineffective; the problems continued. A local manager was eventually dispatched out to the home; he claimed that the sub-par image quality was a result of “electrical issues” having to do with the wiring inside the home. End of discussion, case closed. (A visit from an electrician several weeks later would show that this claim was incorrect.)

The litany of his complaints is detailed in this DSLReports thread. Sadly, one of the reasons that Verizon took the plunge with fiber was to be able to reduce costs. Unlike copper, fiber is unaffected by most environmental issues. But this guys tale seems to indicate that though the fiber line is less vulnerable, the ancillary support equipment is not. Nox Nix?

HT: Consumerist

[Piling on Update]: Looks like VZ Calif has pooped the pooch. 74k customers can’t retrieve voicemails — link.

With the cable cuts over in the Middle East still fresh in our minds, I thought it mght be of interest to our readers a little historical reflection on how this all has been put together. No I am not going to bore you with my iconoclastic writing style and tales from the Telco crypt. Instead –

The headquarters was Kew Gardens outside of London. Penang was one of the forward outposts, and it became incomparably more important than the nearby fort. In 1876, 70,000 seeds of the rubber tree, painstakingly collected by botanists in the Amazon rain forest, were brought to Kew Gardens and planted in a greenhouse. About 2,800 of them germinated and were shipped to the botanical gardens in Sri Lanka and Penang, where they propagated explosively and were used to establish rubber plantations.

Most of these plantations were on the neighboring Malay Peninsula, a lumpy, bony tentacle of land that stretches for 1,000 miles from Bangkok in the north to Singapore in the south, where it grazes the equator. The landscape is a stalemate between, on one hand, the devastatingly powerful erosive forces of continual tropical rainstorms and dense plant life, and, on the other hand, some really, really hard rocks. Anything with the least propensity to be eroded did so a long time ago and turned into a paddy. What’s left are ridges of stone that rise almost vertically from the landscape and are still mostly covered with rain forest, notwithstanding efforts by the locals to cut it all down. The flat stuff is all used for something - coconuts, date palms, banana trees, and above all, rubber.

Until artificial rubber was invented by the colony-impaired Germans, no modern economy could exist without the natural stuff. All of the important powers had tropical colonies where rubber was produced. For the Netherlands, it was Indonesia; for France, it was Indochina; for the British, it was what they then called Malaya, as well as many other places.

Without rubber and another kind of tree resin called gutta-percha, it would not have been possible to wire the world. Early telegraph lines were just naked conductors strung from pole to pole, but this worked poorly, especially in wet conditions, so some kind of flexible but durable insulation was needed. After much trial and error, rubber became the standard for terrestrial and aerial wires while gutta-percha (a natural gum also derived from a tree grown in Malaya) was used for submarine cables. Gutta-percha is humble-looking stuff, a nondescript brown crud that surrounds the inner core of old submarine cables to a thickness of perhaps 1 centimeter, but it was a wonder material back in those days, and the longer it remained immersed in salt water, the better it got.

So far, it was all according to the general plan that the British had in mind: find some useful DNA in the Americas, stockpile it at Kew Gardens, propagate it to other botanical gardens around the world, make money off the proceeds, and grow the economy. Modern-day Penang, however, is a good example of the notion of unintended consequences.

Warning! I pulled this from Wired in thier 0.8 days. The formatting is funky and in some places nonexistent. But nonetheless it is an interesting read of how the undersea cable system has developed and laid out. So warm up that cup of joe in the micro, settle into the easy chair and give a read — here.

Enjoy your Sunday!

Overseeing the world’s largest communications market could get a lot easier if the FCC doesn’t get their act together soon. Why? Because the US market will cease to be the largest if the present policy continues. The agency recently sought to fine ABC for a broadcast breifly showing butt cheeks in 2003 and has been pushing for a la carte cable channels (a good idea, but enable TVoIP with fat broadband pipes and the market will do it). What they have not done is enforce a 1996 agreement with the Telcos that was supposed to bring big investments in last mile infrastructure and open access for competetion:

In 1996, the government agreed to free the Baby Bells to compete in the long-distance market if they met certain conditions. Among other things, the Bells promised to share their facilities with other providers and pledged to run fiber to every home. “Almost every one of them reneged on their promises,” says David Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group.

Ironically, the rate relief the carriers were given over the years in return for their empty promises — by some estimates as high as $70 billion — would have gone a long way toward running fiber to every home in the U.S.

“The politicians gave away the store, and all of the networks that were paid for by the rate [payers] were handed over to the Verizons of the world,” says Passmore. source: Computerworld

Unwittingly, the FCC is shipping US jobs overseas every bit as effectively as wholesale factory closings did. The largest carriers, AT&T (aka SBC) and Verizon spent more far more capital on mergers and acquisitions than on the promised network improvements without even a harsh word from the FCC. An act of Congress won’t fix this. An executive order might. IF Mr Bush would lke to leave a more positive legacy, he could forcibly direct the FCC to enforce existing regs already on the books. We’ll recover from the naked butt cheeks most of us missed in 2003 and being forced to pay for Al Gore’s Current TV that no one watches. We will not recover from the rest of the world passing us by if we do not get serious about a 100MBPS pipe into every American home and start deploying it now.

One big advantage copper has had over fiber is that glass fiber tends to break in sharp bends, and light transmission can be impaired in even soft bends. While not capable of carrying backhaul speeds, Corning developed a new bendable fiber that was said to tolerate sharp bends. Corning’s first real world customer has found the fiber does work as advertised.

Verizon worked with Corning during trials and has plans to deploy the technology shortly, but a company by the name of Connexion Technologies this week became the first Clearcurve customer.

According to Connexion, a Flordia FTTH installer, the bendable fiber was a time and money saver when it came to MDU installs. “During our field trials, we saw firsthand the ease and speed of installation of the ClearCurve Drop Cable,” says company founder Glen Lang. “With this technology, we were able to realize at least a 30-percent time savings, in addition to material savings such as ducts.”

This demonstration video from the Corning website is worth watching. (from Broadband Reports)