We are #1

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by BeamOn

With each company owning and maintaining it's own separate grid adds to cost and uneven service. For example when we moved in our home, only AT&T service would work, not Verizon nor T-Mobile. Doubt if anything has changed. And this is the Bay Area, not some remote backwater!

It's difficult in mountainous areas. When I lived up on the Russian River I had two different cell phones, AT&T and Sprint. I could use AT&T from my house but I had to use Sprint at the end of my block and had to switch back and forth from one to the other as I traveled through the area.

John

[djv8ga]

Gotta love utility Companies . The fight continues over solar -
http://www.azcentral.com/story/money...mers/19753373/

[Rajoo]

Originally Posted by Boreas

It's difficult in mountainous areas. When I lived up on the Russian River I had two different cell phones, AT&T and Sprint. I could use AT&T from my house but I had to use Sprint at the end of my block and had to switch back and forth from one to the other as I traveled through the area.

John

The AT&T signal goes from five three dots at the end of our driveway and zero at the end of the block. When my brother's family visit us, they need to go to the end of our driveway to use their Verizon.

I don't quite buy the mountain theory. There used to be no AT&T coverage between Placerville and Echo Summit on the way to lake Tahoe via US-50. Now there is a strong signal almost the entire way.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by BeamOn

I don't quite buy the mountain theory. There used to be no AT&T coverage between Placerville and Echo Summit on the way to lake Tahoe via US-50. Now there is a strong signal almost the entire way.

Cell signals are line of sight and are blocked quite effectively by geographic features. That's why that always look to site them on high ground.

When I lived on the Russian River, I was less than 1/2 a mile from a cell tower on the Korbel Champagne vineyard's property. I lived in a canyon. If I were on the side of the canyon closest to the tower, I couldn't get the signal. The canyon wall blocked it. If I went to the other side of the canyon I left the "shadow" of the canyon wall and could then get the signal.

I could also get the signal by going up to the second floor of my next door neighbor's house. His house was built higher up the canyon wall. The combination of 2-storey building and a starting point farther up the wall meant the signal was no longer blocked.

John

[merrylander]

Originally Posted by Boreas

Cell signals are line of sight and are blocked quite effectively by geographic features. That's why that always look to site them on high ground.

When I lived on the Russian River, I was less than 1/2 a mile from a cell tower on the Korbel Champagne vineyard's property. I lived in a canyon. If I were on the side of the canyon closest to the tower, I couldn't get the signal. The canyon wall blocked it. If I went to the other side of the canyon I left the "shadow" of the canyon wall and could then get the signal.

I could also get the signal by going up to the second floor of my next door neighbor's house. His house was built higher up the canyon wall. The combination of 2-storey building and a starting point farther up the wall meant the signal was no longer blocked.

John

I tried their 'champagne' once and dumped the rest of the bottle.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by merrylander

I tried their 'champagne' once and dumped the rest of the bottle.

I remember once at a wedding I attended the champagne started with a decent import, can't remember which, but after everyone had had several glasses, they brought out the Korbel, thinking that by then nobody could tell the difference. They were wrong.

John

[whell]

Originally Posted by Boreas

According to the author, US broadband is great because, even though it's only half as fast (or a third as fast in customers with speeds above 10 Mbps) as the fastest, it's pretty?

Basically, that article admits that we're slow and expensive but insists that we're not that slow and expensive. Typical Forbes apologist for Big Business.

It also addresses net neutrality not at all.

John

No, that's not what he's saying, and it certainly does speak to net neutrality.

n large swaths of this country, the incumbent cable operator faces a fiber-based telco offering triple-play packages. Unless you think that cable operators are colluding with the telcos—a position espoused by Ms. Crawford—Internet prices are less than monopoly levels where telco-based fiber is available. And help is on the way for the rest of us in the form of wireless 4G LTE offerings, satellite broadband connections, and further telco deployment.

This is not to say that market forces and a largely hands-off Internet policy have delivered the ideal state of competition. In a market with large fixed costs, when consumers are reluctant to switch providers, and when certain must-have video programming is controlled by the incumbent cable operator, we shouldn’t expect ten broadband providers in each zip code.

IMHO, you don't need to drop restrictive network management regulations, since the market is on its way to taking care of this itself. As more broadband options become available in more markets, and as more content that is currently captive to cable becomes available on competing content providers - and this is truly more about the delivery of content than it is about download speeds - the issue of blocking, throttling and network management will become far less relevant.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by whell

IMHO, you don't need to drop restrictive network management regulations, since the market is on its way to taking care of this itself. As more broadband options become available in more markets, and as more content that is currently captive to cable becomes available on competing content providers - and this is truly more about the delivery of content than it is about download speeds - the issue of blocking, throttling and network management will become far less relevant.

I don't see how you can divorce content delivery from download speeds. High transfer rate is essential for things like Netflix, for gaming and for many, many business uses like HF trading. 4G LTE is sloooooooow, around 7 or 8 Mbsp and satellite is very fast but expensive and a heavy rain will knock it out.

Be that as it may, whatever the technology, it's still going to be provided by an ISP and, therefore, throttling, blocking and other forms of restricting access are still possibilities unless there is regulation, the dreaded R word, prventing it.

John

[merrylander]

Look chaps there is only so much bandwidth from DC to Green light so forget net neutrality. Three subscribers on my leg of cable decide to watch movies and I am SOL for a software download. Verizon finally admitted to the Glenwood Hum and switched our land line to FiOS. Of course that means that now I get to provide the talking battery at the local Flicker and Flash's rates.

Despite the urgings of the IETF the Internet still has yet to switch to IPv6 and IPv4 was one of the reasons ITU-T rejected it as a telephony system as there simply was not enough address space.

[merrylander]

Since this started about taxes maybe Big Erik can tell us how it is now, but when I left Canada the Internal Revenue income tax form was only 4 pages and one of those pages was the tax table. Her out tax accountant sends me the State and Federal forms to sign and send in in a large manilla envelope and there are more Effing pages than I can count.

So simplifying tax codes can be done but as long as that collection of yahoos on the Court insist on the assinine concept that money = speech and that Corporations are people fuggetabouttit