Robert Cringley looks at the effects of the FCC ruling on DSL that I mentioned in my previous post. Like me, he is doubtful that this is anything but a giveaway to the phone companies.

I believe larger companies are in general too conservative in rolling out new products. This has been especially true with phone companies. Telephone companies missed the broadband boat by 5 years at least. Cable companies aren’t much better. Countries like Korea and Japan are eclipsing us.

In the software industry, the startup comapnies lead the way with inovation (sorry, Bill G.). They do this because they have to, because brains are their biggest weapon against entrenched old-school companies. How many startup phone companes (outside of pure VoIP ones) can you name?

Giving the keys to these larger players will, in my opinion, further accelerate our slide into becoming a broadband backwater.

The Old Nole, my 1990 Honda Accord EX, up for sale. For those not in the know, the Old Nole got its name from the license plate it wore under its previous ownership (my Dad). The name “Not-Quite-As-Old Wolfpacker” never seemed to catch on, so I went with what works!

It’s been a fantastic car in every respect. It has taken the Turners over 221,000 miles. That’s the distance to the Moon! And it still has plenty of life left in it. It comes with sunroof, 4-speed automatic transmission, power windows and locks, ice-cold air conditioning, and AM/FM CD player. It regularly gets 26 MPG in city driving and 28 MPG on the highway: amazing for a car of its vintage.

If you’d like a piece of Turner history, it can be yours for $1800 or best offer. Contact me via email ( markt at markturner dot net) or call eight four six nine three one seven (area code nine one nine, of course). I’ll see if I can’t post some pictures, after I go give it a proper bath.

I went to Crazy Fire for lunch Friday, the first time in a long while. I handed my bowl of food to the cook working the grill and continued a conversation with my coworker.

In a few minutes, my lunch was ready. The cook, a large Latino, brought me my lunch and waited to hear what type of rice I preferred.

“White,” I said.

He stared at me blankly. Too much noise in the restaurant, I thought. Time for a different tack.

“Blanco,” I told him.
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I want to send a shout out to the dozen loyal MT.Net readers out there.

Thanks for reading. Y’all make it all worthwhile!

I just got back from my Asterisk presentation to TriLUG. The room was absolutely full. I don’t think there were seats available. Must have been close to 130 people there.

My slides somehow got corrupted about an hour before my talk was to begin, so I madly recreated them from memory right before packing things up and heading out. I looked like a college kid moving into his dorm, with arms full of computer stuff, backpacks, and laptop bags hanging off of me.

My demo system didn’t behave, which led to some delays, though fortunately not many. My reconstituted slides worked just fine and gave me a good story to tell in the process. I was surprised when Jason Tower motioned to me that I had five minutes left as I felt like I was just getting warmed up.

It was a great turnout. A huge turnout. Lots of fantastic questions were asked. I kept most everyone’s attention for a full 90 minutes, in spite of my technical difficulties. Looking back on it, I’m amazed I pulled it off as well as I did.

Next month’s talk is by former Red Hat CEO Bob Young. Ironically, I owe my speaking success to getting fired by his company. Three years ago, I would have never imagined standing in front of a crowd of total strangers and speaking for five minutes, much less 90 minutes. Leaving Bob’s company led me to my sales engineering job at my last company. It was there I gained confidence in public speaking.

Thanks, Bob, for canning me. Oftentimes those bumps in life are there to teach you something.

I’ll be presenting Asterisk to the Triangle Linux User Group Thursday night. It will be a general overview of the system and will include a live demonstration near the end. I’ll be giving away a few complete Asterisk servers as prizes, too.

The talk begins at 7 PM and should last until 8:30 or so. It will be held at Red Hat‘s corporate headquarters in Raleigh. See the TriLUG site above for directions.

Hope to see you there!

After a long dry spell, we finally got some decent rain. Yesterday morning the floodgates opened on us, dumping three inches of rain in just one day. Amazing.

If that wasn’t enough weather fun, could Irene be coming for a visit?
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I struck up a conversation with a Bellsouth tech last week who regaled me with all the planned improvements Bellsouth hoped to make with its network. He was a DSL tech as well as a line installer and was quite fluent in the upcoming technology. Among the gems he threw out were a 6 Mbit download speed coming in September and video on demand coming soon afterward. The goal is 100 Mbits to the home, and will be here sooner than you think. Bellsouth has embarked on an aggressive deployment of new DSLAMs to growing neighborhoods with the goal of bringing fiber to within 5000 feet of their subscribers.

The video on demand stuff sounded appealing, as that’s where I expect things will be heading. I’ve said for a while that the television network is a dying breed. PVR’s like Tivo blaze the way for viewers to purchase their programming by the half-hour, not by the channel. Bellsouth hopes to capitalize on this with their video service, which will pipe three or four simultaneous channels into your home over their copper. Then again, those of you who were in the game in the early days will remember that ISDN was hawked for video on demand. Look how that turned out!

The tech repeated a line I’ve often heard from other telecom technicians: things aren’t fair because the phone companies are regulated and other ISPs (like Time Warner, or competing DSL providers) are not. The view from the phone companies is that their hands are unfairly tied. That all changed last week when the FCC has effectively killed DSL competition. The ruling allows incumbent carriers like Bellsouth to cut loose competiting ISPs from their DSL network. No longer are the ILECs required to offer their copper to competiting providers. As others have noted, the future doesn’t look good for Internet users.

In many other cases it would be a win for a free market. It doesn’t quite square here, though, because the phone companies owe their existence to their early days as monopolies. That fancy infrastructure the phone companies so jealously protect was bought and paid for at the expense of you, the ratepayer. AT&T executives used to brag how the government, in the name of national security (sound familiar?), paid for a large chunk of its network.

So if we want to talk about fairness, we should take that monopoly into account. We should also take steps to ensure another monopoly doesn’t grow up around broadband access. Last week the FCC opened the jailhouse door and now the robber barons are on the loose again.

If there ever was a time for home-grown, wireless neighborhood networks to show how broadband shold be, it’s now. Let’s dust off those yagis and get to work.

NASA‘s Mission Specialist Steve Robinson, the guy whose spacewalking duct-tape job made the shuttle safe for reentry, has recorded the first podcast from space. Take a listen to Steve’s personal account of the STS-114 mission.