So Much For Fios

I'm a little dumbfounded that Verizon would let a customer of over three decades leave so quickly. Alas, I'm getting ahead of myself...

My modem died, and their only solution was to sell me a new one for $59.99 (trust me, if you saw it you'd agree it's a $10 part, tops). I would at least understand if they wanted to try and sign me up for another year to get the modem, like with a cell phone plan. Unfortunately, that's not the deal, even when I told them nicely that I'd be shopping around for "other providers"= Optimum Online that runs down my street.

So, it was off to Optimum we go. I called them up, explained the deal, and asked about both an internet deal, and triple play. I got the following prices: for internet only, including the modem (now a sore spot), they want $29.95 for six months, and then $49.95 thereafter. While the 15/2 speed is no slouch (when you can get it before the kiddies get home and start BitTorrenting), it's kind of expensive compared to Fios.

In for a penny, in for a pound. So, in for more, how about the triple play. I got quoted $29.95 for each of the services (phone, internet, television). Of course, they leave a few details out.

"Do I need a box," I inquired.
"Oh, yes, how many TV's?" was the reply.

I proceeded to tell them that I needed two settop boxes, one for HD and one for standard. I also wanted a DVR which runs $9.95 monthly. Each box (HD and standard are the same) was $6.50 with the remote. The internet is the same 15/2 with the included cable modem. The TV is Family iO package with "180 channels." The phone is a prioritized VoIP package which includes unlimited calling throughout the US.

So, the new total is $112.83 for all of this. Hmmm. Not quite the $29.95 each for all three services. You know, I'm in a Fios area, can you do better? I'm told that they can throw in the DVR for free, so the new total is $102.88. If I want the movie package it's an addition $10, but so far I'm passing on this as I wasn't expecting to do this for a few months.

I inquire about other fees. There's a $14.95 installation fee which they can waive. There's a $40 "number port fee" that they can't waive. I ask for it to reduced, but they won't. Ok, I go ahead, and give them the go ahead, and I make an appointment.

I call Verizon to cancel my DSL, which isn't working anyway, and all of a sudden, they can help. The nice folks now can give me modem for free, and a credit for my downtime. The only thing is that they sign me up for a monthly modem maintenance plan of 99 cents monthly. I'm tempted to go back to my original plan, and forego cable for a few more months.

So, I open this up to the peanut gallery? Was the cable deal I'm getting a good deal or not? Should I stick with Verizon a few more months?

Jonas

DSL Modem No Go

I've been a generally satisfied DSL customer from Verizon. While I need to have the overpriced copper phone line to get internet, the DSL (for 768/128 kbps) is a veritable bargain at $17.99 monthly and suits me fine. I've had it since 2005, and to the best of my recollection, it was only down for one night in all that time- a good uptime record my anyone's measure. Even when my phone line died, the DSL kept chugging along.

With that in mind, I present the following. I went to turn on my internet yesterday, and the modem wouldn't connect to anything. In fact, while the other lights for power and connections glowed green on the box, the modem, a Westell 6100, had an orange light for internet- clearly not good. The computer acted otherwise fine, and I had made no changes to anything, so it clearly wasn't the problem.

Hmmmm. I went to check for a dial tone on the phone line, and it was connected so that wasn't the issue. I also double checked the wires and everything was still hooked up fine. Ok, time for some outside help, and a consult of the networking kind.

I called Verizon, and I wandered through their voice menus to "Repairs" and "DSL." They did a line test, and told me it was working fine (which I already knew). The next step was to speak to someone. I figured at this point I was going to tell them that it wasn't working, and they were going to tell me that they had a network outage, or a switch down, and they were working on it or something.

Not quite. The tech support is clearly outsourced, and I had reached somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. The reps accent was very thick, and her English was much less than fluent. She painfully talked me through rebooting the router, and reconnecting the wires to no avail. Then she talked me through some DOS commands to try to manually connect the modem to Verizon which didn't work either. She also had me take the wireless router out of the mix, even though I was plugged into it with a wire anyway. After over 45 minutes of this "just one more minute," and "thank you for providing this information," the two key American phrases she had mastered, we were no further along, and I had somewhere I needed to be, so I thanked her, and told them I'd call back when I could work on this further.

After dinner, I gave it another shot. This time I reached the Philippines, and guys English was quite fluent with much less of an accent. Yay! At least now I could focus on fixing the connection, and not repeating everything four times. After a few minutes of me explaining what had gone on before, him reviewing the notes of my previous encounter, an on hold consult with a network specialist, and my modem was pronounced dead. Ok, now what?

Here's the frustrating part. I was told I needed to contact billing, and they would figure out how to get me another modem. I was connected to them at 7:55 pm, but they close at 8, and they didn't pick up the phone. Clearly mediocre service.

I'm wondering how this will go at this point. If I have to buy another modem, I'll probably cancel the service, and try with something else. The original Westell 6100 was a piece of junk, and I was surprised it lasted as long as it did. The ideal would be if I could just bring it to a Verizon store, and they could swap me out, and hopefully charge me a nominal fee for a refurb.

Stay tuned, Verizon billing opens in 40 minutes or so...

Jonas

NudgeCast 4/16/08

Click to Play

This week's lineup: broadband limits, Microsoft branded stores, and cool site Billshrink.

Are Dumb Terminals Getting Repackaged?

Back in the mid 90's I remember that there was plenty of debate at organizations as to whether it was better to deploy fully functional PC's, or those invariably beige dumb terminals. IT types argued that the dumb terminals were cheaper to deploy, easier to upgrade, and posed less of a security risk (maybe virtually none). Yeah, nobody was plugging in their USB key or iPod to any of those beige screens.

Around the same time, I was employed intermittently at a not so secret governmental facility. Throughout the place, they had terminals like you see pictured above and to the right. They consisted of a keyboard, which plugged into the monitor. Mouse? We didn't need no stinkin' mouse! The monitor (ours were orange monochromatic models) then plugged into the wall outlet for power, and into an Ethernet connection for data. It was a model of simplicity. These boxes, ugly and dumb as all heck, were quite simple to support centrally, for as far as I could tell, they had no internal processing power. Everything was done at the server level, and we had access to email, word processing, and data based applications- but not the World Wide Web. With no way to plug in a peripheral, this network was locked down tighter than a drum, and it was absolutely secure, even from the floppy discs that were popular back then. I had heard that they had six servers running all of this, and it never went down, but it did slow down significantly a few times as they had to take some of them offline. At the time, I also thought that it was pretty dumb that these appliances couldn't do anything on their own.

Enough with the history, let's fast forward several years to the here and now. In the great dumb terminal vs. PC war, the clear winner was the PC. As a matter of fact, as I was leaving the facility in the new millenium, they were replacing the dumb beige boxes with Windows based PC's (which a bunch of us promptly added some networked games to, but alas I digress). The power of the WWW was simply too much to resist, and as the applications got more and more complex, it was too much for the servers to handle, and it was better to offload some of the processing to the desktop.

However, now I see the trend reversing. Desktop pc's currently have tons of computing power. However, over 90% of users hardly use it for anything beyond email, word processing and the web. All of these pedestrian applications worked fine on 486 chips, and hardly take advantage of multicore processors that we've all flocked to. More and more, the internet hosts and runs the application. Many users use online document editors such as Zoho and Google Documents. Even more resource intensive tasks like file conversion are now easily done online with tools such as Zamzar. Finally, there are even plenty of sites that can do online video editing, a typically resource heavy task, and let's not forget about online photo editing as well. With all of this at our disposal, for the affordable price of free, installing software becomes much less of an issue, and is easier to justify for frequently used tasks.

With so much of this going on online, and not using the clock cycles of your PC, the network connection becomes far more important than the processor speed. Hence why users are gobbling up the faster speed connections as fast as fiber can get run to their home. In a way, the speed of the network can be as important a determinant of overall performance as is the speed of the computer. Needless to say, dialup is about as useful as that 386 desktop that was long ago placed curbside.

The current trend in phones is to shift the broadband network from a wired affair to a wireless one. This is the so called "third generation" network that gets discussed, and is becoming more commonplace here in America. Other initiatives include WiMax, and the recent wireless auction that may even provide a third pathway to the home for internet access over these potentially robust wireless networks. Finally, the groundwork is being laid for affordable access everywhere, all the time, and a move beyond WiFi with its purposely limited range that was never really designed for anything beyond a home router.

With these wireless broadband networks, the other half of the equation becomes the smartphone. Users are moving beyond moving their phone as only a voice communication device. Beyond even a dedicated text messaging platform, the possibilities are opening to have internet access everywhere, in a useful format. Sure, my Palm T/X could access the internet over WiFi, but the Blazer browser is quite limiting. With the option to have iPhone apps written by 3rd parties, expect to see some innovation there in the months ahead. With the network assuming greater importance, suddenly that underpowered smartphone, with a flash memory card for storage, is more than adequate as everything is really online anyway, and not local.

If things continue in the trend that many are guessing, than the next generation of smartphones, could very well be the seriously attractive reincarnation of those beige dumb terminals. Now if only they could make the data plans more affordable I'd be willing to jump on board. How many months on my T-Mobile contract again?

Jonas

Verizon Won, Now What?

With the coming end of analog television, an historic opportunity was created. The soon to be vacated portion of VHF television spectrum, popularly known as VHF was to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. In case you haven't noticed, VHF signals are particularly adept at penetrating walls and other obstacles.

It was widely hoped that this would help create a so called "third broadband" offering to the home, adding to cable and telephone company offerings. This would be especially vital in rural areas to deliver broadband everywhere (or at least to areas that fiber doesn't run to). Many also speculated that Google would pursue this as some type of nationwide munifi project with an open handheld device to access this (undoubtedly with the only search engine set to Google). Last night we learned there was a winner, and today we learn that the biggest prize went to Verizon.

While it was hardly a secret that Verizon was interested in this, I certainly wasn't rooting for them. For starters, are they really going to build a legitimate alternative to fiber to the home, when they've already overinvested in Fios? I doub it.

Verizon also has a very hefty wireless division. Ditto for the open handset model that would operate on the new frequency. Also, with their wireless broadband offerings, charging $40 for a mere 50 megs of data, I'm not thinking that we'll see a real alternative broadband offering here.

So, just what is Verizon going to do with over 9 billion of soon to be vacated wireless spectrum? I'm not really sure, but I'm not expecting to see any real competition for mobile broadband, fixed broadband, or wireless anytime soon. I only hope that I'm wrong on this one, because our nation is behind on broadband, I hope we haven't squandered yet another opportunity. Then again, maybe things will be more open than I expect.

Jonas

Broadband: Good Enough For Government Work?

I was reading this report on the apparent "success" of the broadband rollout here in the US, and I couldn't believe it. Typical government adheres to the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" quote that I love to quote.

Here are the salient points:

- broadband is defined as a connection > 200 kilobits per second (which is quite slow, and not what most of us are looking for)

- the US, that invented the internet, is in 15th place worldwide as of 2006 for access to broadband

- if any residence in a zip code has access to broadband, then the entire area gets counted as a broadband area which makes about as much sense as the Electoral College

- 82.5 million broadband lines exist in the US

Now personally, I can't rant too much about my access to broadband. Where I live, I can get DSL or Fios from the phone company (although I had to practically beg for the cheaper DSL a few years ago), or could go the cable route. I have good cell phone coverage as well and could theoretically use a wireless broadband approach if I was off the grid. However, a few towns over, a friend of mine still persists in using dialup due to a combination of cost, and usability issues (more like computer crashing is the tale) when he tried to do the broadband thing. I also hear quite often about folks that are too far away from the phone company for DSL, Fios hasn't reached them yet (they're still in only a handful of states), or cable isn't available.

Can the US do better, especially at the prices we're paying for this? Check out this on South Korea where 90% of the country has access at better than 3 mbps, and the price is only $20 monthly. Now when we have that penetration at that price, than our leaders can think they delivered on their promise.

--Jonas