Archive for cable

Seven tips for making your VoIP service work

January 3, 2011 at 5:36 am · Filed under cable, cable modem, DSL, hardware, Internet, Linksys, networking, Sipura, Telephone, VoIP ·Tagged , , , ,

Nerd Moment

Image by hc.saustrup via Flickr

The following is based on my experiences with VoIP over the past few years.  Some people can buy a VoIP adapter, or obtain one from a VoIP provider, and make it work the first try.  Others have all manner of issues, and they may not be due to the actions of your VoIP service provider.  This is not intended to be a comprehensive installation guide, but rather a list of pitfalls you may encounter and tips on avoiding them.

1. Cable Internet works better than DSL. The problem here is generally the DSL modems and they way they are configured. Telephone companies tend to buy the cheapest DSL modems they can get, but typically these DSL modems contain a really crappy router that is enabled by default (you don’t realize it because there’s typically only one output port, but often there really is a very basic router in there).  Then the customer plugs in their own router and presto, you have a situation known as “Double-NAT” (NAT=Network Address Translation).   That is NOT good for VoIP.  I’ve seen situations where a VoIP adapter won’t work at all unless it’s plugged into the DSL router directly (which typically leaves no place to plug in a computer) and situations where with a dual-line adapter, it’s impossible to get both lines to work simultaneously.  One possible way to resolve the problem is to put the DSL modem into what’s called “bridge mode”, which in effect disables its internal router, but most phone companies don’t tell people how to do that, and it’s a process that scares some users (“But what if my Internet stops working altogether?”  And that definitely can happen if you do it wrong!).  One other problem with DSL: While many cable providers tend to let you keep the same IP address for months if not years, DSL providers seem to change users’ IP addresses much more frequently, and that can cause firewall issues (see point #4).

2. Some routers are VoIP friendly and some are decidedly not. So your old router either bites the dust, or won’t keep up with the latest speed upgrade from your broadband provider, and you head online or to a store for a new one.  Chances are it doesn’t cross your mind, “Will my VoIP service still work?”, but it should.  There are certain brands of routers that are utter garbage as far as I’m concerned, and then there are other brands that are much better.  For some odd reason, the newer the router, the more likely it is to cause certain types of issues.  One unfortunate thing is that most consumer-grade routers today seem to come with wireless capability even if you don’t need it, and for some reason those newer wireless routers seem to be more prone than usual to cause problems.  In other cases, routers come with specific settings that are supposed to help VoIP, but don’t.  If you control the VoIP server and endpoints, one thing you can try is running your SIP traffic on ports not normally used for SIP (typically 5060-5061) and if that suddenly works, it may be that your router is trying to manage SIP traffic and doing it wrong (some routers may have a check box that you can check or uncheck to turn this feature on or off). Before buying a router, make sure that if it messes up your VoIP connections you can either return it, or reflash it with third-party firmware (Tomato, DD-WRT, etc., assuming you feel confident in your ability to do this. I assume no responsibility if you “brick” a router because you don’t know what you’re doing!).

3. Some VoIP adapters and equipment will work in certain situations but not others. One thing about the venerable Sipura SPA and Linksys PAP series VoIP adapters is that they will work in many situations where other, cheaper models won’t.  Early on we used a few cheap adapters, and while these were always a bit of a pain to get working, once set up they tended to be pretty reliable — until the newest crop of routers started coming down the pike!  So the typical story is, user buys new router, old adapter (that has worked great for years) won’t work, user buys new unlocked Linksys PAP2, their VoIP works again (obviously I am talking a situation where the user provides their own adapter). Bottom line is, some combinations of equipment don’t play well together (and that can include equipment provided by your ISP and/or your VoIP service provider).

4. Firewalls can be an issue. One thing I suggest if you are having issues is to temporarily disable any firewall you may have if you are having an issue getting a VoIP device to register, with the caveat that I primarily mean at the server end and not at the user end (which is not to say that a user firewall can’t be a problem, but you don’t want users running with no firewall protection).  If you are able to do so, drop the firewall for a few seconds and have the user power cycle their router and VoIP adapter, bringing the router up first, then the VoIP adapter. If they can suddenly register, then you may have a too-strict firewall policy, or you may simply need to punch a hole in your firewall for traffic from their IP address.  Obviously you want to minimize the time your firewall is offline, and you don’t want to do it when you know you’re under attack.  But if you have used good strong passwords on everything in your system that allows outside access, and shut off all services that provide external access and that don’t need to be running, you can minimize your exposure. There is one particular VoIP software package out there that prides itself on its security, but it’s so secure that it causes problems for remote endpoints, particular ones on frequently changing IP addresses (in other words, some DSL users).  I do NOT advise running a server without a firewall.

5. Sometimes, you just need to wait. I’ve seen it happen where a user gets a new VoIP adapter, configures it with the same settings as their old one, then disconnects the old one — and the new one won’t work.  Then they go away for an hour or two and suddenly the new one miraculously starts working.  Why?  Without getting too technical (or straying into territory where I don’t know what I’m talking about), I believe it has to do with “lease times” on connections in the router, or possibly even at the server.  If you really need to get it working now, try power cycling both the router and the VoIP adapter, bringing the router up first, then the VoIP adapter.

6. Power supplies fail in strange ways. One final tip that I’ve discovered is that sometimes power supplies on VoIP adapters partially fail (or the cord that connects the power supply and the adapter might go bad).  When that happens, it’s not always complete failure — the adapter may become noisy, or may exhibit all sorts of strange behavior (such as connecting, then dropping the connection for no apparent reason).  I just saw a malfunctioning Linksys PAP2 brought back to life by replacing a bad power supply, and it’s not the first time.

7. If all else fails, you could try using a Linksys SPA-2102, a Grandstream HT-502, or similar VoIP adapter that includes a built-in router (I tend to prefer Sipura/Linksys devices, but understand that the Grandstream units will support those old antique rotary dial phones that most kids have never seen, except in the movies and on old TV shows).  You’d connect the output of your DSL or cable modem to the INTERNET or WAN port of this unit, then connect your computer, a plain old dumb switch, or possibly your existing router to the ETHERNET or LAN port on the VoIP adapter (the latter combination possibly creating a triple-NAT situation for downstream devices, if you have DSL). Remember that if you do this, you’re limited to whatever connection speed the VoIP adapter will pass through, usually 10/100Base-T, so you probably don’t want to do this if you have cable Internet service or fiber to the home!  The only advantage of doing this is that if you have a router that doesn’t play well with your current VoIP adapter, you can connect one of the VoIP adapters with a built-in router directly to your cable or DSL modem and get your existing router out of the picture as far as your VoIP is concerned. I’d say it’s probably a better idea to get rid of the problematic router (if you can’t reconfigure it or download new firmware to make it work), but if you don’t know what you’re doing you might just buy another router with the same problem. (EDIT: Another possibility might be a Linksys RT31P2-NA router that includes VoIP capabilities, if you can still find an unlocked one for sale — I’ve never used one of those, so can’t say for sure how well it might work in this situation).

Do you have any other tips for making VoIP work, or any horror stories you’d like to share?  The comments are open!

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None-of-your-damn-business-dept: Christian Groups Want To Know How Much Comcast Makes From Porn

June 29, 2010 at 4:36 am · Filed under business ethics, cable, consumer, corporation, Editorial, FCC, issues, Opinion, Regulation

This is from The Consumerist:

As the government continues to pretend that it cares what anyone thinks about Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal, a coalition of Christian media watchdog groups are asking the cable giant to publicly divulge how much money it makes from porn channels and pay-per-view.

The coalition, which also includes the supposedly non-religious Parents Television Council and the always level-headed Focus on the Family, have asked the FCC to consider Comcast’s xxx-rated income when evaluating whether or not the merger is in the public interest. …

Full article here

Now, I have to say up front that I’m not at all in favor of this merger, not that the FCC or anyone else probably cares what you or I think — this is big business, after all, and since we have turned into a nation of, by, and for the large corporations, they are probably going to get their way, and I don’t like it one little bit.  But, having said that, who do these groups think they are?  Maybe they would like the government poking into their finances — you know, the income they collect from their members under threat of hell-fire or something like it, to use in campaigns of hate against people who are not like them. At least Comcast and NBC Universal pay taxes on their income, which is more than can be said of groups that operate under the cloak of religion.

If there is one group I would like to see vanish from the face of the earth even more than huge corporations, it is the so-called “religious right.”  They are still trying to hook our kids, but fortunately for all of us, the kids aren’t buying the same old tired religious crap anymore, especially the hateful invective of the religious right.

One of my deep regrets in life is ever getting involved in fundamentalist religion. Not only because they do preach intolerance and hate, something I could never stand in any other context, but because so much of religion is based on lies and half-truths (I’ve seriously considered writing a series of articles about that, except that I know that the people who most need the truth the most will not accept it, and even if by some miracle they would, they probably wouldn’t accept it from me). But one thing I know from all those years is that the people behind these types of groups truly believe that every spare dime you have should go to them. If you are spending money on entertainment, that’s money that’s not going into their hands, so they can print more hate-filled literature and produce more hate-filled videos. Most everything the church does is ultimately out of self interest — they want to control people and they want wealth, and the former is a stepping stone to the latter. Oh, they may preach love, but try joining them and then disagreeing with them (even if you can show them Bible verses to back up what you say) and see how much they love you… you’ll be lucky if they don’t condemn you to hell* right from the pulpit! Their love is entirely conditional on you doing what they want you to do, and saying only what they want you to say.  If they can’t control you, you’re not going to feel very loved. And if you don’t take their advice on how to raise your children (of course you WILL have children, won’t you?) you’re going to hear their disapproval as well.

Anyway, to me it take a lot of nerve for groups like this to ask that anyone else answer their questions.  They should be the ones being grilled about their operations.  Here’s a question I’d like them to answer, just for starters:  How many gay people have been killed, injured, or placed at a disadvantage because of your literature and media productions?  How many women have they treated as second-class citizens, particularly if those women did not find fulfillment in raising children and being subservient to a man?  How many kids are growing up thinking it’s okay to hate certain kinds of people, because their parents are raising them using your teachings (I would hope damn few, but I don’t underestimate the influence groups like these have). Okay, that’s three questions, but I bet we will never get a straight answer to any of them.  Therefore, Comcast should not feel obligated to provide any answers to these folks.

*If you are part of a religion where they are even suggesting that there is a possibility you might go to hell, I suggest you read this – it explains, in a rather colorful way, exactly why the whole fundamentalist concept of hell is a lie (although Hell, Michigan, is quite real, and in the fall it’s a very nice place, actually).  And once you realize that they lie about one thing, can you really trust them on any topic?

Just to mention another one they lie about: Tithing.  If a religious leader tells you that you are required to tithe, or in any way suggests that giving is anything other than a strictly voluntary act, he is lying to you — and don’t let him string unrelated verses in the Bible together to create a doctrine out of thin air; that is what the fundamentalists DO! When they try to prove something from the Bible, if you are at all inclined to listen in the first place, then do this: If they want to read just a verse, you read the entire chapter (especially the verses just before and after the ones they are directing your attention to), find out the whole story, who it applied to, the circumstances under which it happened, and then whether it applies to you (here’s a hint: if it’s in the Old Testament, and you’re not Jewish, it doesn’t – and even if you are Jewish, there’s a good chance it doesn’t, unless you fall into a very specific group). If they tell you to move from verse to verse to verse in completely different chapters, they are fabricating a lie, and you should not let them get away with it!

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This is the thing that’s going to put the phone and cable companies out of business — someday

May 30, 2010 at 11:35 am · Filed under cable, Editorial, fiber optics, hardware, history, Internet, invention, networking, quantum communications, Telephone, Wireless

I’ve been saying for years now that when quantum entanglement is fully understood, it will revolutionize communications.  And apparently, the Chinese are taking this seriously.  According to an article on the POPSCI site,

Scientists in China have broken the record for quantum teleportation, achieving a distance of about 10 miles, according to a new study in Nature Photonics. That’s a giant leap from previous achievements.

The feat brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal transmission, the researchers note.

Read the rest of the article here (and note that the word “teleportation” is somewhat misused, as it becomes clear when you read the article that they are talking about quantum communications, not teleportation of matter).

Why is this significant?  Well, let’s assume for the moment that right now we understand this technology about as well as we understood lasers in the 1950′s — we knew they were significant and would be very useful someday, but most of the scientists originally had no idea just how useful they would become.  They certainly never imagined that everything from the world’s communications systems to audio and video equipment in your home would become dependent on the laser.

As I have said before, suppose you have two devices that contain entangled particles and therefore are capable of sending data between them, without using radio waves or cables of any kind.  This is what the Chinese are apparently on the verge of achieving, if they have not done so already.  And why is that important? Well, let’s say you are getting your Internet service from a company in New York, or your TV from a company in Colorado, or your phone service from … well, who cares where it’s from.  The Important thing is that in each case, you won’t need wires or cables, nor satellites and dishes, nor a network of cellular towers, to bring the information to you.  Eventually you may have a device the size of a USB stick (or smaller) that you plug into your computer or TV, or that is embedded into your phone, and no matter where you go in the world, it will be capable of communicating with its companion device at your service provider.

It’s my belief that once scientists really understand this, there will be virtually no distance limitation – you could take your phone or TV or Mars and it would still work.  And then there is the other question I really would like the answer to — is this type of communications constrained by the speed of light? I may be wrong, but I have this sneaking suspicion that it is not.  And if that is true, that would in part explain why Chinese scientists are willing to pursue this while Western scientists are afraid to touch it.

The problem is that in the West, our scientists don’t like anything that doesn’t conform to the known laws of science, and we especially don’t like anything that’s “supernatural.” And yet, when you get to the quantum level, science and the supernatural start looking an awful lot alike.  Make no mistake, it’s still science, it’s just science we don’t yet fully understand.  Just as a remote control capable of activating a device that displays pictures and plays sound might have seemed like sorcery to a scientist of 500 years ago, a lot of what we’re discovering about the quantum world seems “spooky” to us now.  People in many Asian nations have an entirely different mindset about such things; they readily accept things that we don’t understand (some forms of Chinese medicine being an example).  So, it does not surprise me that they’d be more likely to embrace this new field of science — it doesn’t pose as great a challenge to their cultural or scientific paradigms.

If we in the west ever hope to get into the forefront of this field of science — the thing that I’m sure will revolutionize communications, if we humans can stay alive that long and not nuke ourselves back to the stone age — we have to we willing to tell the “skeptics” to take a hike and get busy working on this stuff. We can’t take the attitude that because we don’t fully understand why something works, we’re not going to touch it until we do, because if we do that, people in parts of the world that have no such inhibitions are going to get far ahead of us in science and technology.

My prediction is that quantum science (including quantum communications) is going to be to this century what electronics was to the 20th century.  If you think about it, it was only a little over 100 years ago that the very first AM radio transmission took place, and it wasn’t until the 1920′s that radio receivers became a common item in homes. In only about 90 years we’ve gone from AM radios in large, furniture-sized cabinets with vacuum tubes to all the technology we have today. We’re just scratching the surface of the quantum world, and while I may not live to see it, I predict that at some point there will simply be no need for the millions of miles of copper and fiber cable used around the globe, nor all the cellular towers, not to mention the communications satellites in space. Even things like remote controls will use paired quantum particles, simply because they will work through walls, and each remote will control only the device that its paired with (so if you have two brand XYZ devices in a home, one remote won’t activate both devices).

For some reason I just find it really interesting to speculate about this, because I just believe this is truly the Next Big Thing.  The real shame will be if we in the West just ignore it until the scientists in China and other Eastern countries have fully developed the technology, while we’re still trying to prop up up our aging copper infrastructure. In a worst-case scenario, I could see devices that use quantum technology being banned in the United States, at least for a time, so that the big corporations can milk every last dime out of the existing (and by then antique) infrastructure.  I sure hope THAT doesn’t happen!

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A modest proposal to solve (some of) our broadband access and bandwidth problems

December 14, 2009 at 2:35 am · Filed under Broadband, cable, Digital Television, DSL, Editorial, FCC, Internet, invention, Opinion, satellite television, Wireless

I have a modest proposal for how to solve our broadband access and bandwidth problems.  Okay, maybe not all of them, but at least two:

  • The current inability of people in rural areas (with dialup access only) to download larger files in an efficient manner.
  • The virtually non-existent problem of “bandwidth hogs” that consume so much data that they cause congestion in the networks (in most cases this is pure nonsense, but since Big Cable and Big Telco want so badly to sell you this lie, let’s follow them into their fantasy world for the moment and respond with a solution that does NOT involve usage caps or metered service).

Okay, let’s suppose you have a fictitious company, we’ll call it Bingleulu (because no real company could call themselves that!).  And lets suppose this company could do two things:

  • Acquire the equivalent of (initially) 12 television channels worth of bandwidth on repurposed TV frequencies nationwide, and
  • Acquire the equivalent of (initially) 12 television channels worth of bandwidth on a communications satellite (either C or Ku band, but preferably Ku) that is visible from the entire United States (or at least most of it).

Now, this dozen-channel bandwidth would be used as one huge data pipe – let’s call it the Big Fat Pipe, or BFP for short.  If your dial-up modem is like a slow faucet drip, and your cable modem connection is like a low-flow shower head, the BFP would be like an open fire hydrant. Data would be sent up to the satellite in one fat stream, then down to either individual users (mostly those in rural areas not near a terrestrial transmitter) and to the ground station towers that would retransmit the signal over the former TV airwaves.  Why the dual coverage?  Well, satellite is great for use in rural areas and other places where people might have issues receiving the terrestrial signals reliably, whereas the terrestrial stations would require less expensive receiving equipment and would be more suitable for mobile use, and use in locations where satellites aren’t visible due to heavy tree cover.  Plus it gives you a bit of redundancy, since in time the terrestrial stations could be linked by a backup fiber optic link.

So now you have this giant firehose of data, as it were.  Now, let’s say you decide to watch a video.  You jump on your web browser, on your existing dial-up or broadband connection, or even your mobile phone (which would have a built in data receiver) and go to the Bingleulu site, and select your video.  On the pages there’s also a small setting dropdown that says something to the effect of “Number of seconds I’m willing to wait”, and it defaults to 60 seconds, but you can set it to something shorter or longer – even much longer if you’re selecting a large file that you won’t be able to watch until later.

Now, here’s the magic part.  The Bingleulu site looks at whether it has space available in the flood of data it’s sending out, and if possible it sends your file within your specified maximum wait time as part of the the big flood.  It uses a smart algorithm to figure this out, taking into account things like your connection speed and type (dial-up and mobile users might get some preference), whether you’re on an ISP that caps your data usage, and a bunch of other things.  One thing it takes into account is how likely it is that someone else will request the same file within your specified wait time, because one of the things this system attempts to do is send popular files (especially LARGE popular files) to many users at once.

So when you make the request, the video or file or whatever might come back to you the usual way, over your internet connection, and the smaller the file the more likely it is that it will come that way.  But if there is space available – and assuming you give it long enough, there will be – the file will come back to you via the satellite or terrestrial transmitter system.  In that case, your browser will be sent an ID tag of some kind (via your regular connection) and it will then know that it is to look for the data containing that tag on the satellite/terrestrial over-the-air system.  If it misses any packets, it can request retransmission of just those packets, so that the entire file doesn’t have to be resent (and again, these could be sent either the normal way, or over the BFP of data sent through the airwaves, depending on which makes the most sense).

During times of congestion in the BFP, priority would be given to large files, files that have been requested by many people (you would try to fill as many requests as possible using the same data stream), and live streams (such as live audio or video programming, especially streams that many people are wanting to access simultaneously).

What do we accomplish with this scheme?  Well, for one thing, we get a lot of the largest files off your ISP (so they have a lot more “breathing room” and don’t have to meter usage – and yes, I KNOW there’s no reason they have to do that anyway, but if they’re going to lie about it, this is one way to pull the rug out from under their lies).  And if you have a dial-up connection or mobile broadband connection, where either slow speeds or congestion might be actual issues, this scheme at least gets you access to the large files you may want at something other than a snail’s pace (though at some times of day you may have to wait a while for the download to start, but once it does start you’ll have it quickly!).

Now, who would pay for this bandwidth?  Well, in some countries they might choose to operate it as a public utility, but that likely wouldn’t fly given the political climate in the U.S. (by which I mean, those lousy obstructionist Republicans and “blue dog” Democrats that stand in the way of anything that might benefit the common person unless it gives one or more huge corporations a leg up… sorry, got carried away there). So that’s why I invented out mythical company, Bingleulu.  Just saying, there are several companies that face the problem of potentially having a real difficult time getting their content out to you if the big ISP’s start metering service, and those companies (any one of them individually, or a consortium of two or more) could come up with a solution.

What would you need to make this work?  Well, for starters, an extension to the HTML protocol, or some mechanism so that when you make a request, you will always get some response via your primary Internet connection, but if you have access to the BFP, the response might be, in effect, “get it off the BFP by looking for packets tagged with this ID”, followed by an ID string. In a well-designed system it would even send an estimated time to the start of the download, if there will be a significant delay.

Also, you’d need a receiver for the BFP – initially this could take the form of a card that would go into your computer, or (more likely) a USB-connected receiver, or possibly even a receiver that sits on your local network and can service several computers in your home or small business (something akin to a HDHomeRun® type device).  The receiver should have connections for both a satellite dish LNB, and a regular TV antenna. Note that initially, a company that wants to do this could implement half of this system (the satellite half) just by designing the system and then leasing bandwidth on a Ku-band satellite (Ku usually requires dishes of about two feet up to one meter in diameter for reliable reception, but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of unused space on Ku-band satellites these days), then wait and see if the FCC will allow them to obtain the bandwidth in the broadcast spectrum.

Some additional things to consider:

First, it’s very likely that sooner or later there would be more than one BFP.  This might be because “spot beams” would be used to increase capacity, or simply because you’d need additional satellites to cover other parts of the world (such as Hawaii and Guam) if this catches on.  So when the system is designed, it need to have some way to know which satellite feed or terrestrial transmitter the receiver is receiving, and if there is more than one BFP, to return the requested data on the correct one.

Second, there may be special considerations for certain types of broadband connections.  For example, what if the requester is using another type of satellite provider (WildBlue, HughesNet, etc.)? Do you try to avoid sending the request back that way (because it might trip a usage cap) or do you treat it like a normal broadband connection (where smaller, less popular, and “immediate gratification wanted” files would sometimes be sent back through the normal connection)?

Third, once we get into the area of live streams, those can eat bandwidth quickly (particularly high-definition quality video streams!).  Unless you have a LOT of bandwidth, you can only carry a certain number of those in real time, so how do you decide which ones?  Do you compress them (and sacrifice quality) during times of congestion? One thing to note – unlike what happens with your cable company, if no one has requested a particular stream, it wouldn’t be sent.  EVERYTHING sent on the BFP is sent in response to an actual request by at least one user.

Fourth, let’s suppose several broadcasters jump on this as a delivery mechanism and now, suddenly, you don’t have enough capacity, but then your satellite provider and/or the FCC manages to find you more bandwidth – but now nobody has receivers that will tune the new bandwidth.  Should receivers be designed from the outset to be tunable over a much larger range than what’s actually used at the start of the service? Seems to me that any service like this should be designed from the get-go with the idea that more bandwidth will be needed, and possibly available, at some point in the future, and that receivers in particular should be electronically reconfigureable to tune any additional bandwidth that may become available. I might even suggest that it should be possible to connect a DiSEQc switch to the receiver, so that if the time ever comes that multiple satellites are used, it will be possible to switch between the satellites.

I’m just tossing this idea out there, to see if anyone else thinks it might be a good idea.  With the economy as it is, there are several of the older-style Ku-band communications satellites that have a fair chunk of unused spectrum space available, and I can tell you from personal experience that in most places a two-foot dish will get you a very adequate signal, and a three-foot dish will get you excellent reception (at least for Free-To-Air television reception). As long as people don’t let idiot installers mount the dish on their roof (making it nearly impossible to use a broom to clean off the snow in the winter), a delivery system that uses now-vacant bandwidth on Ku-band satellites should be quite workable, and even affordable.

If you stop and think about it, the most efficient use of spectrum space would be if the entire broadcast radio and TV spectrum, and all of the satellites, transmitted nothing but the BFP data stream.  Television networks and local stations would simply be data streams.  The BFP could even be smart enough to send you the network TV stream when you are watching a network program (and that network stream would only need to be transmitted once, as a single data stream) but when it comes time to show local commercials, there would be other streams for those, and the beauty is that everything could be configured to use a minimum of bandwidth (hopefully NOT by reducing the quality of the received signal, though) – for example, if Burger King buys the first local commercial spot in “Heroes” in 20 local TV markets, that commercial would only need to be streamed once and your receiver would be smart enough to know that you are supposed to get that commercial, even though people in other markets would be getting different streams. The advantage to viewers would be that you’d be getting the original data stream in full high definition direct from the network – no sub-optimal signals because your local station has crappy transmitting equipment, or is trying to cram three or four stations into one digital television signal.

Who would hate this idea?  The National Association of Buggywhip… er, I mean, the National Association of Broadcasters, who would be just fine with keeping the status quo (and in protecting local stations that in many cases don’t deserve it, particularly when they superimpose their damn useless weather radar graphics and similar useless crap over a network show!).  But if one of the big players really turned their most talented and creative people loose with this idea, it could totally change the way we distribute data in this country – and, as I say, pull the rug out from under those greedy bastards that want to start metering your data usage and charging you extra if they think you’re a “bandwidth hog” (here’s a great funny rebuttal to those morons, but don’t click there if you’re uptight about profanity).

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DSLreports.com: Wisconsin Data Shows AT&T’s ‘Franchise Reform’ Was A Joke – Now consumers get higher prices AND no consumer protection laws…

December 3, 2009 at 3:40 pm · Filed under AT&T, cable, consumer, corporation, customer service, DSL, Editorial, government, issues, Legislation, Michigan, Opinion, Regulation, Telephone, video

A long time ago, this blog had a somewhat different direction than it does today.  Part of what I tried to do was expose the abusive practices of the large phone companies, and (among other things) try to stop them from basically writing the communications laws that were supposed to regulate them. One of the reasons I shifted directions was because, basically, we customers lost, and I don’t enjoy beating a dead horse.  And only now, it seems, is the reality of what happened finally dawning on state officials, as indicated in Karl Bode’s article on the BroadbandReports.com/DSLreports.com site:

Wisconsin Data Shows AT&T’s ‘Franchise Reform’ Was A Joke — Now consumers get higher prices AND no consumer protection laws…

We’ve discussed how a significant number of states passed new state level video franchise laws at the behest of phone company lobbyists, but didn’t really realize what they were signing up for. Bills that consumers were told would result in lower TV prices by making it easier for phone companies to jump into the TV business, in many cases were little more than phone company wish lists — aimed at legalizing the cherry picking of next-gen broadband deployment, eliminating local authority (even eminent domain rights) and in some cases eliminating tough consumer protection laws.

The one thing the laws were supposed to do — lower TV prices — never actually happened.

One of the worst of these bills approved by duped lawmakers was in Wisconsin, where AT&T both wrote and lobbied for a bill that essentially gutted all consumer protections in the state under the auspices of cheaper TV. State residents used to have the right to prompt repairs, saw ensured refunds for service outages, mandated notice of rate increases or service deletions, and carriers had to provide a written notice of disconnection. Not any more. Now a new Wisconsin state audit shows that basic TV prices continue to skyrocket:
…..

One Wisconsin legislator (Representative Gary Hebl of Sun Prairie) has introduced a new bill that, he says, “puts people first, not corporations.” Well, if that’s really true, it’s about damn time (pardon my expressiveness, but it is!). All laws ought to do that.  Our Constitution ought to do that. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Rep. Hebl’s bill ever gets passed into law.

Here in Michigan, our legislators have been sold a similar bill of goods. About the only thing that did not happen here is that we did not completely do away with quality-of-service requirements.  But our wonderful Michigan legislators did pretty much eliminate all other consumer protections. They turned the Michigan Public Service Commission from an agency that was able to help consumers solve most any communications-related issue, to an agency that’s pretty toothless with regard to anything telecommunications-related. Unless you are subscribing to one specific landline service that virtually no one has or wants (PBLES), you now have very little protection against abusive practices by the phone company, unless you want to take them to court or file a complaint with the state Attorney General’s office (actually, I think aggrieved customers ought to complain to their state legislators – they made this mess, let them clean it up!).

(Just so as not to mislead anyone, I will say that complaints to the MPSC sometimes do still bring results, but only because the MPSC knows how to reach the top executives at some of the phone companies.  The MPSC usually can’t force the phone companies to help you anymore, but sometimes they can present your case to a high enough official that you’ll still get the desired results.  And, if you actually do have a quality of service issue – your phone doesn’t work and they tell you they can’t fix it for another month – then the MPSC does still have some authority in that type of situation).

One other point:  For nearly two decades, the Michigan Telecommunications Act had a “sunset” provision, such that it automatically came up for a rewrite every four or five years.  The phone companies always saw this as a chance to re-craft the law to be even more to their liking, while consumer groups and legislators that felt they’d been “hoodwinked” the last time around saw it as a chance to restore some previously lost customer protections.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the latest rewrite – a couple of years ago, the Michigan legislature quietly killed the sunset provision, making the current Michigan Telecommunications Act the one we’ll probably be stuck with for decades to come.  This indicates to me that the phone companies got what they really wanted last time around, and had no intention of letting the applecart be upset by disgruntled consumers or legislators in 2009.

Of course, any one of our legislators could, on their own initiative, introduce legislation that would attempt to undo the damage that was done in the last Michigan Telecommunications Act rewrite.  But unless they receive enough complaints from affected citizens, I doubt they’ll want to poke that particular beehive (the bees being the big telco lobbyists and lawyers, which would probably come into the state in full fury if there were ever any serious attempt at reform).

One way consumers could make an effective statement is to “vote with their feet”, and refuse to purchase any service from a large company that abuses their customers (especially when there are any other viable options available). But most customers don’t have that kind of willpower – all the “evil corporation” has to do is dangle a shiny enough carrot off the stick (in the form of a great “limited time promotional offer”) and we, like a bunch of stupid jackasses, subscribe to their services.

Like I said, I’m not into beating dead horses – once they’ve been dead long enough, they really start to stink — kind of like our Michigan legislature (and, presumably, their brethren in Wisconsin) when the big corporate interests come around.

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Killing the Golden Goose

November 25, 2009 at 3:35 pm · Filed under Broadband, cable, consumer, corporation, customer service, Editorial, government, Internet, invention, networking, Opinion, Wireless

I wonder how many folks saw this article yesterday on the Stop the Cap! site:

Cable Companies’ Big Internet Swindle: They Charge You $40 For Broadband That Costs Them $8 To Provide

I had sent this article to a friend and his response was, “if all these huge profit margins are true, then why is Charter in bankruptcy?” Well, a possible reason is that even what ought to be a hugely profitable company can be sunk by bad management and horrible customer service (and I have seen allegations of both with regard to Charter).  But in a way, Charter is the reason for this article. As I mentioned in a previous article,  Charter wants to move to what they call “consumption based billing.”

I just want to point out that while people may be slow to react, they are not stupid.  America is littered with the remains of once-great corporations that in their day were at the top of the heap, but then got greedy.  At one time, the American railroads controlled much of the country, especially the in the west.  It took a while, but shippers finally figured out that trucks were less expensive and more practical.  The thing is, the railroads at one time had all the advantages, including friends in government and economies of scale, but they just plain got greedy and priced themselves out of the market.

I’ve previously mentioned Western Union, which at one time owned electronic text-based communications within the U.S.A.  But even as they became more automated, moving away from guys pounding brass keys and into the age of teletypewriters, fax machines, and microwaves, they kept raising the per-word prices for telegrams. At the same time, the price of a phone call kept falling.  Had Western Uninion been a bit smarter, they might have been a major player in today’s world of electronic communications.

Then we have landline phone service.  While this is a bit of a unique story, since in part it’s a story of the landline business being cannibalized by the wireline side of the business, it still is an example of many customers finally getting sick to death of being overcharged for service.

So what do we have today? We have cable companies and phone companies that overcharge for service, particularly with regard to broadband and cable television. The cable companies complain that they are being practically held up at gunpoint by the broadcasters and content providers, who demand higher fees, and therefore they need to pss those fees onto customers – however, they won’t even consider the one easy solution that would virtually eliminate that problem – allowing customers to pick and choose the channels they want, rather than being forced to subscribe to tiers of channels they don’t want in order to get channels they do want.  If customers were allowed to vote with their wallets, a lot of the alleged extortion by content providers would quickly end.  Yet the cable companies fight the very idea of à la carte programming tooth and nail.

As for metered billing for broadband – it’s totally unnecessary and it leaves customers open to possible fraud by the provider (this is sometimes even a problem with utilities where you can physically see the meter, so how much more of a problem will it be when the meter exists only in software, and customers have no possible way to check the accuracy of that meter).

But what I see here is a convergence of a “perfect storm” that’s going to totally reshape communications in the U.S.A. Here are a few, somewhat related points:

  • Many other countries, particularly our competitors in Asia, are providing far higher broadband speeds to their customers, at a lower monthly rate.  Only so much of that can be explained by population density; I think a larger part is that in many of those countries it’s just not socially nor politically acceptable for companies to exhibit unbridled greed, and to gouge their customers for every penny they can get. The U.S.A. simply cannot afford to have its citizens giving up their broadband connections to avoid being gouged.
  • The much-hated Universal Service Fund should be abolished, but instead it’s going to be expanded to include broadband.  However, the possible silver lining is that any time the government doles out money, it gains more control.  If the government used that control in a beneficial manner — by, for example, imposing network neutrality and a prohibition on metered billing on those companies that receive USF subsidies — it could nip some of these gouging attempts in the bud.  That’s not a long-term solution, however, since those regulations can and do change depending on the party in power.
  • It looks like competitive broadband providers are finally going to be allowed to use “white space” (e.g. unoccupied television channels) to provide wireless service.  If the FCC can make sure that smaller providers get a fair shake, this could allow competitive wireless providers to offer broadband service at reasonable rates (note to such providers – PLEASE don’t assume your users will be happy with an upload speed only one-tenth of download speed.  People want to make and share thir own content, and you should allow them to do that without making them die of boredom).
  • Also, when the large cable and DSL companies start gouging their customers, it creates a market for all available competitive services delivered via more traditional means (competitive DSL, current-technology wireless, etc.)
  • Then there is “the ‘x’ factor” (see below).

What do I mean by “the ‘x’ factor”? I mean the new technology that’s not been fully explored yet.  Technology doesn’t stand still, and there may be a breakthrough soon that will cause all existing technologies to essentially become obsolete. Have you ever noticed that the SETI project, and other attempts to “tune in” to advanced civilizations “out there” haven’t met with any success? Maybe that’s because the aliens aren’t using old-fashioned radio waves. Our current forms of electromagnetic radiation are very inefficient and often, very power-hungry. I suspect that the world of quantum physics is going to provide us something much better, if our governments will allow it.

For example, Google “quantum entanglement” – now suppose there were a way to place two particles in a state of entanglement, such that when you change the state of one particle, the other changes instantaneously, withour regard even to the speed of light limitation on traditional electronic communications.  Imagine that you had a box at your ISP, and a companion box at your location, and each box contained two (or more) matched pairs of entangled particles (probably in some kind of plug-in module) – at least one pair of particles for transmitting data, the other for receiving.  These boxes wouldn’t use radio waves or the electromagnetic spectrum, so there would be no bandwidth limitations to worry about.  Furthermore, communications would be totally secure, because only the entangled particles would communicate with each other. That last part is why some governments would hate it – no more intercepting data mid-stream. But if that principle were developed commercially, your ISP could be on the moon for all you’d care, running off solar power and providing communications for half the planet – and if they started gouging their customers, someone else could set up a competing system, anywhere in the world. Maybe you could set one up in your basement, if you wanted to.

Sure, it sounds farfetched now – but so did the whole idea of radio before it was developed. We’re not talking some nebulous idea here, “quantum entanglement” is now a known principle of quantum physics. It’s just so new that either it hasn’t been commercially developed yet (much like the laser in the middle of the 20th century), or it’s being used in secret for totally secure communications, and the governments that are using it would rather you (and their enemies) didn’t know, not that there’s much an enemy could do about it.

My point here is that if today’s communications companies want to be around for the next revolution in technology (which will surely bring about opportunities that haven’t even been considered yet – who could have envisioned the opportunities the World Wide Web would create?), they had better re-think their ideas about alienating their customers. Sadly, American companies are notorious for not thinking ahead – as long as the current C.E.O. gets his golden parachute when he retires, what does he care what happens to the company in the future?  But the stockholders ought to care, and customers ought to care, and the government ought to care if they don’t want America to become a third-rate nation.

It will be interesting to see which companies survive the next few decades, and which ones kill the golden goose to get the immediate big windfall. But if I had to take service from one or the other, I’d rather get it from the one that plans on being around for the next century, and treats their customers accordingly.

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Why landlines are going away

May 12, 2009 at 1:04 am · Filed under business ethics, cable, consumer, corporation, customer service, Opinion, Telephone, VoIP

In the last week or two I’ve seen several articles and other references to the impending death of landlines (the old-fashioned copper to the home service that many of us have known and used for so many years).  Some people are worried about the prospect, others have cheerfully ditched their landlines and aren’t looking back.

Some are speculating as to why this is happening.  Really, it’s not a hard question. There’s sort of a confluence of factors at this point in time. We will shortly reach the “tipping point” where the remaining landline holdouts will dump their landlines en masse, leaving only a relatively small percentage of diehard landline users.  The thing is, while the phone companies could have forestalled this for quite some time, they actually did nearly nothing meaningful to retain landline customers.  Some have suggested that they didn’t really want to keep their landline customers, that the cost of providing landline service has become prohibitive.  I don’t believe that – it sounds like exactly the sort of lie they might tell regulators when asking for yet another rate increase, but in the cold light of day it makes no sense, except perhaps for a very few, very rural telephone companies that never figured out how to game the system like some of their larger bretheren. I think it’s more just neglect and inertia – an institutionalized inability to make any meaningful change.

Just in case it isn’t perfectly obvious to anyone, here are the top five reasons people are dropping their landlines:

  1. They aren’t portable.  Every time any company tried to come out with a method to let people take their phones with them over even a moderately short distance (more than  a city block or so), the phone companies yanked the chain of the FCC and made sure that things like long range cordless phones never saw the light of day.  The big phone companies probably thought they’d be the only provider of wireless phone service, and that there would be little or no competition from here to eternity.  They were wrong, and as competition brought prices down, it made cell phones far more affordable.  At that point, many people started to wonder – if I’m using my cell phone most of the time anyway, why should I also be paying for a landline?  Sure, there are reasons one might want to do so, but for many folks none of them are very compelling.

    2.  

  2. There are extra charges for long distance, and in some places, for local calls.  If the phone companies would have had the least bit of foresight, they’d have realized that people were rebelling against long distance charges.  They were using alternative long distance carriers, and making calls on their cell phones during the “free” hours.  When the Internet came along, they started using VoIP to avoid toll charges.  The phone companies could have responded to this by offering wider local calling areas and “free long distance” hours (say midnight to 8 AM and on weekends at first, gradually expanding the free hours to meet the competition) but they didn’t.  In fact, not only did they not do that, but in some cases they actually started raising toll rates again, after people had gotten used to seeing them decrease over time. They never figured out that many people hate meters, and would actually pay a bit more just to not have a meter.

    3.  

  3. There are extra charges for “custom calling” features and other services – and the charges weren’t at all relative to the costs of providing the service.  A couple bucks a month for touch tone? A charge for not publishing your address and phone number in a directory? $6-$8 per month for Caller ID? These and other charges were simply outrageous – it cost the phone company little or nothing to provide these types of services, but they saw them as cash cows, and thought their customers were too stupid to realize they were being gouged.  What could have been a public relations bonanza – constantly adding new features and service at little or no extra charge (something that almost certainly would have happened in a truly competitive environment) was replaced by a philosophy of pure greed, where the idea was to gouge the customer for every nickel and dime they could get.  It was stupid to ever treat customers that way, but it was especially idiotic to keep doing it when the cell phone companies (and later the VoIP companies) offered all these features and more at no additional monthly charge.

    4.  

  4. They are redundant.  When, because of the items listed above, people started making more use of cellular (and, in some cases, VoIP) service, it suddenly occurred to them that there is really no need to pay for essentially the same service from two different providers – especially when one of the providers had been overcharging them, giving them marginal to poor customer service, and basically taking their customers for granted for years.  For many years, and even today in some cases, the landline companies still approcah customers as if “you need us more than we need you.” I’m old enough to remember when phone company representatives actually threatened people with prison (or at least the cutoff of their phone service) for buying and hooking up their own extension telephone, thereby depriving Ma Bell of a monthly rental fee that actually paid for the phone in about 6-8 months.  As Lily Tomlin’s character “Ernestine” used to say, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company!” So when people started to realize that it was silly to pay for essentially the same service from two or more providers – something that’s only going to accelerate given the present economic conditions – guess which one is going to get the boot.

    5.  

  5. They just aren’t cool anymore.  Landline telephones are fast becoming like a spitoon in the living room – something you just don’t see anymore, particularly in residential settings (for those of you that are young enough to have no idea what a spitoon is, just remember that in your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generation, it was a lot more socially acceptable to chew tobacco than it is today, which is probably why so many older people have false teeth.  Anyway, they needed someplace to dispose of the excess saliva that tended to build up while chewing – hence, the spitoon.  And you thought ash trays were disgusting!). Watch TV or any recent movie – unless they are showing an era of times gone by, about the only place you will see landline phones are in an office-type setting.  If you’re in your mid-20′s to mid-30′s, think about when you were a teenager – would you ever have seen a teenager on TV haul out an old style record player and spin a few tunes?  Maybe on “Happy Days”, but not in any show set in the then-current era.   Well, look at today’s shows – how often do you see a modern teenager (or adult, for that matter) use a landline telephone, especially at home?  The media has always helped set the trends for the current generation, and landline phones just aren’t where it’s at anymore (neither is the expression “where it’s at”, but at my age I can get away with using it!). :)

Any one of these things by itself would not be insurmountable – but right now, in the current economic climate, it’s just a “perfect storm” of reasons for people to dump their landlines.  And it’s not necessarily that every one of the defectors really hate the idea of the telephone itself – after all,  a not-insignificant number will replace their landline with some type of VoIP service – it’s just that when you put all the above together there no good reason to keep a landline phone.  Even the oft-repeated mantra of the landline diehards, that in an emergency the landline phone will be the only phone that still works, was disproven during Hurricane Katrina, where it turned out that the only thing that still worked in downtown New Orleans was VoIP.

Thing is, the phone companies were stupid.  They took their customers for granted, abused them and overcharged them, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.  And what other big industry is guilty of this? Yeah, I know, the banking industry, but forget them for a moment – who else is guilty of treating their customers like dog poo? That would be certain cable companies, of course.  They just keep raising rates and acting like they are the only game in town for TV and Internet access.  Well, they haven’t been the only game in town for TV for many years (and yet their rates keep climbing) and even if they are the only Internet provider in a given area today, I can guarantee that competition will be coming in that area as well – maybe not for a decade or two in some of the more remote areas, but it will come.  The big cable companies would be well advised not to make the mistakes the big phone companies have made, but I suspect that (as is the case in so many American corporations) the current executives only care that things don’t go completely in the crapper while they are in charge, but what happens after they retire is of little concern to them. Is it possible that, in 15 to 30 years or so, someone will be writing an article like this one, analyzing the reasons that people are giving up their cable service en masse?

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The most important article you may read this year

May 6, 2009 at 8:14 pm · Filed under Broadband, business ethics, cable, consumer, corporation, DSL, Internet, Regulation

If you care anything at all about the future of the Internet (and all the services provided via the Internet), drop everything and go read this article:

If ISPs Meter, Who Verifies Meter Accuracy?

I get a sense of Déjà vu here – I was making these same arguments over a decade ago when telling people why you could not trust the phone company to accurately bill for local measured service.  There was actually one verified case where every call made from a particular telephone exchange was being counted twice, effectively resulting in double billing for measured service customers – it took a city hall auditor to finally figure out what was happening. At least in that situation, someone could put a notepad next to a phone and make a check mark every time a local call was placed, to try and get some idea of whether the billing was accurate.

Let me make it perfectly clear – given the current trend for large corporations to shaft the consumer any way they possibly can, particularly when they think there is very little chance that the consumer will discover that they are being conned, there is no doubt in my mind that some broadband companies will deliberately overbill customers if given the opportunity. I don’t know which company will be the first, and I don’t know exactly how they’ll attempt it, but the very first time a customer gets a bill for excess usage you should at least be suspicious.  Look at how the cell phone companies deliberately mislead their customers about things like international data charges and you may begin to understand why, if metered billing ever takes hold, customers will have a very real problem.

Seriously, metered billing is a VERY bad idea from the customer’s standpoint, especially if there are additional charges for “excessive” use (as opposed to bandwidth throttling when the customer passes a certain usage plateau, which while still objectionable, at least limits the damage by making sure the customer never pays more than the monthly rate he or she agreed to pay).

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The Unintended Consequence of Broadband Usage Caps

May 5, 2009 at 5:37 am · Filed under Broadband, cable, consumer, corporation, Internet, networking

I think broadband providers had better be very careful. I’m old enough to remember a time when it seemed like almost everybody hated the phone company, with the type of hatred that today might be reserved for certain four-letter organizations that end in “AA.” Those of you old enough to remember Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh In” may remember Lily Tomlin’s famous line (while playing the part of Ernestine the Operator): “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the telephone company!”

Well, substitute “cable company” for “telephone company”, and you’d have a phrase that one could easily imagine falling from the lips of a big cable representative. They don’t care that people don’t want usage caps, that this is not the Internet you signed up for. They figure they’ll just re-educate you so that, like a bunch of stupid sheep, you’ll accept the caps.

The trouble with this, however, is it only works until a significant number of people find an alternative. International telephone rates were totally outrageous until VoIP (and especially Skype) came along.

Now here is the problem I see for the cable companies (and the phone companies that offer cable TV type service) that want to impose usage caps. The thing they are trying to block – the whole reason they are trying to limit usage in the first place – is video over the Internet, especially the high quality variety. They want you to buy their expensive cable service and more expensive video on demand. They will, of course, lie through their teeth and give you any other plausible-sounding reason they can think of, but the thing they are scared to death of is the day you can download any TV show, any movie, or any other kind of video you might want to see via the Internet, and they’re not getting a cut. The day you say, “I don’t need cable TV, I don’t need traditional telephone service, I just want unlimited broadband, thank you very much.”

Just for a moment, think about how your life might change if you could go to a web site at any time on or after the day a new episode of a TV show was released, and click on a button and almost immediately have it start streaming to your computer monitor or nearby HDTV set. You’d never worry about missing an episode again. No presidential speech, no sports event, no local weather or news bulletin would interrupt your program. You wouldn’t be in the only television market in the country to not see some network show because the local affiliate decided you’d rather see a local special on the city hospital, or the West Bumfart High School football game. We are, for all practical purposes, almost at that point (some would say already there), at least for some shows.

Thing is, the cable companies probably don’t mind if you go to Hulu and catch a missed show every now and then. But what they really don’t want is you deciding you don’t need cable television, and can just watch everything you want to watch online.

But what they are forgetting is that even where they are the only game in town, computer storage is getting much smaller and cheaper. And look what’s coming down the road: Store 250 DVDs on One Coin-Sized Surface (via Discover Magazine)

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but it wasn’t so long ago when modems ran at paltry speeds like 300 or 1200 bps.  There was no commercial Internet – if you were lucky you might connect to a local Bulletin Board Service, but to exchange data with anyone else online could be a very expensive long distance call. So how did large programs get transferred from one user to another? Via floppy disk, sent via U.S. mail.  For the price of a couple postage stamps, you could send several hundred kilobytes anywhere it needed to be.  Even if you figured in the cost of the floppy disk and the cardboard mailer, you still came out ahead over a long distance phone call in most cases.

So what happens when your local ISP starts charging a buck or two per gigabyte over their paltry cap, and you get fed up and decide that if you want to trade a significant chunk of data with anybody you’ll just put it in the mail? By the time it gets to that point, people will be really pissed off at the cable company.  What I envision happening is they will use their cell phones (with unlimited texting and enough data to send and receive e-mail and maybe do some web browsing each day) but start swapping large chunks of data via mail, and some of those folks will then tell the cable company to take a flying leap.  You can bet that sending data by mail happens already in areas where no broadband is available – people order a hard drive with several hundred gigabytes, or maybe even a terabyte in capacity, have it sent to a close relative that has a collection of videos, programs, games or whatever, and that relative fills up the hard drive and ships it out.  Today that’s a pain in the posterior – but when you can put that same amount of storage or more on a coin-sized surface (and maybe several terabytes on a disk that would just fit into a standard sized envelope) all bets are off. Would you rather pay a couple bucks to receive two or three months’ worth of viewing material in the mail, or pay the cable company a few hundred dollars (or more) for the same amount of viewing?

I always like to point to the fact that Western Union gouged people on sending telegrams (charging an outrageous per-word rate, even after they had developed teletype machines to replace the old Morse code keys) and the minute long distance telephone service became halfway affordable, people pretty much discarded the telegram like an old smelly shoe.  Then the phone companies continued to charge outrageous long distance rates even after technology brought their costs down, and now we see their landline business going the way of the dodo bird – I doubt there will be many landlines left by 2020.  The cable companies should learn from these mistakes and not antagonize their customers.  I know they probably think that they cannot be replaced in many areas – that customers have no other choice but to use their service – but that’s simply not true.  I’m sure we will see advances in digital wireless technology, and we can’t rule out the possibility of electric utilities getting into the broadband business (forget broadband over power lines, start stringing fiber on those poles!).

And then there’s the possibility of some totally new technology being developed.  Personally, I’d put my money on something having to do with quantum entanglement. If you can affect the state of a particle at any distance by altering the state of its twin, and you can do this in a totally secure fashion and with minimal power usage, then all you have to figure out is how to do the state changes quickly enough to send data, and how to decode the received data at the other end. If we ever put a colony on Mars or someplace even more distant, we are not going to want to wait minutes or hours for old-fashioned electromagnetic waves (limited by the speed of light). My understanding is that at the quantum level there is no speed-of-light limitation, and I’ll just bet that you don’t have to use several thousand watts of power to get the signal out. Maybe I’m wrong, and it will be some other technology we haven’t heard of yet, but if you have ever wondered why SETI hasn’t yet picked up an extraterrestrial equivalent of “I Love Lucy” on their gigantic dishes, I suspect it’s because any aliens that might be out there would no more think of using electromagnetic waves for communication than we would consider using smoke signals.

Point is, when the new technologies and alternative connection methods come along, the cable companies may just wish they’d treated their customers a whole lot better. Guys, you know bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper – get it right out of your heads that you can overcharge customers for a decade or two and they will forgive you.  No, really, they won’t, and their children won’t give you the time of day. The unintended consequence of bandwidth caps is that you become the next company that everyone loves to hate, and that’s definitely not a recipe for long-term survival.

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Did Comcast Hire Public Stand-ins For Neutrality Hearing? – Napping, disinterested attendees mysteriously appear, cheer Comcast – dslreports.com

February 26, 2008 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Broadband, business ethics, cable, consumer, FCC, Internet, Regulation ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

You’ve heard of a denial-of-service attack – read the following and see if it appears to you as though Comcast might have taken the same principle and applied it to citizen participation. Or, if you’re of my parents’ generation, see if this reminds you at all of the days when union organizers (or opponents) would fill a meeting with a bunch of paid shills:

The Save The Internet Coalition, a coalition of consumer advocates like the Consumers Union authors of Consumer Reports and the Free Press, is claiming that Comcast bussed in a large number of disinterested individuals to yesterday’s public FCC hearing at Harvard on network neutrality and traffic shaping. The group is claiming Comcast paid these individuals so those seats would not be filled with interested, question-asking participants. Many didn’t even know what the meeting was about …..

Full article here:
Did Comcast Hire Public Stand-ins For Neutrality Hearing? – Napping, disinterested attendees mysteriously appear, cheer Comcast – dslreports.com

The real question is, are the FCC Commissioners so isolated from reality that they can’t figure out that this sort of thing might be happening right under their noses? I mean, if we assume that the critics have the right take on this, it would seem to me that once the Commission discovers that Comcast apparently believes their case is so weak that they dare not allow opponents to fairly participate in the process, that would work against them. I might be wrong, but to me this sort of seems like an admission that if the hearings are conducted in a fair and open manner, Comcast doesn’t believe their position will be the one with which the FCC sides.  But then, that (and everything in this article other than the article excerpt and link) is just my personal take on what I’ve read in the linked article. As always, feel free to leave a comment if you disagree.

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IP Democracy: Verizon’s War with Cable over VoIP Customers

February 12, 2008 at 6:02 am · Filed under cable, FCC, litigation, patents, Verizon, VoIP ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

It appears as though Verizon is resorting to lawsuits, as well as allegedly violating FCC rules, in an attempt to defeat or delay the widespread use of VoIP.  It won’t work, of course, and Verizon should beware the unintended consequences, by which I mean increased scrutiny by three-letter Federal agencies.  The problem for big telco is that no one will be able to kill VoIP – even if it were to die here in the United States (which could only happen if one of the telco brass somehow managed to become absolute dictator), it would still flourish in other countries around the globe.  So, the phone companies are in the unenviable position of playing the role of the buggy whip manufacturers trying to hobble the introduction of the automobile.  As IP Democracy reports:

Top telco Verizon has seemingly had enough with cable operators stealing away its local voice customers. Fresh from its VoIP patent lawsuit victory over independent VoIP provider Vonage, Verizon is now flexing its legal muscles to take on the even more threatening cable industry.

Last week the telco filed its second infringement suit against a cable operator, Charter Communications, accusing Charter of violating its VoIP patents. Verizon seeks an injunction plus monetary damages. The Charter suit follows a similar lawsuit Verizon filed against cable operator Cox Communications last month.

Charter and Cox are not, apparently, alone in feeling Verizon’s jab at their VoIP businesses. Three other cable companies, Comcast, Time Warner and Brighthouse Networks, filed a complaint with the FCC yesterday claiming that Verizon is violating the Commission’s rules by dangling retention incentives to landline customers that have already decided to switch to cable digital voice services.

Read the full story here:
IP Democracy – Verizon’s War with Cable over VoIP Customers

If I were a Verizon shareholder (which I am not – I’ve never played the stock market, and have no intention of doing so), I think I’d be a little worried about Verizon taking on big cable. The lawsuit against Vonage was sort of like an elephant taking on an ant, in terms of available legal resources, but taking on the cable industry is a whole other matter.

It’s interesting to me that so far, Verizon apparently hasn’t sued Comcast, but that doesn’t mean that Comcast has no interest in the outcome of the other lawsuits, and if they get involved that could change the balance of power.  If the cable industry chooses to unite to fight these lawsuits, under the theory that “you pick on one of my brothers, you take all of us on”, Verizon could suddenly find themselves in a clash of relative equals. Granted that at the moment, the Federal Communications Commission seems to show undue favoritism toward the telephone companies, but that may make the cable companies all the more willing to move the contest into the courts, where the FCC has relatively little influence.  And, if this turns into a prolonged fight, it’s quite possible (some would say quite likely) that the makeup of the FCC will change. So, the ultimate outcome of this clash isn’t at all a foregone conclusion. However, in the long run, history never seems to favor the party trying to hold back technology. In the case of a company, even if they don’t cease to exist entirely, they become much less of a force to be reckoned with.

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The Consumerist has trifecta of Comcast items today

January 30, 2008 at 1:09 pm · Filed under cable, consumer, customer service, Regulation, Telephone ·Tagged , , , , ,

I don’t know if someone decided to put Comcast in the spotlight today over at The Consumerist, or if all the Comcast-related items just happened to pour in today, but there are three items that may be of interest to Comcast customers (the last item may apply to you even if you’re not a Comcast customer):

First, there’s now an easy way for customers to opt out of mandatory binding arbitration as a way to settle disputes with Comcast (along with a link to an article that shows why you might want to do that). If you’re already convinced and want to cut to the chase, here’s a link to the opt-out form on Comcast’s site.

Second, The Consumerist also reports that Comcast has been fined $12,000 for having crappy customer service by Montgomery County, Maryland. The quote we like comes from county Councilmember Duchy Trachtenberg: “Fining companies that fail to fulfill their contractual obligations is an important part of good government.” We sometimes wish that certain other government officials felt that way (and we don’t mean that only where Comcast is concerned – there are a lot of other companies out there giving crappy service, and/or charging higher-than-advertised prices through the use of bogus add-on fees, and/or engaging in other practices that should elicit fines).

Third, and this may be the most important, The Consumerist advises that a Comcast insider warns that Comcast doesn’t check to see if 911 is working on your Comcast digital phone – and this article concludes by implying that this may be a problem with other companies as well. As much as a few 911 center operators may hate the idea (most don’t, but there are a few that seem to forget what their role actually is), we think that any time you change phone service providers, it’s a good idea to make a test call to 911 during daytime hours, when there’s not likely to be much real emergency traffic (not in the middle of a major storm, in other words). Some people (including some who have left comments on the article) advise that before doing this, you call the 911 center on their non-emergency number and ask if it’s okay to make such a test call. Note that in a few jurisdictions it may actually be illegal to make such a test call, and/or the 911 folks may yell at you for tying up their lines (particularly if you don’t use common sense about calling when they aren’t busy), so that’s another reason to call the non-emergency number first, if you can find it (this is probably particularly true if you live in a metropolitan area).

When making a test 911 call, the first thing you should say is that there is no emergency, and that you are testing your (new) phone service to see if 911 calls are being completed properly.  Then ask if the call has actually gone to the 911 center that serves your address, and also whether their caller ID display is showing correct information (your name and street address). Some 911 centers (probably all of them) have a way to add notes associated with an address, for example, if there is an invalid living in your home or some other special situation that you think first responders may need to know, and you may want to find out if any such notes are still attached to the account (if you need to add such notes, there may be a page or a form in your local telephone directory that explains how to do that, but you should probably call the center’s non-emergency number to discuss that). And don’t forget, once you start a 911 call, do not just hang up if an interruption occurs – in most jurisdictions they are required to send the police out if you hang up on a 911 call without saying anything, under the theory that you may be ill, or you may be in an emergency situation (home invasion, etc.) where you cannot speak. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the police will actually arrive soon enough to help in a real emergency if you just hang up without speaking, but Murphy’s Law says that if you don’t need them and hang up, that’s when they will be knocking at your door.

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The slippery slope of metered pricing for broadband

January 17, 2008 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Broadband, cable, consumer, Regulation ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

There have been a few reports surfacing this week that Time-Warner intends to try a metered pricing scheme for broadband service  down in Beaumont, Texas. I’m not sure why they picked that town but I’ll bet there’s not a lot of broadband competition there. Or perhaps Time Warner has friends on the Beaumont town council. Whatever…

In any case, The Consumerist points out that metered bandwidth to consumers might lead to unintended consequences.  They point out that,

Although tiered pricing is often touted as a means to resolve fears of a “bandwith crunch” on the Internet, the model may also serve to constrain one of the Internet’s biggest sources of innovation — user-created content, particularly home videos and movies uploaded on sites such as YouTube and Joost.

Bandwith-heavy services such as video hosting and sharing may never have gotten off the ground if users were concerned about exceeding caps on their bandwith, and if tiered services are adopted by cable and telecom providers on a nationwide basis, it may lead to slower usage of file-sharing services and video-sharing sites.

While that might mean fewer videos of pets performing silly tricks, it could also severely restrict the many ways Internet users communicate and share information via the Web.

Full Consumerist article here:
Time Warner To Test Metered Pricing For Broadband

I want you to stop and think for a moment – how much of the content that you download, view, or listen to via the Internet is NOT produced by large corporations with deep pockets? How much of that content is available to you for free, just because someone had something to say or to share with the world? That is the content that is endangered by metered pricing.

Sure, maybe the world could get by with fewer funny pictures of cats, or videos of people making fountains by dropping mints into cola, or even user-generated articles like this blog.  Maybe you can do without VoIP – after all, your cable company would be happy to sell you their version of phone service, and apparently quite a few of you see nothing wrong with getting phone service from your cable company, even if they do charge you twice the price of an independent VoIP provider. But mark my words, metered bandwidth will make us all poorer.

Let me tell you what I believe is the phone and cable company wet dream for Internet service:  You pay them a monthly fee for the service – the “base rate” just for providing a wire or fiber to your home – and then you pay additional charges for the traffic you use.  Chances are, the charging mechanism will be so obscure that you will not have any way to verify whether you are being charged accurately, or whether they are just pulling some usage number out of their … um, hat. But also, the people who provide the content you view or download will have to pay, or their packets will never reach you.  so you will pay once to have the service, again to have the packets get to you, and the people you serve up the content will also pay.  Oh, and maybe they slip in a few “unfees” while they are at it. Meanwhile phone and cable company executives will get multi-million dollar salaries and “golden parachutes” that will keep their great-great-grandchildren from ever having to work if they don’t want to.

Now I hear you cry, “but that’s not what Time-Warner is proposing at all!”  Well, of course it isn’t. They aren’t that stupid, and maybe not even that greedy – yet.  But the problem is, any type of enforced metered billing sets up the “slippery slope.”  Large corporations, and even governments, have learned well how to play the game.  You start out charging a small amount, and maybe to only the “top 5%” or so.  Then every year or two, you increase the amount charged, while also increasing the percentage of people who have to pay it.  The beauty of the system is that eventually it creates an “us against them” situation – by the time the top 30% or 40% are having to pay, they are looking down their noses at the “bums” who aren’t paying, and complaining that those folks are getting a “free ride.” If your great-grandfathers are still living, ask how many of them had to pay income tax during the early years, and what percentage of income was actually taxed, and compare it to what people are paying today.

As with taxes, once a usage charge is implemented, it NEVER goes away (unless, perhaps, it falls flat in the initial trials). And lest you think taxes and metered billing are unrelated, consider that for over a century the government had a usage-based tax on phone service. It certainly isn’t inconceivable that as people have to give up more of their income for broadband service, the government will see that as too good an opportunity to pass up, and will impose a “luxury tax” of sorts on broadband service – again, I don’t expect this will happen in the immediate future, but who knows how the politicians will be thinking about the Internet in ten or twenty years, especially if it turns into a medium that’s primarily commercial in nature (with much of the free content gone the way of the dodo bird).

Now, apparently some folks just don’t understand this.  Even David S. Isenberg is talking as though this is a good thing, because in his mind it means that broadband providers will be open and transparent about managing congestion.  He writes:

If you must manage congestion, then doing it explicitly is, at very least, honest. It is better than doing it (a) covertly or (b) indirectly, by injecting artificial interrupts and (c) denying you’re doing it — like Comcast currently does.

But that’s assuming that if they can meter bandwidth to end users, they won’t engage in any of the covert or indirect methods of limiting broadband.  However, that would logically only be true if they are making significant sums by allowing such content to flow without interference.  If only the top 5% of users are going to see extra amounts on their bills because of this scheme, that logically means that 95% will be free to continue doing what they’ve always done, without paying any more.  Do you see the problem?  If there really is a bandwidth shortage – which, by the way, there shouldn’t be if companies would properly engineer their networks – then there will be a strong temptation to apply the metered billing to a larger percentage of the customer base, or to use surreptitious methods to limit the bandwidth used by those customers not paying on a metered basis.

Furthermore, metering bandwidth is not something that you can apply the “lesser of evils” test to, because the problem is that it will grow like a cancer if not nipped in the bud – just because it may be the lesser of evils today doesn’t mean it won’t be a much greater evil a few years down the road. And beyond that, it opens a myraid of new opportunities for customers to be ripped off by providers.  The moment you meter anything, you then have the expense of metering (which, of course, gets passed on to the customer) AND you have the problem of making sure that the metering is accurate.  That implies that you either need a government bureaucracy to investigate claims of inaccurate metering, or you simply get into a “wild west” situation where companies can charge hapless consumers whatever they want, and if the customer suspects that the billing is inaccurate, tough luck – there’s no real recourse (particularly in areas where there’s little or no competition).

When I was a child, growing up in the 1950′s, kids didn’t just pick up the phone and call their grandparents (if there was any distance between the two), because a long distance call was a significant expense back then.  In our family, about the only time long distance calls were ever made was on Christmas or someone’s birthday (and my parents would still try to end the call within three minutes, even after the phone companies dropped the three-minute minimum).  I’m sure we will never go back to that, but do we want a situation where parents have to think twice about sending videos of their kids to the grandparents, or about letting the kids conduct long video calls over the Internet? That may seem ridiculous now, but maybe a new technology will be invented that will be too expensive to use over limited bandwidth (think some sort of 3-D presence – the technology exists now, but it’s too bandwidth-intensive for all but dedicated, very-high-speed connections). Do we want that technology to be metered, so that the new applications never see widespread usage, or in the alternative, shouldn’t we expect broadband providers to increase their available bandwidth, in order to keep up with the new technologies?

And as a final thought, why would bandwidth providers have any incentive to increase bandwidth to end users if that means that fewer people would have to pay for excess usage?  Have you noticed that traditional wireline phone companies still only give you minimal bandwidth of 0-3000 Hz or thereabouts, even though audio circuits capable of reproducing sound to the limits of human hearing (and beyond) have been available for decades now? If phone service had been flat-rate across the country AND there had been multiple phone companies that customers could have chosen from, my bet is that we’d have telephones capable of at least FM radio quality speech by now. The phone companies had the monopoly, they charged based on usage, and they gave consumers as little as possible in the way of innovation, except when they thought they could make a few extra bucks a month.  Is that the model you want to emulate for broadband service?

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Why hidden fees are a big deal – Gotcha Capitalism

January 15, 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under cable, consumer, customer service, DSL, Regulation, satellite television, Telephone, VoIP, Wireless

FINALLY the major media is starting to see this as a problem, though I fear this will not stay on their radar long.  The following is an excerpt from the book “Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day and What You Can Do About It” by Bob Sullivan, as posted on MSNBC’s site:

When I was a child growing up just outside New York City during the 1970s, I learned to be afraid of getting mugged. But this is not that. The criminals I’m talking about don’t bop anyone over the head and steal hundreds of dollars. These criminals slowly take $5, $10, and $20 from me, often with a smile. They pop a surcharge onto my monthly phone bill. They pad my TV bill with services I didn’t ask for. They drain my bank account — drip, drip, drip — when I’m not watching. These hidden fees keep me up late at night like the sound of a leaky faucet. I feel like I have to watch everything all the time, because it’s so easy to miss some statement on some form with some asterisk that means the company can take even more money from me. And when that happens, I suffer from what I call small print rage.

Read a much larger excerpt here:
Why hidden fees are a big deal – Gotcha Capitalism- msnbc.com

Mr. Sullivan has figured out that these sneaky fees are costing the average American $946 a year. In another article at MSNBC’s site he has listed ten tips to avoid sneaky fees and demand fair treatment. Readers of this blog may find tips 3, 4, 9, and 10 especially interesting and enlightening.

You want to know what I think?  Personally, I think that the companies and executives that come up with these fees … well, let’s just say that I’d really like to tell you what I think of them, but there might be minors reading this, and I don’t think I could truly express how I feel about them in any manner that would be acceptable in a blog intended for readers of all ages.

BroadbandReports.com also mentioned the above article. They’ve been great about shining the spotlight on companies that engage in this type of false advertising, and I hope they continue to do so.  The problem is that a lot of people post their gripes in their forums, when they should be sending their complaints to their state Attorney General or Public Service Commission. If you’tre going to complain in a forum, you might as well save yourself the effort of typing your complaint, and just call up one of your siblings, or go out on the street and find someone to complain to – it will have about the same effect. People, please, stop just putting up with corporations stealing from you.  Would you let someone walk into your home and smile as they carted off your possessions, or took a few bills out of your wallet or purse? Heck, would you let your kids do that? Then why do you let big corporations do it to you, without a word of protest?

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Comcast sending local channels to “Siberia”

December 7, 2007 at 6:38 pm · Filed under cable, Regulation ·Tagged , , ,

This excerpt is from the Muskegon Chronicle:

Comcast Cable Communications surprised public access television operators and its own customers by announcing it will move four channels from the analog basic service lineup to higher channels in the digital cable system. Cable customers will need to rent a digital converter box to see the channels.

The change is slated for Jan. 15.

It’s a move akin to sending these locally produced channels to “Siberia,” potentially eliminating hundreds of viewers, one West Michigan media producer said.

“It’s going to hurt us,” said David Mooney, director of MCC’s television operations. “We are worried that a number of our viewers are not going to go and get a digital converter box. We worry that we will be losing a chunk of our audience.”

Read the complete article here:
Comcast public channels go digital – mlive.com

There are many people who wouldn’t bother to watch a local channel if their life depended on it, and who won’t care at all about this. But there are other who find it useful, or even necessary, to view those locally produced channels.

Back when cable companies were first setting up operations, many communities imposed a requirement that the system carry a certain number of local access channels as a condition of receiving a franchise.   I don’t suppose that the people who drafted those agreements ever anticipated that one day it would be feasible, and in fact, cost effective, to block those channels from those receiving the lowest-cost tiers of service.  I can’t imagine that ten or twenty years ago, anyone ever anticipated that a cable company would attempt to charge extra for viewing the local access channels.

I don’t know this for a fact, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the analog-only viewers will still be able to receive at least one or two home shopping channels, or some other channel that’s a revenue-producer for the cable company.  Anyway, just in my personal opinion, this is more evidence that certain large cable companies are getting too large.  That’s why I have such mixed feelings about FCC chairman Kevin Martin’s efforts to impede their continued growth.  I realize that he’s angering a lot of people and probably overstepping his authority (and the FCC’s authority), but doggone it, if there were some way he could accomplish what he’s trying to do without bending any laws, I don’t think it would bother me too much.  Some cable companies (probably most of them, with a few notable exceptions) deserve to be taken down a peg or two.

Whatever happended to the obligation to serve the public interest in some small way, in return for that lucrative exclusive franchise?  If Comcast loses any customers because they are moving the public access channels to digital-only territory, I’d say it serves them right.  But beyond that, maybe the affected cities ought to keep this action in mind the next time Comcast’s franchise comes up for renewal.

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DSLreports.com says FCC’s Kevin Martin plays favorites, and is NOT really pro-consumer

November 14, 2007 at 8:46 pm · Filed under cable, consumer, FCC, Regulation ·Tagged , , , ,

I have to admit, my earlier posting might have left some with the impression that I thought that the FCC was belatedly playing the part of the white knight, finally ready to save us from the abuses of the cable monopolies. I guess that some days, I am willing to rejoice if it seems like us consumers are getting half a loaf. Hypothetically speaking, if you have two huge monopolists and the federal government tries to break the back of one of them, isn’t that better than leaving them both alone, to do with consumers as they wish?

Well, maybe not, if the hidden goal is to make the other monopolist just that much larger and more powerful, thus giving them the ability to oppress consumers more than the two competing monopolists ever could.

DSLreports tackles this issue in an editorial, in which they reveal what they believe are the real motivations behind FCC chairman Kevin Martin’s recent actions.  It’s well worth reading:

Kevin Martin Doesn’t Hate Cable, He Just Loves Ma Bell – Editorial: Time to stop pretending FCC boss is pro-consumer…

Personally, I have no great love for either big phone companies or big cable companies.   But in my lifetime, the phone companies have always been monopolies, and it actually appears that they are losing their hold on the American consumer, though that may just be an illusion.  However, I can remember when there was no such thing as huge, nationwide cable companies.  I can recall a time when most cable companies were local, and actually felt a duty to provide service to their neighbors at something approaching a fair price. Yet the cable companies have consolidated and grown more monopolistic, and have raised their rates at levels far out of proportion to the rate of inflation.  On the other hand, if you compare local phone rates in the 1950′s to today’s rates, with a proper adjustment for the rate of inflation, the cost of wireline phone service has actually dropped considerably (especially when you factor in the cost of long distance calls).

So there is a part of me that wants to think of the biggest cable companies (one in particular, which I shall not name because they probably have many lawyers)  as the bigger bastards.  But as I say, that may just be perception. In any case, fairness would dictate that the FCC should not impose conditions on the cable industry if they would be unwilling to impose similar conditions on their friends in the phone industry.  Of course, fairness goes out the window when Washington runs on favors, bribes, kickbacks, “gifts”, and campaign contributions, and makes policy with little consideration of what’s best for consumers, but much consideration of whose career is getting advanced, or whose family is getting a “free” vacation.

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Sick of high cable bills? Help may be on the way, courtesy of the F.C.C.

November 10, 2007 at 5:25 pm · Filed under cable, FCC, Regulation ·Tagged , ,

You know that a large industry has gone completely off the deep end when a federal agency in the current administration is willing to impose more regulation.  Apparently, cable rates have been rising at a rate much higher than the rate of inflation for years now (not that this is news to any cable subscriber) and that, coupled with the industry’s steadfast resistance to offering any form of “ala carte” programming (where you could pick and pay for only those channels you want, instead of having to take a bundle of crap to get the one channel you really want) has apparently finally caused the F.C.C. to decide “enough is enough” (there are actually probably many factors in their decision, but those two have been sore points for quite some time).

(Excerpt:)

The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to impose significant new regulations to open the cable television market to independent programmers and rival video services after determining that cable companies have become too dominant in the industry, senior commission officials said.

Full article here:
F.C.C. Planning Rules to Open Cable Market | TheLedger.com

This is huge if it actually goes through as planned – finally, cable subscribers may get some relief from the ever-increasing spiral of high prices, and smaller, independent programmers may actually have the ability to get their programs seen.

Of course, if you are not the sort of person who spends hours a day in front of the “idiot box”, and if you don’t absolutely need to see the movie channels and speciality cable channels, and if all you really want is just little more variety than what you presently get from your local stations, then you could sink a couple hundred bucks into a “Free-To-Air” digital satellite receiver, and maybe another hundred or two into a satellite dish and positioner (assuming you can’t scrounge up an old Primestar dish somewhere, which is more than adequate for the purpose), and get several additional free channels. It’s perfectly legal (provided you don’t deliberately try to do something illegal) and there are no monthly bills, but you have to put some effort into learning what to buy and how to set it up, and don’t expect to get any of the pay channels that you find on your local cable system. Depending on how much of a TV addict you are, and how much you like older TV shows, it might be just enough. And if you happen to have the room for a larger C-Band dish, you are golden – you can get even more variety in programming.  There is a learning curve, but there are Internet forums that will teach you the basics.

And yes, I know there was a huge run-on sentence in the last paragraph.  Kids, don’t do that at school, your English teacher will have a fit!

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