Tag: att

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Microsoft’s Solution to Cyber Attacks: PC Health Certificates

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Quarantine officers on our flight

If you haven’t already, please read Seymour Hersh’s insightful and non-alarmist New Yorker article on cyber security in the context of the recent Stuxnet virus and China’s growing hack capabilities.

The Hersh piece contains a very simple solution to safeguard our nation’s IT against government or mere freelance hackers: mandatory encryption of all commercial and civil Internet communications.

While this broad approach is attractive in principle, cost and inconvenience make this less than desirable. And there’s also opposition from the same government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting us against cyber attacks in the first place: they wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop as easily.

Though perhaps not the most credible candidate, Microsoft has offered its own proposal, an idea that has proved useful in managing infectious diseases: PC health certificates.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

1 Gbps in Chattanooga

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I practically did a spit take while drinking my coffee this morning and reading The New York Times story about a municipal broadband project in Tennessee.  I learned that  Chattanooga’s  community owned power provider, EPB, has plans to offer up to 1 Gigabit per second  to its fiber-to-the-home subscribers by the end of the year. True, that can cost you almost $350 per year (lower if you bundle in voice and video).

I checked some of the pricing of their various service bundles—a classic triple-play of voice, video, and data—on the EPB website, and the packages are quite competitive: 30 Mbps data, enhanced video, and voice for $111.

This is a big win for non-profit fiber projects nationwide. And possibly a leading candidate for winning Google’s Fiber for Communities contest to build and test an  ultra-high speed network.

By the way, it appears that Comcast was at one point the sole  broadband and cable video provider for Chattanooga.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T Charged with Slamming

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Ars Technica reported a few months ago that the practice of slamming still lives on. Slamming involves the deceptive switching of a customer’s voice carrier. It is one of those minor protections spelled out in Title II of the Communications Act.

By the way, the specific rule is covered in  section 201 ( “any such charge, practice, classification, or regulation that is unjust or unreasonable is declared to be unlawful” ) and is one of  the six sections that will be applied to cable broadband providers in the FCC’s novel third way approach.

So it is disturbing to read that AT&T was caught  slamming customers in Illinois. On Friday, the FCC granted a complaint against AT&T for switching a customer of Unitel Communications without first receiving authorization.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Afternoon in NYC with Galaxy, iPhone, and Droid

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Why not see three of the newest smartphones during a hot Saturday in NYC?  Since the  Apple store on Upper Broadway is a five-minute walk from where the Samsung Galaxy S was receiving visitors in the Time Warner building,  we could hop from one air-conditioned venue to another without getting broiled.  Along the way we could also check out the Motorola Droid X at a cell phone shack.

It seemed like a good idea when my friend, let’s call him Dr. Smartphone, suggested it to me this past weekend.  He was anxious to see how Galaxy’s 4” super AMOLED 800×400 display performed, and I had yet to gaze upon the iPhone 4.  Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Is Google Voice Net Neutral?

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Not according to, er, AT&T.  “Intellectual contradiction” and “noisome trumpeter” and other mean words were lobbed at Google by AT&T in a letter to the FCC in September 2009.  You get a little dizzy reading this contrivance especially when AT&T is holding this search provider’s feet to the fire by quoting an  FCC policy statement on Internet competition: “consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service.”

Wow, so does that mean AT&T is suggesting that the FCC should be regulating Internet applications to promote competition?

This would all be another day-in-the-life of squabbling service providers—read below the he-says-she-says between AT&T and T-Mobile over competitive pricing for TDM-based backhaul — but this is Google, and Google Voice is now open to the public.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The AT&T-Verse

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Waves of bad news coming out of AT&T recently stand as a reminder of what life would be like if the crown was restored to this former monarch.

First there was the iPad security escapade wherein a group of hackers fooled a very insecure AT&T web form to display email addresses of iPad owners. Then the pre-order web meltdown in which customers for Apple’s iPhone 4  were faced with an AT&T back-end order entry system that stopped working. Then there’s the customer who received a terse cease-and-desist voicemail response after he emailed AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson to complain about the new caps on data—Zappos’s Tony Hsieh is probably smiling and FedExing a copy of his latest book, Delivering Happiness, to Randall.

Add to this brew the usual problems with AT&T’s 3G coverage (see TechCrunch’s  wireless frustrations) and barely acceptable customer service, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of how telecom was delivered in the Middle Ages (circa 1970s) when AT&T and the Bells were the only games in town.

And to rub salt into our wounds, AT&T is threatening to cut off investment in its U-verse/IPTV cable rollout if the FCC doesn’t reconsider its reclassification of cable broadband as Title II telecommunications.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

From AT&T Picturephone to Apple FaceTime

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AT&T Picturephone

It’s been a long standing journalistic practice that when writing about the failure of yet another video phone product, you march out AT&T’s Picturephone launch at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. I believe it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple’s new FaceTime will break the long losing streak of this concept and make video chats as natural and popular as, well, a cell phone call. Even though we finally have a video phone winner, it’s still instructive to look at that early Bell product, if only to understand why it will take a company like Apple to make it a mass success.

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss of privacy, but thought it would be counterbalanced  by the public’s just-under-the-surface narcissism. Their original advertising slogan was “Some Day You’ll be A Star” (see P. Coburn’s, The Change Function). This was a  bold call to arms for a pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, and pre-Youtube America.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T’s New Pricing Plan

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Perspectives from David Pogue (New York Times) and Stacy Higginbotham (Gigaom) are a good starting point to understanding what data caps, pricing tiers, and tethering charges imply about the state of wireless competition (less than thriving) and profit expectations of a big carrier (“greedy”).  The money quote from Pogue after the jump:

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Archaic Telecom

Verizon's Good Deal: 1 Mbps for $20/month, forever

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Carriers have always loved to meter. They are utilities after all.  Of course, then came the Internet,  dirt cheap bits,  and a generation of consumers brought up on free.  Wanting to charge on a piecemeal basis but fearful of consumer outrage on being nickel-and-dimed, the telecom industry has been adopting pricing tiers (see AT&T) as a compromise solution.

With tiers, the meter isn’t running. Instead, customers pay a fixed amount for a given level of service (speed, capacity, quality, etc.)   This has traditionally been the arrangement in business telecom—of course, in that world you’re protected by service level agreements that pay out for disruptions, excessive latency, and packet errors.

I was excited to learn about an interesting variation on the pricing tier model that was revealed in a  letter from Verizon.  In its latest  marketing campaign, Verizon promises to lock in a  stingy 1 Mbps broadband for its subscribers at $19.99 per month, forever: “...low price you can count on, month after month, year after year.”
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Archaic Telecom

The Real FCC Plot: Open Internet Access

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After the FCC lost its net neutrality case against Comcast, I put on hold a project to review a series of YouTube videos involving Chairman Genachowski. The rough plan was to gain some insight as to how the FCC would approach net neutrality, open internet, and universal access based on Genachowski’s public statements. I wasn’t going to do this alone, instead I would enlist the resources of Crowdflower’s cloud workers to help with the analysis.

That was ages ago (last month). Since then the FCC has announced its plan to place has placed broadband transmission under Title II regulation and has regained the net neutrality high ground. And in response, one well known, respected FCC watcher, Glen Beck, has said that the President plans to regulate the Internet and control the “misinformation” through net neutrality—there was also some talk about Marxism and public utilities.

This was enough to spur me into action and get those videos scanned for certain keywords.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Verizon Blinks

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As we all know, Verizon went public on Tuesday with its agreement to allow Skype’s VoIP application to run on its network. There are still a few gotchas for Verizon subscribers who want the service, but in the world of telecom this is momentous. Faced with the FCC’s proposed rules for net neutrality and a new fifth principle of non-discrimination, Verizon (along with AT&T) has relented.