NYCPHP Meetup

[Ajai Khattri]

On Wed, 20 May 2009, Mitch Pirtle wrote:

> That is the price we pay for things getting invented over here. Radio
> is another example. First time I saw a car radio in Switzerland and
> the name of the song was displaying I almost had a heart attack. Then
> I used something called TeleText to check the news on a TV, without
> internet access.

Cleverly sending data during the blank interval, Teletext is great. They 
had a similar thing here but it never caught on. Seems its cheaper to have 
500 channels for info than using something like Teletext perhaps? Or maybe 
the not-invented-here symdrome kicked in...

> Simple things to a European, but totally tomorrow-land stuff to an
> American. We may have invented TV and radio over here, but we also are
> stuck supporting the caveman-era technologies that were rolled out
> when they were first invented.
> 
> The Europeans sat back, and watched us blow our fingers off with our
> experiments; and when the pain stopped and things started looking
> really good, they said "Hey, this whole radio thing is a brilliant
> idea, and we can include text in our broadcast as well."

Sure, but I could also argue a lot of important inventions weren't 
invented here (radar, jet engines, web browsers, etc), but I think a lot 
of American either dont know or forget.

> For Brooklyn, the problem is that the original cabling was hung from
> poles going behind all the houses. Say you are Verizon, and you want
> to do the Right Thing by putting in modern facilities. You are going
> to have to contact every tenant for every residence to get permission
> to go out back and replace that cabling. Let me know when you are
> done, assuming I live that long.
> 
> -- Mitch, noting that the cable companies DID get to wire stuff where
> it belonged

There are a lot of other forces at play here. Verizon for years had to 
share and the cable companies did not. So there's no incentive for Verizon 
to improve facilties. Now that they dont *have* to share their network, 
they can just sit back and wait for the fiber rollout (effectively locking 
out any competition from anyone else). Ive seen whole building where the 
copper has been replaced by fiber. So noone else can sell services into 
that building. Pretty neat strategy.

I had a friend who signed up for Verizon FiOS TV. They showed up and 
replaced ALL of his copper with fiber, including his phone. Unfortunately, 
he has DSL on the phoneline so he lost Internet access - took them two 
weeks to 'fix' it.

Why do I know a lot about this crap? Well, I used to work for a local ISP 
- we've seen all the BS, tricks and games from Verizon...

Without competition, be prepared for things to be crappy for a long long 
time.



-- 
Aj.