Author Archives: Jesse

Broadband Bytes for 2013-08-16

By | |
Leave a comment

Doing voice on the super-cheap? SumoFiber has it figured out

By | |
Leave a comment

A great thing about smaller providers is that they’re always looking at the crazy ideas to come up with something really cool. A great example of that is how SumoFiber is approaching home phone service. Most providers either resell a SIP trunk or roll their own in-house SIP solution. (Veracity is an example of the latter.) SumoFiber took a different tack: why not add inexpensive E911 service onto a Google Voice account? (Update: This is in addition to traditional VoIP solutions.)

The secret sauce is an adapter from a little-known company called Obihai. It’s an inexpensive ATA that lets you hook up Google Voice accounts and use a normal home phone with them. That means unlimited long distance to the US and Canada and cheap calls to pretty much everywhere else. Google Voice is a free service, and E911 trunks are pretty inexpensive (often under $1/mo). They’re doing what I did at home about a month ago, so I can attest to the reliability and seamlessness of the service.

Could you buy the adapter and configure it yourself? Probably. The advantage of the provider doing it is that they’ll handle all of the hardware, setup, and QoS for you. A gearhead like me may be able to figure it out and deal with the occasional service provider hiccup from congestion, but Joe User could find it tricky, especially finding an E911 service provider to provision. Even so, the only QoS I can implement is on my local connection, not all the way to the ISP’s backhaul connection.

This is a great way to add value to an existing service and really embraces the “dumb pipe” nature of an open access network. This is one of the many ways that UTOPIA providers can differentiate themselves against incumbents and each other.

PS They’re also going to be bumping all 50Mbps customers to 100Mbps just like XMission and match the price too.

If you’re a UTOPIA service provider doing something a little off the beaten path, let me know and I’ll be happy to write about it.

XMission Gives UTOPIA Customers a Free Speed Bump

By | | , ,
5 Comments

If you’re using XMission on UTOPIA, you probably noticed a nice little bonus last night: all 50Mbps customers got a bump up to the full 100Mbps for no extra charge. There’s a few people left to be switched, but it should be done within a couple of days, tops.

One thing to note is that if you aren’t seeing those speeds, you may need to upgrade your router. Most routers, even newer ones, don’t include a 1Gbps WAN port which often serves as a bottleneck. Older 802.11 a/b/g routers also create choke points on the wireless side. All said, that’s a pretty nice problem to have, isn’t it?

Broadband Bytes for 2013-08-09

By | |
Leave a comment

Broadband Bytes for 2013-08-02

By | |
Leave a comment

Google Fiber: The Deal That Keeps Getting Worse

By | | , ,
7 Comments

landoIt’s no secret I’ve soured on Google Fiber, and I was pretty loud in saying that Provo wasn’t making a very good deal with the advertising giant for iProvo. They threw open access under the bus. They killed the prospect of public-private partnerships. They gave businesses the cold shoulder. Now they’re going one further: their boilerplate ToS bans running servers just like Comcast and CenturyLink.

This matters. It matters a lot. The point of a faster upload speed isn’t just to send pictures to Facebook faster. It would let you share content directly with other users. Most ISPs go with an asymmetrical connection precisely to dissuade you from creating content, preferring to drive you to content consumption that costs them less bandwidth. A symmetrical connection is supposed to facilitate this.

What should we expect to see? Will a small business be cut off because they decided to host their own mail server? Will a start-up be scrambling to move their site to a hosting company (with additional costs) because they setup a web server? Would someone’s home Minecraft server for their friends result in a disconnection of service? The history of other ISPs suggests that it will be enforced unevenly and without explanation.

Google seems to have a habit of altering the terms of the deal in ways that favor them. It’s much easier to just have your own hosting your can rely on. Picking up a cheap server using a HostGator Cyber Monday Deal 2016 coupon is a smarter, easier decision with less mental stress in the end. Provo, you’d going to start feeling a lot like Lando Calrissian, that the deal is getting worse all the time. Don’t let Darth Google get away with it. If you can.

Broadband Bytes for 2013-07-26

By | |
Leave a comment

Broadband Bytes for 2013-06-07

By | |
1 Comment

Broadband Bytes for 2013-05-31

By | |
Leave a comment