Reminder: Subcommittee Meeting Tomorrow Morning

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Just a reminder that the Government Competition and Privatization Subcommittee will be meeting tomorrow, Wednesday November 7th at 9AM in Room W125 of the House Building at the Capitol Complex. This meeting will be to specifically discuss UTOPIA-related legislation as discussed in the prior meeting. (Read more here.) Prior to the meeting, it will be very important that you e-mail members of the committee to express how you feel about the proposals on the table. Killing bills in committee is much easier than trying to kill them during the general session.

Hope to see a bunch of you there tomorrow morning!

(h/t to forum member aef123 for reminding me to post something.)

No Rest For the Weary: Vonage Coughs Up $80M to Verizon, Gets Hit With Major Security Holes

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The bad news for Vonage just keeps on rolling in. The face of VoIP providers everywhere has reportedly coughed up $80M to make Verizon leave them alone. That's almost a third of their cash on hand, not a pretty picture for a company with high churn rates due to some lacking customer service.

It's only downhill from there. According to a security firm, Vonage could be wide open to line hijacking. Among the key elements cited is a lack of encryption used between their telephone adapter hardware and their VoIP gateways. Combined with weak authentication, it could take as little as a phone number and a name to make Bob Jones of Virgina have his calls ring in Moscow with little indication that anything is wrong.

I've been using Vonage for over three years myself and I can attest to their kind of crappy service. It took me over 4 months to get a simple e-mail problem fixed and about 2 months to get them to swap my primary and secondary numbers (after which they forgot to activate my voice mail box). Despite that, I've been pleased with the service. I am, however, worried that I'll wake up one morning and find I no longer have a dial tone. 

Comcast Facing Wrath of Consumers, Congressmen, Wall Street Over BitTorrent Throttling

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In the wake of Comcast's throttling, er, "delaying" of BitTorrent connections, it seems like all hell has broken loose for the mammoth cable operator. Not only are they facing lawsuits, consumer complaints to the FCC and some seriously peeved members of Congress, but they'll also have to contend with a re-energized network neutrality debate.

Throughout the whole process, Comcast has made itself look worse and worse. First they denied. Then when the AP caught them, they tried to spin it and claim that they were "delaying" instead of outright blocking. Then when an internal memo got leaked detailing their official policy, they started on a witch-hunt to find and terminate the responsible employee. So to recap, Comcast thinks that good PR consists of deny, spin, fire whomever talked. It's a Reality Distortion Field™ that would make Steve Jobs proud.

Since the story broke, Wall Street has been pounding the company, sending their stock price to a 52-week low. Even prior to their dismal earnings report on the 25th, the stock had already dropped about 25% from it's 52-week high. What's to blame? Probably their poor customer service driving customers away to services like Verizon's FIOS and a lack of dial-up customers to continue their growth. Industry observers have said it's time for them to start dropping prices, but that doesn't jive with their plans to jack up television rates even higher.

Do you hear that, Comcast? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your irrelevance. 

Announcing the New Free UTOPIA! Forums

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Taking a cue from a commenter's suggestion, I've setup a discussion forum for the site built on phpBB. It's still a work in progress, but you're welcome to start posting and registering accounts. Since I'm still working on it, it might go up and down periodically as I implement changes. To cut down on forum spam, I've already added support for Akismet and plan on adding httpBL support Real Soon Now™.

Why don't you go check it out? Leave any questions or suggestions there or in the comments.

UTOPIA in the Bloghive: Construction in Perry, Rob Bennett Takes a Position in W. Jordan

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I'm going to start making a conscious effort to track blog postings in Utah about UTOPIA. As I noted earlier today, a lot of us talk but not to each other. Here's to hoping that highlighting discussions about UTOPIA brings more attention to the project!

First up is an update from Perry, one of the Phase 2 cities covered under the RUS loan. According to this blog post, service should be live there beginning in May of 2008. Construction is just barely underway, but it sounds like excitement in the city is high. After all, they've spent years planning this.

Second is a post from Rob Bennett, a city council member in West Jordan. He's taken an official stance on UTOPIA: wait and see. It seems like he understands both the technological need and the business need for UTOPIA given the failure of big telco; he's just having a hard time with the financials. West Jordan residents, perk up: after reviewing a copious amount of UTOPIA-related data, he plans to take it to the city council to be acted upon! (You know, provided he gets re-elected and everything.) This is an opportunity to get your friends and neighbors in West Jordan clamoring for UTOPIA!

That's all I've got for today. Stay tuned for more as it happens. 

Help Me Find Fellow UTOPIA Supporters

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It seems that part of the biggest problem with advocating for UTOPIA is that supporters don't really know each other. Most of the people I've met who are enthusiastic about UTOPIA have been contacts through this site and at various government meetings, though I'm sure that just scratches the surface. Just today, I stumbled across Woods Cross UTOPIA, a site supporting UTOPIA in Woods Cross. (They also have a handy, dandy list of which council members are in favor of joining.) I managed to find the Pro-UTOPIA mailing list by total accident when a message got cross-posted to Pete Ashdown's UT Politech list. While I appreciate happy accidents, we really need a better way of finding each other.

It's also hard to keep on top of meetings that concern UTOPIA. I usually find out that a city has been considering membership long after they've held public hearings and starting taking down the votes. The legislative subcommittee responsible for UTOPIA-related legislation changes every year (both name and membership). Mainstream news sources often miss reporting on these matters until days after they've happened if at all. This is despite tracking several dozen RSS feeds and getting e-mail alerts from Google on a regular basis.

What I need is your help. If you know UTOPIA supporters, if you know about upcoming meetings concerning UTOPIA, if you know about a movement in your city to get UTOPIA, I want to know! Drop me an e-mail and I'm happy to help out in any way I can. I'll create and conduct presentations, I'll do a brain dump on the knowledge I have, I'll attend upcoming meetings and hearings. Qwest and Comcast each put on their own united front; it's time we do the same.

Qwest Building FTTN, Plans 20Mbps DSL

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Remember the RFPs that Qwest put out earlier this year for fiber optic equipment? Apparently they plan on going somewhere with it. During their quarterly conference call to discuss earnings (which, by the way, paints a poor financial picture for Qwest), it came out that they're planning on dropping about $300M on an FTTN network. The plan? To use ASDL2+ or VDSL to give about 1.5M people 20Mbps connections.

This sounds impressive until you consider what the other major telcos are doing. Verizon is planning to spend $23B to build out FIOS and AT&T has committed $6.5B for U-Verse deployments. Qwest also has no plans to offer IPTV over this new network like Verizon and AT&T, sticking to their partnership with DirecTV instead. They also plan to only have this available to about 24% of their customers by the end of 2008, a very slow build-out. Any bets that we'll still see very slow upload speeds? My magic 8-ball says "count on it".

Of course, this is all a case of "too little, too late". Qwest has entered the fiber game late and UTOPIA providers clean their clock on speed and price. I guess they can always compete with Comcast, right?

FCC to Ban Exclusive Contracts in Apartment and Condo Complexes

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The FCC is expected to hand down some new rules on Wednesday to ban exclusive provider contracts in apartments, condos and other multi-unit dwellings. This is a reaction to cable rates that have jumped 93% in the last decade. FCC Chair Kevin Martin noted that cable rates often drop 30% or more when a second provider enters a market, proof positive that monopolies are bad for consumers.

Not only is this great news for those residents, it's also great news for UTOPIA. Part of their problems with expansion have been centered around complexes locked into these contracts who are unwilling to allow installation while the contracts are still in effect. With a ban on such arrangements, UTOPIA would be free to expand at a much faster rate.

UTOPIA Ups the Ante, Upgrades to 50Mbps

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The rumor mill at DSL Reports says that UTOPIA residential connections will be beefed up to 50Mbps in both directions. That means downloads at least 7 times faster than cable or DSL and uploads over 60 times faster. The price? Still $40 a month as always. Even though the speeds are being upped, you still have a 100GB per month cap on transfer. Obviously no ISP is going to stay in business if they give you a truly all-you-can-eat experience with bandwidth greater than a DS3. There's no word on where commercial connections are going, but I'm expecting somewhere in the 100Mbps range.

So where's the bottleneck now? Probably in the crappy router sitting on your desktop. Most home products from Linksys, D-Link, Netgear and other manufacturers only have a 10Mbps port for the WAN connection. Most of the ones with a 100Mbps WAN can barely muster 14-15Mbps through the port. Your options are to either upgrade to a high-end router (models with a 1Gbps port sustaining 250Mbps can run $200 or more) or build your own Linux-based router. I'll write up some more later so you'll have some idea where to go when your hardware fails to keep up with your connection.