Report From the Initial Meeting of U-CAN

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Today was the inaugural meeting of the UTOPIA Citizens Advisory Network or U-CAN for short. Attendance was about a dozen and we had some great conversations getting caught up on the status of UTOPIA and an idea of where it's going. Some highlights:

  • UTOPIA is looking at using Special Assessment Areas to expand services in non-member areas and unincorporated county lands. It's a voluntary tax increase in order to pay for deploying the network and doing the installation costs in a specified area that takes advantage of 15-year government bonds and the low interest rates they enjoy. The cost of installation will be assessed entirely to members of the SAA.
  • There's going to be some announcements soon on new service providers as soon as next week. Up to 4 could be announced over the next month and at least one is rumored to be interested in providing triple-play services.
  • The new bond closed in late May as planned, so we may yet see construction by August. The UTOPIA website is actively soliciting new employees, a Business Sales Director and Teams Coordinator, as well as an RFP for asset management software and services.
  • Speaking of UTOPIA's website, they are working on a new one with more updates and information. This will also include a mapping application to show you where the demand for UTOPIA is so you can find out if your neighborhood is higher or lower on the priority list.

Meetings are going to be held at least monthly and will rotate between the member cities to give everyone an equal chance to participate. I'm also planning on provisional monthly meetings outside of this rotation for Davis, Salt Lake and Utah Counties to encourage better participation in pledging member cities. The regular monthly meetings will be as follows:

  • July 2008: Orem (Utah County)
  • August 2008: Layton (Davis County)
  • September 2008: Brigham City (Box Elder County)
  • October 2008: Murray (Salt Lake County)
  • November 2008: Lindon (Utah County)
  • December 2008: Centerville (Davis County)

I'll announce the meeting times and locations here on the website as they are scheduled. Meetings will be tentatively planned for the 4th Saturday of the month at noon. If you want to receive U-CAN related announcements via e-mail, send a blank message to [email protected] to get on the mailing list.

Comcast Makes Final Four in Comsumerist's Worst Company in America 2008

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Most companies would normally be excited to be a semi-finalist for an award, but not this time. Comcast has managed to bump off Menu Foods, The American Arbitration Association, Ticketmaster and even Exxon in its quest to become Worst Company in America 2008. It now faces off against Diebold, stealer of elections and maker of faulty voting systems, for the, er, "privilege" of going head-to-head with the "winner" of the Walmart vs. Countrywide faceoff.

Overall, telecom was heavily represented in Comsumerist's annual choosing of a winner/loser. Charter, Time Warner, Sprint, Dish Network, AT&T, Cox, DirecTV and Verizon each grabbed one of the initial 32 spots, giving cable, television and phone companies more than a quarter of the roster. Is it any wonder that these companies also consistently place near the bottom of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index?

Reflecting on Carterphone: Why Open Networks Are Needed

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Bring up the term "regulation" and you're often going to think of heavy-handed mandates, byzantine rules and unresponsive bureaucracies. Despite this popular image of regulation, it sometimes works.

Ars Technica reminds us of the 40-year-old Carterphone decision that the FCC handed down 40 years ago yesterday. The landmark decision allowed third parties to start attaching any device they wanted to the public phone network so long as it did not cause interference. Not only did it let us pick and choose our handsets, it also gave birth to devices as varied as the answering machine and modem.

The decision has even been cited in mandates to support CableCARD (despite it being a largely stillborn technology) and open access on the 700MHz spectrum, something that Verizon is trying to subvert. With the Carterphone decision in mind, we should also be exited to know that in addition to banning exclusive cable television contracts in apartment buildings, they also dropped the hammer on exclusive phone service.

Even so, regulation sometimes fails us. Some small ISPs are having their day before the Supreme Court to nail AT&T to the wall on wholesale line-sharing rates. Their argument is that the fees were designed to give the incumbent carrier a significant advantage over competitors. Many CLECs and competing ISPs brought up the same allegations throughout the 90s, and with fewer ISPs today than in 1997, the accusation has legs.

There's also the issue of network neutrality hanging up in the air. Big companies like AT&T and Verizon are scared to death of mandates from Congress, especially with how badly Comcast has been skewered over their secretive throttling and booting users who use too much of their "unlimited" Internet. Their angle is to try and get the FCC to approve a plan favorable to their interests before a less-friendly White House takes over. The good news is that the mere threat of regulation has forced them to move pretty far from their original positions, a move that's good for consumers.

When you have a network with competing service providers, interchangable equipment and freely-moving applications, consumers and innovation win. Open platforms like the kind that Carterphone created should be encouraged instead of hampered.

Caps Without Meaning: Japanese Telco NTT Caps Uploads at 30GB… Per Day

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It seems like caps are popping up all over. Comcast, Time Warner, Sprint and Verizon Wireless all have talked about or instituted caps that make users weep, wail and gnash teeth. Now that Japanese telco NTT is getting into the business of caps, we have to wonder if it's just trying to make American ISPs look silly. Their plan? Cut you off after 30GB per dayof upload with unlimited downloads.

What the deuce? That's nearly a terabyte of uploaded data each month, more than even a heavy BitTorrent user is likely to stack up. The implication is that some users, who are shelling out a cool $42/month for a 100Mbps line, are exceeding it by enough to be causing a problem. Meanwhile, US ISPs keep on boosting speeds to make you reach the caps even faster than before.

Apparently the secret sauce in avoiding really small caps is to invest in infrastructure. Verizon's FIOS has no caps and neither do French FTTH providers. XMission offers a generous 500GB soft cap per month on UTOPIA. It's time to get on the fiber bandwagon, guys, instead of pretending that you are.

ICANN has .cheezburger: New TLDs Approved for Sale

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ICANN decided to open a virtual Pandora's Box and approve the sale of any domain name that can be dreamed of. While it's no secret that the existing domain space is really REALLY crunched, letting imagination run wild seems to just be another invitation for spammers and phishers to snap up domains by the thousands. It should also be noted that a fair number of anti-spam and e-mail verification systems depend on a known list of valid domains to help speed up lookup times. I'm also wondering how the DNS root is going to look now. There's already been concern that the root servers are heavily taxed and adding a significant number of new registrations is going to make DNS much trickier.

The move is intended as a revenue generator. Companies can pay anywhere from $100K to $500K for the privilege of being the sole registrar of their own TLD. There are some important restrictions: no copyright violations and squatting, nothing similar to an existing TLD (no typo-squatting), no registrations for communities or companies that don't exist and the ever-nebulous nothing immoral. There's also an application and review process.

I would note that the last attempts at creating new TLDs was a fail. Almost as soon as they were introduced, .biz and .info were overwhelmed with cybersquatters, spammers and all kinds of nefarious elements. TLDs like .travel haven't taken off either (yuk, yuk). Despite a run on .com, .net and .org addresses, many companies have gotten creative by using international domains (last.fm, del.icio.us, etc.) and creative company names (Flickr, Meebo, etc.).

Not all is bad, however. ICANN also voted to move forward on allowing domains with non-Latin characters including Chinese characters or the Cyrillic alphabet. I'm sure there's a lot of non-western countries who are pleased as punch at the idea of having domains in their native tongue. And domain tasting? Arrowed! Apparently the spammers would keep on passing a tasted domain back and forth between entities, keeping the domain locked up for months or years without paying a dime for it.

Anyone who operates network equipment should be doing some upgrades Real Soon Now(TM) to avoid problems in the future. Adding UNICODE support and ditching reliance on a fixed list of valid TLDs would be highly recommended.

Mstar Customers on iProvo Lose Phone Service Because Mstar Didn't Pay Their Bills

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In an unbelievable move, around 200 Mstar customers on iProvo have been without phone service since Friday after New Global Telecom, the VoIP provider that Mstar uses, cut them off. NGT claims that Mstar is behind on their payments for iProvo customers and that UTOPIA customers are not affected. John Hansen, Mstar's interim president, says the claims of non-payment are bunk and blames the problem on iProvo customer service staff.

Broadweave managed to do an emergency transition of most of the affected customers to their network but it is still struggling with the last 200 or so. Phone customers are still able to receive calls and place 911 calls, according to NGT. Customer experiences have been mixed with some reports that the customer service lines are busy and others saying that they've been able to get through. For some odd reason, Broadweave's PR consultant has stated that they're waiting for the affected customers to call them to get the issue sorted out instead of aggressively trying to contact those customers.

While this problem isn't Broadweave's creation, it's their baby now. Mstar doesn't have much incentive to make sure the transition is a smooth one and can easily put egg on Broadweave's face by dropping a problem in their lap that they don't quickly resolve. It makes you wonder how many customers will unbundle services even if it costs more money to do so.

NGT also claimed in their statements that Mstar would be selling off the phone customers on UTOPIA to another provider. Obviously, UTOPIA can't comment one way or the other and there's nothing from Mstar to confirm or deny that claim. Any insiders want to clarify this in the comments?

(Read more from the Daily Herald. h/t: Capt. Video and Thomas Perry for sending along the stories.)

The Need for Speed: Comcast, Verizon Start Boosting Bandwidth

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The race for the speed crown continues as Verizon rolls out 50Mbps/20Mbps service to all of its current FIOS customers. The super-fast tier of service comes at a price of around $150/month, not far off from what Qwest is charging for inferior 20Mbps/896Kbps DSL service. This also prepares Verizon for a fight to the death in the Lone Star State with AT&T's inferior U-Verse service where it plans to overbuild to 600,000 homes in the GTE territories it purchased. I'm sure Qwest is sweating as well; it also borders several Verizon markets and can't compete on speed either.

Comcast also made some speed announcements, bumping upload speeds on the 6Mbps and 8Mbps tiers to 1Mbps and 2Mbps respectively. I've independently speedtested this claim and found that I'm getting a solid 1.3Mbps of upload on my 6Mbps plan. While the plan is to roll out 50Mbps service in multiple markets after testing in the Minneapolis area, that will also come with all kinds of protocol-agnostic throttling and potentially a 250GB monthly transfer cap.

Despite all this increased speed, we're still doing terribly in broadband availability and adoption. OECD numbers show us slipping to 15th out of 30 with China stealing the crown from us for most fixed broadband connections. Caps and throttling are also going to prove highly unpopular as we approach a new variant of Moore's Law that shows IP traffic doubling every two years through at least 2012. Maybe its time for companies to respond to consumer demand for more bandwidth instead of trying to smother it with a pillow, you know?

Clearwire Promises Open Network; Is This the Mythical Third Pipe?

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Everyone was buzzing about the prospect of a wide-open network during the 700MHz auction (don't hold your breath on Verizon making good on it), but Clearwire is giving it to us now. The company, a joint venture with Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner and others, is promising open everything on its new WiMax network. Bring your own device? Check. Use any application? Check. Pick your own retailer? Check, and that's the real measure of the open network.

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Website Updates: WordPress 2.5.1, bbPress 0.9.0.2

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Since the old forums have stopped working and WordPress was badly out of date, I decided it was time to do some big upgrades. The website is now running on WordPress 2.5.1 instead of 2.1.3 and I’ve updated a bunch of plugins to match.

Bigger news is that I’ve ditched the old phpBB forums in favor of bbPress after we heard from a responsive web design in Perth Australia company telling us all this information. It’s from the guys at WordPress and seems to be a much more modern and clean design inside and out. It also has the most excellent Akismet spam protection, an area where phpBB just flat-out stinks. Unfortunately, all of the old posts and user accounts registered for phpBB will not be migrated. There wasn’t much content and the pain involved in figuring out how to do it? No thanks.

Let me know if you encounter any oddities with either the site or new forums. 

Shakeup at Mstar: CEO and Chief Marketing Officer Part Ways With Company

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After several rounds of laying off the rank-and-file, it looks like executives are among those now leaving the company. Mstar CEO Ben Gould and Chief Marketing Officer Kirk Tanner are no longer with the company, reportedly having departed voluntarily. The word on the street, according to the Daily Herald, is that Gould got an offer to go elsewhere whereas Tanner's status is unknown. John Hansen of Chicago Venture Partners LP, Mstar's owner, has taken over in the interim and there aren't plans in the near future to hire a new chief marketing officer.

Given their performance problems on iProvo and the decimated customer base from the sale of iProvo, it's not surprising to hear that Mstar went through some more slashing. Their plan is to re-focus on building a customer base on UTOPIA, secure additional financing and pursue opportunities on other fiber optic networks around the country. Also of note is that Broadweave offered a settlement to Mstar to get them to drop their objections to the sale of iProvo.

The question now remains: can Mstar survive? Post your thoughts in the comments.