No such thing has been "patented". This is a mere published patent application. There is no "monopoly" and nothing to "revoke" because there is no "patent" at this time.
The cost to you to send relevant prior art to the Patent Office (if you are in the US) is 37 cents, not "thousands of dollars".
Your comments about "cut to size" mats, as if that is what the patent would cover if one were to issue (and no patent has yet issued) suggests that you may be under the mistaken impression that a patent covers what described is in its abstract. This isn't a patent, but if it were, it would cover only what is in its claims. Thus the relevant question is whether the subject matter of the claims is novel and unobvious.
And yes, I can say with hand on heart that if a member of the public timely submits relevant prior art to the Patent Office after such a publication, the Patent Office will consider it. But please keep in mind that "relevant" in this context means "relevant to what is claimed."
Indeed most US patent applications are published 18 months after the filing date, for precisely this purpose. You can see some examples on my web page. Members of the public are then free to send prior art to the Examiner.
Many patent offices around the world, including the European Patent Office, do the same thing.
The Edge web page lists only one phone, the Nokia 6200. I gather it can use a USB cable to connect to the computer. It would be great if somebody would make an Edge-compatible phone with a Bluetooth port for connecting to a computer.
The Edge communications manager has a signal strength display and the crummy throughputs often happen when the signal strength is at or near the top of the display.
What I think you are referring to is the question of whether we would have been required to become a CLEC (licensed telephone company) to rent unbundled network elements from Qwest. And the answer is, if we were to carry voice traffic we would have to become a licensed telephone company. The chief issue for the regulators is whether we would be providing voice service where somebody would pick up the phone, dial 911, and we would fail to connect the call properly. And we are not providing such service.
We are a bunch of unpaid volunteers. Providing tech support to people far away strikes me as something that is unlikely to go well.
But hopefully our FAQ would provide some help to would-be organizers in other areas. And under the 1996 Act, others can "opt in" to the contract we signed with Qwest.
Again, under the 1996 Act, once the lawyering is done and the interconnect agreement is signed, it becomes a public document and others may "opt in" to the same agreement without having to do the lawyering. So your "low income" neighborhood can simply opt into our agreement.
Please be reminded that under the 1996 Act, once the lawyering is done and a contract is signed, others can "opt in" to the same contract without having to do the lawyering a second time. So our lawyering has the potential to benefit other would-be DSL organizers.
In answer to your question, lawyers in our neighborhood donated several tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time to the Coop prior to service launch.
The state regulators are concerned, reasonably, with what happens when somebody picks up a telephone and dials 911. Does the call reach the 911 dispatcher? Does the dispatcher get correct Caller ID information on the screen? The regulators want to be *absolutely sure* that the answers are "yes."
Thus so long as we don't provide an opportunity for a failed 911 call, they don't mind that we are not a licensed telephone company. The mere fact that an ISP subscriber can pass voice over IP doesn't trigger this "failed 911 call" risk, in the eyes of the regulator.
With the exception of our neighborhood metropolitan district, local government served us poorly. A couple of local towns established a "Summit County Telecommunications Consortium" the stated goal of which was supposedly to bring broadband to our county. This lulled us into thinking some results would follow, and they did not. As far as I can tell the consortium did nothing to advance deployment of broadband. So we lost about a year. Had we known better, we would have ignored the consortium and pushed ahead with our plans a year earlier. Our neighborhood metropolitan district helped a lot, making the barn available for our DSLAM and in other ways.
This is in our FAQ. You can see photographs and text descriptions of the equipment at http://www.rric.net/howitworks.htm . The fourth box down shows the TSU (T-1 service unit).
There is no such requirement in Colorado. In Colorado the PUC says that T1 is "unregulated". The PUC's position is that only "regulated" services (basically, residential phone service and business service with up to two lines) are ones which Qwest must provide to anyone who asks. If you ask the PUC for help getting a T1, their answer is "that's a fully competitive market and we don't regulate it, you have plenty of other choices."
This is an area we have talked about a lot within our Coop. Right now I am the only one. If I am out of town there is nobody to troubleshoot it. We plan to try to train some of our neighbors to know how to troubleshoot and I would then set them up with "enable" access. It is an area of great concern.
Nope, no prior experience. But the chief skills needed (router programming, microwave link design, DSL configuration, inside wiring skills, outside plant skills, ability to litigate with the phone company) are skills that would not automatically be found in a housing or food coop. It's not like bagging groceries or stocking shelves or operating a cash register.
There is no way we would have expended our thousands of hours of volunteer time if there had been any local DSL or cable modem options. Especially if the only problem were cost. Suppose the local DSL were $90 per month and we were to spend $50,000 worth of our volunteer time trying to provide a $60-per-month option. That would be irrational.
In Colorado, at least, the position of the state regulator is that it is not necessary to be a CLEC (licensed telephone company) to rent subloops from Qwest. I gather the situation is the same in New Mexico. Maybe it is the same where you are, I don't know.
Our patent law firm (www.patents.com) would keep the T1 going in any event for the firm's own needs. If we were to lose half our member homes, we would no longer have to pay Qwest for the subloops to those homes. So the chief recurring cost for a lost home would go away.
You are right, of course, our patent firm (http://www.patents.com) gave tens of thousands of dollars of free legal time to the Coop. But we had other pro bono legal help from others within our neighborhood also.
The good news is, if anybody else in Colorado wants to do what we did, they can opt into our agreement and not have to spend money on lawyers.
No, we can't afford to do more than we have already done in the way of redundancy. The SPFs you have identified are of genuine concern to us but we don't have enough money to do anything about them.
If we were to bring in another T1, for example, it would be physically routed the same way anyway, so a backhoe cut would knock out both of them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
No such thing has been "patented". This is a mere published patent application. There is no "monopoly" and nothing to "revoke" because there is no "patent" at this time.
The cost to you to send relevant prior art to the Patent Office (if you are in the US) is 37 cents, not "thousands of dollars".
Your comments about "cut to size" mats, as if that is what the patent would cover if one were to issue (and no patent has yet issued) suggests that you may be under the mistaken impression that a patent covers what described is in its abstract. This isn't a patent, but if it were, it would cover only what is in its claims. Thus the relevant question is whether the subject matter of the claims is novel and unobvious.
And yes, I can say with hand on heart that if a member of the public timely submits relevant prior art to the Patent Office after such a publication, the Patent Office will consider it. But please keep in mind that "relevant" in this context means "relevant to what is claimed."
Indeed most US patent applications are published 18 months after the filing date, for precisely this purpose. You can see some examples on my web page. Members of the public are then free to send prior art to the Examiner.
Many patent offices around the world, including the European Patent Office, do the same thing.
The Edge web page lists only one phone, the Nokia 6200. I gather it can use a USB cable to connect to the computer. It would be great if somebody would make an Edge-compatible phone with a Bluetooth port for connecting to a computer.
As you may see in my writeup, I have measured ping times on the Vision service around 400 ms. On AT&T I have never seen less than 600 ms.
Thank you for pointing it out. I went back to my web page and changed the "K" to "k".
Of course you are right. Sorry about that. I corrected my web page about this. Thanks.
The Edge communications manager has a signal strength display and the crummy throughputs often happen when the signal strength is at or near the top of the display.
What I think you are referring to is the question of whether we would have been required to become a CLEC (licensed telephone company) to rent unbundled network elements from Qwest. And the answer is, if we were to carry voice traffic we would have to become a licensed telephone company. The chief issue for the regulators is whether we would be providing voice service where somebody would pick up the phone, dial 911, and we would fail to connect the call properly. And we are not providing such service.
But hopefully our FAQ would provide some help to would-be organizers in other areas. And under the 1996 Act, others can "opt in" to the contract we signed with Qwest.
Again, under the 1996 Act, once the lawyering is done and the interconnect agreement is signed, it becomes a public document and others may "opt in" to the same agreement without having to do the lawyering. So your "low income" neighborhood can simply opt into our agreement.
In answer to your question, lawyers in our neighborhood donated several tens of thousands of dollars of lawyer time to the Coop prior to service launch.
Thus so long as we don't provide an opportunity for a failed 911 call, they don't mind that we are not a licensed telephone company. The mere fact that an ISP subscriber can pass voice over IP doesn't trigger this "failed 911 call" risk, in the eyes of the regulator.
Read our FAQ. X is $900 on eBay. Or go look in eBay yourself, and see a CopperEdge 150 that sold last week for $500 and another for $1500.
As you will see, I posted direct answers to lots of the posted questions, even if they did not end up in the ten interview questions.
With the exception of our neighborhood metropolitan district, local government served us poorly. A couple of local towns established a "Summit County Telecommunications Consortium" the stated goal of which was supposedly to bring broadband to our county. This lulled us into thinking some results would follow, and they did not. As far as I can tell the consortium did nothing to advance deployment of broadband. So we lost about a year. Had we known better, we would have ignored the consortium and pushed ahead with our plans a year earlier.
Our neighborhood metropolitan district helped a lot, making the barn available for our DSLAM and in other ways.
This is in our FAQ. You can see photographs and text descriptions of the equipment at http://www.rric.net/howitworks.htm . The fourth box down shows the TSU (T-1 service unit).
There is no such requirement in Colorado. In Colorado the PUC says that T1 is "unregulated". The PUC's position is that only "regulated" services (basically, residential phone service and business service with up to two lines) are ones which Qwest must provide to anyone who asks. If you ask the PUC for help getting a T1, their answer is "that's a fully competitive market and we don't regulate it, you have plenty of other choices."
This is an area we have talked about a lot within our Coop. Right now I am the only one. If I am out of town there is nobody to troubleshoot it. We plan to try to train some of our neighbors to know how to troubleshoot and I would then set them up with "enable" access. It is an area of great concern.
Nope, no prior experience. But the chief skills needed (router programming, microwave link design, DSL configuration, inside wiring skills, outside plant skills, ability to litigate with the phone company) are skills that would not automatically be found in a housing or food coop. It's not like bagging groceries or stocking shelves or operating a cash register.
There is no way we would have expended our thousands of hours of volunteer time if there had been any local DSL or cable modem options. Especially if the only problem were cost. Suppose the local DSL were $90 per month and we were to spend $50,000 worth of our volunteer time trying to provide a $60-per-month option. That would be irrational.
As described in our FAQ, we are requiring each subscriber to use a broadband router/firewall. This hopefully minimizes this problem.
In Colorado, at least, the position of the state regulator is that it is not necessary to be a CLEC (licensed telephone company) to rent subloops from Qwest. I gather the situation is the same in New Mexico. Maybe it is the same where you are, I don't know.
Our patent law firm (www.patents.com) would keep the T1 going in any event for the firm's own needs.
If we were to lose half our member homes, we would no longer have to pay Qwest for the subloops to those homes. So the chief recurring cost for a lost home would go away.
You are right, of course, our patent firm (http://www.patents.com) gave tens of thousands of dollars of free legal time to the Coop. But we had other pro bono legal help from others within our neighborhood also. The good news is, if anybody else in Colorado wants to do what we did, they can opt into our agreement and not have to spend money on lawyers.
No, we can't afford to do more than we have already done in the way of redundancy. The SPFs you have identified are of genuine concern to us but we don't have enough money to do anything about them.
If we were to bring in another T1, for example, it would be physically routed the same way anyway, so a backhoe cut would knock out both of them anyway.