> 'If Windows tablets start growing as fast as the tablet market overall then Windows could stabilize in share,'
Man. Ow. I just about popped a vein trying to suppress laughter just then. How is that supposed to work? How are those overproduced commercials working out for you?
> You are complaining that DSL is dependent on POTS. This is not the case. DSL just cares that there is copper in the ground, it does not care whether you run voice service on said copper.
This may be area specific, but back when I still had DSL (before the local telco converted to fiber) you *had* to have a land line in order to have DSL. They wouldn't sell it to you any other way. Friends in California tell me it's the same situation there. Although, I'm willing to believe that there may not be a technical reason for this.
> You keep saying that it is dying out, but only POTS dies. The wires are still there.
Except where they're not, of course. My understanding is that our telco has completely converted to fiber. (I submit that this is a Good Thing.) But let's say the wires are still there. I guess the opportunity exists for a competing DSL service to use them. This still begs the question, Why? It's like insisting on using a hand crank telephone when everyone else has a cell.
At some point, society has to jump the chasm. The telegraph remained in operation after telephones became common (and still has some life today, albeit for a different purpose) but at some point we had to stop considering the telegraph as a valid fall-back if this telephone thing doesn't work out.
Another way to fix it is to stop using it until it's fixed. If people switched en-masse to cable, telcos would have to change or die. That's what competition is for.
And I personally have fiber to the house, incidentally. The local telco offered exceptionally crappy DSL, we all switched to Comcrap, the telco laid fiber, and we switched back.
Incidentally, Frontier offers network only. (On fiber.) We have phone also because I need a land line for work, but we weren't required to bundle. And we have not had TV service for years. Wife has a roku and a big antenna (remember those?) and that's enough.
Agreed on both points. But if the telcos own your copper, why does changing it to fiber make any difference? I know that at least in some areas telcos are required to let other DSL providers share their space (I was a Speakeasy user for awhile. Twice the speed and better reliability with the same copper.) If telcos can be made to share a copper infrastructure, they can be made to share a fiber infrastructure.
In our area, we have three providers: Frontier (fiber), Comcast (cable) and something on wifi... can't remember who. They seem to compete fairly well. At least, Comcast is always bad-mouthing the other two, which is actually a good sign. (I really hate Comcast, but they provide necessary competition.)
The word you're looking for is "hyperbole". The true question is WHY are people still using DSL. If that's the only choice, why is that the case, and how do we fix it?
I submit that this isn't actually true. My mother (in her seventies) I've always considered an average person, and even she can see that youtube (for instance) as well as any site that shows... say, movie trailers, for instance, are absolutely useless at 1 Mb/sec. Even my cell phone is faster.
I'll grant you, if all a user does with the internet is download static text, they're not going to tell the difference. I'll even submit that higher than 15 Mbps is mostly for bragging rights. But 1 Mbps is too low on the curve, even for what today constitutes the average user. Bring up the yahoo.com main page, and many of the links don't do anything but stutter for a few seconds before lapsing into silence. Regular users will notice that.
When you're too slow for effective torrenting, only geeks will notice. When you're too slow for the roku to work correctly, then more people, including my wife, will certainly notice. When you're too slow for OMG and Prime Time in No Time, considerably more people will notice. I'd submit the time for 1 Mbps "broadband" has passed, and the industry is only traveling on inertia now.
...as a matter of fact, I just returned from a bike trip to California, and was shocked to learn that friends and family were making due with DSL speeds in the low single digits. (1 to 1.3) And crappy service it is, too. What is this uverse, and why doesn't DNS work properly on it? About every third try at little known sites like yahoo.com give "site not found". You'd think AT&T would know how to do this.
So, in each case, I have to say, yes, Comcast is the crappiest national company ever to run a wire to your house, but even THEY would be better than what you're currently putting up with. And hopefully, when telcos see that they're rapidly losing their customer base, perhaps they'll put in something different. Or go out of business, making room for companies that are a little more forward looking.
Our local telco went the fiber route several years ago, and the advantage, the greatly emotionally satisfying advantage, is that fiber is serious competition against Comcast. People (like us) who went to fiber have never looked back. Comcast comes to the house about once a month and pleads with us in vain to switch. Good times.
Ok, "who in their right mind would buy from Comcast?" -- I'll give you that. But looking at this from a marketing standpoint, with Comcast offering speeds in the double digits, how does a DSL provider offering 1 Mbps download speeds keeping any customers? The reason to lay fiber is that Comcast, as odious as it is, will eat your lunch if you don't.
What's wrong with DSL is that it was layered on top of a technology that was barely appropriate for the task (is not at all appropriate in densely populated areas with very old infrastructure) and which is currently dying out. The trend is to drop land lines in favor of having a cell as your primary phone. DSL is a reasonable long transitory step, but transitory it is.
The maximum we ever got on DSL around the turn of the century is 3 Mbs, and we have relatively young wires in this area. With fiber, the *minimum* download speed our ISP can provision is 15 Mbps. I don't know what the current max is -- 15 is fast enough for me. When I was serving websites out of my garage, I had 25/5.
So... when I hear that people are still paying for a landline they don't need in order to get 1.3 Mbps down, 350 Kbps up... I have to ask, why? (Understanding that the answer to "why" may include factors beyond personal choice.)
...actually, I'm surprised his dad's job hasn't already been outsourced to India. There's no helpdesk that can't be made better by adding a 13 hour time difference and nearly insurmountable communications problems. Or so it seems.
...except that (a) most of what's already there was laid back when nobody had even conceived of sending data over copper, leaving a terrible snarl that gives a TDR fits, and (b) it's starting to get really old. The hot setup is to rip it all out and relay it in a more data-friendly fashion. But if you're going to do that, it makes more sense to lay fiber instead.
Do people still use DSL? In my area the choices are cable or fiber to the house. It seems like, if you were going to worry about DSL taking over for ISDN, you'd be doing that in the late nineties.
I suppose some big corporations still use ISDN for the same reason some companies still use 3179 terminals. A large initial investment in what has become stale technology, and it's just easier to continue to piece together what they have than to swap it out for a modern technology. That said, it seems like there should be a significant price advantage to switching to something from, you know, this century.
I'd recommend your dad train up on modern technology. Learning keeps you young, and let's face it, 15 years is a long time in computer tech. That's enough time to have a whole 'nother career. Sorry he won't have an opportunity to coast the rest of the way to retirement, but thems the breaks. (Speaking as someone who will be 56 in just a few days.)
Well, of course it's actions are delaying the inevitable. That's all any company's actions do. Just like, we're all dying, just some faster than others.
What I haven't seen discussed is the effects of this decision on Google Apps users, in other words, (paying!) business users. With Google shuttering XMPP federation, you instantly lose the ability to communicate outside your organization (unless your customers/partners are also using google). As federated XMPP is much more heavily used in the business world, this drastically alters the value proposition of using Google Apps since you lose the very interoperability that used to be a selling point.
I'd love to see Google answer that particular question. All "enterprise IM" solutions out there are built on (federated!) XMPP. Even Microsoft's.
This isn't a theoretical question -- My last two employers used federated XMPP to communicate, both internally and with external clients/vendors.
Bingo. It's the interoperability, and the ability to use it anywhere (including outside the company intranet) which makes Google Talk valuable in the enterprise, and the reason many workgroups use Talk instead of the company supported Office Communicator. I don't understand why Google would jeopardize that.
Hey, don't look at me, my company tried to give me an i-phone, and I gave it back. I have used an android phone for a couple years now. The point of all of this is that I have friends who are... a little obsessive about their privacy or something, and insist on using one of the alternates instead of gtalk. It'll be interesting to see what they do. Actually, it'll be more interesting to see what *I* do. I'm looking for an alternate to... what was the name changing to again? As I type.
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> 'If Windows tablets start growing as fast as the tablet market overall then Windows could stabilize in share,'
Man. Ow. I just about popped a vein trying to suppress laughter just then. How is that supposed to work? How are those overproduced commercials working out for you?
"What happened here?"
"Grandmother visited from Italy."
"Were there any survivors?"
Well, but, except for the krell metal, we could do that since 1948 (when the phototransistor was invented).
Now, just making cabalistic gestures at empty air and making complex things happen... I'm trying to think of a non-fantasy story that had this.
Excuse me, I need to go shut off my router.
Man, there's nothing to say after that.
> You are complaining that DSL is dependent on POTS. This is not the case. DSL just cares that there is copper in the ground, it does not care whether you run voice service on said copper.
This may be area specific, but back when I still had DSL (before the local telco converted to fiber) you *had* to have a land line in order to have DSL. They wouldn't sell it to you any other way. Friends in California tell me it's the same situation there. Although, I'm willing to believe that there may not be a technical reason for this.
> You keep saying that it is dying out, but only POTS dies. The wires are still there.
Except where they're not, of course. My understanding is that our telco has completely converted to fiber. (I submit that this is a Good Thing.) But let's say the wires are still there. I guess the opportunity exists for a competing DSL service to use them. This still begs the question, Why? It's like insisting on using a hand crank telephone when everyone else has a cell.
At some point, society has to jump the chasm. The telegraph remained in operation after telephones became common (and still has some life today, albeit for a different purpose) but at some point we had to stop considering the telegraph as a valid fall-back if this telephone thing doesn't work out.
Another way to fix it is to stop using it until it's fixed. If people switched en-masse to cable, telcos would have to change or die. That's what competition is for.
And I personally have fiber to the house, incidentally. The local telco offered exceptionally crappy DSL, we all switched to Comcrap, the telco laid fiber, and we switched back.
Incidentally, Frontier offers network only. (On fiber.) We have phone also because I need a land line for work, but we weren't required to bundle. And we have not had TV service for years. Wife has a roku and a big antenna (remember those?) and that's enough.
Agreed on both points. But if the telcos own your copper, why does changing it to fiber make any difference? I know that at least in some areas telcos are required to let other DSL providers share their space (I was a Speakeasy user for awhile. Twice the speed and better reliability with the same copper.) If telcos can be made to share a copper infrastructure, they can be made to share a fiber infrastructure.
In our area, we have three providers: Frontier (fiber), Comcast (cable) and something on wifi... can't remember who. They seem to compete fairly well. At least, Comcast is always bad-mouthing the other two, which is actually a good sign. (I really hate Comcast, but they provide necessary competition.)
The word you're looking for is "hyperbole". The true question is WHY are people still using DSL. If that's the only choice, why is that the case, and how do we fix it?
I submit that this isn't actually true. My mother (in her seventies) I've always considered an average person, and even she can see that youtube (for instance) as well as any site that shows ... say, movie trailers, for instance, are absolutely useless at 1 Mb/sec. Even my cell phone is faster.
I'll grant you, if all a user does with the internet is download static text, they're not going to tell the difference. I'll even submit that higher than 15 Mbps is mostly for bragging rights. But 1 Mbps is too low on the curve, even for what today constitutes the average user. Bring up the yahoo.com main page, and many of the links don't do anything but stutter for a few seconds before lapsing into silence. Regular users will notice that.
When you're too slow for effective torrenting, only geeks will notice. When you're too slow for the roku to work correctly, then more people, including my wife, will certainly notice. When you're too slow for OMG and Prime Time in No Time, considerably more people will notice. I'd submit the time for 1 Mbps "broadband" has passed, and the industry is only traveling on inertia now.
So, in each case, I have to say, yes, Comcast is the crappiest national company ever to run a wire to your house, but even THEY would be better than what you're currently putting up with. And hopefully, when telcos see that they're rapidly losing their customer base, perhaps they'll put in something different. Or go out of business, making room for companies that are a little more forward looking.
Our local telco went the fiber route several years ago, and the advantage, the greatly emotionally satisfying advantage, is that fiber is serious competition against Comcast. People (like us) who went to fiber have never looked back. Comcast comes to the house about once a month and pleads with us in vain to switch. Good times.
Ok, "who in their right mind would buy from Comcast?" -- I'll give you that. But looking at this from a marketing standpoint, with Comcast offering speeds in the double digits, how does a DSL provider offering 1 Mbps download speeds keeping any customers? The reason to lay fiber is that Comcast, as odious as it is, will eat your lunch if you don't.
What's wrong with DSL is that it was layered on top of a technology that was barely appropriate for the task (is not at all appropriate in densely populated areas with very old infrastructure) and which is currently dying out. The trend is to drop land lines in favor of having a cell as your primary phone. DSL is a reasonable long transitory step, but transitory it is.
The maximum we ever got on DSL around the turn of the century is 3 Mbs, and we have relatively young wires in this area. With fiber, the *minimum* download speed our ISP can provision is 15 Mbps. I don't know what the current max is -- 15 is fast enough for me. When I was serving websites out of my garage, I had 25/5.
So... when I hear that people are still paying for a landline they don't need in order to get 1.3 Mbps down, 350 Kbps up... I have to ask, why? (Understanding that the answer to "why" may include factors beyond personal choice.)
> 1. Its already there, pretty much everywhere.
Do people still use DSL? In my area the choices are cable or fiber to the house. It seems like, if you were going to worry about DSL taking over for ISDN, you'd be doing that in the late nineties.
I suppose some big corporations still use ISDN for the same reason some companies still use 3179 terminals. A large initial investment in what has become stale technology, and it's just easier to continue to piece together what they have than to swap it out for a modern technology. That said, it seems like there should be a significant price advantage to switching to something from, you know, this century.
I'd recommend your dad train up on modern technology. Learning keeps you young, and let's face it, 15 years is a long time in computer tech. That's enough time to have a whole 'nother career. Sorry he won't have an opportunity to coast the rest of the way to retirement, but thems the breaks. (Speaking as someone who will be 56 in just a few days.)
This could be an xkcd skit.
Facebook can't even be the next Facebook, these days.
Well, of course it's actions are delaying the inevitable. That's all any company's actions do. Just like, we're all dying, just some faster than others.
What I haven't seen discussed is the effects of this decision on Google Apps users, in other words, (paying!) business users. With Google shuttering XMPP federation, you instantly lose the ability to communicate outside your organization (unless your customers/partners are also using google). As federated XMPP is much more heavily used in the business world, this drastically alters the value proposition of using Google Apps since you lose the very interoperability that used to be a selling point.
I'd love to see Google answer that particular question. All "enterprise IM" solutions out there are built on (federated!) XMPP. Even Microsoft's.
This isn't a theoretical question -- My last two employers used federated XMPP to communicate, both internally and with external clients/vendors.
Bingo. It's the interoperability, and the ability to use it anywhere (including outside the company intranet) which makes Google Talk valuable in the enterprise, and the reason many workgroups use Talk instead of the company supported Office Communicator. I don't understand why Google would jeopardize that.
Hey, don't look at me, my company tried to give me an i-phone, and I gave it back. I have used an android phone for a couple years now. The point of all of this is that I have friends who are... a little obsessive about their privacy or something, and insist on using one of the alternates instead of gtalk. It'll be interesting to see what they do. Actually, it'll be more interesting to see what *I* do. I'm looking for an alternate to ... what was the name changing to again? As I type.