Phones

I am just off the phone after several hours with some very patient troubleshooters in North Carolina (BellSouth) and India (Linksys). And I am reconnected to the internet! It has been a frustrating two or three days.

I upgraded my DSL service to BellSouth’s DSL Xtreme 6.0, which is double the speed of my old DSL Xtreme and costs $2/month less. My DSL service went down about 11:30 last night and was down most of today. When it finally came back around 7PM it was running at twice the speed.

Watch next week to see if McDowell, a Republican, listens to Democrats like Ed Markey and keeps himself out of the merger discussions, or whether he bends to chairman Kevin Martin’s wishes and ties the deal up in a big bow for the holidays. Equipment providers like Cisco, who are waiting for the deal to go through so that AT&T can start spending BellSouth money, are likely to give McDowell a ring soon.

I’m anxious to try this at the office where BellSouth sez I should have 3 Mbps, though I’ve never clocked it at over about 2.5. Also at a customer’s site where I set up a 6 Mbps DSL link last week that actually clocked at about 8 Mbps. I could feel the difference in that one with my eyes closed, by the way my hair got windblown everytime I clicked on a link. Downloading the Microsoft updates for Windows Server 2003 was almost a pleasure… almost…

Is there anything definitive about what’s going on with Bellsouth people being unable to get to Myspace and/or Youtube lately? I know there’s been a lot of rumors and rumbling about filtering and QoS stuff and net neutrality, but the only official quote I can find so far is from the PC Mag story, where Joe Chandler, director of media relations at BellSouth, said

It’s kind of funny that the big phone companies waited an entire week before attacking the story about their alleged complicity with the NSA in the driftnet to track domestic calling patterns. When USA Today published their report about how the NSA was collecting data related to every phone call inside the United States, alleged co-conspirators BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T were somewhat tightlipped. The first two denied providing the information and the last one declined to “comment on national security matters.”

I don’t know if I ever plugged Grayson’s Georgia Political Digest column or not, so I’m going to knock out two birds with one stone here. First, read the aforementioned column from Grayson about the telecos that picks up where my Bellsouth column left off. She did some actual journal-ma-lism and got quotes.

I'm currently on hold with BellSouth "customer service." Bob says that he can't remove the forwards that are coming to my phone. He thinks my only option is to change my phone number, forcing me to tell everyone who HAS my phone number that it has changed.

Via Maker Blog, I liked this backpack mobile mesh wifi set up.

Mark Del Bianco has this very interesting (and technical) commentary at news.com about the AT&T-Bell South merger (via What About Clients?). Del Bianco argues that the conventional wisdom that the AT&T-Bell South deal is a “done deal” is incorrect.

There has been a lot of blogging about the AT&T-BellSouth merger. Instead of linking to all of them, I’ll just note a couple of the more substantive posts. The Technology Liberation Front has this excellent post about Reed Hundt’s change in view on mergers like this one. The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog has this post about the lack of monopolies in cable.

Internet providers like AT&T and BellSouth have recently said they want to see high-volume Web services (Google, Skype, Yahoo!, etc) pay a premium for their current position on the Web. Any company that doesn’t pay the premium will have their traffic slow exponentially. Such a system, critics argue, will drastically reduce the open nature of the Web by squashing smaller Web services. The biggie sites would likely have to pass costs off onto users.

The issue of the telecommunications companies seeking to exert control over the use of the net, and staking out the commercial territory to which they believe they are entitled, continues to move forward. The impact of decisions yet to be made, sought in proposed new legislation in the US in which the telcos are seeking to set up a two-tier internet (heftier fees for more bandwidth) is stirring up some spirited commentary.

Glenn Reynolds and Rand Simberg have a litany of complaints about their BellSouth internet service. Brother, tell me about it. At my home we use BellSouth phone service and Comcast cable internet. No problems with either one. But at my office we use BellSouth only and it’s nothing but problems, and that is an expensive business account:

BellSouth insists it’s just trying to look out for the interests of the local Lafayette taxpayers. Its argument hinges on the fact that the city-owned utility, which is building the network, is a monopoly.

Bellsouth’s FastAccess DSL almost always comes with a Westell DSL modem if you purchase the modem from Bellsouth. I’ve been supporting users on Bellsouth DSL in Georgia since 2002. The Westell modems have always proved to good hardware in my experience. As of late 2005, Bellsouth has started selling customers refurbised Westell DSL modems. (Bellsouth puts this microscopic type on their web site, printed materials, and television commercials to warn you about.) Surprisingly, I’ve found that the refurbished modems, other than looking slightly different, tend to work just fine.

Greed knows no bounds in our large telco oligopies. Not only do they want to charge us for the pipe, they want to charge us for the content. In the process they have to know exactly what the content is and feed it into a mamouth database. In order for this to happen telcos need to kill of the remnants of the “common carrier” concept and turn the internet into a private network. This is a very bad idea for all players involved, particularly the public, except for the ATT, Verizon, Bellsouth and Comcasts of the world. It’s tied to their wish of eliminating “network neutrality.” The privacy implications of massive data mining of the internet are staggering. It’s anti-consumer in the extreme and needs to be strongly opposed.

Looks like AOL has finally figured out there is no future in dial up services if you really want to be a relevant ISP in the 21st century.

This WashPo story says businesses will eventually be offered a different class of Internet service – and explains how that’ll affect the rest of us:

After looking at prices and testing service for what seems like months, I finally pulled the trigger today and ordered BellSouth phone and DSL. The phone cost versus Vonage, my current provider, is pretty much a wash…Bell may be a couple dollars more expensive. I first considered dumping Vonage a few months ago when I had some tech support issues using their service with my Clearwire service. Those issues never got resolved. Clearwire insists on locking down their network (not to mention they’re a-holes when you call) and Vonage took a strictly “hands-off, it’s not our problem” approach. At one point they actually gave me a bogus set of instructions to allow their terminal adapter to “bypass” the blocking system put in place by Clearwire just to get me off the phone (I knew they were bogus because I work in the tech industry…I wasn’t born yesterday).

We've switched to BellSouth DSL, which requires a phone line. And, since we now have a fixed phone line to the house, Vonage didn't make sense economically. For our long distance, we'll use calling cards or something.

So now it’s Tuesday. A company trenching for fiber optic managed to cut several of our phone lines and almost all of our data lines. The company doing the trenching saw the markings for phone lines, but bored anyway. By the end of the day, the street in front of the office had been dug up, and BellSouth had settled in for a long night of repairs. Just as I was asking what next, the bottom fell out and the newly dug trench began to fill with rainwater. We’ll be lucky to have our network back online by the time kids arrive.

As some might have noticed the site has been down almost 2 weeks. Doing the old self hosting thing and moving plus changing my ISP from Bellsouth to Cox has made for an interesting adventure to say the least. We got moved by the 24th of last month but no internet access or cable until the 30th. I went strictly cable services this time including a rather pricey upgrade to business tier service. Each item had to be completed before the next item could be undertaken. We bought a house that was built in 1964 so every single thing like establishing new cable service had to pretty much be done from scratch. Lines that were in existence had filters on them and the house had only one outlet installed and firebreaks in the walls made installing new ones difficult but Cox got it done. That was phase one.

On June 8, Cingular--a joint venture of SBC Communications and BellSouth--sent a letter to Marion C. Blakey, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, that raised a red flag about the prospect of cell phone blabbing on airplanes. "We believe there is a time and a place for wireless phone conversations, and seldom does that include the confines of an airplane flight," wrote Paul R. Roth, Cingular's executive vice president for external affairs.

After Swisscom had to delay the roll-out of IPTV ('Bluewin TV') due to technicalities, shivers went through the vendor and telco communities. After all, Microsoft right now is the only company to provide all software parts of an end-to-end IPTV solution. And Microsoft has trials or outright orders for its Microsoft TV software suite from a.o. Verizon, SBC, BellSouth, Telecom Italia and Swisscom. Most likely SBC will not be able to launch this year.

Cox just upgraded their cable modem users in Virginia to 15mbps/2mbps. Now THAT’S some bandwidth. Thought I’m (mostly) loyal to BellSouth, our 3mbps tier doesn’t look so hot now. We’ll have 6mbps by the end of the year and 24mbps by the end of next year.

I called BellSouth to see about hooking up DSL but it’s a total rip-off. Not to mention that their customer service system sucks big donkey wang. The actual people I talked to were nice enough but I called an 800 number for internet service and got a woman who could only give me pricing on DSL–she couldn’t help with phone service. Evidentally, you have to set up a phone line first and then call for internet service 3 days later. I asked her to transfer me to BellSouth’s phone service. She sent me to just some dude. The guy answered his phone and when I asked about phone service, he said, “who are you trying to call?”

Mike's beef is that the company backing BellSouth, Navini, are supplying their propriety technology based on the 802.16 WiMAX protocol, whereas the competing 802.20 is more likely to become the ratified standard (whenever that happens), so the trial is based on technology that has already been trialed, it's just been rebranded to jump on the WiMax bandwagon.

BellSouth tips its toes in pre-WiMAX fixed wireless, will launch trials in Athens, Georgia, later this summer using gear from Navini Networks. More details at Daily Wireless. Mike thinks this is old wine in an old bottle with a new label: WiMAX.

Not too long back, Athens, GA was the posterchild for the concept of flooding the downtown hub of a college town with free wifi and little meshnets. Bellsouth seems to feel otherwise. I have to wonder if the concept of multiple WiMAX deployments in a specific service area is going to become a reality or if there's a first-mover advantage here that defeats the purpose (or marginalizes the longer-term viability of the deployment) as others enter at lower barriers to entry when the WiMAX gear becomes more easily justifiable.

More than 20,000 will attend it. Conference speakers include Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon Chairman and CEO; Duane Ackerman, BellSouth CEO, Kathleen Abernathy and Jonathan Adelstein, FCC Commissioners. John Chambers, Cisco CEO will be a keynote speaker. Other keynotes include Bill Owens, Nortel CEO and Pat Russo, Lucent CEO.

The new improved and recently ratified VDSL2 standard has one enthusiastic support at the very least - BellSouth. The company says it will use Tellabs’ AFC gear for its fiber to the curb project. “BellSouth will use VDSL2 to upgrade existing FTTC systems and achieve broadband speeds greater than 50Mbps on systems installed over the last decade,” said Bill Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth, which even now has 1.1 million FTTC curbs. Tellabs will provide the technology to upgrade those customers to bring them upto speed....

On the telco side of the fence, BellSouth and Comverse announced the final resolution of their patent battle, a pact that makes official the cease-fire announced in December. Comverse supplies a critical technology to telcos: voice mail. Under the deal, Comverse agreed to license BellSouth’s voice mail and other emerging important technologies, including patents for integrating wireless and wireline phone numbers.

Is Microsoft’s IPTV strategy falling apart? Over the past few years they’ve made some massive investments in developing new software and technology for delivering television over broadband and cut some serious deals with telcos like Verizon and SBC, but El Reg says that lately things haven’t been playing out the way Microsoft had hoped. For starters, the one IPTV rollout they did have underway, with Swisscom in Switzerland, has been delayed, reportedly because of problems with Microsoft’s expensive and “overly complicated”...

I’ve had similar issues (no pun intended) with other companies that were “#1” or otherwise huge. AT&T, Comcast, BellSouth, and SunTrust Bank all come to mind immediately (based on experience) as having obvious organizational problems when it comes to managing customer information. The last time I called Comcast, for example, they said I didn't have an account with them - I wonder who was sending me bills (complete with account number) and providing internet access for me all those years then? I’m sure...

The standard for VDSL2 was ratified today, which means Bellsouth should be rolling out in approximately 80 years or so.

"As a result of this project, about 30 miles of additional fiber have been placed throughout the parish - basically going out to every major neighborhood in the parish," adds John Williams BellSouth's regional manager for Southwest Louisiana. "This will make it more economical for local businesses as well as consumers to access high-speed Internet services throughout the parish."

“Complimentary” – another word describing the fact that the three recent mergers now reduce the U.S. telecom industry to five dominant players — Verizon, SBC, BellSouth Corp., Sprint and Qwest — leaving the cable TV industry as the only serious threat offering telephone services.

The attached graphic of Bellsouth’s stock performance is a good indication of its future direction. I need no more analysis of this company than the facts listed here to accurately predict the near certain demise of Bellsouth as a provider of much of anything in the networked future. Their incredibly inept handling of that advanced technology called the cell phone is a good template for the way they will be going in the areas of broadband, VOIP, video services — you name it service if it is something likely to produce revenue for the...

They will have many facile answers that will be the kind of corpspeak mumbo jumbo designed to derail any form of common sense analysis of their actions. I’ve considered the possibility that Bell-headed-South was secretly preparing for a takeover from Comcast and the executives are making life easy on their future employer’s. They don’t want to provide competitive pressure that could make the Comcast guys lose any sleep at night or worry that consumers will think twice when next year they enter the VOIP market full swing and wipe...

Unbundled or “naked” DSL is a data-only service without the voice line that is normally part of the DSL package. Naked DSL is used by customers who are using alternative voice services or wireless phones rather than landline phones provided by the Baby Bells.

Home > FCC Daily > BellSouth Pricing Flexibility Petition - FCC Requests Comment >

In Public Notice DA 05-740, the Commission requested comment on BellSouth's petition for pricing flexibility for switched access services. BellSouth stated that it meets the criteria necessary to obtain Phase I pricing flexibility relief in 34 Metropolitan Statistical Areas ("MSAs") and two (2) non-MSA areas. Comments or oppositions are due by April 1, 2005. BellSouth may file a reply by April 11, 2005.

In considering that, we’re faced with a slew of potentially ugly situations. First and foremost, (and this revolves around the free vs. pay for play model) the existing service providers like Time Warner and Bellsouth probably aren’t going to be happy. I think it has something to do with unfair competition. Of course, I don’t see them spreading WiFi so I’m not sure there’s any competition out there right now. Then you have to consider that there’s no one in Columbia that can fulfill this project, at least that I know of. That fact, given that the city has been in the recent past focused on local purchasing, leaves us in a bit of tight spot…I mean, god forbid we go outside of Columbia to a service provider that could fulfill our requests. Perhaps I’m being overly simplistic.