Picks and Pans

Are you seeing adds for RCN in the paper? It all started when
I read about a weird thing in the local paper. It seems that
Boston Edison and some other little firm had placed the
city council's underwear in a knot because they had petitioned
to pull fiber all over town and the dead-line for the council
to respond was only two weeks. They needed more time. But
legally Edison and the other little company were entitled to
their permit.

Turns out the other little company was RCN.

So, six months later I'm seeing adds about how bad NYNEX is
(did we need to be reminded?) and how they are going pull
fiber into our houses and give us phone, cable and Internet.

I want to believe. I want the fiber. I want a gigabit network
connection. But can they really do it? I'm not sure I want to
give up my copper phone and copper cable connection just yet.

But if they did pull fiber to my house. Wow. That would be
cool. And, if they did they could give me phone, cable
and Internet and it would probably be cheaper and only one bill.
Humm...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I remember reading about someone (AT&T?) about to deploy a box
you put in your attic. It would be a wireless box giving you
cable, phone and Internet. Has anyone seen one of these?
I might not stand too close to it if I did :-)

My theory has been that there would be eight different ways to
get Internet: copper, fiber, wireless, blah blah, etc... It looks
like we're getting close.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A friend recently discovered that there are new modems out which
"do voice". I don't mean you can talk over the phone while using
the modem (I think that was a dumb idea). I mean there
are modems which when connected to your computer can digitize
speech and turn digitized speech into sound. So what? Well, it
means you can have your computer answer the phone and act as
an answering machine or turn on the air conditioner or tell you if
you have email. Sounds geeky, I know, but it's just the sort of
application which I love. My next phone will be a computer with
a web server and one of these modems :-)

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Did I mention that my cell phone is also a pager? You can send
me email and some nifty software will send it to my phone as an
alphanumeric page. I think this is way cool. Now I want my
phone to display video...

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)