Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Stat of the Day

According to Cisco, by 2017 video will account for 69% of all consumer Internet traffic.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Verizon Strike Over

The Verizon strike by about 40,000 works is reportedly over. This is good news for both sides.

It is easy to forget but those 40,000 workers are individuals with bills to pay or with families to provide for. A strike of over 6 weeks was starting to cause real financial strain and harm. Imagine being the head of a household and having to pray that your wife or kids did not get hurt because Verizon cancelled your healthcare 4 weeks ago!

For Verizon - any additional contract gains would have come at the cost of some potentially purely horrible public relations risks.

Good news.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Speed Tests

Interesting. Netflix has a new speed test Fast.com (which consistently pegs my Charter broadband at 16 Mbps).

Compare to SpeedTest.net (which also tested my Charter connection fairly close to 15 Mbps).

Others have found wildly varying results comparing the two testing sites.

How do your results compare?

Monday, April 18, 2016

Verizon's Fiber is the Only Fix Program

The Motley Fool looks into why Verizon is refusing to fix problems for some customers.

While the "Fiber is the Only Fix" program is fine for customers who live in areas that have fiber - what about all the rural customers whose only choice is decades old copper lines? Many of the customers who live in these areas have come to expect poor service on their old copper lines any time it rains. Many real estate agents trying to sell homes in these areas beg the sellers not to disconnect their existing DSL service because if they do then in many cases Verizon will not offer DSL to the new homeowner. These are real and major issues for people living in these areas.

Fiber truly is the only fix for those people living in such broadband deserts but not in the way that Verizon imagined.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Verizon and NG-PON2

Interesting development by Verizon.

If Verizon chooses NG-PON2 as their standard of choice then that could spell real problems for real-world adoption of XGS-PON.

Monday, March 14, 2016

Do You See a trend?

Cord Cutting more than doubled in 2015. Here's the year by year tally on reported video subscribers cutting the cord:

2015 - 385,000 subscribers
2014 - 150,000 subscribers
2013 - 100,000 subscribers

Do you see a trend?