a short note on FiOS

I have not had a long experience with FiOS but I already have some experience with it. This morning I experienced my first extended outage with the service and I have something to share with you. 

When my service came back up after the technician reset the optical network terminal*, the service was very shaky to start with. For a 15 mbps down and 5 mbps up, 4.96 mbps sounds good but the 6.50 mbps down is not so much fun. The service went down and I power cycled the router and ONT. I got on the phone with Verizon (call them at 1.800.553.1555) on the issue and by the time I was on the phone with a support representative who was actually able to help me**, the router had an amber light and I had hope again. The rep advised me that while actual throughput will be less than the connection speed, it should not stay too low for too long.

After I put down the phone, I got back on the computer and tried the speed test again. Result? 15.57 Mbps down and 5.34 Mbps which sounded a whole lot better. I ran the test a few more times and although the results showed some variance, it was not as bad as the first picture suggests. The bottom line is actually pretty simple: 

If your service goes down, it may take some time for things to stabilize.

* and other things on the network side that he did not talk to me about as it seems telling customers that your network is fallible to simple human errors — like a tech tripping over a cable or pulling the wrong cable out in the early morning shift — has a tendency to scare customers away. 

** because I call from a cell phone with a 903 area code which is East Texas, Verizon likes to save me time and effort by forwarding me to the call center for Texas. This does not really help because the service is in New Jersey. At times, it feels that the call routing could be made faster and more streamlined that it is with the current automated voice response system.

*** As I was writing this post, I ran the test a couple more times and here are the results. All tests for this post reference the New York, NY servers of Speak Easy.

14.46/5.19

8.27/4.60

16.33/5.23

12.75/5.25

a practical world

Do I dare call Martin Sherrard, who is named in the SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) article "Sorry Google, but the buck must stop with you" a journalist? While our positions may vary, perhaps I should start by thanking Mr Sherrard for bringing up this topic.

The article starts rather nicely with the writer thinking out loud that "must be missing something". The answer is yes.  He is missing something. While I will not defend Google for taking as long as they did in taking down the video after it was reported (if they indeed take two months to take down the video), I must say that the analogy of "publishing" does not apply online. The writer sounds more like a crybaby than a journalist than anything else when he repeatedly says that a new medium still has to follow the rules of the old media. 

Let us see what his commentators had to say about the discourse. In the comments, BHK called the article "a mouth-frothing rant rather than reasonable discourse". Another commentator, Mike, makes a very strong analogy—self-publishing. I believe what he says is relevant enough for me to cite here in its entirety. He says: 

Martin, to use your own example - while publishers may be responsible for the content they publish, are the printers? No.
This is the analogy you should be using. Youtube is the equivalent of the printer of a magazine. They are not liable for what the magazine publisher puts in their magazine - only the publisher is.
Youtube goes even further than a printer in that they remove offensive content if they are made aware of it. Do you think the printer of a magazine would refuse to print an article if they believed it to be inappropriate? No.
The conviction of the three Google execs in Italy is outrageous and the entire world needs to make its distaste for it known in no uncertain terms.

The article closes saying "You live in our world, Google. We don't live in yours." BillR in the comments says "I would add to it and point out to Ray that we also don't live in America's world." Well, guys. Welcome to the Internet! It is your government's choice to decide what it allows in your country. I said earlier that a two-month window between reporting and take-down, if true, is unacceptable. However, you have to decide whether you want a mostly free Internet or a subset of it as your government sees fit. (If you really believe this article can cause national panic and widespread instability for any nation, I have nothing to say.) 

Where I agree with the authors is that rights without responsibilities just does not exist. Even The Pirate Bay— champions of unrestricted free speech—moderates its website. Here's the Google cache for the blog post and I quote: "Our moderators work on all the reports we receive from the public and they contact ECPAT or other organisations if they found suspicious stuff."

Shifting the burden from the original publisher to the platform can have devastating consequences. If Youtube is guilty of hosting the video (as opposed to taking too long to comply and remove the video after they were asked to), aren't youtube's content delivery network (CDN) partners liable to police their own data servers as well? By extension, aren't your CDN partners liable to the contents on the SMH? If yes, should your content delivery network start regulating whatever is being published on your website? Should your ISP be liable for your publications? After all, the information was momentarily present in their network. Say good bye to hard-hitting journalism. Circumstances would prevent some controversial articles to ever be published. This would never happen again. Liberals would lose. McCain's videos would get pulled off the Internet for ridiculously invalid reasons. Conservatives lose. In fact, no one will win from the position that the writer advocates.

Would it be nice to ensure that everything on Youtube met the community guidelines and Youtube's own terms of service as well as disparate laws worldwide? Sure, it would be nice. However, it is not practical to monitor every single video as it uploads to youtube. We live in a practical world. Do you?

Television nowhere

While this blog is still in slow mode, I had to make a post today to highlight a document that shows a point of view on online television. I must add that while I am in no way affiliated with free press and do not necessarily agree with their position, I believe that more people ought to know about the PDF document that I am linking here.

See also: Ars Technica (TV Everywhere: gift to consumers or plot to kill online TV?)