Austin Texas is not a random choice for the next city to get 1Gb/sec residential Internet access. In addition to being the Capital of the Republic of Texas, it is the blue dot in the middle of a red state.
Austin is the location of the influential SXSW festival of Hollywood and Silicon Valley types. It is the plan B for companies looking to get the hell out of California.
In a somewhat related note, this past week Dial Global shut down most of their SAG/AFTRA unionized operations in California and moved them to non-union offices in other states. I wonder what Thom Hartmann and Eddy Schultz have to say about that and who they can blame? Sequestration! Global Warming! the ghost of Margaret Thatcher!
Hartmann and Schultz should blame POTUS’s incompetence.
If I move to Austin, how much faster will I get page refreshes from This Ole Server? 😉
So, fast it would arrive smokin’ hot………
You’d see it mentioned often on the upcoming HouseFire cable tv channel.
Wish you best of luck on that.
LOL !
Parrott
I know I’m weird – but I find traffic cameras watching the Interstates more interesting than most Cable TV channels
Back around 1981 when I lived in Oklahoma, there was a TV station in Tulsa that fed encrypted porn movies at night – but FCC rules required them to broadcast a certain number of hours a day of “in the clear” programming. So they had a storefront on the downtown mall and hired a personable radio guy to stand there with a microphone and just talk to random people for 3 or 4 hours a day. There would be some arranged things like the baton twirling group or the Boy Scouts showing how to chop down a tree – but mostly it was just random people walking by he would engage in conversation. One of the “regulars” was a crusty old man who delivered newspapers downtown using a wheel barrow. That’s my kind of TV. No writers, no national ads, no “point” beyond maybe increasing traffic to the local merchants
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That is how FNN (the Financial News Network from Los Angeles) got their start. The major cities in the early 1980s had subscription channels that shows movies at night – normally not porn but HBO type movies for people that were in neighborhoods that had not been cabled up.
During the day, they needed content, and FNN from Los Angeles became a favorite. GE eventually bought them about 20 years ago and merged them into CNBC.
CBS and Fox may go back to that subscription model. I would like to see the FCC auction off the digital spectrum they were gifted so there is a more level playing field.
Rahmbo says he wants to bring Gigabit Internet to Chicago. That way the gangstas can stream their drive by shooting videos live in 4k ultra
If he pulls that off, it seems likely my neighborhood would be near the top of the list. Being a few minutes from O’hare, this is a perfect place for computer consultants who travel a lot.
My client (maybe future employer) just installed a gigabit switch inside the computer room – out at the remote locations, we are putting in 6 Mb/sec connections – an entire warehouse running on less than my Comcast connection
The web server is running hanging from a $400 eMachine (including monitor) with the data and programs stored on a very slow 20 GB external USB hard drive. Since I connect from the router, I won’t be aware of slowness caused by Comcast congestion other than if my connection to work via a VPN slows down.
After a shaky start, my Comcast connection has been surprisingly solid. My VPN record is currently 14 days without a disconnect – but it’s just as likely that it was someone in Phoenix resetting the server.
From the same guys that offered ISDN connections with no per minute connection charges while Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) and most other regional companies did (Southwestern Bell bought ATT and renamed itself as ATT)..
ATT also had the same Texas sized news this week:
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/ATT-announces-plans-to-build-Gigabit-Fiber-Network-in-Austin-202171211.html
For some odd reason, the local phone company in Chicago is RCN, not AT&T
I hope at some point this building gets a direct fiber connection – T-Mobile and US Cellular have large offices about two blocks away (at least they have large signs!)
Hard to know what to call the connections being put into place in Bluffdale, UT but I suspect it would dwarf anything Google is doing, anywhere.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
Intercept operators are being instructed to begin (that was several years ago) “warrantless targeting of Americans overseas calling the U.S. “The calls were all in English, they were all American, and the guy goes back to his supervisor, a warrant officer, and says, ‘Sir, these people are all Americans,’” according to Faulk. “He said, ‘No, just transcribe it, that’s an order, transcribe everything.’ . . . A lot of these people were having personal phone calls, calling their families back home, having all kinds of personal discussions, and everything just disappeared somewhere, someone’s got it.”
This book is now 30 years old but still a great read. It is a narrative of post WW2 intelligence. I recommend it:
http://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Palace-National-Intelligence-Organization/dp/0140067485
I just signed up for Google Voice. One of its features is it will transcribe your voicemails and send you a transcript. Computers don’t get all wrapped up in that morality crap.
I wondered where they could hire-a-bad stenographer, so I said Glass… eventually I late found:
“At our India headquarters in Google Hyderabad, we do it all.”
One thing I learned driving out to Illinois is that Siri is incapable of doing voice commands unless you have Internet connectivity, even if the action doesn’t require anything not on the phone – so your notion might actually be right.