Hollyman’s World blog

We have all heard about the net-neutrality debate: consumers want all they can eat and service providers want to limit what we use. Why not discuss the ways that both can be happy at the same time? It reminds me of an old Political Science professor that lived and breathed the “win-win” situation.

Just this week, Qwest Communications announced plans to roll out a new fiber to the home (FTTH) service in 28 markets. Initially, I thought, “wow! I can get more than 3Mbs of speed!,” but then I realized, this plan might not make a lot of sense for many providers and customers. These two new packages are the Quantum (20Mbps) and Titanium (12Mbps).

The plans are $99/month and $49/month, respectively, if you bundle the service with your home phone line. Overall, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal, but will it really work? And if so, for how long? It does not take many subscribers using these links to the full capacity to quickly make Qwest re-think their costs and speeds.

So what will likely end up happening? My guess is that these lines will end up being rate-limited, especially during peak times of day. This will surely generate numerous complaints by consumers that they “paid for 20Mbps and expect 20Mbps at all times.” So why not be creative and offer service-specific offerings that people are willing to pay more for, but not cost the provider in expensive CAPEX funds for new interfaces and routers?

For example, I primarily work from home. I have a 3Mbps line that isn’t bad, but I would love some additional bandwidth for downloading ISO images. I would also enjoy more speed for VoIP calls and if my VPN were a priority, it would make working from home even better.

So how about this for a plan?

I primarily use my line during the day, which is typically the lower trough of traffic from a broadband subscriber. Give me this:

1. 5-10Mbps link speed down
2. 1-3Mbps link speed up
3. from 6AM to 6PM, prioritize my VPN/IPSEC traffic and VoIP
4. from 6PM to 6AM, put me in a big bucket with everyone else with limited bandwidth for applications hogs, like P2P.

Sounds like a Win-Win to me!

The provider gets to fill up their links with more traffic during the day.
I get great VPN and VoIP traffic during these hours.
The provider gets some relief at the peak hours of usage because I agree to be limited.

What’s wrong with that picture? Both parties get something good (me bandwidth when I need it most and the provider gets more revenue) and that makes for happy individuals.

Something to think about, I guess.

I received my Lexar ExpressCard 16GB SSD card last week. Unfortunately, my excitement was suppressed when I was finally able to test it with Parallels. For a refresher, my plan was to move my Windows XP parallels image off my MacBook Pro and onto the SSD card. This was to save space on my internal 80GB harddrive, which was mostly full.

Copying the 10GB image to the card was no problem and I really like how the card sits right inside my computer and doesn’t stick out like a USB flash drive.

Once I started running the parallels image, however, I realized that my goal would not be met with this device. Parallels ran OK, but running applications, menu actions, etc, were all painfully slow. I am 99% sure this is due to the nature of parallels and the speed of the card.

Parallels uses a single harddrive image file for your guest OS. In my case, that is Windows XP. This is an image of about 10GB for my use.

This design causes lots of “seeks” in the file to locate the application or whatever data it is you need to run. I’m sure that the seeking for data in the flash drive was just too slow for normal everyday use. Perhaps if my guest OS was only 2GB, it would work fine, but you will never get that with XP unless you have no applications installed…

I decided to move my parallels image back to the internal hard drive and just move things like iTunes music and some other large directories to the SSD card. This has freed up about 14GB on my internal drive, which I am more than happy with. My overall satisfaction is high, as I met my goal of getting more space on my laptop, but my desire for a faster parallels image is not going to be met with this solution.

I’ve finally realized that the 80GB drive in my Macbook Pro is just not enough space for me. Unfortunately, unlike the Macbook, the Pro is not a user-serviceable hard drive upgrade. (at least not if it is under applecare protection…)

I run Parallels software for Microsoft Windows XP. This is, unfortunately, a requirement for work. Being as I only have about 4GB free on my drive, I really need to offload the XP drive somewhere else. That will both free up about 8GB on my drive for more iTunes songs/podcasts and photos.

I just ordered a Lexar ExpressCard 16GB model to try out. Some reviews say the speed is too slow to use, but no one has really used it with Parallels images, yet.

That will all change! Once I get it in, I plan to move my 8GB drive image to it and see how well it performs. My hope is, the disk I/O on my internal drive will decrease and have less contention than it does today, slowing down both XP and OS X at the same time.

I will post back here with updates as it arrives and I can begin testing.

See you back soon!

Update: I did end up getting an iPhone and love it

The iPhone simply does not do the things that I need a “smart” phone to do for me.

Sure, I’ve held one, played with it, enjoyed the awesome looking screen and marveled at the touch-screen capabilities, however it just does not do the things that I really need a phone to do. What are these magical things that hundreds of thousands of other users didn’t end up needing? It’s a pretty short list, really. I’m just not willing to pay $600 for a phone that doesn’t do the few things I need it to do. (OK, I admit, if I had the spare cash to drop, I’d get one)

Multiple Voice-mail announcements selected by a setting on the phone

What this really means is, I want to record several different voicemail announcements for people that call me. Some examples might be, “I’m in a meeting right now” or “I’m currently traveling and will get back to you when I am back on the ground.” Each would be pre-recorded ahead of time and all I need to do is change a setting on the phone to pick which one. Now, when I’m in a meeting, the person calling me would get a message stating that I am in a meeting and hopefully won’t call 5 times in a row.

Another good use is to have custom greetings per contact. Wouldn’t it be nice if when you call your wife you get a personal vm?

A calendar that actually works when you move to other timezones

OK, maybe this works on the iPhone today. I’m not really sure and haven’t read anything online that would indicated that it does. I need a calendar that, when I have a meeting that was set for 9 AM MDT, if I am now on the west coast, that meeting will automatically be moved to 10 AM PDT. My “smart phone” today runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and doesn’t even get it’s time from the cell towers.

Multiple options for sending a call to voice-mail with custom greetings

Why do phones still only have two options? You either answer the call or ignore it and it goes to voice-mail. How about letting me have a couple of custom selections that would pla a pre-recorded voice-mail greeting to the caller? Like, “I’m in a meeting and can call you back in about 30 minutes” or “I am quite busy now, please leave a message and I will get back to you when I have a moment.”

Wouldn’t that be nice?

I know that the iPhone has a lot of potential. Apple has done a great job so far, but it’s far from revolutionary until I can make it do all the things I want it to do.