33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
Copyright © 2014 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
The Telecom Digest for Sep 16, 2014
Volume 33 : Issue 160 : "text" Format
33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981Copyright © 2014 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.The Telecom Digest for Sep 16, 2014 |
| Messages in this Issue: | |
|---|---|
| New Fast Lane in Open Internet Proceeding | (Neal McLain) |
| Basic fiber optic phone service vs. Fios phone service | (Tom Metro) |
| Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (Telecom Digest Moderator) |
Philosophy is common sense with big words. - James Madison
See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details.
| Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 03:49:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: New Fast Lane in Open Internet Proceeding Message-ID: <716f775f-b8e9-494b-8658-3bd731b9ee8d@googlegroups.com> By Harry Cole, CommLawBlog, September 14, 2014 FCC provides "bulk upload" option for adding even more comments to the million-plus already on file - now who's going to read them all? When last we took a sounding of the rising floodwaters of net neutrality comments, they were 1.1 million deep and more were pouring in. That was a month ago and, we're pleased to report, the levees have apparently held. At least we assume that to be the case because the FCC has just announced, in effect, that it's opening the dam upstream in an apparent effort to increase the flow of incoming comments. In a blog post on the FCC's website, the Commission's Chief Information Officer advises that [i]n the Commission's embrace of Open Data and a commitment to openness and transparency throughout the Open Internet proceedings, the FCC is making available a Common Separated Values (CSV) file for bulk upload of comments given the exceptional public interest. Continued: http://www.commlawblog.com/2014/09/articles/internet/new-fast-lane-in-open-internet-proceeding/index.html -or- http://tinyurl.com/ofchnwv Neal McLain |
| Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 22:46:06 -0400 From: Tom Metro <tmetro+blu@remove-this.gmail.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Basic fiber optic phone service vs. Fios phone service Message-ID: <541652EE.3040200@gmail.com> A few weeks ago in the consumer column of the Boston Sunday Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/08/30/copper-fiber-phone-service-better-fight-than-switch/83SzuNwB4QmJbyM1Rfmg1J/story.html -or- http://goo.gl/DqZZ6r ... a reader explained that in response to a repair request on their copper phone line, Verizon was forcing (not encouraging) them to migrate to fiber. The reader asked, "...what consumer protections apply. Has Massachusetts taken a position?" The reporter started off with the usual note about fiber being different from copper in that during a power outage, you are reliant on a local backup battery, but otherwise it is technically superior. But then he went on point out that Verizon is offering two different products. One being Fios phone service, and the other being basic fiber optic phone service. As we know, Fios isn't regulated by the state utility regulators, but notably basic fiber optic phone service is. I hadn't heard of that before. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Telecommunications and Cable (DTC) said, "Because this is a technology upgrade...the department does not have the authority to interfere with this change, so consumers must either switch to fiber or switch carriers." So I guess you are out of luck if Verizon picks you for a forced upgrade and you want to stick with copper. The reporter referenced the DTC's advisory on this matter: http://www.mass.gov/ocabr/docs/dtc/consumer/fiber-migration-advisory-final-6-27-14.pdf A quote from that: The DTC requires that Verizon make available to all residential customers in Verizon's service territory a regulated landline voice telephone service and Verizon claims its fiber service, where offered, will meet this obligation. So what changed from the early days of Fios, where Verizon would pull out the copper lines to prevent the consumer from using those lines they were obligated to share with other telcos? Does this mean another telco can demand that Verizon lease the fiber line? And if so, what capabilities are available? Does Verizon use loopholes to argue that only a voice line of bandwidth is available for lease? Is Verizon implementing this with Fios style dedicated fibers between the CO and the customer, or are they running fiber to neighborhood concentrators, and multiplexing only a low-bandwidth signal onto a shared trunk line? I'm assuming for simplicity sake they're using a single identical infrastructure for both, plus this way once they have a foot in the door, they can upsell the consumer on their bundled offerings and not have to upgrade the connection. ...you should inform Verizon if you have any home monitoring equipment such as alarm/security systems or medical equipment that relies upon your existing phone line to ensure that it will continue to work after you make the switch. Digital voice services are also notoriously incompatible with fax machines, due to the way they compress the signal. The DTC advisory implies that there aren't technical differences between the two Verizon voice offerings, only marketing and regulatory differences. So I'm assuming both are using lossy codecs in their ONT. They may support T.381, which demodulates the fax at the analog-to-digital conversion point. 1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38 -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA "Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting." http://www.theperlshop.com/ |
| Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:37:29 -0400 (EDT) From: telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org (Telecom Digest Moderator) To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <20140915213729.32324ACD@telecom.csail.mit.edu> I've been using the ISO-8859-1 "Latin1" character set in the Digest for a few years now: we adopted it as the standard after a reader made me awaare that there are no accented characters in ASCII, so I figured that I'd implement a way for him to spell his name properly, and also be able to add "Internationalization" to my résumé. I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the "transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a permanent solution such as UCS-16. I'd like to hear opinions from you, particularly if you have expertise in choosing character sets for online publicatoins such as The Telecom Digest. TIA. Bill Horne Moderator |
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