This is where I am heading for a couple of day, the 2008 FTTH Conference & Expo. The conference is being held in Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center.
I will be giving a talk on Monday concerning technology and the end user. Mainly from the perspective of someone who works out of a home office in a rural area. How such technology makes that possible and how without it, we can not be competitive with those in the city. Then I will be doing some one on one visit with some providers and will be on a focus panel too. Should be interesting to say the least.
The one point I plan to hammer home is the fact we have to have such technology, mainly high speed Internet services in the rural area for there to be continued economic growth. It has to be reliable and priced right. And it has to work.
If any of you have anything you would like me to bring up or look for, please leave a comment to this post. This should be a fun and educational time for me and I do plan to tweet and blog about it too.
Grant, first, congratulations on being asked to speak at such an important Conference for us who make our livings using the internet.
As you may know, we live 7 miles from the town “square,” of a rural agriculture Northeast Texas town. For years, all we had was dial up. My life changed and I will never be the same, because on August 25, 2008, we finally got DSL high speed internet through Verizon, our local telephone service provider. I am officially a home office lawyer.
Regarding the rural access issue, I believe any local telephone provider can add high speed internet access without more cost effectively than any other high speed non telephone service provider. Our service is great, however, it is not as fast as my ATT service that I had in Richardson, TX, the city that Texas Instruments calls home. Moreover, part of U.S. Highway 75 (a/k/a Central Expressway) is called Telecom Corridor. I had fiber optic service through ATT. I am not a technology engineer, however, it is my understanding if there is phone service just like if there is water and electricity to connect to in the country, adding high speed internet access along with the phone service is a no-brainer.
It is my understanding a costly alternative is satellite internet access, if Verizon or ATT is not available.
Another problem I have noticed in Northeast Texas is small town phone coops. In Cumby, Texas, which is situated along Beer-30 (Interstate 30, there is a drive-thru beer store with that name), the phone carrier is Cumby Telephone Cooperative, Inc. Verizon can ignore this coop and others like them, assuming the Verizon $28.1 Billion buyout of Alltel is approved. Alltel is the “rural cellphone” provider. Alltel places towers where you will not get ATT, Verizon or Sprint service. I will post an interesting link from sprintconnnection.com for more analysis why Alltel will be an important asset to Verizon. http://sprintconnection.kansascity.com/?q=node/635
ATT’s 881 USB 3G Connector wireless connector is not a solution if you cannot receive an ATT signal. It acts just like a cellphone, no bars, no internet. However, it does work great in Paris, Texas where 3G is abundant.
I look forward to your hearing from you after the Conference.
Brian
Security needs to be super-simple easy and automatically set up at a high level - then easy to double-check. You’re asking people to trust what they cannot see and what is difficult to understand for the no-tech. With those assurances, I think more people would be willing to give it a chance and once they do, will be kicking themselves that they took so long.