Graves On SOHO Technology

My wife’s family is from Thorndale, TX. Bert, her oldest brother, lives at the family’s homestead. In his late 60’s Bert recently got his first cell phone. It’s as pretty basic flip-phone. It’s exactly what he needs. However, he’s having trouble receiving calls when he’s in the house.

The rear portion of the old house has a steel roof. That’s also where Bert’s bedroom is located. As far as I know the cellular signal is ok in the yard, and even in the front portion of the house. But if Bert is in the rear of the house his cell phone loses it’s connection to the nearest tower.

Bert’s cell service is a prepaid account. I don’t know what company provides the service, but Googling for the phone number I see it belongs to Cingular. That suggests that the service provider is using AT&T’s network. This tells us what kind of network it uses (GSM) and the frequencies involved.

A week ago I tweeted an inquiry about cellular signal boosters. Rakesh Agrawal replied, telling of a good experience with Wilson Electronics Wi-Ex signal boosters. Apparently Rakesh’s company, Snapstream, had cellular connectivity issues in their former location. He described that building as a metal box.

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Recently, my parents decided to pay us a visit. It was their way to escape the Canadian winter for a short while, and see how their most distant son lives. Amongst the many things that we did was they were here was to tour the The Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History.  It was something that I had been meaning to do ever since I learned of its location some years ago.

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It’s nice to see people “thinking outside the box” as exemplified by David Frankel’s recent presentation to the FCC. Please recall that David is the CEO of ZipDX, a leading voice in the battle for HDVoice and a sponsor of the VoIP Users Conference.

Doug Mohney’s HD Voice News has a good overview of David’s petition. David’s idea was that the merger hearings present an opportunity to point out how the ILECs have utterly failed to advance the issue of call quality. What Doug doesn’t mention is the mechanism of David’s presentation on May 27th.

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Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn testifies on the AT&T-T-Mobile merger before the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee on May 11, 2011. I caught a portion of the testimony via the web stream. You can find that C-SPAN coverage here.

I found that AT&T’s arguments for the merger were hollow at best, and deceptive at worst. I hope that the Congress will act via the DOJ where it seems unlikely that the FCC will see fit.

For more information, check out http://www.publicknowledge.org/tell-president-obama-stop-unthinkable-att-t-mo….

My belief is that since your home office network is your network, and under your control, it should actually be more reliable than the network that your office-bound associates a) enjoy or b) suffer. If you operate from a home office on anything more than an occasional basis I think that you should give some serious consideration to maintaining redundant sources of IP connectivity. This is especially true if you rely upon VoIP for your office phones, as we have here for many years.

Redundant IP connectivity can be achieved in a variety of different ways, each with advantages and disadvantages. Performance and price vary widely depending upon the access methods available in your area. For us the best solution has been to use Comcast Business Class cable as our primary internet access, with backup provided by a dry loop DSL circuit from Covad.

It’s important that your two sources of connectivity are different modes of connection, in our case cable & DSL. We could bond a couple of DSL lines and achieve higher speeds, but we’d be susceptible to a single mistake with a backhoe taking out both of our circuits.

I’ve walked down the street, examined the lines and know that the copper goes south down the street while the coax cable goes another direction. No one silly mistake will take them both down.

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Over this weekend AT&T got hungry. To address it’s desire for a snack it has bid a staggering $39 billion to acquire T-Mobile USA. There’s a ton of analysis and commentary about this appearing online. Anyone who is not working for the two companies seems to think that this deal is bad for customers. That’s my position as well.

I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for the past five years. I’ve been consistently impressed with the companies customer service ethic. They didn’t always have the best handsets, or the best coverage, but they handled me in a manner that made me feel good about doing business with them.

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