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Walt Mossberg Says “We suck at broadband!”

You really need to see this. It’s Walt giving a presentation outlining trends in TV viewing on PCs vs home theater and the sorry state of the broadband reality in North America. I don’t always agree with Walt, but he has this completely nailed. He very lucid and well spoken on the matter. He also highlights AppleTV & Tivo as well as the pending (60 days) availability of a 3G iPhone.

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Houston Will Get Limited Muni Wifi Despite Earthlink

When last year it was announced that Houston was to get municipal wifi network I had to applaude Mayor Bill White for his vision and drive. There are vast number of people in this city for whom the internet is not readily accessible.

Houston is a huge city with a more pronounced digital divide than many other places. It’s the kind of place where opportunity presented to low income neighborhoods can make a big difference in the lives of people.

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monowall Screencast Tutorials

m0n0wall-160Rarely do I profess as much devotion to a piece of software as I have for m0n0wall. I’m told that it’s one of the single most successful open source projects and it’s easy to see why. It’s been my primary router for over four years. It’s never let me down, and the user community is very supportive.

I am happy to see that Phillip Cooper has recently created a series of “screencasts” documenting it’s basic setup and configuration. This should help new users a lot. I wish they’d been around when I got started. I further wish that I’d thought to do the screencasts myself. It’s a good idea.

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Remembering Sprint ION

Back in 2001 we had the pleasure of a year of Sprint’s ION DSL service. ION remains to this day the best broadband service that I’ve experienced. It’s a terrible pity that Sprint shut it down.

ION stood for, “Integrated On-Demand Network.” It was an xDSL drop to a CPD (CPD = Customer Premises Device) that presented network connections (RJ-45) and phone connections (RJ-11s.) It was offered in a couple of packages. We had the one targeting SOHO users, which was 2 fixed IP adresses and 4 phones lines. For $149/mo the service included 1.5/768 data and unlimited local calling & domestic long distance. There was also a lesser service with 1 IP and 2 phone lines for $99/mo.

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