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Hotel Broadband: The Ongoing Saga

As mentioned last week for the next few days I’m appearing nightly at the Hyatt Regency SFO. I don’t normally stay at Hyatt’s as they’re typically beyond my budget, but a UK based coworker is here and I decided to stay where they put him for convenience. He’s here two weeks so he got a deal, for my three nights I didn’t.

Anyway, returning to the theme of broadband this place, which is vast, has wifi throughout the rooms. Last night it was solid and pretty speedy. This morning it’s simply D.O.A. A call to in-house tech support, provided by a company called Z-Net, had me try various things…but no joy. I have both  a laptop and a netbook, neither of which get issued an IP address. Although both report decent wifi radio signals.

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Broadband Internet Access In Hotels

hp-compaq-8510pJust recently both Andy Abramson and Rich Tehrani had posts describing their experience with  broadband internet access at hotels. I can barely convey how this is a topic that strikes a nerve with me. At times during my working year I travel extensively. Anyone who has been following my Twitter stream will know that I’m been to and from SFO so often recently that I’m starting to feel like a migratory bird. The local taxi drivers are starting to recognize me!

Suffice it to say that I stay in a lot of hotels. In the past month of activity on the west coast that includes two Hiltons, Le Meridien, the MarQueen Seattle, a La Qunita and a Club Quarters. Next week I’ll be appearing nightly at a Hyatt. Talk about a diversity of establishments!

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Broadband Reform In The US: Turner, Isen & Obama

I just finished listening to Brough Turner’s Ecomm 2008 presentation called “Own The Network.” His talk is available for download from IT Conversations, the accompanying slides and notes are available from his blog.

Mr Turner’s key assertion is that we insist upon owning the dark fiber to our homes & businesses. This is very similar to David Isen’s idea of “Fiber From The Home.” It’s a principle that I can completely get behind.

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Customer Owned Fiber

Timothy B. Lee over at Ars technica has an excellent piece on a pilot project going on in Ottawa, Ontario. A neighborhood is getting fiber installed to their homes at their own expense. Once that's in place any ISP that…

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Today’s VOIP Users Call & My SIP URI

Well it certainly was a pity that today’s VOIP Users Conference call didn’t happen. Randulo, our host, was just about to start the call when he lost IP connectivity with the world. As such he lost control of the Talkshoe conference bridge. People could call in, but he could not unmute anyone.

Judging from irc channel and the Talkshoe web app there were a number of people trying to be on the call. However, the conference bridge kept us all muted. Too bad.

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