I, Cringely July 2011

Internet Class Warfare

My last column on broadband data caps rubbed the wrong way my old friend Brett Glass, an Internet Service Provider in Laramie, Wyoming. “Your most recent article regarding ISPs and bandwidth caps is misleading and inaccurate,” wrote Brett. “I hope you haven’t joined Bob Frankston’s ‘kill all service providers’ camp, because it sure seems like you have… Our bandwidth costs are $100 per megabit per second and are going UP due to increasing charges for middle mile bandwidth from Qwest/Centurylink and the FCC’s failure to act on special access.”

“My situation is absolutely the norm. Bandwidth is expensive, and anyplace you have to use the (monopoly) telephone company to get to it — which […]

By cringely|July 30th, 2011|2011|60 Comments

Bandwidth caps are rate hikes

Internet Service Providers in the USA are trying to apply bandwidth caps to their users, with those caps being 2, 4, or 5 gigabytes-per-month for wireless users at various price levels and generally 250 gigabytes-per-month for home users. Most of the press coverage of this issue comes down on the side of consumers but lately the ISP publicity machine has been revved-up and we’re being told that bandwidth caps are necessary, even inevitable. This is, as my 87 year-old Mom would say, BS.

Provisioning is what ISPs call the amount of Internet backbone capacity they buy per subscriber. This number is always less than the amount of bandwidth we think we are buying because most of […]

By cringely|July 28th, 2011|2011|175 Comments

Bufferbloat 2: The Need for Speed

Almost eight months ago in my annual predictions column I made a big deal about Bufferbloat, which was the name Bell Labs researcher Jim Gettys had given to the insidious corruption of Internet service by too many intelligent network devices. Well I’ve been testing one of the first products designed to treat bufferbloat and am here to report that it might work. But like many other public health problems, if we don’t all pay attention and do the right thing, ultimately we’ll all be screwed.

At the risk of pissing-off the pickier network mavens who read this column, Bufferbloat is a conflict between the Internet’s Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and various buffering schemes designed […]

By cringely|July 25th, 2011|2011|63 Comments

The Future of Hulu and U.S. TV

Who will buy Hulu, the IPTV streaming service and why should we care? I’m not sure I do care, now that Lie to Me has been canceled, but in case you are an American who feels the future of series television is important, here’s what I think is going on.

The Wall $treet Journal says Apple is thinking of making a bid for Hulu and Seattlepi.com says Microsoft’s is no longer interested, which leaves Amazon, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and any unnamed parties. I can’t think of any unnamed parties, by the way, so I’m guessing one of these will walk with Hulu, which went into play a couple weeks ago following an […]

By cringely|July 22nd, 2011|2011|47 Comments

The Decline and Fall of Facebook

Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning.

The core of McNamee’s speech didn’t have to do so much with Facebook as with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and […]

By cringely|July 20th, 2011|2011|201 Comments

700 MHz opportunity down the toilet (no, make that stolen)

Today, if you have a few million bucks to spare, the Federal Communications Commission will be auctioning wireless licenses in the 700 MHz band — primo space in many respects because it is lower on the RF spectrum and offers longer range. But Auction 92, as it is called, is anything but primo, since it is for licenses that either received no bids in the previous Auction 73, held in 2008, or were sold in that auction to organizations that never paid in full. That earlier auction, which I covered at the time, is a sad story of opportunity lost, especially for Google.

Remember how that freed-up spectrum was up […]

By cringely|July 19th, 2011|2011|68 Comments

Entrepreneurial OCD

I don’t often respond to other bloggers but today I was asked to do so by my friend Dr. Steven Berglas who blogs for Forbes and is quite an expert on executive and entrepreneur psychology. Steve wrote recently about President Obama’s call for shared sacrifice in the current budget fistfight with Congress, claiming this was exactly the wrong message for the President to send to American entrepreneurs, effectively discouraging entrepreneurism. He asked a number of bloggers including me to comment for a follow-up post. My response (Steve’s wrong) ran so long I figured — what the heck — I might as well make a couple bucks from it. So here goes:

Dear Steve,

I don’t […]

By cringely|July 13th, 2011|2011|138 Comments

All My Children a killer app?

This may seem an odd topic, but stick with me. Yesterday Disney’s ABC television network said it was licensing two canceled daytime TV soap operas to a production company that would be moving the shows to the Internet. I seem to be the only one who thinks this is a brilliant move. In fact it might be the Internet’s next killer app.

All My Children and One Life to Live as killer apps? Yes.

A killer app, remember, is the Silicon Valley term for an application that all by itself justifies to certain users the acquisition of hardware needed to run that app. People will go down to the store and buy hardware just to be able to use that application, whatever it is. […]

By cringely|July 8th, 2011|2011|61 Comments

The flip side of cyber bullying

There is no good aspect to cyber bullying, but maybe there’s a little light to be found in the underlying idea that people interact differently online than they do in person. That’s not all bad if it gives a voice — an academic voice — to students who might otherwise remain silent in class. This is certainly the experience of Democrasoft, a startup I have written about before that seems to have stumbled on a whole new class of software for education.

Democrasoft’s Collaborize product began as a way for communities to discuss issues online with the idea that the core groups would be cities or local governments. But the Santa […]

By cringely|July 7th, 2011|2011|36 Comments

Which domain registrar is best?

I have domains from Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and Register.com, but there are many other registrars — some of which must be better than these. Network Solutions is too expensive and difficult to work with, GoDaddy is annoying and greedy, while Register.com may be great but I don’t have a good comparison.