life hereafter

random musings from a wannabe economist

A few months back Clear, the WiMax 4G Joint-Venture between Sprint, Comcast and a host of other companies launched in the Philadelphia area claiming broadband speeds up to 4X faster than the cell phone companies. Given that neither Comcast High-speed, nor Verizon FiOS was available in my Center City condo, I decided to give it a try.

Ordering:

I signed up for the “Pick-2″ promotion with both Mobile and Home Internet. Sign-up was easy and the order without a 2-year contract was completed in less than five minutes.

The next-business day I had two packages waiting for me. The packages arrived covered in “hazardous materials” stickers. This completely threw me off from the fact that this was the order I had placed the day before. I’m not sure if the goal here was to scare would be criminals from stealing my order, or if I am now in-fact slowly dying of radiation poisoning.

The “Home” package contained a shark-fin Motorola WiMax modem, Ethernet cable, power cable and installation manual. The “Mobile” package contained a Motorola WiMax USB modem, USB flash drive containing installation software and a USB adapter allowing you to rotate the modem perpendicularly.

Installation and use:

Installation was about as simple as could be. For the Home modem all I did was plug it into the wall and my WiFi router. In about 30 seconds it found a signal and obtained an IP-address. After loading up my computer I was redirected to the Clear registration page where I could sign up for Clear email and set up the remainder of my billing information. The hardest part of the whole set-up was trying to find the best signal in my home. The top of the modem has five bars, much like a cell phone. You obviously want as many bars as possible to light up. Unfortunately I could only achieve three bars. This means speeds in the home were anything but “super-fast.” In my informal tests during peak hours (9pm) I was able to achieve between 1 – 1.5mbps downstream.

Mobile installation required me to install the software contained on the USB flash drive first. After that was installed a little green and white icon was placed on my desktop. Once you load the Clear software and plug in the USB modem, Clear attempts to find a signal and offers to connect to the network for you. Instead of five bars, the Clear Connection Manager has ten which show you your current signal strength. Once connected and stationary I was able to achieve roughly 3.2mbps down with bursts to 4mbps and 82kbps up. (These speeds were obtained just outside of Center City, near Overbrook Station.) Consistently, within my home, the speeds obtained by my mobile USB device were faster than the speeds obtained by the larger device. Even moving the position of my in-home device did not help.

I mainly signed up for the mobile package so that I could use my computer on my commute to and from work. I ride the R5-Throndale train which is well-within Clear’s mobile coverage area. Unfortunately the signal on that line is not exactly consistent. Frequently as the train gets up to speed my connection is dropped. Once you get to stations further down the mainline, Villanova, Radnor, etc, it becomes impossible to connect. Perhaps they should take down their ads in the train cars which only serve to frustrate and taunt me as I wait for a reconnection.

Major cons:

- The IP Address assigned by clear is in the 192.168.x.x range which is not publicly addressable. If you run dyndns or some other dynamic DNS service for reaching your home network, you will be out of luck with Clear.
- This thing does not work on fast(er) moving vehicles (defying the laws of physics.) Be sure to take Clear for a test drive on your normal route if you plan to rely on it for a connection while moving. (Clear does have another option for 3G/4G connections. This option has a high $250 up-front cost, but can serve to smooth out dead-spots within the 4G coverage area.)

Bottom line:

Clear isn’t exactly the “super-fast” mobile Internet they claim to be. Especially in areas outside of Center City and along the main-line. If Clear or DSL are your only options in the home, Clear is definitely better than DSL or dial-up. If you can get FiOS or Cable, stick with those. For the mobile option, the speeds are definitely faster than 4G, but only if you are in a fixed location. Travel around the coverage area and you are likely to get spotty speeds.

Ok… I know I am a bit late to the party with this, but it’s been a busy week. Give me a break and let me get my jabs in…

Article: Facebook and Google Contrasts in Privacy

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines –including Google –do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

Supporters of the statement above always point out that if you are doing something that requires privacy, it’s probably something you should not be doing. Numerous commentators have already pointed out the logical fallacy that this statement fails to take into consideration:

The problem with that point of view is that it assumes you can only be concerned about privacy when you are doing something illegal or unethical.

What about when you search for something deeply personal, such as symptoms of certain types of cancer, or the effects of drugs you are currently taking? What if health insurance companies were somehow able to obtain this information. Not because Google decided to give it to them, but because some nefarious organization obtained access to the data and offered to sell it for a premium. Do we honestly think the insurance company is going to do the right thing here, or do you think they are going to do what is best for their bottom line?

Putting aside for a second the sheer unpopularity of the Schmidt statement from end-users and privacy advocates everywhere, this really underscores the hubris of companies that think they just need to keep every last bit of information regarding their customers in the hopes that it will someday become useful. Do they not understand how this puts countless people at risk under the law? Currently if you have the data, and it is subpoenaed you have fork it over. Suddenly a hobbyist looking for materials to fuel his sons toy rocket is an enemy of the state for his potentially threatening searches.  Of course this is an extreme example, but why take the risk?

Why not just tier the data? After an personally identifiable artifact is obtained add that object to an anonymous and sanitized demographic data set and then assign the demographic block to that particular user account. At least with this method you still accomplish some of your targeted advertising goals while still providing a level of privacy for individual users.

Unfortunately, yes anything you do on the Internet is captured and indexed somewhere. And yes, it personally identifies you, and yes if someone really wants to get at that data, they can. It’s time for the world to wake up, realize this and take action. Companies will only do the thing that will make them profitable. If capturing personal information suddenly makes them less profitable than purging it, they’ll stop. You can figure it out from here.

[Note: I don't even want to get into the legally mandated privacy violations we experience every day. That is something that can only be corrected at the ballot booth.]

Article: Yahoo: Now Accepting Facebook ID (Business Week)

Conceding to the ubiquity of Facebook as the default form of identity on the Web while helping further it, Yahoo announced a partnership with the social network on Wednesday that will enable users of Yahoo’s home page, mail, and other sites to share content with friends using their Facebook accounts.

Is this the end of anonymity on the Internet? Major sites left and right seem to be ditching either anonymous commenting or their own authentication repositories in favor of Facebook. This means that someone could very easily Google your name and see your random comments on some niche website you thought no one would read. Granted, you can create a fake Facebook account for this purpose, but no one from the masses is going to go through that much effort. Word to the wise, be-careful where (and what) you comment.

Even CNN has Facebook integration… Now how are all the trolls going to get fed?

Article: Homebound flu victims could stymie Internet

A Government Accountability Office report, released Oct. 26, says the Internet could slow dramatically if worker absenteeism reached 40 percent – a reasonable speculation for a severe flu outbreak, the report said.

…

The Internet, with many more users home with the flu, could become so congested that functions critical to the economy, such as online banking or stock trading, might grind to a halt.

really? Take a step back… does that really make sense?

Can someone please explain to me how the Internet manages to survive a typical weekend or holiday when a majority of the working public stays home? Heaven-forbid 40% of these (potentially) very sick individuals decide to stay home from work and watch streaming video all day instead of sleeping it off…

Perhaps the GAO should focus more on figuring out how we can address the growing Federal debt and leave the fear mongering to the real politicians.

Honestly, I really want to know if I am missing or overlooking something completely…

Earlier today I read an article in Business Week entitled “Hacking for Dummies.” (Please forgive the inaccurate use of the word.) The article discussed how easy and cheap it is for anyone to “rent a botnet” for the day and performed DDoS attacks. The article made me wonder how easy and cost effective it might be to use something like Amazon’s EC2 to accomplish the same thing.

What kind of safeguards do these “cloud computing” companies really have in place to mitigate the risk of rouge applications. I’m sure reputable companies would shut down disruptive services in a reasonable amount of time, but what if you only need a few minutes of distraction. Would it really be that hard to use a stolen credit card to sign up for service leaving virtually no trail.

Perhaps I am way off…

I learned something new today, even if you a) live in the city where Comcast is based, and b) Comcast has a franchise in the city where you live, you might still not be able to get cable in your new building. Condos can negotiate with, for lack of a better term, what I am going to call TV management companies. These companies control the type of service offered in the condos and basically add overhead.

My options are limited to Verizon FiOS for Internet (not a bad choice), and severely crippled 12 or 24 month contract encumbered packages of Dish Network or DirecTV re-sold by Hotwire Communications. Stupid MDUs.

Of course, I don’ really care about pay-for TV. I’m just as happy streaming Hulu to my TV or watching whatever I happen to have in my Blockbuster Queue. Although, TrueBlood has been awesome this season.

I’m still holding out hope that Comcast will offer to run a line just to my unit… I promise I’ll sign up for all of the packages which make you the most money!

Nothing is every simple, is it?

All I wanted to do was post two items I wanted to give away on Craigslist (CL). I spent a few minutes this morning taking and cropping pictures, writing witty little descriptions and (what I think is) posting on CL.

I end up getting two emails which look like confirmations that the ads have posted. Fast forward 12 hours and I started to get a little depressed. I’m thinking to myself, “Honestly, does no one want a free TV…? My how the world has changed…”

Then it dawns on me, I check my email. I re-read what was sent and I realize that I had to click a link to confirm my email address AND THEN click a link to confirm the posting & post it. ARGH!

Nothing was ever posted on CL, however it is now Saturday evening and I doubt anyone will really be perusing the thing for my free crap tonight.

…

Anyone want a 26” CRT TV or dining room table?

_______

Update 7/27: After successfully posting the ads I received approximately 200 emails in twelve hours. Did I mention that these 8 hours were between 7:30pm and 7:30am Saturday evening – Sunday morning. Apparently ‘free’ interests a lot of people. I had to remove the posts just to be able to read through the emails.

Unfortunately even though a ton of people seemed interested, everyone one who I contacted either ignored my emails or phone calls. It took me until today to find someone who was willing to drive to my place and remove the items. Apparently it’s one thing to be interested, but its another to be interested and have the ability to get off the couch and do some light lifting…

All-in-all not a bad experience, but it still would have been easier to take an axe to the thing and throw it in the trash. America, you have failed me with your indifference.