Fiber – Our technological infirmity

Swiss Army Knife Life

I once posted a picture of this Swiss Army knife and someone made some disparaging remarks about Swiss Army knives in general. I responded back that if you have never needed a Swiss Army knife, your life was likely confined to more civilized areas than I have frequented. Even a cursory examination will reveal that this knife has been well used. I am pretty sure it went to Newfoundland with me on our little trip to the barrens. I know it went in my pocket every day that I farmed. It did things it was never designed to do and some parts are broken as a result. It never failed me. I like to think the theme of my life is lot like that beaten up Swiss Army knife.

Somehow, I seemed to be prepared for whatever challenges that I faced. Perhaps it started when I grew up the child of single mother in the fifties. I tried not ever let having only one parent drag me down. Mother always told me that if I worked hard, I could be anything that I wanted to be. She pulled herself out of red clay soils of Yadkin County, NC and got her license to be a beautician. She supported us from the beauty shop attached to the back of the house.

In a sense being an only child of a mother who worked extremely long hours gave me a push into learning how to do things I might have avoided in a more standard family. I learned the basics of cooking because if we got food on the table at any reasonable hour, I needed to be involved. It started with just sticking food in the oven, but well before I got to Boy Scouts, I was grilling half chickens on an old charcoal grill. Tinkering with things started at an early age. By the third grade it was my job to balance the check book and make sure the deposits were recorded properly. At some point I became the navigator and developed a love of maps that still bedevils me today.

Being a Boy Scout accelerated many of these interests and enhanced my love of the out of doors. By the time I left college, I was in need of an escape from the cities. Regular visits to Maine had only made my desire to get back to the land worse. The old Nova Scotia farmhouse that I bought in 1971 only pushed me harder. I had to learn plumbing and how to wire a house at the same time my carpentry skills had to get better if we were going to have a place to survive the winter.

By the time we got to our New Brunswick farm, I was ready for almost anything. With a welder and an acetylene torch, there wasn’t much on the farm that could slow me down. I always had a John Deere tractor and a Chevy 350 3/4 ton 4WD that I could lean on and some great neighbors who were always willing to help. With some local help I even built a couple of barns that are still standing 50 years later.

After the farm, I went on to sell Apple computers, learned how to manage a sales force, and how to survive a teetering small business. When I actually went to work for Apple, the second day I was on board, they gave me a tray of real 35 mm slides and said you’re presenting to 100 people tomorrow, put together a presentation. If was the first of many presentations that would define my almost 20 year career at Apple. My last days at Apple in 2004, I was director of federal sales and sat with Avie Tevanian at a federal hearing on cyber security. Had Apple stuck more with open source and the direction our team was headed, there would be a lot more Macs in the federal government and our government would have a more resilient infrastructure.

After a consulting gig with the National Lambda Rail (some called it Internet 3), I went to work at an email company and learned the ins and outs of online marketing. It was a steep learning curve with Google analytics, buying search terms, and managing an inside sales force when I had spent most of my life in outside sales.

By the time the email company was sold, we were well on our way to establishing a life on the North Carolina coast, I worked a writer and I dabbled enough in real estate to know how to mine data from tax databases which turned out to be very useful when I became a vp at a company that was building fiber and convincing people to sign up for it. My love of maps led me to extensive use of Garmin’s mapping tools both on land and in my skiff and kayak. A knowledge of GPS helped me jump feet first into ArcGIS Pro and the technical reports and maps that have defined my last dozen years.

Not long ago, my barber asked me, “How in the world did you get from shoveling manure to selling computers and then helping to build fiber networks?

I told him the answer was simple, I always believed in what I was doing and I never sold anyone something that I wouldn’t be proud of using whether it was a bull, a bailer, a computer, or a report on the state of the Internet in their county. I could have said that I had a Swiss Army kind of life, always ready for the next challenge even as I was taking a lot hits along the way.

Competition and the Internet

I like white button mushrooms. They are a favorite in omelets, salads and all sorts of things. Six years ago we were living on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast which is roughly defined as the area from the White Oak River in Swansboro to Town of Beaufort. It is a very unique area because most of the year there are less than 70,000 people in residence but for six to twelve weeks during the summer, the population more than doubles. In order to feed all those people staying in rental homes, the area has an abundance of grocery stores.

Yet for our first eleven years on the coast, button mushrooms remained relatively expensive. Whether you went to Harris-Teeter, Lowes, Publix, IGA, or Piggly Wiggly, button mushrooms seemed priced higher than I expected.

Then almost simultaneously Aldi and Lidl opened stores in the area. Instead of paying $2 to $3 a box for mushrooms, you could get a box for ninety-nine cents. It was a welcome change which I expected to go away, but it didn’t and to this day, white button mushrooms are more competitively priced than were before Aldi and Lidl came to town.

Studies show that less than ten percent of households in the United are not connected to the Internet. However, a larger portion of those connected people in effect only have one provider that delivers anything close to the speeds needed in our wired world. Usually those with only one option find their Internet is more expensive than what can be found in areas with competition.

Much like my expensive button mushrooms, it doesn’t really matter if you have five grocery stores in your community if they all charge similarly high prices. What it took to get the price of mushrooms down was a different kind of grocery store with a different pricing model.

There are a number of factors which affect competition for Internet services. Much like the grocery stores that all sold mushrooms at a similar price, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often set their pricing to be very close to other ISPs. Some providers even charge people with slow Internet the same as people getting faster Internet. That is the classic definition of tier flattening.

Fiber Internet connectivity is the gold standard for home Internet. In general national providers are competitive with their fiber pricing. Competition for new fiber customers is fierce right now with some great offers and pricing that is unlikely to stay that low without competition.

It is really a golden age for faster Internet because fiber is more widely available in more neighborhoods and there are more fiber providers. Fiber Internet service providers have figured out that very few fiber customers change providers once they get on fiber. The reason for this is two fold. One is that fiber Internet is so much better than other copper-based or wireless Internet services that few will ever go back to slower cable, DSL, or wireless. The second reason is very few areas have a choice of two fiber service providers.

In most communities, the ISPs have a captive audience—a local monopoly. It is very difficult for a second (competitive) provider to make a business case to build a second fiber network in community where there is already an ISP offering fiber Internet. According to a recent study only 12% of homes have access to two fiber providers.

Unlike copper-based cable and DSL Internet, a fiber network can easily carry several competing Internet services. Cable and DSL are like a two lane road. They can only handle a limited amount of traffic. Fiber is like a superhighway with unlimited lanes. You can have multiple service providers offering services over the network—this is known as the “open access” business model.

We have built networks that have six service providers offering service from a single fiber network. Service providers can focus on delivering differentiated services without the immense capital costs of constructing a second (or third) fiber network. In this scenario, one party owns the network—it can be a local government, a nonprofit, or a for profit company. Service providers can each sell their own services, Internet packages, and offer their own pricing on the single high performance fiber “road.”

Amazon, UPS, and USPS do not each build a road so they can deliver packages; the government builds roads and all public and private businesses use the one shared road system to deliver goods and services.

Until recently, most Internet Service Providers have resisted this “shared network” model because they prefer having monopoly control over customers and pricing—that is, they do not want to compete.

Currently, some state and Federal grant money is being channeled directly to ISPs, which enables them to expand their monopoly network to more customers. A better solution is to use state and Federal funding to build open access networks. Some local and regional governments have embraced this model and have a long track record of success. And there are now ISPs that recognize open access networks as a business opportunity.

Modern fiber Internet networks are easy to build and to operate. Local and regional government that adopt the open access model create private sector jobs and business opportunities, and help keep the cost of Internet affordable for businesses and residents.

Design Nine has been a pioneer in assisting with the development of open access networks. Visit our website Designnine.com for info or send me an email: dsobotta at designnine.com or dsobotta at wideopennetworks.us .

¹TIER FLATTENING: AT&T and Verizon Home Customers Pay a High Price for Slow InternetJuly 31, 2018- National Digital Inclusion Alliance – by Bill Callahan and Angela Siefer

²Fiber Broadband Association Reports North America Hit Highest Annual FTTH Growth Record- Fiber Broadband Association -December 11, 2023

Still Using Macs

Years ago the kind of computer you used could stir some serious passions. The world was in two camps DOS/Windows and Macintosh. There were people who were afraid of the Macintosh and the ease of use that it represented. Computers were supposed to be difficult. Taking away the hard work meant that anyone could do it, not just those who had invested years in learning how to make computers work for them. In the early days, people believed that knowing what to do with a DOS command prompt made them superior.

Apple lost the hardware desktop war for a myriad of reasons which are beyond the scope of my article. Even the resounding success of the iPhone did not matter a lot. Only 41% of iPhone users also use Mac. A lot more use iPads but that is a different story. While DOS users did not all end up on Macs, Microsoft to its credit came banging on Windows until on the surface it looks enough like a Mac that there are no longer religious wars about computer operating systems. The Mac user interface one, even if the plumbing under the Windows version is a lot more complicated.

The difference between a Mac and Windows machine is still huge but it is not something that you can explain in a sentence. Unfortunately, most people have decided Windows is good enough for them. However, among those of us who still really need desktops to churn out serious work, the Mac enjoys a serious and dedicated following.

While I did work for Apple for nearly twenty years selling Mac in some of the toughest markets, anyone who has read some of my writing or my book about my Apple sales career, The Pomme Company, would agree that at times I have been one of their toughest critics. I like to think that I have seen far more Macs than the average person and just maybe I have a better idea of where Apple needs to apply resources to make the Mac experience even better.

I am still not particularly excited about Apple, the company. While they arguably have some of the best computers, their products are marketed as elite products with only those living close to Apple Stores really getting the kind of support that users sometimes need and certainly pay for in Apple’s case.

There is a case to be made that We Are Lucky to Still Have Macs, because Mac revenue is dwarfed by other parts of the company. It’s not the Mac’s fault that they are not on more desks. It has a lot to do with Apple, the company, and the decisions made over the years to not grow their share of the desktop. At times it was like, we have a great product but we really need to keep it a secret. We don’t want it to sell in the enterprise because Steve would be unhappy.

I hesitate to call it poorly-conceived marketing that focuses on just one part of the country but that is close to the truth. If you are near a blue-voting metropolitan area, you likely have an Apple Store close enough by to be practical. If like me you have lived near Roanoke, Virginia, the North Carolina coast, or west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, you likely have rarely seen the inside of an Apple Store except on visits to the big city. I hate to think the kind of support people in the fly-over states get.

I have suggested Apple hire Apple user group coordinators across the country where it does not make sense to have a store, but given that Apple would have to part company with some of its pile of money to make that happen, I think the chances are close to nil. The money would hardly register a blip on Apple’s horde of cash, but I am not going to worry around it very much because those of us who have been using Macs for years know how to get by the challenges that Apple throws in front of its non-metropolitan users.

About the only place that I get to see Macs is in our local Costco twenty-five minutes away. Unfortunately choices there are usually limited to lower-end configurations with minimal storage or RAM options. Either one of those limitations would keep me from buying there since Apple like other manufacturers has been on the no-upgrade path for years. While I call myself a rural user because there is a twenty-acre soybean field across from our subdivision and lots of other farming nearby, there is a two GB fiber connection to our house which my Mac Studio could handle if Calix could deliver a router with 2GB output ports. There is no shortage of computers and technology in the house. I even have a 12 TB Network Attached Storage device (NAS) next to my desk. My home office is better equipped than the Reston, Virginia, Apple office I had when I was director of federal sales for the company.

It is fair question as to why I am still using Macs. Would you still drive a Ford if Ford threw you out the window after 20 years? Apple defenestrated me in July 2004. I bought an aluminum PowerBook G4 the next month- it died thirteen months later. Fortunately, I also bought a Dual G5 tower that December. It lasted from December 2004 until January 2023, an admirable run for any computer. I started using Linux in 2004 when I also started using Windows.

I have seen plenty of Windows computers over the years and my dalliance with real estate means that I ended up using a Windows machine for most of that job. I still use Windows because my current job requires the use of ArcGIS Pro and it will only run on Windows. For a good ten years, I did most of my photo work almost exclusively on Windows. It is only in the last six months that I have switched back to the Mac for my photo work. Apple finally decided to no longer tie your data to a single Mac and I got tired of Lightroom on Windows being unable to figure out two monitors being used at once, Windows has also become something of a pest. It wants Teams to launch anytime it isn’t running and it is also quick to try to get me to do something I have no interest in doing. The first rule of operating systems is to not get in the way of the user. Windows has never done that and certainly does not do that in its most recent incarnation.

Besides photos, I maintain a number of websites. I got used to Mac web tools at the dawn of the Internet. They have continued to mature and get better. They kept me using a Mac when I was doing most of my work on Windows

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it was Multiplan. That means I have a lot of years with it and it is still but default spreadsheet but I have grown to appreciate what you can do with Apple’s Numbers. Most of my books have been written in MS Word, but the number of pages composed and complexity pale in comparison to the reports that I have done with Pages in the last twelve years.

Perhaps the straw that broke any loyalty that I had to Word is Word’s propensity to screw up its own mail merge documents. It is tremendously frustrating and time-consuming to have to go looking for dropped addresses in a list of one hundred twenty addresses. I have wasted a lot of time recovering from those Word errors. While Apple’s Pages does not do mail merge address labels, LibreOffice which runs on the Mac does them flawlessly without dropping any. Apple’s Pages is a pretty good page layout program.

I recently wrote an article, The Best Mac Ever. In it I declare the reason the Mac Studio Pro is the best Mac ever because it just works. I doubt anyone is going to switch to a Mac because of this article or my experiences. However, remember the Mac has to be a pretty dang good computer for someone like me to keep using it.

I don’t remember serious computer user switching over to the Mac ever going make to Windows. The only thing that is better on Windows is search. If you are like me, you probably have a Windows machine doing little or nothing that can run a search for you while you keep working on your Mac.

Mini-Monopolies Are Not Your Friend

Our rural area in Davie County, NC- Rural with 2 Gig fiber

I have made my living in the broadband world for over twelve years. I spend the time at my day job analyzing broadband in counties across the United States.

While there are publications that would disagree, I can confidently say that most of you might at best have a choice between two providers. Sometimes it is between an expensive provider and a lousy provider, one with high costs and terrible customer service and the other with dead slow or unreliable service.

All this results from the broadband world being cut up into little fiefdoms. Competition to broadband providers is “I am going to lock up this subdivision before you have a chance to wire it.”

Competition in the broadband world is rarely here are three services competing for my business, I will pick the one that best suits my needs.

Many of us for years have believed that community-run, open-access fiber fixes this problem. The challenge is that sixteen states won’t let communities run networks. I have used the road analogy many times. We don’t build different roads for UPS, FEDEX and Amazon Prime. We build one road they all share it.

In broadband each provider builds their own network. They like to do that because it locks the customers into them. If we built fiber once, there is plenty for them to share but what mini-monopolist wants to share customers.

If Amazon Prime had to build their own roads, it would be a more expensive proposition than today’s sharing of roads.

Our company has built open-access networks across the country. Some have been running successfully for over a decade. They all have multiple providers competing for customers.

The problem is that now the federal government is throwing bucketloads of money around. Many local governments who are tired of being beat up by their citizens over broadband just want broadband to go away. They know they need a network but they don’t want to go through the difficult process of figuring out how to come up with a long-term solution that fixes both availability and competitive pricing.

They opt for what I call the “Westshore Homes Model.” I came up with the name from the home remodeling outfit that promises your bathroom remodel will be easy and done in a day.

A current Internet Service Provider hears the city/county wants a network. They show up, “We will build you a network, and you don’t have to worry about the details. Just trust us.”

The government jumps into bed or perhaps better out of the frying pan into the fire with the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP applies for funding with their new government partner. They get money and build another leg of their mini-monopoly. The only problem, you and I are financing their profits.

Sometimes you run across a situation where there is competition and government money has helped foster that competition. I live in one of those places.

A situation like mine where I have a choice between telephone coop built fiber, cable and other technologies while living in a very rural setting is not what I usually see in my studies.

While I work for a fiber company, I have nothing against cable companies. In the absence of a lot of open-access networks, cable competing against fiber is what keeps pricing competitive.

In areas where there is only cable or only fiber, you run the risk of someone taking advantage of the situation. Having both around usually fixes that.

I will make one prediction. In ten years, someone is going to ask why did we spend so much government money creating mini-monopolies to carve up the world?

The government is helping Big Telecom squeeze out city-run broadband is a great article from the Verge that tells the broadband story better than I can. It is a good education on the problem.

Below you see that same rural area with fiber to the home (FTTH).

Below the first map are state maps showing broadband availability.

Keeping Updated Just Enough to Stifle Giggles

When your children grow up and leave the house, you can forget about the times when you are just a momentary embarrassment to them and move to living on the edge of potentially being a permanent embarrassment.

It can be how you dress or drive, what foods you like or what television shows you watch. Most likely in our technology-rich society, we are looked down upon because we appear to be missing all the technology trends that have been declared to be essential to modern life.

Being older we are just not like the people with whom they spend most of their lives. It is understandably hard for them to slow down enough to figure out that we are not doing too badly for people who started out on party lines with rotary dial phones and no television.

Modern life is not kind to those who would prefer to ignore technology. NC’s DMV is now requiring you to understand QR codes in order to check in at their offices. Increasingly businesses would prefer not to handle cash.

People now want to pay you with apps like Zelle. Our teenage granddaughter would much prefer that we deposit money in her Step account that she can use like a credit card in stead of giving her cash. She has even given me cash and asked to deposit it for her in her Step account. My grown son won’t shop at Harris-Teeter because they do not take smartphone payments. Cash seems to be a burden.

You can try living by the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but if you read about the tech refresh that we did in 2017, you will find that waiting too long to upgrade can create even more challenges than ignoring the pressure to upgrade. I love technology, but you really have to stay on top of it or both it and your children will laugh at you.

In 2006, we spent a lot of money for fancy wall-mounted Sony HD televisions throughout our beach house. Apparently, we were not on top of things enough to know that screen technology changes regularly and we should just get a new television with a fancier screen every two or three years. You know you are behind the technology curve when your children give you money earmarked for a new TV.

Technology has always been a wild ride but the rider is getting faster. The first amazing technology that I remember coming into my life was the transistor radio around 1955. It was more important to me than our black and white TV that came later.

If you fast forward twenty-seven years to 1982, my wife and I have three children of our own and one day after work I bring home a Panasonic VHS VCR. It cost roughly $650 and while there were still concerns that Sony’s Betamax might win the VCR war, I was reasonably convinced that VHS would deliver the entertainment that we wanted in our two channel TV rural world. VHS tapes were part of our lives at least through the ballet recitals we attended in the mid-nineties.

Twenty-four years after that first VCR in 2006, we were living in a home wired so that you can plug an iPod into the whole-home stereo system which included a VHS tape player and a six disc CD/DVD player that fed a wall mounted HD Sony flat panel TV.

By 2017, most of that technology was obsolete just like the Sony television that had come before it and taken two men to move. After our tech refresh in 2018, the closest thing to a VHS player left in our technology closet thirty-five years after buying our first VCR was a Blueray Disk player which cost $49 at Best Buy.

Four years after that in 2022, we are living in another home. This one has 2 Gig fiber to the home (FTTH) connectivity. While there might be some DVDs and VCR tapes in boxes, we would have to dig around to find them. I do have a plug in DVD drive for a computer. It is as close as we could get to seeing them. We still have a wireless home phone system, but the connection is VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) that is delivered by our fiber connection. We mostly use our 5G Google Pixel phones but keep the VoIP line so I can have a second line in my office.

There are unused coax cables in our walls because our new in 2021 home was never hooked up to cable services. In addition to our television being connected to the Internet with an Ethernet cable, we also have two upstairs offices which are connected by Ethernet to our router. The fiber that comes to our house runs all the way to the optical network terminator (ONT) on the same table as our TV. There are close to thirty network devices on our network including our garage door. The oldest technology that we have is the FireTV Cube that is a couple of years old and which provides the streaming channels for our television. We cut the cord in February 2021, and have never looked back.

For a short moment we riding the crest of the technology wave (as long as the kids don’t ride in our 2005 cars) but without diligence (and probably a new car), it will crash right on top of us and once again upend our world.

Interested in learning if fiber to the home (FTTH) is for you? Read this post of mine, Choose The Right Technology For The Decade.

Apple No Longer Just Works

Actually, I am a patient person when it comes to technology. It took me two years before I labelled my 2010 iMac, my first iLemon. Even then I gave Apple’s executive relations team a chance to make it better. When they failed, my son, who passed his Apple service certification before he graduated from college, helped me fix it by installing a SSD drive.

I said this back in 2012, just over ten years ago,

To many people Apple is a premium product on par with the best computers that are out there. Certainly with few exceptions, you end up paying more for an Apple product than you might for a product from another manufacturer. If like many Americans you live in a metro area, your Apple purchase gives you access to an Apple store and what can be for many people a very satisfying support infrastructure.

Apple products are even more premium now than they were ten years ago. We still use Macs in our company, WideOpen Networks, where I am vice president of sales. Even though I am in much more of a metro area than when I made the comment ten years ago, an Apple Store is still almost an hour away from us. Still that drive is an hour and an half shorter than the nearest one to our corporate office.

I could easily have given up on Apple products when they showed me the door eighteen years ago when my team had just finished another unbelievable year selling Apple products to the largest enterprise customer in the world with perhaps the smallest sales force ever to tackle the US government. I was director of federal sales and my team of just over twenty people tripled sales there year and year.

However, I am a committed Apple user. I started on an Apple II+ and began my technology career selling Apple products over forty years ago. I still appreciate how Apple has changed computing for all of us, but they are not perfect and they seem to be reluctant to use their mountain of cash to give us better products, warranties or services. The components in Apple’s computers sometimes are no better than what we get in other products and to make you feel good about that Apple has one of the most expensive extended warranties in the business.

Even so when we moved from North Carolina’s Crystal Coast, I took the step of upgrading the Macs that I was using. We were getting fiber to the house and I felt like I needed a backup machine for my I5 MacBook Pro. I went with the new-at-the-time MacMini with the M1 processor and 16GBs of RAM.

I am glad that I kept the I5 MacBook Pro as my main work machine. The M1 MacMini is fond of locking up. I keep hoping that one of the software upgrades will fix things. I am beginning to think the real problem is Apple just not caring. I know that conventional wisdom says to never upgrade to the first release of Apple’s operating system software, but I was having enough problems that I thought it was worth a shot. After all I am never shy about upgrading my Windows and Linux machines as soon as I can.

Today, I am running Ventura 13.0 on an eighteen-month-old MacMini with 16GBs of RAM. It is hooked to my internal network and a rock solid NAS with what I would call a bullet proof 2GB fiber connection where the speed at any of my desktops rarely drops below 940 Mbps/940 Mbps. There is nothing but Category 6 Ethernet cabling from the Calix Gigaspire router all through my home and office. I have five other computers in the office including that old resurrected iMac from 2010 and a Lenovo Yoga from this summer running Windows 11 and a much older Lenovo I5 running Ubuntu Linux.

One morning recently I tried adding a simple contract to my Highrise CRM using Safari. When I went to add the picture from a network mounted volume, it froze three different times under different scenarios. Finally, I brought up Chrome and everything worked fine.

So the question is- how can Google make a better browser for the Mac than Apple’s own Safari? Google makes Chrome for all sorts of platforms and it generally works. You would think that when you release a major operating system update like Ventura that you would make sure your browser works.

Apparently Apple just doesn’t care any more.

I haven’t been brave enough to open any of the newly updated apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I am not expecting a good ride.

Apple should appreciate that more customers than me have been using their products for over forty years. We deserve better and because we have been around so long, we have seen better from Apple. Even when there were far worse problems in the early nineties, Apple appeared at least to be taking the problems seriously.

Just to show that I am not conjuring this up out of an old Dual G5 case, I ran additional tests to prove that this is a problem on the M1 with Ventura and the most recent Safari.

I used the same test of opening Highrise CRM in a browser, creating a new contact, and adding a picture from a mounted NAS volume. The results aren’t much of a surprise. It worked on everything else but the M1 Ventura MacMini.

My test worked flawlessly on the following systems:
2020 MacBook Pro I5 16GB RAM running macOS Monterey 12.4 and Safari 15.5
Late 2012 15 MacMini 16GB RAM running MacOS Catalina version 10.15.7 and Safari 15.6.1
Mid 2010 I5 27” iMac (iLemon) 16GB RAM running High Sierra 10.13.6 and Safari 13.1.2
2022 Yoga 9 14” 16GB RAM running Windows 11 Home 22H2, successful using both Edge and Chrome
2010 or perhaps early I5 Lenovo desktop with 16 GB RAM running Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish and the latest version of Firefox.

I also had no problem performing the task on a 2021 Lenovo Yoga C740 with Windows 11 using Firefox and connected through our wireless network.

I replicated the problem three days after finding it. I finally got it to work on Safari by quitting almost everything else on the M1 MacMini.

I chose not to add insult to injury by running the test on a Chromebook or an iPad. It would probably work on my dead Dual G5 if I just get it to boot.

Apple, it is time to do better by your customers.

The Internet Is Not Done Changing Our Lives

Recently, our home in rural Davie County got a 2 Gig fiber circuit. It was not a special order, just a $99.95 midrange consumer offering of Zirrus, our local telephone cooperative. I know people in California who would give their left arm for connectivity like what I now have across the road from acres of soybeans. One of my co-workers who works out of San Diego asked if I was going to run a data center out of our house? I know one thing, having my television connected to Ethernet is way better than having it on wireless.

Around thirty years ago, I first got on the Internet. The early Internet brought little new functionality. Email had been part of our lives for years. We used a proprietary system called AppleLink. Most of our big customers used the same system. The switch to standards based email that allowed us to communicate with anyone who had an email address was the first of many radical changes headed our way driven by the Internet

It was impossible in the early nineties to predict how deeply the Internet would become intertwined with our lives. Our family was destined to be full of early adopters. My son gave me my own Internet domain in the mid-nineties. My first webpages were online well before the century closed out. Not long afterwards, I helped create Apple’s online store for federal customers in 2002. Online shopping was something of a novelty then. By 2004, I was regularly blogging. Those baby steps were just the tips of my personal Internet iceberg. Shortly after his college graduation my son was managing networks on multiple continents from the heart of the Internet, Northern Virginia.

Even with all that early preparation and a career in technology, I am not sure that even I appreciated how quickly it is coming and perhaps how unprepared we are for the Internet driven changes which are accelerating even in my little piece of the Piedmont. In Davie County which by most measures is about as far away from the data centers and urban sprawl of Northern Virginia as you can get, we have Internet connectivity far better than most urban Internet users.

I recently got my NC driver’s license updated to a Real Id one. When I walked in the DMV office, I was greeted with a large sign saying “Scan this QR Code to Check In.” As I did, I wondered how many people might not be able to do that? Almost immediately the answer was clear, a lot more than I suspected. While I made and confirmed my appointment weeks prior online, there were people unsuccessfully trying to make an appointment in person at the office. All those folks after a substantial wait were eventually given a piece of paper with a web address and a phone number. One person who said he had neither smartphone or computer was told to call the DMV phone. Someone quickly chimed in that no one ever answers that number. The response was, “they’re understaffed.”

Not long after, I did an e-checkin for a blood test at our local Novant clinic. All those forms which accompany every medical visit were filled out and signed on my iPad from the comfort of our kitchen table. Less than hours after the tests, I started seeing test results posted in Novant’s MyChart app.

I haven’t made a hotel reservation in years by talking to a person. It is always online. We get many of our household staples shipped to us by Amazon. I depend on the fast service of Chewy for the wheat-based cat litter that our cats use. I even read my treasured Winston-Salem Journal online if the carrier has been delayed. The Journal made some of my favorite comics online only. I ended up subscribing to Go Comics and have all the comics that I have loved my whole life.

It is impressive that all of these things would be impossible without the Internet, but those things pale in comparison to what that 2 Gig fiber connection will allow our house to do. We now have two offices both with 1 Gig circuits. My son, the Linux system administrator and network architect, will be able to work from home in his next job if he so chooses, I have been working at home for over three decades. My home now has better connectivity than the three story Apple office I managed in Reston, Virginia, when I was director of federal sales.

What do I expect to see in Davie County and yes even in Forsyth County as fiber comes to many cable modem suffering urban dwellers? We will see more companies like the one where I have worked for the last twelve years. I like to joke that I have only been to our head office in Blacksburg a few times and one of them was the result of a hurricane evacuation when we lived on the NC coast.

Every Monday afternoon for as along as I can remember, we have had a video conference staff meeting. It brings together those of who work remotely with those who work at the head office. There might always be a need for some people to be in an office, but I can tell you the signs are already on the wall of the seismic change that is coming.

Recently we were interviewing for a job with a California customer. We have an employee less than a two-hour drive from the potential client. Much to our surprise, they turned down the offer to have our California employee at the interview in person. They told us they found 100% virtual meetings to be more effective. We got the job and our business is not the only one continuing to evolve. Many will follow the path we have blazed.

I tell people that neighborhoods which have fiber should be called fiber-hoods. Those lucky neighborhoods will form the basis of virtual business parks where knowledge, ideas, and new ways of doing business will flow freely. We have studied over 200 communities in the last decade or so. Even five years ago we were seeing some communities where 70% of new businesses were being run from homes. Much as the home laser printer revolutionized what could be published from a home office, fiber is going to do the same thing for the business tasks that can be done from home.

Fiber will also make it is easier for students to effectively educated at home and for all workers to take courses to retrain themselves for future jobs which might be home-based just like the administrative pool that has answered our phones for years. Fiber even makes it easier for some medical services to be delivered in the home and for older people to stay in their homes longer.

North Carolina has a lot going for it when it comes to connecting people with fiber. Long ago some visionary North Carolinians paved the way with a strong open-access middle mile. The North Carolina General Assembly initially funded the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) in 1980 to be “a catalyst for technology-based economic development throughout the state.” They have gone on to build middle mile fiber across on whole state. It is how our educational institutions and classrooms got connected so early.

That same middle mile enabled telephone coops like Zirrus to bring fiber to those us in places like rural Davie County even before our more prosperous neighbor Forsyth County has gotten much of a start. Coops like Zirrus have done an exceptional job bringing not just fiber but world class fiber to our homes.

If fiber is so great, why don’t we have even more fiber? Unfortunately there is some restrictive legislation driven by incumbent telecommunications companies that prevents NC communities that don’t have a Zirrus from pushing forward. Greenville, North Carolina was one of two that took fiber into their own hands before the assembly decided to stop it. For the last few years, there has been an effort to make it easier for communities to support fiber coming to their communities. While that effort has stalled, it is absolutely critical because we have seen companies threaten to leave towns without better connectivity. Telecommunications companies love mini-monopolies but North Carolinians can fix that by electing people who support letting communities responsibly help bring fiber to their citizens.

Fiber is not a magic bullet. We also need to train people how to take advantage of the opportunities that fiber brings to areas like Davie County. North Carolina is blessed with places that have a rural feel but access to top quality services. We just need to make certain that fiber is one of those services. It has risen to the top of the checklists for many companies and is often nonnegotiable.

Having worked in both Northern Virginia and California, I can only say that people look with envy at our beautiful rural areas. Where else can you find an abundance of farmers’ markets and charming small towns combined with outstanding connectivity plus access to mountains and world class beaches?

As a native North Carolinian, I am a little humbled to know how far we have come as a state. I grew up on Styers Street in Lewisville listening to my mother tell stories of walking by her dad’s wagon from the millpond where she lived in Yadkin County to Winston-Salem by way of Styers Ferry where they would spend the night with my great grandfather, Abe Styers, who ran the ferry.

We have gone from cutting ice from millponds and hauling that ice with horse teams. There were only dirt roads with few bridges then. Now we have to fiber to the home (FTTH) and super highways across the Yadkin River. It has happened in just a little over one hundred years. It is nothing short of amazing. I have to smile a little at the jealousy of my California friends still waiting for their 2 Gig fiber circuits. However, this is just the beginning for no one knows how far our connected state can go.

Connections for the Future

Things have changed a lot since the original iMac® introduced “simple” Internet connections. Most of us in 1998 ending up using the modem to get to the Internet and not the Ethernet port. Connecting to the Internet was often not as easy or simple as the marketing brochures promised. Fortunately, technology changes and those changes have made it much easier to connect and stay connected to today’s Internet.

WideOpen Blacksburg offers symmetric fiber Internet connectivity to its customers. Almost everyone living in Blacksburg today has a home Internet connection. If you do not have our fiber, maybe you are wondering why our symmetric fiber is such a big deal?

For lots of good reasons, fiber is often called the gold standard for home Internet connections. Technology adoption moves in stages. Most people are familiar with the technology adoption curve. We all know about the innovators and early adopters but just where do fiber to the home users fit in that curve?

We will get that answer but first let’s get some basic understanding of how to evaluate home Internet connections by looking at concepts that are familiar to everyone. When the first Interstate highways were built in the fifties they were a huge technological advance over two lane highways.

The one thing that was quickly discovered about Interstate highways is that the communities that had immediate access prospered. Also businesses and people who quickly figured out how to take advantage of them did exceptionally well. Interstate highways had the capacity to move huge amounts of traffic much more easily than two-lane roads which were often clogged with slow traffic.

Fiber is an even more capable technological advance than Interstate highways. While you have to build more lanes to increase the capacity of Interstate highways, with fiber you increase capacity by changing the electronics at the ends. It would be like putting a bigger entrance and a larger exit on a stretch of highway and magically more lanes appearing in the road between them. Fiber is technologically advanced because it moves information with light.

Fiber is also proven technology. Fiber has been the Internet backbone for decades. TAT-8, a transatlantic fiber optic cable, was built in 1988 and linked the United Kingdom, France and the US. Fiber is also a well-tested commercial technology which has become a cost effective way to deliver Internet connectivity to homes. WideOpen was involved in the design and construction of the nDanville fiber network in Danville, Virginia. It is the fiber network which has become a cornerstone in Danville’s revitalization. Amazingly, Danville’s fiber network has been in operation since 2008. Since FTTH (fiber to the home) was being offered in 2008, we are well past the early adopter phase.

Fiber is superior technology because it moves information faster. The best way of thinking about the speed of fiber is that commercially available technology already exists for 10 Gbps residential connections and for 100 Gbps business connections. It is unlikely that there are many people who need connections that fast today but it does mean the fiber that we build to your house now will be more than capable of meeting your full connectivity needs today and far in the future.

Looking at the big picture of Internet connectivity from an individual homeowner’s perspective is easy if you have recently gotten a fiber connection like I did. When we moved to Mocksville, North Carolina, eighteen months ago, we evaluated a number of things from the perspective of how will it meet our needs five or even ten years from now? Our Internet connectivity was one of our prime concerns.

I have been working for WideOpen for eleven years, and like my previous years in technology, it has been as a remote worker with a home office and an Internet connection. It did not take a lot of math to figure out that the coax cable technology we had been using was not improving fast enough to meet my business and personal needs. Beyond work, I take thousands of photographs a year and store some big files in the cloud. I am not unusual in today’s world.

Almost nine years ago in 2013, when I wrote an article, “Just How Bad Is Your Internet Connection,” our cable connection delivered 32.24 Mbps down and 5.49 Mbps up. When we moved in Feb. 2021, we were getting 484 down and 24 Mbps up. While it looks fast (and the download speed is), what it really shows is that our download speed was fifteen times what it had been nine years earlier but our upload speed had NOT even gotten to five times what it was.

It is obvious to heavier users of the “Cloud,” that coax speeds have focused on downloads and not successfully pushed ahead with faster upload speeds that we need. In their defense, the technology to increase upload speeds with coax cables is difficult and sometimes requires a lot of tuning. As is often the case with a technology like coax that is pushing its limits, users’ needs are growing faster in different directions (uploads) than coax cable technology can easily deliver today. The recording industry tried a number of things before iTunes® and similar services driven by new more scalable technology won the day.

As many people learned during the pandemic, upload speeds matter and if you are sharing a connection with people in your own household and your household is also on shared bandwidth with your neighborhood instead of using fiber which provides more individual bandwidth, you can get frustrated. Work does not get completed on time, video conferences don’t go as planned and files, including homework ones might not get where they need to as quickly as possible. That is why we went with fiber and the coax cables for our house have never been connected.

When deciding to jump from one technology to another one, the questions are pretty simple. Is the new technology proven technology? Is it better technology? Is it reasonably priced? Will it provide my family with a better experience and will it have the capability to grow with our needs?

I answered all of those questions in the affirmative so I went with fiber. While I am living in rural Davie County, North Carolina, across the road from a twenty acre soybean field, I have Gig fiber from a telephone cooperative now named Zirrus. I could have chosen any of at least three other technologies. From the day the Zirrus technician showed up on time even through getting a new Calix Gigasphere router, every experience with the company and the service has only confirmed that we made the right decision to go with fiber.

On July 31, our power flickered out for a couple of minutes during a thunderstorm. As the Internet and our WiFi came back up a minute or so later, I was reminded of all the similar times that I had spent staring at cable modem lights waiting for all the signals to sync so the Internet could return.

If you decide to not to go with fiber, remember cable companies are still working to commercialize the technology that will allow them to theoretically compete with the fastest upload speeds that we are offering today to our customers in Blacksburg. Are you willing to wait the years that it will take them to get DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications) 4.0 finalized, debugged and deployed in the field? You will also be gambling on the cost that they will eventually charge you.

Fiber is a proven technology, now available at a competitive price. To quote the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Meanwhile, fiber systems have at least a 10,000 (yes ten…thousand) fold advantage over cable systems in terms of raw bandwidth.” What that means for an individual homeowner is that there is plenty of proven technology already in place to make your fiber connection even better next year and five or ten years down the road.

I mentioned fiber is the “gold standard”of Internet connectivity. With ever more photos and videos being produced in your home along with all the other digital services that are rapidly becoming essential to our lives why wouldn’t you go for the gold and snatch some symmetrical fiber upload speeds. Look for fiber from a local company or a community owned fiber company, both are likely committed to providing great service to their neighbors?

The iMac with its USB ports started a revolution. Today none of us connect things to our computers with serial ports. Those of us who can use fiber should not be connecting to the Internet with coax cables. Someday maybe not too far in the future everyone will connect with fiber.

iMac® and iTunes® are registered trademarks of Apple Inc.

How To Be A Sensible Streamer

Streaming your choice of video channels is what the future holds. I spend a good chunk of my day job looking at the prices of Internet services across the county.

I studied cable, DSL, and fiber services in dozens of counties and communities last year. That along with my personal experience with prices and as an early streamer starting several years ago has helped our family to continue to save money after switching from cable and its expensive packages to fiber and streaming services.

However, it is easy to go overboard with streaming. The grandchildren show up and their favorite shows are on Disney+, so you subscribe. An older child comes home and wants some Apple TV channels. It only takes three or four spur of moment decisions added to your regular streaming services and you will be paying more than you would be for a cable package.

The way we handle our streaming services is to keep them on a budget. We budget $40 monthly for streaming services. We are Amazon Prime members so I am not sure we would allocate the full $8.99 (stand-alone cost) for Prime video but as you will see, even when we do that, we are still well under budget.

Our four current services for a fee are Prime Video at $8.99 monthly, Paramount+ $5.99 monthly, Britbox $6.99 monthly, and PBS Masterpiece $5.99 monthly for a total of $32.96 for all our streaming services. We also subscribe to the free version of Peacock. I recently canceled Netflix and Acorn while adding Masterpiece and Britbox.

We stream so much that it is easy to run out of new, watchable programs in two to three months. I manage all but one of our channels on Amazon prime so it is easy to see them and the costs all in one place. You also have the advantage of being able to snare some Amazon specials like HBO Maxx or Starx for $1.99 a month for two months. You just have to remember to cancel them. The picture at the top of the post is what you see in Amazon’s Video channels management console.

My studies across the country along the current Hulu and YouTube pricing I see tell me that about $70 a month will get you full range of video services. So if you are paying $70 or more for your streaming services, you are not saving money and it is time to go on a streaming budget.