Byte by Bite

'Last mile' users have a while to wait for DSL

by Marv Dealy

AT&T said in their presentation that about half the county was now DSL-eligible, and that some 10% more would be sometime this year. That leaves a lot of us out in the cold.

From reports of the meeting I’ve received, one of the more encouraging pieces of news was that not one but now two of our County Supervisors are “true believers,” having each recently gotten DSL hooked up. I can’t imagine in this day and age that someone wouldn’t have experienced high speed Internet previously, but in this case apparently that was true, which makes their epiphany, while overdue, very welcome.

Do I believe that the meeting will suddenly cause Comcast to roll out broadband or AT&T to turn on the switches to already-in-place equipment that could provide DSL? Well, in a word, no.

Certain facts remain the same – there are supposedly about half of the population in Tuolumne County (no one reported on the numbers for surrounding counties) who can get DSL right now and the rest of us are too expensive to reach and wouldn’t provide enough of an economic incentive to provide the “last mile” of coverage.

An aside: AT&T seems to be trying to stretch the “last mile” to the “last two or three or four miles.” The phrase “last mile” has often been used to refer to the gap that exists between the broadband service now available and the outlying areas where it isn’t, and isn’t an accurate measure of the actual distance, but more a way of lumping together all the broadband “have nots.”

While the requirements for DSL used to be as much as 18,000 feet from the central office buildings, I’ve heard that distance has been reduced to perhaps 12 or 13,000 feet. In fact, my business partner – Bob Oakley – who did attend Tuesday’s presentation stated that one of the AT&T folks lamented that he wasn’t eligible for DSL at his home because he was about two yards over the limit and therefore even he couldn’t get broadband. Other anecdotes have been passed on to me, one particularly startling, in which a gentleman bought a residence that had DSL hooked up and operating and the time of the sale. Upon calling the phone company to get the service switched into his name he was told that service wasn’t provided at that address. He protested that it was working at that very moment, and was told that DSL service was no longer offered at that address and that it would be turned off.

Back to the economic facts: one of the folks who was able to attend the Tuesday presentation, Greg Falken, emailed that “I found [the meeting] pretty interesting and it reinforced my belief that the county needs connectivity and from what I heard, it’s going to take a grassroots effort to get it to those areas that AT&T and Comcast don’t deign to serve.”

“My take on the AT&T presentation is that there will be a slow build-out away from the four COs that are fiber-fed (Sonora, Groveland, Twain Harte & Jamestown), using remote terminals to serve residential clusters. AT&T is not in any way prepared to give any details on when and where these build-outs might take place. In fact, they sounded strikingly like certain government officials with their ‘we can't comment on an ongoing investigation’ line.”

“Comcast, in the meantime, isn’t going to commit to any upgrade of their infrastructure until their franchise with the county has been renewed and they’ve been negotiating that for over a year now.”

Aside number two: Good grief. Why is it taking so long to negotiate a deal with Comcast? Is it they aren’t really interested in serving us? They certainly don’t make much money from us, it’s true. Or is it that we’re represented by some of the same folks who “helped” us buy the leftovers at the Jamestown mine?

Back to Greg’s comments: “Probably the most interesting thing I heard today was about the creation of the California Emerging Technology Fund, which was created as a condition of the merger of SBC and Verizon. This from the press release at http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUBLISHED/NEWS_RELEASE/51357.htm: ‘As a condition of approving the mergers, the PUC also required both companies to contribute a combined total of $60 million to an infrastructure fund for emerging broadband technologies. The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) would be established by the PUC as an independent non-profit entity that would focus on building broadband networks in areas with limited access to high-speed Internet service.’”

“The CETF expects to publish guidelines for the submission of proposals by June, so maybe there is a glimmer of hope for funding.”

From that same press release, I found that the commission’s president, PUC President Michael R. Peevey, said that “This Commission is committed to 100 percent access in the next five years. [CETF] is aimed at building those last mile connections that are the hardest to reach, and tend to be uneconomical for the private sector to serve.”

That press release also noted that CETF funds are intended to be matched with other funds from unnamed sources to reach a total goal of $100 million over five years.

Well, now. If it is going to take some areas up to five years to get the funding in place to build an infrastructure to cover the missing pieces in broadband Internet coverage, where do you want to bet our area will be on that list?

Friday Freebie

Writes reader Shelly Davis-King “I love your Friday freebies, which you seem to have only on occasional Fridays every three months.” Well, Shelly, what did you expect for free?

In any event, today’s is for those out there still using Windows 98/Me – this time Microsoft really, really means it. As of July they won’t support the operating systems any more. That means no tech support, no security updates, no patches, no nothing. This means if you’re still using one of those Oss you’ll need to decide whether you want to keep using the systems without assistance or whether you need to upgrade to XP or wait until Vista comes out, which is presently said to be sometime in 2007. The way that date keeps getting pushed back, however, makes me wonder.

OK, that wasn’t really a Friday Freebie. How about this one: tired of getting a machine when you call a big company? Would you rather talk to a human? Somebody has gone to the trouble of compiling a list of phone numbers that are supposed to hook you up with real people, not a phone tree, at www.gethuman.com/us -- visit the web site, you’ll see the companies listed, with instructions on how to get a human on the phone. The entry for American Express is typical: dial 800-528-4800, then press 0 repeatedly. For the IRS, dial 800 829-1040 and don’t do or press or say anything.