Working Anywhere

To Me The Price is Right

Would I pay $4,000 to $10,000 to have my house made fiber connected? Heck yes.

Having experienced in my Sacramento home just how good SureWest's fiber to the premise service is (50 megs up and down for $200) there's a portion of the buildout recovery in the monthly price. I already pay Cox Communications $119.xx a month for Cox Business Internet and that gives me 15/1.5 but usually better. If Cox would offer me fiber I'd be thrilled as the next standard of DOCSIS 3.0 will supposedly offer more speed, but a fiber build will mean even more speeds and lower latency. That's the key in my book.

Netbook Tips From One Who Knows

I'm a big fan of the new line of Netbooks. I carry one around as a backup to my MacBook Pro and find that in some cases it meets my needs when I'm on the go just fine, filling the gap between mobile smartphone and full size computer.

James Kendrick has posted his tips to help people make the proper choices over on GigaOm.

The biggest tip I can make is buy a 9 or 10 inch size netbook, and make sure it has the Intel Atom 1.6 processor. Everything else is just too underpowered to do things grown ups like to do with PCs.

My second tip is think about buying a 3G data card. Until the Qualcomm powered mids come out with the SnapDragon platform and on-board 3G, having an external USB data card is a very useful option.

Last but not least, take the pre-load with Windows XP, and if you can XP Pro. Avoid Vista for now and only go with a Linux version if you're comfortable with the various flavors.

You may also want to see what else is cooking from client Nokia to compete with the netbooks along with some additional perspectives from Jonathan Greene.

AT&T Making it Easy to Get On WiFi

If you aren't reading the tea leaves, then you're likely missing the fact that AT&T really has a WiFi strategy.

First they did the deal with Apple for the iPhone. The iPhone has WiFi and it also has 3G now.

Second they overtook T-Mobile, winning the WiFi business away for the thousands of Starbucks locations, while at the same time working with Wayport on McDonalds.

Third, they bought Wayport, thus getting firmly into the business of hospitality industry and conference facility WiFi in a big way.

Now they have released an what I'm calling an "easy on ramp" application called Easy WiFi for AT&T. It's nothing more than a stripped down, AT&T only log-on application for AT&T hotspots from DeviceScape. It's also free. You go to the App Store, download it and plug in your AT&T Mobile phone number and off you go.

Connection is easy, fast and simple. What AT&T and Apple are doing here is much in line with the Apple philosophy of no manuals required, and also, no support needed. By making WiFi access simple and easy, AT&T is getting people used to the use of WiFi by taking the most painful part of setting up access away.

Vishing and Asterisk

I'm happy to see pal John Todd, whom I know from his days with TalkPlus, has landed with the Digium folks. That's a great match as John knows Asterisk very, very well and has always been viewed with high regard in the open source community.

When I read about John in PC World it was related to Vishing, a topic I have been aware of for some time, and the potential impact it could have unsuspecting customers of financial institutions. Given all the changes occurring in banks right now due to the current storms in the banking world, one has to realize that opportunistic criminals will take advantage of the opportunity.

In the summer months I reached out to front line PR representatives of Wells Fargo Bank and Citibank, two of the largest banking institutions, as well as a Privacy Officer at American Express. I asked each of them a simple question. "What are you doing to protect against vishing?" Only the American Express representative was able to provide some sort of answer, but like his counterparts at the other two institutions, I had to first explain what vishing was.

Despite promises that from Wells Fargo and Citibank's reps that they would look into the matter with their technical people, neither ever got back to me, not even with the usual, "we don't comment on matters of bank security."

Once again, the bad guys are winning.