This weekend we decided we've had more than enough of the infernal beeping from our Tellabs 612 ONT (the FiOS box) telling us that we have to replace the battery. I don't want to pay to replace a battery that serves zero purpose -- if there's no power to the ONT then there's no power to the router, the computer, the television, or the cordless phone base.

Unfortunately the "alarm silence" button does nothing. So we opened up the power supply unit and literally cut the little piezo buzzer off the board.
There's a red LED telling me that I need a new battery, but that doesn't bother me.

IG - be careful - the Battery Police will come knocking... ;)

Actually the Battery Police only care if I throw the battery away in my household trash ... which I won't do because unlike the "green" crowd I actually care about the environment.

From reading through teh internets I see that the only reason this thing has a battery backup in the first place is so that they can at least claim they gave you a little bit of a possibility that you can still dial 911 from a wired telephone during a power outage. I don't care. I have a cell phone and a generator.

So now let's see if I can remember all of the ways that I've modified the "approved" installation into one that actually meets "common sense" for my house ...

* Disabled the battery alarm. I'm not replacing the battery this year; I'm replacing the house.

* Modified the power inlet. The stupid thing came with a power brick inside the battery backup unit with a wound-up power cord going to an internal outlet that then goes to an inlet on the side of the box that then plugs in. I ripped all of that out and simply extended the internal power cord to a receptacle the way it was designed to operate in this sort of setting.

* Modified the ground arrangement. I can't fault Verizon for this, because I know this was because of legal harassment from the cable company, who went to the PCSU and said "hey look at all of these ungrounded installations!" which then had to be retrofitted. Yeah, as if a lightning strike was going to travel through a piece of fiber optic cable with no metallic messenger wire in it. So there was a stupid piece of green wire going from a grounding terminal on the ONT, through the side of the house, and bolted to the side of my electric meter. Guess how the meter is grounded, kids? Through the main service panel, which attaches to an indoor cold water pipe. So I ripped it all out and ran a much shorter and neater green wire from the ONT to a ground terminal on my service panel (literally about 18 inches away).

* Removed a stupid piece of coaxial cable and barrel connector that they put between my TV splitter and the ONT. They put this in for more superfluous grounding, another piece of green wire between two locations that are both grounded and linked together over the main path anyway.

* Ran ethernet between the ONT and my router instead of letting the data connection piggyback with the TV signal. Actually this is a fully approved method but they don't do it unless you ask (and there had better be an ethernet cable already in place when they get there).


For all the installation stupidness, though, it's still the best service around.

The way they can say these things with a straight face is amazing.

Comcrap is looking to acquire Time Warner Cable. If the deal goes through, Comcrap will control an entire one-third of the cable/broadband market. Comcrap described the deal as -- and these are their exact words -- "pro-consumer, pro-competitive, strongly in the public interest, and approvable."

Netflix is now going to pay Comcast for priority access to its network.

This is the day net neutrality died.

Not sure how they're going to accomplish that, given that Netflix is mostly hosted on EC2 - so presumably they're not building an actual "pipe" as indicated in that article (?)

Basically they figure out what IP addresses belong to Netflix and then apply a shitty policy to them. Then they coerce Netflix into using their CDN.

Did a little reading. I think Netflix is hosting the UI and control services on EC2, but they have their own CDN plus partner CDN's for video file distribution. There's apparently already quite a bit of Netflix colocation been going on at ISP premises.

And of course there has. If you want to do what Netflix is doing, you need replication on a massive scale, and you need to get as close to the client as possible. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth about "Comcast bullying" is starting to sound like much ado about nothing.

To really build a Netflix well, you want anycast addressing, and that requires a lot of provider cooperation. To some people out there, that's going to smell like a breach of neutrality, and it's going to be hard to convince them otherwise. But it just is what it is.

So that's why were gonna have at least a two-tier backbone for some time to come, it seems.

If they are just "paying for CDN" that's one thing, but what we really need to know is whether Comcast is deliberately deprioritizing Netflix traffic in order to make that necessary. I don't like where this is going; other last-mile carriers are already making noises of "oh yeah, gimme some o' dat money"

Is the SLA dead?

Can you get SLA'd service in NYC without paying exorbitantly for T1 or "direct Ethernet" connectivity?

Does it even matter if you can just buy redundant connectivity from TW(cable) and VZ(DSL)?

If it doesn't matter, then why does TW's contempt for customer service leave such a bad taste in the mouth?

Oh yeah. Because even when VZ works, you'd be better off with Snail Mail.

Nobody does SLA's for residential customers. Those agreements are totally one-sided, offering "speeds of up to..." type language that commits them to nothing.

SLA's are alive and well but they are strictly the domain of commercial grade networks. So yeah, if I find that Level 3 is penalizing Netflix on my 10 Gbps pipe, I can go postal on them, but if I get lousy Netflix performance on my 50 Mbps FiOS connection, I'm more likely to get Lily Tomlin telling me they don't care.

Fortunately I don't have Netflix. But it's only a matter of time before the douchebags who run last-mile carriers turn their greed machine sights onto YouTube.

I'm talking about the connectivity for your typical cubicle farm. "Commercial grade network" is a slippery concept these days. "Business class" service frequently comes with no SLA, if it's cable/DSL class - unless you push for one.

Fucking lame, is what it is.

The "business class" versions of residential service doesn't usually have SLA. The only thing you really get over and above residential service (aside from a higher price, of course) is -- sometimes -- a static IP address.

Wow, I just looked on the business FiOS site ... they want an extra $40/month for a static IP address.