Steve Gillmor comments on TechCrunch today that Comcast’s caps on bandwidth may finally drive people from the land of torrents, and to the land of streaming. [here]

While I agree that the promise of streaming is long overdue, there is the one area that streaming still can’t fill: The mobile viewer. I don’t mean folks on mobile phones, although with the growth of 3G in the Americas (Europe and Asia laugh at us in the area), the mobile market will become more important.

No, I am referring to the mobile, laptop-using traveller, mainly the business traveller, although leisure travellers are starting to take their laptops with them more often. Streaming doesn’t work on the road, in a hotel with a crappy connection, in an airport, or somewhere were the 3G isn’t 3G enough.

While streaming will become more prevalent, it won’t unseat the culture of Torrents for a few years yet. It will happen. But affordable, reliable connectivity saturation across the Americas has to occur first. And, in some ways, Comcast and the other providers are the ones hampering this process.

The focus of the connectivity providers on their dinosaur cage-match with the FCC has left them ignorant of the asteroid screaming toward them. In order to create a streaming market that they can profit from, they have to open the pipes, lower the costs, and increase the options for the consumer of their Internet/bandwidth services. If the connectivity they provide to the consumers can’t support the desire for the streaming economy, the Torrent reality will not fade away.

Seems there is an unannounced little issue sending mail from Comcast to Hotmail. [here]

I use a Web mail program; guess the twits at comcast think that everyone should be.

Technorati: hotmail, comcast, foobar

IceRocket: hotmail, comcast, foobar

So, I mentioned earlier that I have packet loss on the uplink from my Web server where GrabPERF and this blog are hosted. How do I know it’s packet loss and not some other issue?

CLICK THE IMAGE

Notice the banding of measurements around 3 and 9 seconds? These values are the set TCP re-transmission timeouts for new connections for almost every operating system. When you see this pattern, check your packet loss stats from your routers/switches/network equipment.

Now…I wonder what my connectivity provider has mucked up?

Today, by special delivery, I got notice that FIOS is available at my house.

I called Comcast and asked how they were going to match this offer. They offered me $29.95/mo. for 6 months.

Now, because of my unique situation (i.e., requiring a semi-permamnent IP address to allow people to access my servers), I may be stuck with Comcast, because Verizon uses the much smarter random release on DHCP addresses.

But for 97% of the Web-surfing public, FIOS will be the cat’s meow. And that the the flow of customers from Comcast will become a flood. A cable company that continues to think like a cable company in this new world will look like Bethlehem Steel in 3 years…or less.

I have a good friend who is a senior network engineer at Comcast; I hope he is looking for a new job.

Technorati: Comcast, FIOS

IceRocket: Comcast, FIOS

Tried to set up Verizon DSL last night. Didn’t work; rotating IP addresses; a variety of line related issues. Cancelled the service this morning.

Sorry for any interruptions you may have encountered last night.

After 4.5 years of customer loyalty, I have decided that I have had enough of Comcast’s outrageous prices. I will be switching to Verizon DSL as soon as the install kit arrives.

Due to the way that my DNS is managed, you may encounter issues connecting to the server during the couple of days that it takes for the DNS to migrate and propagate.

Comcast has lost another customer. Does that surprise anyone?

Dear Arrogant Monopolistic Cable Operator:

The day of reckoning is upon you. Your formerly monopolistic power has been drained by years of failed mega-mergers, media plays, satellite providers and gross mis-management. Your cash cows are showing signs of Mad Cow Disease.

The final straw for me is your incredibly pig-headed strategy of price inflexibility on your high-speed Internet service. I pay what I consider a ridiculous amount every month for what is a necessary service for me. Now I see that your Telco competitors are slashing prices every way they can to win back business.

I read that you will lower your price if I call you and threaten to move to an alternate provider. But only for 3 months.

You really need to step back and realize how dead your business is going to be in 2 years.

I live in the testbed for fiber-to-the-home in Massachussetts. Every day, Verizon linemen, training to string fiber to every home, drive up and down our street, leaving spools of high-speed goodness on every corner.

They say that in a year, I can have incredible speeds to my home, for less than what I pay for your high-speed Internet service.

So, Mr. Cable Operator (you have to be a man, because only a man would be this pig-headed), what are you going to do to keep me a customer?

Sincerely,
me

TECHNORATI: Comcast, dsl,Cable Operators, Verizon

DNS has been a great hidden mystery to most people who use the Internet regularly. As a Web performance analyst, I see the effects of poorly deployed or improperly maintained DNS services.

Business 2.0 brings this to the rest of you. While sounding a little apocalyptic, it does highlight a problem that those of us who work close to the ground know: DNS is inherently complex and fragile.

Complex in the sense that a single mis-step can bring down a site like Google, or prevent Comcast users from using the Internet (not just the Web). Complex in the sense that the software, even after being re-written from the ground up for BIND 9, requires an incredible level of knowledge and expertise to configure and maintain correctly.

I run caching BIND servers at my home, because I know how easy it is for a DNS outage to take me off the Internet. But the level of knowledge needed to set up that service for 5 computers is incredible.

Services such as UltraDNS and Akamai have made DNS management for large companies a core component of their service offerings. Nominum, home of Paul Mockapetris (father of BIND and DNS), sells a robust and scalable BIND replacement.

The question now is: what next? What could replace the DNS infrastructure? So far I haven’t been hearing a lot of conversation about this, because without DNS, nothing will work.

DNS and name resolution using DNS are integrated into EVERY operating system from phones to supercomputers. So is the question not what will replace DNS?, but what will replace BIND?

Don’t know….

Gee, want to make those searches even more powerful? How about we track exactly where every person on the Web is going by tracking them using a piece of software that they install on their own computers?

Google Web Accelerator. The latest from Big Brother those folks at Google.

This also explains why Google wanted to buy up all of that dark fiber. You have to plug your proxy servers into something

Doesn’t mean I am not going to try it…

Via Micro Persuasion

O’Reilly Radar has the same paranoid delusions privacy concerns that I do over this product. [here]

John Battelle notes the salient feature of the Google Accelerator at the end of his article.

However, you do start to run all your web surfing habits over Google’s servers, and that, of course, makes Google something of a proxy ISP, with access to all the aggregate data that an ISP like AOL or Comcast has on you. Is that a good thing? Well, yes and no. But net net, it has implications down the road. Very soon, Google will know an awful lot about the world’s surfing habits, well beyond search. Hmmm.

Search Engine Watch has a straight-forward list of the features — limited commentary. [here]

Great comments from Techdirt.[here]

More from TechDirt, pointing to a great post by Tristan Louis.

The usually paranoid TDavid seems to be addicted to the revving icon. [here]

Lifehacker comments.

Google Blog Comments.

Darren Rowse hits for six with this quote from Mike Lambert:

Instead of using a random surfer model, Google can use a real surfer model, based on the aggregate web traffic of the people using their Web Accelerator. They can discover /exactly/ how the Google Juice should flow in the real world.

C|Net’s party-line, facts-only commentary. [here]

Silicon Valley Watcher is prescient enough to mention that “your browsing history might be just a subpoena away from the nearest FBI office”. [here]

More Google Web Accelerator anti-love from Carson McComas. [here]

Now, I never even heard about this Comcast outage until this morning. [here]

One reason that I likely didn’t notice it is that I run my own caching name servers on my home network. I do this because I have never trusted any provider’s overworked name servers (goes back to the history of the industry I work in; more on that some other time).

This is still a fairly crippling outage. Surely there is some redundancy in the Comcast name server infrastructure…please?

There is a list of possible workarounds to this problem linked from here.