Working at Home on the Internet

Cable and Telco’s Lying about Net Neutrality

 

Sorry, I know I said I try to keep politics out of this Blog, but I  saw an ad by Comcast Cable (local) that tells people that Net Neutrality is Bad for the Consumer.

They say that the Big Billion Dollar companies in Silicon Valley want to charge you for information.

Talk about False Information and Lies.  They want to charge for their “pipes”, even though we already have to pay for any access to the Internet we get.  I wrote an article or two on my PolBlog regarding Net Neutrality, and Liz over at Successful Blog has an extensive listing of Articles that explain it in much more detail.

My point is that if the Cable and Telco’s are spending Advertising Dollars Lying about Net Neutrality, we need to amp up our efforts to Protect our Rights to a Free Internet.

 

And in case our friends in Canada think they are safe from Cable and Telco interference with the Internet in the Great White North, Read The Newspapers…  They’re trying the same thing up there.

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November 8th, 2006 at 06:36pm | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Net Neutrality, Organization | 1 reader remark | Print This Post

Service (or non-service) vs Net Neutrality

In the middle of research for posting yesterday, around 8:30 am, Verizon DSL went down. I tried rebooting the Modem, tried resetting it and still no connection. It wasn’t the UBS connection or anything simple, it was the internet connection itself.

Went I tried to bring up Internet Explorer, the only thing that would come up was the Set-up page of Verizon, telling me to install the system.

I called Verizon and after going through line tests and resetting passwords, I still couldn’t get a connection. Finally, the tech checked their system and found the had a problem at the routing station in my area and needed to change out a card.

I finally got the connection back at 7:30 pm, a full 11 hours later. Needless to say, I lost a full day of work on the internet. I did get some offline work done, but that is usually reserved for weekends, so there wasn’t really much to catch up on.

The Big Question…

How are the Telco’s going to handle a two tiered internet when they can’t even keep the existing DSL service running?

The Cable Companies have the same problem, they are always having interruptions of service with their TV programming. Will they fair much better if they try to handle something so complicated as splitting the internet in two?

Can I charge back Verizon for my downtime or loss of revenue for the day? I don’t think so. But if they start charging premium prices for preferred service, I think they may just have to reimburse companies for downtime.

If they start charging Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars to companies such as Google, EBay, MSN, Yahoo for these preferred services and there are outages such as this, you can bet that they will seek reimbursements, refunds, credits, compensation and damages as well as for lost revenue.

But, this is not so much about Net Neutrality as Service.

Service the Telco’s and Cable companies already charge for, and have problems providing. What happened to the $600 Billion dollars in tax credits to improve the communications infrastructure? They say they need the additional fees for premium service to provide for a better infrastructure. If they took the tax credit then we should all have fiber optic cables to our homes and businesses already. Why would they need to charge us now?

If you charged your customers for a service, never performed said service, and came back later to install the service and and charged them again, what would happen to your business? You would be out of business, you would be facing legal fees and law suits that would bankrupt you. The Government would levy fines for double-dipping, and conspiracy to defraud. You could even go to jail.

Verizon and the rest are not only going to get away with this, they are being endorsed by the Congress of the United States.

So, instead of trying to stop them about Net Neutrality, we should hit them where it hurts. If we hold them responsible for the services they are supposed to provide, and start holding them accountable for their incompetence, they may figure it out.

Related Posts:
Parallel Super Highways for a Fee
Help Save Internet Neutrality

June 20th, 2006 at 10:36am | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Net Neutrality | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

For Sale… The Internet

Beware: Rant Ahead

A few months ago I started using Google Alerts in trying to get information on Working at Home. I thought that the information would be fairly up-to-date, so I would be able to keep abreast of anything new.

The stories are sometimes good, and usually within a day or two of publication. Something I did notice was that they are almost always a “formal publication”, in other words MSM, Newspapers, Magazines and Press Releases.

The problem I find with that is they are all commercial ventures. I don’t mean an entrepreneur, trying to build his business, but Major Publications. Fully commercial in their all aspects.

If they happen to have anything on Working at Home, it always has something to do with Big Business and how they deal with employees telecommuting. There is almost nothing about the “little guy”, the people who actually work at or from their homes trying to run a small business.

If you Google something about Working at Home, you may or may not find something that you are looking for. If you search in the Blog Search, you will find some personal blogs on the subject, but since these major publications all have “blogs” now, you are just as likely to find an article from the Wall Street Journal.

Now, we have Technorati teaming up with the Associated Press along with The Washington Post. If you think we have problems getting indexed now, just wait…

Combine all this with the fiasco of net neutrality and the Telco/Cable Co’s, and there will not be any room for the Work at Home types, unless you work for some Big Corporation Telecommuting.

What are your feelings on this? Do you think the Small Business is getting pushed off the Internet?

Related Posts:
Help Save Internet Neutrality
Parallel Super Highways for a Fee
Technorati-Shopping is NOT Strategy (Liz Strauss)

May 24th, 2006 at 01:08pm | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Net Neutrality | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post