Geekwhore.net - Pimpin’ since ‘02

So I’ve been using wordpress for quite a few years now.  Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t like website design, I leave that to the pro’s which is why I have a pretty vanilla website.  I like it that way, I post when I want and just add to the mess of crap that we call the internet.  I logged in earlier tonight thinking I’d see how things were going and thinking I would write something.  Low and behold Wordpress 2.5 was out, for whatever reason I always have to upgrade when I see something new is out.  I downloaded the upgrade and put it on my web server, loaded up the admin screen and I must say that wordpress has made quite a few strides.  The admin interface has an ajaxie feel to it and I like it.  Good job wordpress crew, keep up the good work, I know it doesn’t mean much coming from me but I do appreciate all that you do, maybe someday I’ll stop hating on website design and actually make this site something worth looking at but it’s nice to know that with wordpress and a few hours of work you can have something that is very presentable and highly customizable.

Tags: wordpress ajax

So we just turned up our second DS-3 a few weeks ago. Overall I’ve been pretty happy, dual DS-3’s, slowly tweaking BGP, life is pretty happy. However, I noticed as we turned up the second DS-3 that the next logical step is an OC-3 and then I got to thinking how stupid it is to have to deal with circuits in this day and age. The landscape is changing but it can’t get here soon enough. Why can every other piece of equipment on my network work at ethernet speeds (10 Meg, 100 Meg, 1000 Meg…etc), yet when I go to connect to the internet I have to buy it in stupid increments of 45 Meg, 155 Meg…etc. As an ISP we like to wait until the last minute to buy more internet bandwidth, not because we like to cut it close but because it makes no sense to buy a 45 meg pipe that you are only going to use 10 meg’s on. Unfortunately we are forced to because it takes so long to get the connections installed and in place (the most recent DS-3 that we just put in took over 6 months for the RBOC to get installed!!!!). Life will be much simpler when I can go out and simply purchase bandwidth in 5 or 10 meg increments. So I call the RBOC(or whomever I’m buying my bandwidth from), they deliver the piece of fiber that goes up to 1 Gig and then we rate shape the connection to whatever I need. If I only need 5 meg’s that’s fine..charge me for 5 meg’s and the loop, if I need 500 Meg’s then so be it. Also, when you do this, I want to be able to have multiple VLAN’s/MPLS circuits running across it. So if I want 200 Meg’s of internet and then I want 100 Meg’s for a point to point connection then so be it. We currently work with a company that does just this. It’s great, other providers are getting there…unfortunately it’s just not the providers that I have to work with most of the time.

So the company I work for has been deploying Fiber-to-the-Premise Networks for three years now, we have two markets now and are looking at quite a few more markets. We have had our ups and downs and it has been one wild ride. One of my responsibilities is evaluating fiber equipment and making recommendations on what we use and where we are going. Thus far I have evaluated three different PON platforms from three different vendors. The first PON platform we went with was a little rough, it works pretty good today but it is not standards based. In the new market that we deployed we made the decision to base our build-out on GEPON instead of GPON like the rest of North America has gone. Since we are building our network out Greenfield and we do not have a large investment in legacy equipment like most providers it has made sense for us to base our deployments on GEPON since it is more geared towards a full IP network than GPON. The market is still young and every few months bring new innovations and new vendors. In the next few months there are a few big name vendors that will be entering the GEPON market and this could really shake things up.

Time will tell!

So I’ve been fairly happy with Viaero Wireless, they appear to be a growing company, the local sales people are nice and many of them I have known for many years so I feel comfortable going into the store. However, I have been seeing some cracks starting to develop, my guess is that they have simply grown too fast and are at that weird time that all successful companies go through where you have to start doing things like a big company even though people like you because you are a small company. We use Viaero quite extensively (something like 12 cell phones, 1 blackberry, and 1 internet PC card). I definitely do not consider myself a small customer, I’m sure there are bigger but we spend around $10,000 a year with them. Anyway, time for my rants.

1. Customer Service - So I got a new Sony Ericson K790a a few months back. I love this phone, I can take 3.2 Megapixel pictures with it, get RSS updates, browse the internet, and all the other general stuff that a cell phone should do. The reason for going with this phone was twofold, first, I wanted to be able to stop carrying my digital camera around and second, text messaging/internet means I can view our network status from anywhere. HOWEVER, a few problems have cropped up with this. First, I can’t send picture message on the phone, nobody at Viaero can tell me why I can or can’t, I call into the *611 and they try a bunch of stuff and then tell me to go to the store. I go into the store and they tell me to call in for additional support. Every now and then I’ll pass by a Viaero store when traveling around the panhandle and I’ll stop and see if whoever is in the store can help. Having stopped in 3 different stores now I can say that I will NOT stop into any store that is not in my home town, not because I don’t want to and not because it is not convenient. Whenever I go in to a store and the sales person doesn’t know me the first thing they want to do is sell me a phone…that’s great, they are commission based, however, as soon as I tell them that I am already a customer and that I just need assistance the walls go up. They want me out of there ASAP so they can sell a phone to the next guy. On numerous occasions my phone would just not ring and my voicemail wouldn’t pick up. I went into the Viaero store in Scottsbluff, NE, ask the sales guy who looked really tired or really stoned (maybe both) why my phone was acting strange. He looks me straight in the face and says “I don’t know we aren’t having any problems”, hands me my phone back and then turns back to his partner in crime behind the counter and finishes the joke he was telling him when I walked in.
2. While it is nice that you offer blackberries and the PC card, however, for all that is holy, figure out how to offer tethered modem support. I was told by the “blackberry expert” that Viaero was not going to offer tethered modem support because it was slower than their pc card service. At the time I had not tried the PC card service so I figured what the heck. However, now that I’ve used it for a few months I can tell you that your PC card service isn’t all that fast. Yes, I have the newest version of Venturi (think pre-caching to make me think your wireless is fast). Yes, I have disabled my anti-virus, it didn’t make a difference. And finally, Yes, I have good signal. Now, I don’t mind the slow speeds, the fact that I can get ANYTHING when I’m in the middle of nowhere Nebraska is great, that’s why I pay for it, not for the speed but the fact that if I’m driving and some network issue comes up I can stop on the side of the road and have a fairly solid connection is great. Now, if you offered tethered modem on the blackberry I would be even happier, the blackberry can do almost everything that I currently use the PC card for. The only reason I want tethered modem is so that in the rare occasion that I need my laptop I can use it, speed doesn’t really matter to me, I promise! If you could figure out how to get the Blackberry 8300 I’ll give you a one-up as then I have the camera and GPS…but I can live with the 8100.

   Now for all the ranting in this post, I must say that I like Viaero, they have done a LOT of good in the area, two years ago I was at the end of my rope with Alltel, they refused to admit that they had signal issues in the area, Viaero came in and 1 year after Viaero came into the picture Alltel now has a tower actually in Imperial.

Okay, so I’ve had a Grand Central account for a few months now. Since I work for a phone company and our switch has a lot of the same features that GC offers I don’t usually use GC. I gave the number out to a few select people but overall I found that it didn’t make sense for me to use GC. Since I have sim-ring services to ring multiple numbers at once, centralized voicemail that auto-sends messages to my email, call screening and I can add additional features just by logging into the website it doesn’t’ make sense for me to use GC.

All of that being said, I see what Grand Central is trying to do and I agree with the general concept. With a few additions the system could be even better. End-users are tired of having different mailboxes for each phone. Make a phone number that I can call-forward busy/no-answer to that sends this to my voicemail on GC. You have voicemail at home; work, on your cell phone…etc. It makes so much more sense to have one centralized voicemail box. While you can have a single voicemail box end-users still need to be able to have different greetings depending on the phone number that was dialed. On my voicemail at work I have all my cell phone and desk phone calls route through our voicemail. The nice thing is that I can designate that if someone calls my desk phone I want them to hear “thanks for calling blah blah office please leave a message”. Alternatively, if they call my cell phone they should hear “This is Nick’s Cell phone leave a message”. This way the calling party knows exactly where they were calling and so the user can change messages per-number instead of having one centralized message that’s generic for everything.

Anyway, anyone with more than one phone number I would highly recommend this to as it appears to be a great time-saver overall.