What the hell does Comcastic mean, anyway?
If you’re not willing to find the link, then here’s a synopsis. Basically, it’s an over-promise, and an under-delivery. Comcastic services look too good to be true, and they are. Or they look like they’re going to meet expectations, and they don’t. Or they look like they’ll be barely passable, and, well actually, they never set their sights that low.
It’s actually the signature of a good company. Constantly disappointing customers is a problem, of course, but that’s also the status quo in cable service. The public is constantly hit with promises of what can be in the near future, and it never arrives. For example, I’ve been waiting for the flying car since 1985, with the first Back to the Future movie. Several companies have announced that they’re close, but it’s never come to fruition. Ed Begley Jr. got sick of waiting for a flying car, and instead started pushing the electric car. And even today, this ridiculously attenuated expectation (from flying to electric) can’t meet public perceptions.
Bringing the discussion back to the point, let’s go through a brief history of cable providers in the Champaign-Urbana metro region.
OMG (Oh My Goodness), I can’t help but LOL (Laugh Out Loud) at that last phrase MOS (My Own Self). Champaign-Urbana metro region, indeed (car).
Way back in the day, we had Cablevision. This company’s best attribute can probably be described as bringing us HBO for the first time. If I had been in my teens, I would probably associate them with Cinemax instead, but I was 6, and I liked Fraggle Rock. In fact, even today, I miss Fraggle Rock. Go Doozers, go! You’re probably the reason I went into engineering in the first place, and you’re definitely the reason I understand symbiosis today (Doozers build stuff, and fraggles eat it; if the fraggles stop eating the buildings, the doozers run out of space to build, and the fraggles starve).
Cablevision eventually got bought out by Time Warner. This is not way back in the day, but it is back in the day; Time Warner hadn’t bought AOL yet. For the most part, I remember the community scrambling about, warning about the Second Coming and so forth. Seriously, the hubbub was bigger than the impending state-wide smoking ban. As the actual transition date approached, the market was flooded with information about how much better the Time Warner group would be, despite the increased prices, because they offered better services. These services were readily apparent if you bought the (first ever) set top box, but you would still get expanded programming with just your regular cable connection. These “upgrades” were met with skepticism, but were ultimately accepted, and ultimately, they were positive.
Some years later, Time Warner bought AOL. Time Warner customers rejoiced, because this would at long last mean that we could get high speed internet. Unfortunately, this announcement was soon followed by a Time Warner / AOL announcement that they would scale back their range, to ensure QOS (Quality Of Service) for as many customers as possible. This meant they would be selling their rights to east central Illinois, this time to Insight.
Time Warner was no friend to CU, and CU reciprocated the feeling. However, Insight was a startup, and it just had “unreliable” written all over it. At first, Insight was problematic; and then they brought cable internet to the region.
Insight was indeed unreliable. After one or two years in CU, they changed ownership. At that time, they got… better. Good, even. Customer service improved, quality improved, I haven’t had any problems since then (I had a lot of problems with Insight before they changed ownership). In general, I think Insight became more efficient. They found out what works, and they exploited that.
With this big Insight / Comcast exchange, mainly I think it’s an efficiency improvement. It makes both the companies’ coverage areas more contiguous. As far as services and price go, that jury’s still out. I, as an Insight customer, haven’t received any notification of this change. Digital cable customers are currently being greeted with “Welcome to Comcast” messages when their TVs turn on, but then the program guides still advertise Insight. Reports say billing won’t transfer till February (I’m looking forward to that!). There are a lot of additional questions, which just plain haven’t been answered. I expect the bills to go up, but I also expect to get better service. However, I have no idea what’s going to happen with my automatic payment plan. That concerns me.
That concerns me a lot. If my credit card or checking account information starts changing hands, and the entity that is handing off that information doesn’t let me know, that’s a problem. That’s a problem that can end up in court.
Also, if the service I’m paying for doesn’t change, and the automatic payments I’ve set up don’t change, and then suddenly I get a new bill that’s different from what’s expected, that’s a problem. That’s a problem that can end up in court.
Less than a month ago, there was an Insight employee that showed up at our door and asked me how my service was. I told this guy that there weren’t any problems, and then he pitched me the Insight phone service. I really wish I had invited him in, and had a frank discussion with him. I have three concerns about Insight at this point.
1 – What’s going on with this Comcast buyout? It seems to me like it’s just a natural economic reorganization that makes everything more efficient, but dammit, how about telling the customers about it? Seriously, this was announced, and then within two weeks of the transition, Insight is still sending people door to door to gather opinions? What’s up with that? Are you incredibly stupid, or incredibly ingenious?
2 – Where’s my Big 10 Network? I used to be able to get basketball (not just Illinois, but also all Big 10 games) on ESPN+ (CBS local affiliate). Now I can’t. I don’t care why, I just want those games. Make it happen. I don’t mind paying more for it, I just want the option. Right now, I have no option, unless I get the Dish. This is related to the whole NFL network debate; I’d also like NFL network so I can see actual freaking NFL games, but it’s far more relevant because I live in a town where there is a Big 10 team, but where there isn’t an NFL team.
3 – I want my basement finished. Please just come in and finish my basement. Note that it’s not even started, and the we don’t have any plans for it. However, your commercials say that you’ll just plain do whatever I need, and I need my basement finished. If it helps any, I’ll go ahead and agree to get the Insight Triple Play phone, cable TV, and Internet service if you come in and finish my basement for me.
Seriously, what the hell is an Insight guy doing coming door to door, when within a month, you’re not going to be in this community, nor this State, nor even this Entire Geographic REGION! I processed all this stuff internally, and told this guy to F-OFF. And if you don’t believe that, then well, I didn’t want to propagate any rumors, and I didn’t want to invite the dickhead in, and I really didn’t care.
Because I’ve followed the history of cable in this region. Whenever there’s a change, it’s an ultimate win for the community. I’ve never liked any company that’s come into the community, but it’s always brought the community better service. Right now, I’m pissed off that we can’t get Verizon’s FIOS installed. But that’s just not an option, and I’m stuck with Comcast. And so long as they don’t steal my identity, which it appears they’re in position to do, I think that’s just Comcastic!
Cable TV — TNG ! Honestly, I haven’t even been keeping track of which company is providing cable service. Every time I get used to one corporate name, I find out that the name has changed AGAIN.
But I do remember that back in 2000, shortly before the dot com crash, crews were laying fiber all over town. I don’t know where it terminates, but it was becoming ubiquitous, and everyone was wondering what people were going to DO with all that fiber. They probably just added the cost to our cable bills.
But let us focus on what is truly important.
(1) Forget about the Big Ten network. When the Illini got into the Final Four, and someone said that it is a historic moment, I spewed milk out of my nose. On the day that the Illini played in the Rose Bowl, Jane and I agreed that the important thing was that we had to look up the outcome before we went anywhere and ran into people, so that we’d know whether to act happy or sad.
(2) Are we going to get Fraggle Rock back? That Fraggle girl with the mop of red hair — has she grown up in the meantime? What role models will little Nicholas have?
When Jim Henson died, now THAT was historic.
She must be in her thirties now. She probably was in the mortgage-origination business in the meantime, chirping, “Sure you can afford this ! Or you can just flip it !” Now she is out of work and embittered, ready to pick up her old role on Fraggle Rock in a heartbeat.
And on top of all that you can’t even get a decent sammich. *Adds “sammich” to Firefox’s dictionary*
There’s a whole lot of fiber owned by Comcast in the Chicago area, which has never been turned on. Verizon is the only company actively using fiber for cable / phone / internet service to the home, and that’s only in Arizona. AT&T has laid a lot of fiber all over the country, but most of it was sold off (AT&T laid the Chicago fiber that Comcast owns in Chicago). This network is likely to be delayed for at least a decade, because Comcast recently announced they will aggressively pursue DOCSIS 3.0, the next standard for data transmission over coaxial cable. That technology is expected to take up to 10 years to mature, and has theoretical speed limits faster than what fiber can deliver today (of course, fiber will evolve to deliver even faster speeds in the future).
There is also a gigantic (and I mean HUGE, 40 Gb/s) fiber pipeline between Champaign and Chicago. When it was initially laid, the thought was the university could use that fiber to pipe data up to Chicago, and buy Internet backbone bandwidth up there. Bandwidth is much cheaper in Chicago, because there are more lines running through Chicago than through Champaign (obviously).
Soon, as in the next year or so, that fiber will un-darken, and bring a new level of service to Champaign-Urbana (or at least, to the U of I). Half the bandwidth will be used to create a superfast network between UIUC, UIS, and UIC. The other half will be used by NCSA for the TeraGrid. Incidentally, this is the minimum amount of bandwidth the TeraGrid is expected to need; the fiber is just now coming on, and it’s already obsolete!
Oh yeah, and so much for the super cheap bandwidth; there’s no room left on the pipeline.
I just read my letter from Comcast. They make no promises about bringing us Fraggle Rock.
I read the project narratives of those two projects when I was helping with their grant proposals for NSF funding. For instance, I wrote the justifications for not charging indirect costs on part of those projects. At the time, you were much too young to care about that stuff, and now it is ancient history. We always used to say, “It’s a whole new world–every six months.”
Chicago has always been one of the nation’s biggest communications nodes, at each stage of technology. The railroads concentrated there, so telegraphy did also, and every time the technology changed, they lay cables on the same rights of way and interconnect it in the same buildings..
Back before NCSA, the U of I had some kind of pipe to Chicago which carried a number of T1 channels — about 20, I think, at one point. That was when ATT was a monopoly, and shortly after the breakup. (To give an idea of the level of technology, ATT was the sole source of 9600 modems, and they wouldn’t sell you one. You had to rent it for $6,000/month, and operate it on a conditioned line which needed constant tweaking, all day every day.) I knew about this stuff because PLATO was using several T1s, and the PLATO bandwidth was about 1/5 or 1/4 of the total. The non-PLATO traffic was almost entirely voice; data traffic such as DARPAnet could not have amounted to much in those days. Our technicians used to go up there to reconfigure when PLATO users came on and off.
Then in 1993 I went to NCSA — the same year that Mosaic came out and the Internet, as distinguished from its ancestors such as DARPAnet, was born. From working with the grant proposals, I found out that they had hooked up an internet link to Chicago for which NSF paid one-half and the University paid the other half. The NCSA half was for its research, and the other half was the internet service for the ENTIRE rest of the University. Every packet of UIUC internet traffic went over that half of that channel. That was the case until Fiber came along.
The fiber channel from here to Chicago was initially an experimental project called STARlight, and I did some work on that series of proposals. I don’t know whether the UIUC internet traffic went over it; probably the internet traffic stayed on the old channel until the fiber technology matured a bit.
Of course the communications always work at full capacity. It is “free” so demand always rushes in to fill the capacity, as is the case with highways.
Also, there is some neat stuff about funding the one-and-only research pipe between the US and Russia, via Scandinavia. At the time it was somewhat controversial that we would even HAVE a research link with Russian research institutes. Memories of the Cold War were fresh, and there was still some suspicion. The Russians were left with a lot of top-caliber scientists who were redundant and near-starving for lack of funds — in a number of cases, they were working for no pay. For the first several years, that channel doubled in capacity every year, because the limiting factor was funding rather than technology. I have copies of some of that funding stuff, though I’m not sure where in this mess to find it. I am speaking only of the RESEARCH pipe.
Later that research channel was extended right through to Chinese research institutes (even more controversial!) and then across the Pacific. It seemed odd that the connection had to go all the way around the world; I suspect now that China didn’t want to rely upon communications that physically passed through Russia. If so, that remained unspoken.
More about that will come back to me if I think about it for a while; it has been several years since it even crossed my mind. Even more will come back if I look at my files, but I may never get around to doing that. After all, if someone were writing the history, they’d just go back to the principal investigators and the Grants&Contracts Office. But I remember that the STARlight PI was so enamored of cute acronyms that at one point he had to be dissuaded from using one that was too much of an inside joke. It was about using dark fiber but it sounded like it was about steam locomotives.
There was also a project that involved communicating with naval ships at sea. It stopped cold when they told us that we could only count on 300 baud to/from US destroyers. The bandwidth to/from a warship has always, always been problematical, but the bandwidth number seemed horribly low even at the time. This was, oh, maybe about 1998. I reflect that at any given time, the average warship’s electronics are over ten years old — Even a brand-new ship is given electronics that emphasize ruggedness over the state of the art, and ships get updated maybe once every 20 years. Or maybe 300 baud was the highest figure that they would admit to mere civilians.
A fellow I knew in high school went to MIT and then NSA, and by Googling him I see that he’s written a lot of papers whose subjects are at the intersection of signals intelligence and artificial intelligence. Judging by the titles, he’s interested in having a computer recognize when certain words or patterns of words are spoken; and then in the algorithms you apply once you know what words were spoken OR written, to sift out the messages that a human being should look at. I would give a great deal to have a candid chat with him nowadays! But, no, I’m already sure that they are sweeping up everything we say or write, and comprehending it very well, and I am sure that under this Administration they are monitoring people they shouldn’t (political candidates, journalists, and attorneys)
But speaking of Chicago being a major communications node — I don’t remember the address where all the channels went, and I’d rather not. It remained the same location through those three stages of technology that I know about, because you just don’t move entire, huge, intricate systems like that. And when you move to a new technology, you continue to use the same rights-of-way and the same building; it’s prohibitively expensive to start over or relocate. So all that communication is probably still concentrated in the same spot. I suspect that where the Champaign-Urbana bandwidth joins Chicago, they probably have a great deal of onward communications right there — onward to Boston, onward to California, onward to everywhere. So that is one location where DHS had damn well better have some security.
Needless to say, I never had access to anything classified, but I was a civil servant in a position to read the research proposals as they flowed past, and each one recapped the current state of the art. I had at least a seat in the gallery at two departments, each of which was, in its prime, at the leading edge of data communications. Not a researcher by any means, but working in support of research, and interested in what was going on.
This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.