Jared Mauch’s Comments

February 6, 2010

Building municipial fiber

Filed under: internet, politics — Jared Mauch @ 5:09 pm

There are a number of different ways one can pay for building the infrastructure that we care about. The most well known model is the Municipal one. Here you have your water and sewer delivered to you at some point (usually when your home is built) and you pay utilization fees for access.

I’ve started to look at applying the same model to building fiber to every home in Washtenaw County. Let me start with my basic premises, so you have a reference of how I’m thinking before I am destroyed in any comments.
(more…)

January 31, 2010

iPad

Filed under: Uncategorized — Jared Mauch @ 10:17 am

I’ve always been a bit of an apple fanboy (fanboi) since the 1980’s, having found ways to do interesting things with the Apple ][e //c etc’s at school, and programming pascal on the Plus/Classic with my friend MacsBugs in the MacOS 6 days. Having an iPhone has simplified some aspects of my life significantly and allowed me to keep on-task and on-schedule in an increasingly hectic day.

WIth the months of rumors of pricing, features, etc.. leading into this past weeks announcement, I figured if a tablet was launched, we would get one for my wife.

With the prospect of the platform not being a success and just hype, I read everyone dumping on the lack of flash and other capabilities. (Personally, I hope this helps kill Flash, it’s usually improperly and overly used to navigate websites. Those developers should be put out to pasture). I’m now convinced that it will be a success. Why? My father is going to get one. He’s a techie, sure, but not in the traditional tear the hardware apart and overclock the cpu with the right water cooling system. He’s a techie that reads books. He’s one that sees the value in the device.

I suspect that if the naysayers start polling their parents, they will find a similar pattern. Something cheap, immune to malware and with the possibility of $15 or $30/month for mobile E-Mail, a value for them. They were not going to get an iPhone/Blackberry/Android phone anyways.

January 4, 2010

Broadband to displace POTS

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Jared Mauch @ 1:45 pm

AT&T has asked the FCC to set a sunset date for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) in recent FCC Filings. They reportedly see the light in the wisdom of multiplexed data streams in this fancy IP networking that you are reading.

This has some interesting prospects (and caveats). They call out those that are unwilling to build to profitable areas, yet also imply cost as a reason they are unable to deliver services. They are not allowed to recoup market rates in poorly populated areas due to the nature of State and Federal regulation.

Me? I see it as the same situation being played out that Verzion did in the northeast. They determined that some areas were unprofitable to service. They sold these assets to Fairpoint. Fairpoint has since declared bankruptcy. This also could bolster the AT&T argument, as if they could truly charge what the service cost, would VZ have sold the business lines? Would Fairpoint have filed?

I see this as the need to build another wire to homes. Most homes have phone lines and Power. These existing right-of-ways should always have fiber placed in them. I’m actually in favor of banning new builds of any outside copper plant in the US. This does not mean that I own stock in Fiber optic cabling companies, but that there needs to be a competitive landscape. Where it’s not driven by pure market forces, consumers should get together and build their own infrastructure.

DOCSIS 1.1 and 2 equipment can be had for “cheap” on the secondary market. Even if you build coaxial cables, the cost of delivering services can be quite low.

December 31, 2009

Cooperative Internet

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , — Jared Mauch @ 11:52 am

I’ve been researching what it would take to build a Fiber-to-the-Home solution to cover the areas that AT&T, Comcast and others refuse to service. Turns out the cost is actually not too bad.

The cost for running fiber appears to run around $26k/mile utilizing existing poles. Pole rent comes to around $5/year per pole. I’m making progress. If you happen to live near Scio Church and Parker and are interested in participating, please contact me.

It appears that homes can be connected for around $1000-2000 per home, and we could be break-even with a $50 price point (We would offer business services as well at a higher price, perhaps $150-200). These are all tentative numbers, as not all equipment and costs have been factored in.

The fiber could be installed for lower costs if homeowners dig their own trench across the property. This will allow conduit to be laid (which costs more than Aerial) but provides us the ability to access it easier.

You can also call me 734-408-1803 (google voice) any time to discuss your interest in this project.

Potential service areas include:

Parker Road, Liberty Road, Reese Lane, Oreo Court, Pinecross Lane, Wildwood Lane, Jerusalem Road, Musolf Lane, Malena Drive, Park Road, Country Road, Glen Court, Stiles Drive, Streiter Road, Honey Run Drive, Centenial Lane, Renz Court, Streiter Court, Lone Oak Drive, Tupelo Drive, Madrono Drive, Sitka Court, Morin Nature Circle, Gensley Road, Farm Lane, Waters Road, Duible Road, Ellsworth Road and Pleasant Lake Road.

a non-profit cooperative is the way to go, transparent finances, operation and the ability to learn computer skills from your neighbors!

I’m getting excited about the prospects the research is turning up.

December 4, 2009

Building the next generation residental internet

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jared Mauch @ 6:50 pm

Michigan is currently stuck in a backwater of internet access. There are parts that just managed to get basic telephone service in recent months (eg: Don’t Get Mad, Get ILEC) and the local consumers are stuck. If there is any area of sparse population you pass, that’s likely the firewall for real internet access.

Currently AT&T, Comcast and other providers are unwilling to step-up and invest in the infrastructure to capture these consumers. Local activities have been started, such as municipal/county and other wireless projects, but the unlicensed bands these utilize are blocked by trees and their leaves.

Getting the current generation of technology installed is going to require real effort on the part of consumers. Would you be willing to use a shovel to save costs? In norway you can get fiber to your home, and save $400 in installation fees by digging yourself [Dig your own trench, save $400]. With spools of fiber cheap (eg: 2km fiber for $150) this means the largest part of the expense is conduit and digging. Even the equipment runs around $200 for each end.

If you are in Washtenaw County and interested in solving this divide, I’m interested in hearing from you. If you are elsewhere in Michigan, please tell about what you’ve done to solve these challenges. It’s time to create a solution instead of living with 1970’s technology.

May 27, 2009

FreeBSD USB Boot

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jared Mauch @ 3:07 pm

One of the common perils of FreeBSD is that it’s not as user friendly in some cases as I believe it should be. It has taken some time for DVD images to become common for installation, and creating a bootable USB device has been problematic at times too. I figured I would provide an image that has worked (for me) on a few different systems. It doesn’t always work, but should help you out in a pinch. It enables console on the serial ports (com1/com2) after it boots up, so can help out in a pinch since the distributed bootable media does not include obvious ways to access utilities such as ufs/ffs capable mount or ways to put the console on com2 without rebuilding from source.

I hope this link helps you (and others) out, and if it does, I will try to post updated USB media images to help others.

http://puck.nether.net/~jared/mirror/FreeBSD-7.1p4.dmg.bz2 – MD5 (FreeBSD-7.1p4.dmg.bz2) = 2ca1fd7a66d9251d503fdd56ff2b9707

This image is for 512MB media and has no root password set, uses GRUB 0.97 and enables console on ttyd0/ttyd1. GRUB also should be enabled for both the serial console (COM1) & monitor. The same is true for the FreeBSD loader.

You will need to uncompress this (bunzip2) and write it to your USB media with a tool such as dd.

*WARNING* Make sure you use the correct output file (device).

Example:

dd if=FreeBSD-7.1p4.dmg of=/dev/da0 bs=1024k
483+1 records in
483+1 records out
506986496 bytes transferred in 51.327206 secs (9877539 bytes/sec)

If you want to write this from a mac, find the correct device eg:

sh-3.2# diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *931.5 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            931.2 Gi   disk0s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *483.5 Mi   disk2
   1:                    FreeBSD                         483.0 Mi   disk2s1

In this case, you want /dev/disk2

April 17, 2009

60-day review to be completed today

Filed under: internet, politics — Jared Mauch @ 4:08 pm

Various news media are ramping up coverage of the federal networks “cybersecurity” policies. Personally I loathe anything starting with “Cyber”, but the review will be completed today and the report will be sent to the presidents desk.  Some other media coverage are items like:

There have been recent media reports of infiltration of water and power companies by attackers.  I’m not sure what the federal role would be without increased regulation.  This is likely to be met with resistance from industries that see pervasive compromises in their enterprise networks.  Government networks are just large enterprise networks, protecting their secrets the same way a company protects their secrets.

February 26, 2009

Protected: common carrier

Filed under: internet, politics — Jared Mauch @ 1:37 pm

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:


February 11, 2009

fring beams your audio via Israel

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jared Mauch @ 6:06 pm

While evaluating the SIP client fring on the iPhone it came to my attention that they were doing the registration from behind a machine in Israel. This means your authentication credentials are possibly compromised, and your audio stream may go half-way around the world and be subject to intercept by a number of different parties. Not exactly what you want from your VoIP client. Then again, if you’re paranoid about security, you won’t talk about things that really matter over VoIP anyways.

January 6, 2009

Savings Rate positive

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jared Mauch @ 11:16 am

Being a news junkie, I read something last week talking about how the savings rate was now positive whereas it has long been negative, and just came across an article with more data surrounding the current change in savings rates at the WSJ.

I know I personally am in this paradox zone, having opened two different savings accounts in the past year and earned more in interest this past year than the past 5 or so combined. Life should be interesting this coming year.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress