isen.blog

The outdoor splitter leaked and water got into the wire, requiring a whole new drop. It was an expensive truck roll for Cablevision. The cable guy said they use waterproof splitters now. Good, but waterproof wire (fiber) would be better.

The centralization-is-good gang has been getting on my case in comments on this post. "Jonathan," for example, says, " . . . how much of YOUR time and effort were used in fixing your TV compared to your blog? . . . wouldn't have been an issue for you if you knew the founders of Comcast and Sony."

Well, the first fact to consider is I don't care NEAR as much about my TV service. It wouldn't have risen to "bloggable" except in juxtaposition with the Earthlink/Blogger problem. I don't use TV to express myself, so it's not that important. If I had cared at the same level, YOU BETCHA I'd have been hanging on the phone for hours . . .

Second, I didn't have a choice of cable providers. (Well, not exactly true, I can choose Cablevision or satellite, and soon maybe FIOS.) But I live in a Cablevision neighborhood, and even though I absolutely do know senior management at a couple of the other cablecos, I couldn't get my service from Comcast or TWC or Charter if I wanted. The reason, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT, the reason I was able to choose Earthlink as my host in the first place (instead of Verizon or Cablevision), and Blogger as my application, is that there's a tradition on the Internet that the owner of the facility can't discriminate against (or in favor of, which is the same thing) what I connect to using that facility. This tradition used to be backed by law (common law, statute and regulation) but now the law is eroding under the firehose of wannabe robber-barron corporatistas.

Third, YOU'RE RIGHT that maintenance -- and reliability, and other formerly centralized functions -- are much more in the hands of the user than they were in The Intelligent Network. I've been saying that for years, see my "Lost" Business Communications Review article, Buy as Many Nines as You Need. But (a) the added management is a small price to pay for the vast innovative potential The Stupid Network affords, and (b) it is offset by the dramatically simplified lower layers of the Stupid Network -- imagine a computer literate junior high schooler installing ATM/Sonet or 3G the way they install Ethernet and Wi-Fi.

Anyhow, the cable is fixed. Ho hum. Back to work.

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