Category Archives: Tech Toys

Bell’s Blues

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Google denied selling out network neutrality with Verizon earlier this month but the ballistic blogosphere bucked that.

You may recall that Google and Verizon unveiled a plan on August 9 that would prohibit wireline operators from discriminating on the open Internet but proposed a second, closed (mobile) Internet where they could do just that.

Turns out that BP’s Tony Hayward has assumed the helm of the joint GOOG-VZ P.R. department.

[Important Note: The following column appeared under this same title in the Burlington Free Press in March of 1997.]

“Hang on. I dropped the phone.”

Like the toilet, the telephone is the household appliance that must perform faithfully every time you need to make a call.

Once upon a time the telephone came one style (Durable Dial), one color (Bell Black). One monopoly served everyone. Local calls were unlimited, operators assisted, phone bills were reasonable, and the phones stood up to the occasional gambol on the kitchen floor.

Then, with a swipe of the judicial pen, “Ma Bell” split into AT&T and all the regional Baby Bells like New England Bell. Phone bills soared. We all had to buy cheap phones that bounce poorly. Trust in the phone company went down the toilet.

Heard at a Vermont IGA, “Their minutes last 53 seconds.”

[Historical Note: New England Bell spawned NYNEX which in turn merged with Bell Atlantic and spawned Verizon which sold out to Fairpoint which went bankrupt. See how that works?]

Thanks to the Vermont Telecommunications Agreement, NYNEX gave us measured service. In phone company parlance, measured service counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us. NYNEX sold measured service to Vermonters by saying it controls our local telephone costs.

Sure. The old way, we paid $19.63 every month.

Measured service means we can’t “pay any more that $26.67.” If you manage not to use their minimum daily allowance, you’ll pay only $19.52.

Here’s the scoop. NYNEX “gives” us a $6.95 worth of message units each month. Every message unit amounts to one minute on the phone. More or less. When you use more message units, NYNEX bills you. NYNEX charges you for each whole minute’s worth if you use even a single second. Even if you get a wrong number. If I use less than my allotment, does NYNEX give me a discount? No. They just make more profit.

Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.

I installed a phone timer to record every outgoing call; the log shows whether the call is peak or off-peak. The local usage charge on my bill has never come within 10% of the total shown in the log. Since NYNEX apparently cannot count, I guess I do need the gas pump kind of precision in my phone bill. Wasn’t NYNEX forced to return a $15 million excess profit?

Maybe that’s why they needed an 8.2% rate increase [then].

Measured service is such a delicious oxymoron. It positions its purveyors perfectly in a world where decamping lovers practice “cruel kindness,” a computer crash can cause a “partial shutdown” in your life, and “call answering” leads to a heartfelt conversation with a computer voice.

Almost everyone has a phone story. Your state Public Service Board wants to hear yours. Speak up at public hearings; write to them in your state capitol. If one or two of us sing loud and long, it might sound like a song from Woodstock. If a hundred of us serenade them, they’ll think it’s a movement. And if they get letters by the mailbag, who knows, NYNEX might get some competition. With more than one dial tone provider looking for your business, Vermonters might get nicer phone bills.

There is another way. A NYNEX representative told me she has had measured service for a few years, and it doesn’t cost her any extra.

“How so?” I asked.

“I don’t make any calls.”

Back to Verizon and Google. The Internet will be open but not the mobile Internet.

The big players say it is to protect bandwidth.

Some of the talking heads agree and note it is to protect (phone company) revenue.

The Media and Democracy Coalition, for example, noted that this have-have not system “could further widen the digital divide, particularly for those that rely primarily or exclusively on wireless Internet access, as do many individuals in rural areas, and many low-income consumers. It may also create a barrier to entry by independent creators, entrepreneurs and startups.”

That’s true but there is a bigger issue.

Remember the NYNEX message units? Verizon does. You pay them every time you dial your cellular phone.

Bank of America will test a system that bills consumers for purchases they make with their mobile phones. The initial mobile payments test, beginning in New York City next month, includes BP gas stations, New York City taxis, Burger King and McDonald’s restaurants, Home Depot, and the Walgreen’s and CVS drug store chains.

Mobile payments. Phone company collectors with baseball bats.

Mobile payments are especially popular in Asia and Europe where consumer use smartphones to pay for goods and services. The billing uses SMS-based transactions, “direct mobile billing,” mobile web payments (WAP), or the fastest-growing contactless NFC (Near Field Communication). Most purchases are for digital goods (music and videos, ebooks, online games, and the like), bus fares or parking meters, and burgers.

Experts say the market for mobile payments will exceed $600 billion globally in less than three years. That’s almost as much as the AIG bailout.

And you think Google and Verizon aren’t slobbering to skim that?

Remember the former Soviet republic of Moldova? About the same time in 1997 that I reported the NYNEX fleecing of Vermonters, that tiny country gave us the Moldovan horse, a Trojan horse that hijacked customers’ modems and dialed up Eastern Europe, at tens or hundreds or even a thousand dollars per minute. Victims ended up with phone bills that cost more than their cars.

AT&T’s Fraud Control Group got involved. The FTC investigated intensively. And while that was going on the phone company mafia kept collecting on those thousand-dollar phone bills.

Are these the peeps you want in charge of your Visa bill?

Google says their mobile Internet plan is “compromising not selling out.”

Uh huh. And NYNEX said the check was in the mail and they won’t … well, you know the rest.

Breaking News:
Verizon Wireless will pay about $90 million to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged in one of the largest-ever refunds by a telecommunications company.




Bell’s Blues

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[Important Note: The following column appeared under this same title in the Burlington Free Press in March of 1997.]

“Hang on. I dropped the phone.”

Like the toilet, the telephone is the household appliance that must perform faithfully every time you need to make a call.

Once upon a time the telephone came one style (Durable Dial), one color (Bell Black). One monopoly served everyone. Local calls were unlimited, operators assisted, phone bills were reasonable, and the phones stood up to the occasional gambol on the kitchen floor.

Then, with a swipe of the judicial pen, “Ma Bell” split into AT&T and all the regional Baby Bells like New England Bell. Phone bills soared. We all had to buy cheap phones that bounce poorly. Trust in the phone company went down the toilet.

Heard at a Vermont IGA, “Their minutes last 53 seconds.”

 

[Historical Note: New England Bell spawned NYNEX which in turn merged with Bell Atlantic and spawned Verizon which sold out to Fairpoint which went bankrupt. See how that works?]

 

Thanks to the Vermont Telecommunications Agreement, NYNEX gave us measured service. In phone company parlance, measured service counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us. NYNEX sold measured service to Vermonters by saying it controls our local telephone costs.

Sure. The old way, we paid $19.63 every month.

Measured service means we can’t “pay any more that $26.67.” If you manage not to use their minimum daily allowance, you’ll pay only $19.52.

Here’s the scoop. NYNEX “gives” us a $6.95 worth of message units each month. Every message unit amounts to one minute on the phone. More or less. When you use more message units, NYNEX bills you. NYNEX charges you for each whole minute’s worth if you use even a single second. Even if you get a wrong number. If I use less than my allotment, does NYNEX give me a discount? No. They just make more profit.

Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.

I installed a phone timer to record every outgoing call; the log shows whether the call is peak or off-peak. The local usage charge on my bill has never come within 10% of the total shown in the log. Since NYNEX apparently cannot count, I guess I do need the gas pump kind of precision in my phone bill. Wasn’t NYNEX forced to return a $15 million excess profit?

Maybe that’s why they needed an 8.2% rate increase [then].

Measured service is such a delicious oxymoron. It positions its purveyors perfectly in a world where decamping lovers practice “cruel kindness,” a computer crash can cause a “partial shutdown” in your life, and “call answering” leads to a heartfelt conversation with a computer voice.

Almost everyone has a phone story. Your state Public Service Board wants to hear yours. Speak up at public hearings; write to them in your state capitol. If one or two of us sing loud and long, it might sound like a song from Woodstock. If a hundred of us serenade them, they’ll think it’s a movement. And if they get letters by the mailbag, who knows, NYNEX might get some competition. With more than one dial tone provider looking for your business, Vermonters might get nicer phone bills.

There is another way. A NYNEX representative told me she has had measured service for a few years, and it doesn’t cost her any extra.

“How so?” I asked.

“I don’t make any calls.”

Breaking News:
Verizon Wireless will pay about $90 million to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged in one of the largest-ever refunds by a telecommunications company.

 

I Still Have a Landline. Sort Of.

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I miss my landline. Can never find the damn cell phone! the lovely Chris.tine said yesterday. Naturally, that got me to thinking.

I’ve become a VOIP evangelist or perhaps a voipelist for short. A few years ago, I looked at my then-Verizon bill and my dissatisfaction with Verizon-chicanery and realized that technology could save me money.

One of Verizon’s cute tricks in this market is to charge for message units. They don’t use that Jersey-centric term here (they call it “local calling”) but the bottom line is that they charged a long distance rate for calling the next door neighbor and they hid the charge in an arcane counter rather than breaking out the individual calls. I prefer knowing how much it costs me to call Rufus, so that irked me. I hate toll calls. I bought the upgrade with unlimited local calls just to keep my blood pressure in check

At the time, Ma Bell and her progeny cost us about $75 per month and I was paying another $20 or so for dial up Internet access. Remember dial up? ‘Nuff said.

Cable service finally came to North Puffin and Vonage was advertising pretty heavily. I could buy “High Speed Internet” bundled with basic cable TV and switch my existing phone number to the VOIP provider, all for less than the $95 per month POTS and dial up cost us.

Sold, American.

This wasn’t an easy step for a Luddite like me. I just replaced my VCR with another VCR, wear button-down shirts, and drive a ten-year old car and a ten-year old truck. Not simultaneously.

On the other hand I also have a cellphone. SWMBO has a cellphone. I’m thinking about dropping even the VOIP service in favor of those cells alone.

I’m not alone. The number of U.S. households choosing only cell phones surpassed households with only landlines in 2009. Verizon reports that the number of homes with a traditional copper POTS connection dropped 11.4 percent last year, to 17.4 million on their system now. That also means Verizon recently announced it would cut at least 11,000 jobs, people they don’t need to maintain landlines.

The cell phone has come a long way since Motorola introduced the DynaTAC which cost $3,995 in 1984. (Wealthy) users could talk for 30 minutes or so before performing a 10 hour battery recharge in the two-pound “brick.”

One big operator offers discounts to landline-free wireless customers who combine Internet or TV service from the company which, of course, means they still tether you to their land-based infrastructure.

Even businesses are dropping their own landline phone systems, and moving to wireless.

I’m still a voipelist for a few important reasons. I really really prefer using all the house phones because the sound quality is good, the phones are convenient, and anyone in the house can access them. Cell docks don’t do that all that well yet and the speaker phone on my cell is lousy. I call Canadian numbers frequently. We have business contacts, friends, and a dentist north of the border. The cell plans that interest me make Canada a toll call. Remember, I hate toll calls. Oh, yeah, and cell service right here in North Puffin still sucks.

Hey, T-Mobiley! Fix those problems and I’ll dump my sort-of-landline in a heartbeat.

I am never without my cell. I feel naked without it. It was the house phone I would always lose, another correspondent wrote.

I probably shouldn’t say this out loud but I have never (yet) lost a cell phone and I rarely lose the housephone(s). Some of them are hardwired to the wall and the cordless variety all have this wonderful “page” feature. At the end of the day, though, I mostly carry the phone — whether cordless or cell — in my pocket.

The most popular irritation voiced in the surveys I checked is to figure out where the darned cell phone is.

Here’s a thought. One in 50 households has no phones at all.

Tanks. Tanks a Lot.

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I am well and truly blown. Or at least blowable. 36 gallons worth give or take and that’s a might big blow job. Way more than quarts.

Big, I tell you.

And ducky.

Almost 40 years ago I built a pretty useful compressor for ordinary tasks. I got a really good deal on a twin cylinder compressor head that someone had returned to Sears. Graingers gave me the industrial price for a 2 HP, 220 volt, motor that ended up as an “extra” on a business project. I welded up some steel plate and angle iron for a mounting base.

The only shortfall of this project was the storage tank.

It took a while to get the plumbing right since the compressor owners manual had no installation instructions, the controller I found had no labeling, and there was no Internet.

Air compressors are pretty simple: motor, pump, accumulator tank, pressure regulator, relief valve, and some plumbing connect the pump to the tank and the tank to your air tools. The compressor pump works like the engine in your car. A motor turns a crankshaft to push a piston up and down in a cylinder. As the crank pulls the piston down, the vacuum it creates draws air into the cylinder through an intake valve. As the crankshaft continues to rotate, it pushes the piston back to the top of the cylinder, compressing the air in the cylinder. Near the top of the stroke, the compressed air gets pushed out through the exhaust valve. You could simply connect an air tool or tire chuck to the pump but that means the motor has to run constantly. That wastes electricity and a lot of compressed air so an air tank holds the excess air until we need it.

I hate waste.

The bigger the tank, the more efficient a compressed air system is in a garage or production shop because, just like your household water well, the motor needs to run only to refill the tank.

The size of an air compressor is measured by its output, not by the motor. We need to know the volume, measured in cubic feet per minute (cfm), and the pressure, measured in pounds per square inch (psi), to know if the system will do the job we need. When I built race cars and boats, we needed to run air tools that have specific demands. Most $100-200 “home-shop” air compressors can produce 3-5 cfm at 90 to 100 psi.

A compressor with lots of capacity and an upright tank is handy because it takes up the least amount of floor space in the shop and is usually on wheels so it can be rolled to the job. My neighbor has a nice $375 Dewalt 15-gallon, upright compressor on wheels that delivers 5.4 cfm at 90 psi and can run up to 150 psi. It will run my board sander that requires 3 cfm at 90 psi or my air grinder that needs a little more but not both. My new framing nailer can suck down the typical 1 HP, 6 gallon home-shop compressor.

And nothing I own can run a commercial sandblaster.

Before we started trying to tip this rary, I said that my storage tank was too short. The pump and motor combination I assembled yields 5.6 cfm at 150 psi or 6.7 cfm at 100. That’s plenty. Unfortunately, I have always used my little 5 gallon portable racing tank for storage, so the motor cycles more than it should.

As an aside, I like the little 5 gallon tank when all I need to do is pump up the soft tire on the lawn tractor, a chore it needs each time we use it. It takes less than a minute and only a ha’penny’s worth of electricity to do that instead of a couple-three-four minutes and a whole penny’s worth. I dislike waste.

I have always wanted to replace the tank with something bigger.

I found a couple of interesting air tanks on Craigslist last week. Each one was listed at $20. The first, a “former dental office” fixed tank with feet was reputed to be about 20 gallons and the second was a light-duty 11 gallon portable. I wanted the first but could make do with the second. After all that one alone would triple my storage capacity.

We definitely drove over the river and through the woods to get to the first tank; it was halfway down the state on Mallard Road. The “turn onto dirt” should have clued me it would be an adventure. Down and up and down and up a looooooooooong dirt road and the only thing I could think of was, I wonder who has to plow this? I’ve been in Vermont too long. The owner had built a wonderful, cement floored barn and wood shop on top of a hill with great views. He built his house there, too. And, yes, he does have a plow truck as well as a chain-shod square-bodied woods truck.

He was consolidating tools so he also had for sale a lovely cast iron table Craftsman 10″ table saw with base and extension. I would have liked it if I didn’t already have a saw. The Air Techniques medical/dental tank does measure out to be about 19 or 20 gallons in size, liquid measure, and has an apparently good Square D pressure switch and a labeled working pressure of 150 psi. Sold.

The other seller lives closer to North Puffin where he had a Formula V under a tarp on a trailer as well as a 60s VW and a 356 Porsche coupe in primer and bondo in his garage. He raced Porsche Speedsters in E Production class about the time I was racing Camaros so we know a lot of the same people. It’s not often I find another SCCA guy near North Puffin so that was a treat.

He sold me the $20 tank for $15 because I showed him the real $20 super tank in the back of the truck.

So now I have three tanks, two sets of controls, one compressor head, one motor, and a project. I saved two tanks from the recycler by reusing them for a cost of $35 and 135 miles on the truck. My next trick is to manifold it all up to get them to work either into one little, one big, or even all three tanks at once.

Of course Craigslist also had another nice used horizontal tank with a two 15 hp 3-phase motors turning two different 4-piston/compound pumps for about $1000. I’m not sure how I would have moved it, much less where to put it but a boy can dream…

The Game of Telephone

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“I have a cupcake in my briefcase,” I heard Missy say.

Missy and her husband Biff are here in South Puffin for a couple-three weeks of fishing. Missy loves her bling which dangles and jangles and actually seems to attract fish when she leans over the transom. She still has her job with the state but Biff is out of work for the first time in about 20 years. Naturally, they each brought a cellphone.

In the game of Telephone, according to the Wikipedia, “the first player whispers a phrase or sentence to the next player. Each player successively whispers what that player believes he or she heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first. The game is often played by children as a party game or in the playground.” Or by the Congress.

Missy actually said “My son got a cupcake for his birthday. I found it in the fridge.”

The game of telephone has become the game of cellephone.

Everyone in America today has at least one. It is impossible to walk down the street without tripping over Biff yelling into his hand or cupping his earbud to hear a friend at the beach or instruct a partner in Pipeline-istan. If people are far away or speak a different language, Biff knows they can understand him better when he yells.

I hate cellephony.

But it’s cheap! Every cellphone company in this country advertises the best network and the lowest rates. The average $39.99 cell bill last month cost the consumer $103 and change.

But it’s reliable! T-Mobile blamed a software glitch for the outage that left about 5% of its customers unable to send or receive calls or text messages last week. Of course, no cell carrier mentions the millions of individual dropped calls unless some other network does the dropping.

But it’s perfect for people watchers! I love to eavesdrop on conversations; cellphones make too too it easy to listen to just one side.

The game of cellephone we play doesn’t bring more cumulative error, rumor, and gossip than, say, Facebook or television or the blogosphere because our errors are personal, not viral. In the end, though, it’s all about me. Or thee. All I want is for my call to go through when I push send. All I want is to be able to tell if it is Missy or Biff who answers. All I want is to hear the words they say. After all, the simple copper line attached to a Bakelite™ speaker and microphone and the magneto my grandfather cranked did that with amazing accuracy and 99.72% uptime.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to get a bite of that cupcake. I hope it’s chocolate.