What DSL Technicians Know

Although the telephone company has many tools to troubleshoot problems with their lines and equipment, they cannot help you much with the phone wiring in your home. A weak DSL signal inside your home can be caused by long wire lengths, poor connections, multiple wires, multiple connectors, improper grounding and other variables. Your DSL speed will be better if you eliminate these issues. DSL modems are good at working around noise on the line, but do so at the expense of top download speed and latency (delay). DSL technicians tell us that many line problems originate from bad inside wiring, so splitting the DSL signal from the telephone line as early as possible would certainly eliminate this problem.

DSL Pots Splitters are the Key

To do that, you can install an inexpensive pots-splitter where the telephone line enters your home or garage at the box called the Network Interface Device (NID). By installing a pots-splitter at the NID, the DSL signal from the telephone company to your modem is as short and uncluttered as possible. No longer does the DSL signal wind through your home over internal phone wiring — even though most telephone company installation instructions tell you to do that. Why do they recommend that? Because installing pots-splitters yourself inside the home saves the telephone company the expense of making a trip to do the installation right. Those “pigtail” pots-splitters you self-install don’t offer the optimum DSL signal path. The excess in-house line length, the phone jacks and the additional phone equipment in your home all contribute to noise and attenuation of the DSL signal — and therefore slower speeds.

Make DSL Troubleshooting Easier

Instead, to achieve the shortest, cleanest connection, you should buy a pots-splitter and put your DSL modem next to the pots-splitter at the NID. By installing the pots-splitter at your NID, you keep your home telephone wiring out of the DSL signal path, and consequently your line condition is now the responsibility of the telephone company. The telephone company can then easily use their central equipment to monitor and troubleshoot the condition of the DSL line to your home. They otherwise cannot do the best job troubleshooting the line if the DSL signal also runs through your house. With the DSL signal terminating at the NID, they have no excuse to deliver speeds less than the one offered under your service plan. If the speed is much less than promised, ask your telephone company to fix their line until it comes close to the DSL rate offered under your service plan.

Finish with Wireless Router

Once you’ve installed your pots-splitter and modem next to the NID, you also need to install your Ethernet router there too. You might wonder how to use your computer when the Ethernet router is in the garage. There are a couple of solutions. You can use a wireless router, many of which offer exceptional range, or use HomePlug devices. Although these add a little cost, your improved DSL access speed should be worth it. If your wireless Ethernet connection is blocked by the walls, wireless extenders and HomePlug devices offered by many vendors provide a fast, reliable Ethernet connection to any room in your home.

John Koenig is the founder of Compute Media and designer of The Patent Studio. You can follow him on Twitter @johnkoenig.

These are still the early days of the smartphone. The innovation in smartphone products and services is similar to the rise of the personal computer and the web browser. In the early PC business, uncertainty was everywhere. Buyers were concerned about software applications, usability and maintenance. Price and performance were points of constant contention between manufacturers. Developers eagerly chased the most popular platforms.

The browser growth period was a compressed and magnified version of the PC period. The browser spawned an investment bubble and an antitrust battle of the century. Like the PC period, entepreuners and investors watched closely for waves they could ride to profitability. Publishers covered the whole heated debate. Yahoo rose and Netscape disappeared. Google rose and Inktomi disappeared. These and many more, succeeded or failed due largely to differences in management and strategy, but the opportunity was there for everyone.

In both the case of PC and the the browser, it took a number of years for patterns to appear. Today, in the smartphone business, we are seeing some trends and patterns, like Apple’s success in the consumer market and the continuing success of Rim in the enterprise space.

iTunes for Windows in the Enterprise

For consumers and publishers, the iPhone and its popular iTunes store make a lot of sense. Because Apple knows every publisher, there are no issues for consumers about software security, malware and viruses that plague software downloaded from the wild wild web. As Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster explains, “Apple’s dominance in the [consumer electronics] and online music markets is going seemingly unchecked.” Publishers benefit too. For one, consumers cannot resell downloaded software from the iTunes store under the first-sale doctrine. There is no piracy. There is no gray market. iTunes controls exactly who gets what from the software publisher. Apple even provides mechanisms to allow ongoing subscriptions, and this is going to pull in the content publishers. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp announced last month a plan to charge iPhone and BlackBerry users a weekly rate of $1 for subscribers and $2 for non-subscribers to access its mobile site. Other publishers have already started. For them, the iTunes and Blackberry stores offer certain advantages, but will have to compete with free content on the Internet.

iTunes for Windows is about as far as Apple can get with enterprise IT departments, and even that’s probably not welcome. No business would choose to funnel its business applications through an application store like iTunes. For the enterprise, the iTunes store is mostly friction and overhead. Apple slowly responds to enterprise requirements, such as remote wipe, and the Apple documentation for enterprise features are superficial and under-supported. The Apple business of smartphone products and services for consumers can succeed without the rigor and options that businesses demand. Consumers may be perpetually happy to download applications through an iTunes store. For businesses, the logistics and complexity of the iTunes store are a nuisance. As a result, we see the repeated pattern of Apple succeeding in the consumer market but not the business market.

ATT vs Verizon

The largest two carriers, ATT and Verizon are both important factors in the consumer market. ATT has not announced an application store. The iPhone exclusively uses the iTunes store. But Verizon wants some of that action. Verizon has 87 million subscribers it needs to keep happy or lose to vendors offering better smartphones. To control content iTunes style, Verizon appears to be ready to require smartphone vendors to sell their application exclusively through an online Verizon application store. Lowell McAdam, president and CEO of Verizon Wireless, made a deal recently with Google to offer smartphones pre-loaded with innovative applications on Android-based devices from several manufacturers. The advantages to developers are parallel to the iTunes store, since Verizon simplifies billing through its existing customer relationship.

To maintain control like Apple, Verizon may preclude customers from getting their applications from Blackberry App World or the Android Marketplace. According to reports from GigaOM, Verizon is reportedly demanding Verizon handsets include default access to only Verizon’s app store. This includes the popular Blackberry Storm smartphones.

But the bigger issue for carriers is bandwidth. AT&T’s chief technology officer, John Donovan, recently stated that smartphones and associated applications have produced a 5,000 percent increase in data usage over three years. That’s not going to let up. AT&T now requires that every smartphone subscriber have a data plan.

Handsets or Operating System

Motorola has received recent Federal lab approval of a smartphone planned for sale by Verizon for the holiday season. ATT may start working with Dell on offering an Android-based phone for the eventual day when ATT’s exclusive iPhone deal runs out. Apple’s introduction of the $99 iPhone 3G is generating significant market share gains in the last six months, for a “leading position in music and mobile markets,” according to Munster. Yet hardware is rapidly becoming a commodity, eventually to be dominated by Asian manufacturers, just like the VCR. The future of the smartphone will be dictated by software and content, not hardware. The obvious conclusion? Instead of competing on hardware, profitability in the smartphone business will be driven by software capabilities. Right now the strategic key to the smartphone software opportunity is the operating system, and with respect to the operating system, the enterprise market for smartphones is wide open for competition.

The question is therefore, who will prevail as the smartphone vendor of choice to businesses. Rim has a history of being the leader. But if we examine the state of mobile operating systems, we see another pattern. The early generations of mobile operating systems, like Symbian and Windows Mobile are quickly losing ground to Android. This trend will accelerate. The Blackberry operating system may be the next victim of Android. Dell and Motorola have set a clear path on the Android platform. Dell spokesman Andrew Bowins recently told Reuters: “We are deeply engaged with our operator partners around the world to deliver mobile broadband enabled computing devices.” But manufacturers like Dell and Motorola, and even Rim will lose ground to the superior strategies of Google and Apple, companies focusing on operating system software and application developers, where most of the value is added. Apple produces great hardware, but at the core of its strategy is a plan that leverages software and content from the developer community. Many companies can deliver the hardware. Few can deliver the software and developer enthusiasm. Google is one of the companies that understands this well. Those who don’t, risk becoming another Netscape or Inktomi.

Photo Credit: M. Yoshihito

The most likely people to use an e-pass are travelers who carry a PDA like the Blackberry. On the road, they want to get assigned seats and flight confirmation using online check-in. Since hotel rooms don’t have printers, a traveler can elect to have the boarding pass emailed their PDA. Being able to check-in electronically and get an e-pass is also convenient from bus, car or taxi, or in an emergency. But most travelers who use e-pass should still prefer to print a paper boarding pass as backup, if they can, just in case the electronic boarding pass doesn’t scan at the airport.

Agents Get Busy With New Procedures

A traveler with an e-pass arrives with the electronic boarding pass and reservation on their mobile device and can go straight to the security checkpoints. Secondary ID like a driver’s license or passport is still required. Instead of handing a paper pass to TSA security agents at airport security, a passenger shows the e-pass image on the screen of the mobile device.

When it’s time to go through the TSA checkpoint, the screener scans the mobile device with a handheld scanner. The scanner beeps when it recognizes the e-pass. At that point, the TSA screener can see the passenger name and flight information on the scanner. They next look at the passenger’s physical ID and compare it with the electronic boarding pass information on the scanner.

When it’s time to board, passengers queue up to the boarding checkpoint and point the mobile device image into another scanner. The scanner again beeps an all-clear signal, and the agent allows the passenger to board.

Passenger Feedback Is Mixed

The success rate of using the e-pass on mobile phones is mixed, because most mobile phones have a low screen resolution versus PDAs. As a result, there can be problems on mobile phones, with the scanners not scanning correctly at security and boarding.

There can also be hitches in procedures. With paper boarding passes, the passenger shows the TSA agent the pass before entering the metal detector. But since the e-pass is on a mobile device, it goes through the x-ray machine. So what happens when a screener asks to see a boarding pass? Some agents just let the passenger through. Other screeners require that the passenger get a token from the TSA agents who are examining the carry-on luggage.

Not all airlines offer the e-pass and not all e-passes display passenger seat assignments. Rules about advance check-in vary considerably, although most airlines allow online check-in 24 hours prior to departure. Continental has set up a webpage where a passenger can login and get the boarding pass image. iPhone users report that this works well. Other airlines email the image, so a passenger needs to know where email attachments are stored the mobile device, and then open up the boarding pass image on the screen.

Technology Meets International Standards

The Transportation Security Administration has been testing the e-pass system since 2007 at number of airports throughout the country. Nationwide expansion is now underway. Once e-pass scanners are deployed nationwide, the TSA plans to track wait times using e-pass data collected at checkpoints. As a safety advantage for all passengers, the new technology reduces boarding pass fraud, provides enhanced security, and improves customer service to passengers, says the TSA and the airlines.

The International Air Transport Association anticipates that its 240 members will be saving about $500 million annually with electronic boarding. Currently the e-pass works only for U.S. domestic flights. Passengers flying from an airport that doesn’t handle the e-pass will still need a printed pass. International adoption is eventually expected. The TSA paperless boarding passes are consistent with the global standard in the International Air Transport Association for bar coding of passenger boarding passes.

Google may be the best search in terms of relevancy and speed, but some people are concerned about personal privacy. In this case you can follow the money to Mozilla. With the help of Mozilla’s default Firefox settings, Google builds a profile database about you. Since online privacy is an evolving area of the law, in the United States there are very few Internet specific boundaries about how your activity online can be discovered, saved, analyzed and exploited by Internet-based services. So for now, you have to watch out for yourself. 

CustomizeGoogle does a number of useful things to help. It makes your web-surfing and search activity useless to Google by anonymizing your cookies. People who are concerned about Google’s tenticles reaching into their privacy should be thrilled about this feature. 

Google remembers your search settings by placing a cookie on your computer. Some people don’t like Google profiling. They can forbid cookies or delete their cookies at the end of each session, but pay a penalty by losing all their preferences. With CustomizeGoogle, your personal Google preferences are enabled automatically each time you start Firefox, so there is no need to disable cookies or delete cookies at the end of each session.

CustomizeGoogle also makes your connections to other Google services like gMail more secure, by enabling HTTPS protocol. HTTPS prevents snooping by others when you use unsecured wireless connections to check and read your gMail. You might be asked by Google to change to more secure password if you enable HTTPS (secure hyper-text transfer protocol) as the default for services including Google Reader. 

CustomizeGoogle is easy to install, simple to configure and transparent to use. If you’re tired of fighting to keep your privacy from Google by automatically deleting cookies after each browser session, try CustomizeGoogle.